Sen. Serge's attack on PNoy: Weder-weder lang

Last Friday (March 14), Sen. Serge Osmeña made it to the headlines of a national broadsheet when he finally told the whole nation what many of us already knew that Pres. Benigno "PNoy" Aquino III was a poor manager. My friends have been asking me what my thoughts were about this sudden but unexpected attack against Pres. PNoy by his staunch. Honestly, if you ask me, all this is politics -nothing but pure unadulterated politics.

For sure the Osmeñas are not stupid people. From day one, when then Senator Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III made his bid for the presidency, they knew his poor managerial skills. In fact, I won't ever forget the reaction of then Mayor Tomas Osmeña when he heard that his pal, then senator, now Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) Manuel "Mar" Roxas II stepped aside his presidential ambitions to make way for Noynoy Aquino, Osmeña said, "Who is Noynoy Aquino? What does he know?"

But then, Mar Roxas made his pitch to the Osmeña political clan to back up Noynoy Aquino. And since it was "weder-weder lang" time, they asked the Cebuano electorate to vote for Aquino. But now it can be told that supporting Pres. PNoy Aquino and the Liberal Party (LP) turned out to be a political nightmare for Rep. Tomas Osmeña who lost his mayoralty bid in the last May 2013 elections. One of the causes of his defeat was that under the Aquino presidency, Cebu City experienced what we call "nagpuasa" because we got zero infrastructure development in the last three years.

So my take on Sen. Serge Osmeña's frontal attack against Pres. PNoy is: He is now looking for a new political patron to back in the coming 2016 elections. Of course, he has not yet completely dropped Pres. PNoy because he is only asking for the resignation of Energy Secretary Jericho Petilla. But in truth, if Sen. Serge truly believes that Pres. PNoy is an incompetent manager, he should not be asking for the resignation of Sec. Petilla but also the resignation of Pres. PNoy. Again, it is weder-weder lang! I was reading the headlines of The FREEMAN yesterday about the 48 South Road Properties (SRP) guards literally begging for their unpaid wages. I hope that this wasn't misunderstood that indeed those security guards had to beg for their wages. If this happened in the private sector, we would have been hauled to court and forced to pay those back wages, plus, probably some damages against those unpaid employees.

But this has always been the problem with our government and it doesn't matter to me whether it is the local government unit (LGU) or a national government agency. Whenever a service has already been done, it is the responsibility of the agency hiring a security guard or any employee for that matter to pay their rightful wages. If you scrutinized this issue any further, you learn that those security guards are not permanent employees but casual employees of the government.

This is one of the compelling reasons why I want a total revamp of the 1987 Philippine Constitution, because I believe that the case of those security guards is a violation of the Human Rights being employees. I learned more about this when I was the chairman of the Cebu City Traffic Operations and Management (CITOM) where more than 90 percent of the people under me - most of them our Traffic Enforcers - were casual employees who had to get their job contracts renewed every three months. I found this tedious and downright unfair!

Like what we've already said before, in the private companies, whenever we hire a new applicant for a job, we are given six months to evaluate that new hire whether he or she is capable or fit for the job they applied. If they are to the liking of our company, then they are hired as permanent employees. If not, you can terminate that person and hire another one, until you get the person who fits the job description perfectly and make that person a permanent employee in your company after six months.

But this Philippine Constitution allows casual employees because our political leadership apparently wants to use those government employees for their own selfish political ambitions. This is why whenever there is a change in the leadership of a local government unit or a national government agency, many employees lose their jobs because they were a liability during the elections. I dare say that we must do away with this unfair system. Unfortunately, no one in the national leadership is thinking of the welfare of our poor casual employees.

This is the challenge that I would like to throw to all the casual employees working in the government, that they band together and conduct a rally so that our Congressmen would hear their plight and maybe someone would sponsor a bill that would do away with a casual employee for good. So the ball is in your courts casual employees!