Creating a flexible Philippine labor market

The Philippine labor market has drastically changed over the years, and our Labor Code is no longer able to respond to the needs of our current employment picture. It has become obsolete and is even considered an obstacle to many industries in the country now.

An ordinary worker's expectations are very different from what another worker had five or ten years ago.

Today, we have an almost unprecedented number of women entering the workforce. The nightwork prohibition against women currently in the Labor Code makes no sense now because we already have thousands of women working in call centers at unusual hours.

People are no longer looking at a 9-5 job. They may want to work 40 hours in two or three days, and have four days left for other activities. Hence, we can incorporate the compressed workweek scheme adopted by many establishments as a capital-saving strategy and modify the meaning of overtime work to be consistent with flextime arrangements.

Further, work experience is more important now than ever. We must liberalize the apprenticeship rule and expand it to allow young people, whether in or out of school, to acquire training and experience. In order for the labor market to absorb the youth, we must combine classroom learning with floorshop experience. We must give the youth an early taste of the rewards of work, and prepare them mentally and psychologically for it.

If we want to create more jobs, we should take a total, comprehensive look at our labor market and our labor laws. In the Senate, I filed a law calling for a review of our Labor Code in order to modernize it and make it adapt to a fast moving, increasingly globalized labor market.