MANILA – Local and foreign businessmen have asked the Arroyo administration to reduce the number of official and special holidays, saying these are counterproductive in the face of the worsening global economic and financial crunch.
Edgardo Lacson, the president of the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PCCI) cited the urgent need for fewer holidays as well amend the law which requires companies to pay double their personnel rendering holiday work.
Lacson emphasized that now is the time to look for ways to reduce costs for industries amid the slowdown in consumer demand due to the crisis.
“The number of holidays must be lessened,” he emphasized. “Also, the law that requires employers to pay during holidays must be altered. We must remove the premiums.”
The PCCI counts among its members the biggest industries and companies, which employ millions of workers, in the Philippines.
So far, the Arroyo administration has declared nine official and special holidays for the whole of 2009.
According to Lacson, some business leaders, whom he did not id
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entify, have already agreed to reduce their benefits like allowances, bonuses, car plans, representation, entertainment as well as other expenses that can be avoided.
He added other businessmen also agreed not to receive the annual dividends for their investments and instead plow these back to the company to cope with the adverse impact of the crisis.
In other instances, some companies even reduced the salaries of their employees occupying managerial positions as he stressed:
“We need to spread out the misery. It is wrong to think that only the ordinary workers are affected by the less than stellar economy. It is better to have only 50 percent of your salary than to have none at all. It still puts food on the table.”
In this light, Lacson said all the concerned sectors, including government, should continue to consider ways to reduce costs while saving jobs at the same time.
And in his reckoning, reducing the number of holidays is one way of enabling all those concerned to cope with the adverse impact as the global crisis deepens.
Joining Lacson and the PCCI are foreign companies operating in the Philippines which called for a flexible holiday arrangement to help them survive the meltdown.
The first to air the same appeal was Ernie Cecilia, the chairman of the Committee on Industrial Relations of the American Chamber of Commerce (Amcham) in the Philippines.
Cecilia cited as an example the case of the country’s business process outsourcing industry, more popularly known as call centers, which spends the equivalent of $1.3 million per pay during holidays.
Cecilia warned the high cost of holiday pay has put a heavy financial burden on companies already reeling from the disastrous impact of the crisis.
He explained that in calling for flexibility, their purpose is not to avoid paying holiday pay because that is required by law.
What Amcham and the other foreign companies are asking, Cecilia said, is to have flexibility for both employers and employees to set the holidays on days when customer requirements allow for some slack in the workplace.
Cecilia argued that if the Department of Labor and Employment would allow the proposed scheme, this would not compromise the productivity of workers or impose extra financial burden on employers.
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