Teacher-unionists on Wednesday, Jan. 26, staged two picket protests to reiterate their demand for the provision of 25 percent overtime premium and service credits for 77 excess workdays in the last school year.
Members of the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) - National Capital Region (NCR) Union trooped to the Civil Service Commission (CSC) office in Quezon City and the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) office in Manila to urge the two offices to take action on the matter of overtime compensation.
“It’s been three months since we last heard from CSC and DBM regarding our call for overtime compensation. In our last dialogue, you deferred from issuing an opinion and instead asked us and DepEd to submit our position papers,” said ACT- NCR Union President Vladimer Quetua.
“We delivered ours to both CSC and DBM on November 10, but we’re still yet to receive any feedback,” Quetua added.
ACT has staged several protest actions including the “Pambansang Araw ng Paniningil” in November where hundreds of teachers trooped to DepEd to demand overtime compensation.
Meanwhile, teachers in other regions have also been holding varying forms of protests.
Quetua lamented that teachers continue to meet the “growing exigency of education delivery” amid this seemingly never-ending pandemic.
“The health crisis and ensuing worse socio-economic crisis have taken its toll on our and our family’s well-being, as evidenced by the recently implemented health break across many regions in the country,” he said.
“We’re not asking for much, only for the government to properly compensate us for our work,” he added.
In the position paper submitted by ACT, the group argued for the granting of 25 percent overtime premium as well as service credits for 77 days of excess workdays, from April 6, 2021 to July 10, 2021 in School Year 2020–2021.
While DepEd “refused to acknowledge” any excess in workdays, ACT presented 10 years' worth of memoranda on the school calendar and Proportional Vacation Pay computation that showed that DepEd has always treated workdays as equivalent to class days.
In the last school year, ACT said that teachers were ordered to render services on June 1, 2020 even as classes were repeatedly delayed until October 5, 2020 --- which resulted in a total of 297 workdays for teachers.
ACT noted that the maximum allowable class days as per RA 7797 is only up to 220 days.
“We reiterate our demand for CSC and DBM to urgently release a decision in favor of our public school teachers, who compose the largest section of government employees,” Quetua said.
“We have long been neglected by this government by way of low salaries and poor and delayed benefits, it’s about time you properly remunerate us for our services,” he added.