Bello: President Duterte promised to sign executive order on contractualization by March after meeting with labor groups yesterday | @xianneangel (CNN on Twitter)
It started with labor being given the roundabout on the issue of Contractualization by the Secretary of Labor. Now Secretary Silverio Bello III himself has become a purveyor of fake news by making false pronouncements to the public.
Today, he was quoted in the Philippine Daily Inquirer as having said: “Kahapon (Wednesday), nung nagkita kami ng Pangulo, binigay ko sa kanya ‘yung proposed Executive Order which was drafted by (organized) labor and agreed to by management (groups).”
The above statement of Secretary Bello is both misleading and irresponsible. First there was no EO agreed to by both labor and management. In meetings of the Tripartite Industrial Peace Council and its Executive Committee, the only agreement was on agreeing to disagree about the EO.
Second, if Bello is saying that DOLE had revised the labor-drafted EO, which he then submitted to and got the employers’ approval, clearly that’s not the labor-drafted EO anymore.
Thus, if this DOLE revised EO version was what he submitted to the President last Wednesday, then this was not the final draft EO which the NAGKAISA, KMU, and Bello himself had agreed on before we jointly submitted to and discussed with PDigong last 7 February 2018 in Malacañang.
Secretary Bello has never and will never speak for labor groups. His self-declared inability to prohibit Contractualization speaks of his bias for employers. This effectively compromises his ability to defend the workers’ position on Contractualization and renders him inutile as Labor Secretary. #
