150 Dagupan gov’t workers lose jobs

DAGUPAN CITY — About 150 emergency workers and technical consultants at the city hall here lost their jobs when the city government finally decided to trim down its bloated bureaucracy to save at least P1 million a month.

City Administrator Raffy Baraan said the move was part of Mayor Benjamin Lim’s reorganization plan, which is now in its final stage.

According to Baraan, around 65 to 70 percent of the 255 emergency workers employed at the city hall were sacked.

He assured though that the services rendered by the city government will not be affected as the positions held by the emergency workers will be done by regular employees.

He clarified that emergency workers who handle vital and highly specialized positions will not be terminated, such as the POSO traffic enforcers who trained were for a long time before they were deployed to man the traffic.

Baraan said the termination will allow plantilla position holders the chance to shine and perform their duties efficiently.

"We have to judiciously use our scarce resources and do not want to waste the money we are paying for our regular plantilla position holders by hiring emergency workers to do their job," Baraan said.

The end goal of the reorganization is to make the bureaucracy lean but mean.

He added that during the reorganization, only 400 plantilla positions from the original 600 posts will be filled up. There will also be no emergency worker during that period.