DOLE blocks PNP plan for mandatory police clearance in labor transactions
MANILA, Philippines — The labor department has blocked a proposal from the Philippine National Police (PNP) to require police clearances from employees, saying the plan is potentially unconstitutional and has “no legal basis.”
“While good-intentioned, requiring DOLE clientele to secure NPC to avail of our services will do more harm than good,” Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III told outgoing PNP chief Debold Sinas in a letter dated May 4. A copy of the letter was distributed to reporters on Wednesday.
Sinas original proposal intended to mandate workers to secure a national police clearance (NPC) to access “various transactions” with the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE). It was not immediately clear what transactions will be covered, but DOLE offers services such as cash subsidies to those laid off by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Police clearances are not new and the NPC is merely a document issued by the PNP headquarters that clears an individual of any pending crime across its entire database. Before 2018, when the NPC was instituted, clearances of this kind are localized in nature.
This means that each PNP office in cities and provinces issue different permits that clear a person of any criminal case in that locality.
Currently, local employers do not typically require a police clearance in the hiring process, and instead ask the same document coming from the National Bureau of Investigation, a separate office under the justice department. Instead, police clearances are sometimes included among documents needed to get travel VISAs in various countries.
Hence, while seeing some sense on Sinas proposal, Bello said requiring NPC from workers would effectively add a layer of red tape, which he said will run contrary to the administration’s policy of easing requirements for doing business. A quick DOLE survey of employers and employees, he said, showed 94% of respondents as against the plan.
The Trade Union Congress of the Philippines, a labor group, previously asked Bello to reject the PNP’s request, calling it an “unwarranted infringement of the constitutional rights of workers to self-organization.” This came after numerous reports of red-tagging incidents of certain individuals and groups perpetuated by authorities.
“We are with the PNP in building a safer place for the Filipino. We can achieve this without adding burden to the transacting public and the people we serve,” Bello said.
- Latest
- Trending
