LAST WEEK we wrote about doing away with casual employment by introducing to the workplace multi-purpose cooperatives organized under the Cooperative Code of the Philippines or Republic Act 6938.
As we said, the move will result in providing regular work for everyone, besides enjoying other membership benefits from the cooperative. What is important is that the casual worker status will no longer exist, there being no more employer-employee relationship with coop-member workers; instead, the worker as an owner-member of the coop will derive more benefits from his cooperative membership.
We have just celebrated Nurses Week from May 6 to 12, 2018. We believe the nursing profession should also consider becoming members of labor cooperatives so that hospitals will stop treating them as “trainees” even if they are already qualified board passers.
The complaints are that many nurses still receive salaries below minimum wage or fall victim to false volunteerism schemes where nurses pay hospitals for “trainings” or are paid with mere food allowance. We did not know that this setup still exists up to this day.
The culprit is the law or the so-called Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Act which nurses complain is a money-making scheme designed to turn them and other health professionals into “cash cows.” We do not know what they mean but with thousands of nurses leaving the country every year to work abroad, we wonder why Congress has not taken a look at this CPD law up to now and amend or repeal it.
Back to cooperatives, it is said that they have been at the forefront of people empowerment. Since the enactment of the Cooperative Code of the Philippines in March 1990, over 40,000 cooperatives have been registered.
The push and promotional efforts from the public and private sectors alike created a momentum that saw the flowering of cooperatives in various productive facets of the economy.
We wish that a few of them will see this urgent need to go into their labor function and now put an end to casual employment and erase it completely from the dictionary!
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Historical Quote of the Week
“Iloilo is the first city in the Philippines to have double-decked buses.” (For comments or re-actions, please e-mail to jnoveracompany@yahoo.com)/PN
