A BILL filed in the House of Representatives seeks to raise the salaries of private sector workers by P750.
House Bill 7568 was filed on Monday by Gabriela Women’s Party Rep. Arlene Brosas, ACT Teachers Rep. France Castro, and Kabataan Rep. Raoul Manuel.
Granting a P750 across-the-board nationwide increase “in the salary rates of private sector workers becomes extremely urgent to close the gap between the current minimum wage and the calculated family living wage across regions,” the bill’s explanatory note stated.
PHOTOS BY J. GERARD SEGUIA
The bill mandates all private sector employers, “whether agricultural or non-agricultural,” to pay an across-the-board wage increase of P750 “regardless of the employment status and position of workers and regardless of the industry classification and location of the enterprise.”
The new daily minimum wage shall be the sum of the current daily wage “for an ordinary workday” and the P750 increase “mandated in this Act.”
“All workers paid by result, including those who are paid on piecework, pakyaw or task basis, shall receive not less than the prescribed new daily minimum wage upon per eight (8) hours of work or a portion thereof for the hours worked or outputs produced,” the bill read.
If the bill is passed into law, recognized learnership and apprenticeship agreements will be “considered automatically modified to reflect the prescribed national minimum wage.”
The bill stated that it shall be unlawful to lay off workers or to downsize merely to comply with the wage increase.
Micro- and small enterprises, and small landowners owning agricultural land of up to five hectares and relying on agricultural workers, who could not afford the wage increase “may apply for wage subsidies which shall be a fraction thereof, subject to the implementing rules and regulations (IRR) of this Act, until such time that the enterprise can fully shoulder the new daily minimum wage.”
Moreover, the bill stated that a person, corporation, trust, firm, partnership, association or entity “which refuses or fails to pay their workers the mandated across-the-board wage increase set herein shall be punished by” a fine of 100 percent “of the total amount of the wage increment due the employees to be multiplied by the number of working days the wage increment has been unpaid to the employees” or imprisonment of at least three years but not more than five years, or both such fine and imprisonment.
The bill stated that if a corporation, trust or firm, partnership, association or any other entity committed the violation, the penalty of imprisonment shall be imposed upon its responsible officers including, but not limited to, the president, vice president, chief executive officer, general manager, managing director or partner.
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