What they didn't tell you about Labor Law 101

Many of our workers and even their employers do not know the fundamentals of labor laws. When the late secretary of the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), the Father of the Labor Code, Blas F. Ople, or BFO, presented the draft of the Code on May 1, 1974 to then President Ferdinand Marcs Sr., he assured the president that DOLE would educate both employees and employers on labor laws. Somehow the successors of Secretary Ople must have forgotten this duty to empower workers with Labor Law education.

As one of the few surviving disciples of BFO, it has been my advocacy since 1974 up to today, or for 50 years, to teach Labor Law not just in Law schools but also in public fora, including seminars, conferences, and study sessions. I do speak before union conventions, employers' conferences, government officials training programs and in all fora, symposia, and dialogues where I am invited speaker, resource person, and learning facilitator. I am also a consultant of various organizations, corporations, institutions, movements, and advocacy groups. I give free webinars and online classes educating people on Philippine labor laws.

I have written 32 Labor Law books and 12 Human Resources books and I travel around Asia and elsewhere to teach Labor Law, both in Asian countries and beyond. I even put up a school for Overseas Filipino Workers in Kuala Lumpur, in Kuwait, and in Taiwan when I was a Labor attaché, I empowered our migrant workers on their rights and obligations as foreign workers.

In all these, I discovered that there are many important and basic things that our schools do not teach Filipinos. For instance, workers are taught some of their rights but not their duties, obligations, and accountabilities. Many Filipino employees do not even know basic labor standards and fundamental rules on labor relations.

Employers do not know their management prerogatives, especially the scope and limits. They do not know how to document their contracts and how to keep employment records. They do not know how to behave when DOLE inspectors come to look at their payrolls and check on their remittances to SSS, ECC, PhilHealth, and Pag-IBIG. They do not even know how to evaluate probationary employees and have insufficient knowledge on what are regular jobs, casuals, project, seasonal, and fixed-term employment status. They do not know how to investigate and administer due process.

This important information is available for free in my YouTube channel, titled Usec JBJ. There are more than 40 videos available for free. There, both management and personnel can ask questions on all topics, from hiring to retiring. They just have to click the button to subscribe. This is also contained in my books on hiring, firing, disciplining, investigating, handling of cases, and documenting. Both employers and employees need to empower themselves before they are sued due to ignorance or plain ineptitude. Knowledge does not cost too much. Ignorance can be disastrous.