AS I RECALL, the oppressive practice of “contractualization” was invented by the big business owners who wanted to avoid paying for the long term benefits of regular employees.
Under the law, employers are required to “regularize” temporary employees who have worked for them for at least six months.
As a way out of this law, many employers engaged the services of employment agencies that would “supply” them the warm bodies that would work for them for less than six months.
The expectation was for these agencies to take on the role of hiring these employees as regular workers, in other words giving them the long term benefits that they deserve. Unfortunately, this has not happened at all. Into this picture entered the manpower cooperatives, born along the concept that their members are not employees, therefore there is no employee-employer relationship between the members and their cooperatives. In other words, there are no more requirements to pay them long term benefits.
Just to set the record straight, the “contractualization” practice of the big stores is not illegal, even if it appears to be immoral.
Also to set the record straight, the practice of the manpower cooperatives to “contractualize” the provision of services is also not illegal, even if it could potentially become immoral, too.
The expectation is for these cooperatives to provide their working members with the same benefits that they would have received had they been “regularized”. If they end up not receiving these benefits after all, then the situation would in effect become immoral.
The idea behind manpower cooperatives is to turn a problem into an opportunity, in other words, to turn a bad thing into a good thing, possibly to make it even better. To translate that roughly into real terms, the expectation is for them to stop being victims of the “endo” problem, and to start becoming beneficiaries of the “dividendo” system.
In other words, the totality of what they would get from the combination of dividends and rebates is supposed to be equal to, or greater than what they would get in terms of medical benefits and retirement benefits, among many other benefits that they should be getting.
It would be fair to say that working for a manpower cooperative is good enough compared to an employment agency, if the choice is having a job and being jobless. It would however be better to say that employers in general, not just the big stores, should have corporate goals that will aim to progressively increase their ratio of regular employees as opposed to contractual employees.
This should be part of their standard practice of good corporate governance. It would be ironic to see companies that are supposedly implementing corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs for external purposes, and yet their internal labor practices are still appearing to be irresponsible.
Without going into specifics, it would be fair to say that an imbalanced ratio of contractual employees would affect their productivity./PN
