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Thursday. September 14, 2017
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NOT A FEW have expressed alarm over the setbacks that a compressed workweek may bring workers, especially in the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry. Such scheme will essentially push workers to work longer hours in a day, from eight hours to as long as 12 hours, which could adversely impact their health, pay and benefits.
Even if the proposed compressed workweek law – whose version in the lower house, House Bill 6152, passed on the third reading last month – provides that working beyond 40 to 48 hours a week will be considered overtime (meaning work days can be cut down from five to four days a week), in the BPO industry rest day-overtime is pretty common, especially when there is high volume of calls.
Can you imagine a call center employee answering calls for as long as eight hours in a day and this will be extended to speak for another two or four hours? How do you think will this impact an employee’s vocal chords or throat? We need not reiterate that working at night make workers, especially women, susceptible to certain illnesses like cancer and reproductive health illnesses.
Giving flexibility to businesses to extend work hours through a compressed workweek is a bane to workers as it subjects them to more risks and greater exploitation. The clause that supposedly ensures “non-diminution of benefits” in a compressed workweek scheme cannot be guaranteed in practice because in reality, workers will incur higher salary deductions if they miss working in day. Thus, the compressed workweek may be viewed as an outright attack on workers’ wages.
In 2013, by virtue of the Department of Labor and Employment order that allows flexible work arrangements including compressed workweek, roughly one out of five establishments that implemented it were BPO companies, according to BPO Industry Employees Network. Thus it is not unreasonable to expect that a law institutionalizing the compressed workweek, while not mandatory, will be maximized by BPO companies to earn greater margins at the expense of employees’ welfare.
Compressed workweek is a regressive scheme. Giving legitimacy to its practice through legislation takes back hard-won rights of workers to an eight-hour work in a day. Instead of legalizing its practice, our legislators can be one with workers by crafting policies and laws that promote security of tenure, living wages, and workers’ rights and welfare.
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