Government workers beyond the boundaries of labor laws : The (inconspicuous) case of service contractors in the Philippine bureaucracy

Due to budgetary restrictions the Government of the Philippines has restructured the civil service sector and downsized the bureaucracy, cutting the number of permanent appointments and increasing flexible or non-standard work arrangements. The latter are associated with contracts that expressly disclaim direct employment relationship, and these workers are hired through job orders and contracts of services, referred to in this literature as service contractors. These workers have been contributing to government work for decades rendering services that are similar as with regular government employees, as well as core/essential functions. The paper shows how these forms of work contradict the intended purpose of out-sourcing workers through flexible/non-standard employment who are supposed to perform only peripheral functions to government agencies’ mandates and objectives. While these workers are classified as self-employed individuals, they are, in effect, subject to an extent of control exercised by the hiring government agencies that challenge their status as independent workers. The analysis has shown that these workers are, in principle, engaged in a direct employer-employee relationship consistent with the ruling/recommendation of the Supreme Court of the Philippines (2005) and the ILO (2006). However, since their contracts expressly stipulate they are not ‘government employees’ and that their services are not considered ‘government services’, they are not accorded the standard employment security and entitlements of their counterparts in the civil service sector. As such, this mode of employment along with the different practices of hiring government agencies have systematically eroded core constitutional and labor rights of this group of workers. These deficits are promoted to a large extent by their vague positionality – neither government nor private sector ‘employees’ – amidst prevailing civil service rules/regulations covering government services on the one hand and the country’s Labor Code on the other.