The most common problems in employee compensation

The world's biggest names in HR and the region's top gurus in Employee Relations and Compensation and Benefits are coming to Cebu for a virtual summit this February 4 and 5 and they will be welcomed by Vice President Leni Robredo, Governor Gwen Garcia, Mayor Edgar Labella, and Vice Mayor Mike Rama, who will also be one of the top resource persons, having been a successful HR manager himself before entering public service.

Day one will tackle Organizational Justice, the new buzzword for Labor and Employee Relations, to be chaired by this columnist, and day two will be headed by Freddie Marquez, our country's best and brightest expert on employee compensation and benefits. The first problem in compensation these days is how medium, small, and micro enterprises can cope with the demands of paying compensation given the tremendous devastation to businesses by the pandemic. How employers can help their people cope with the application of no work-no pay principle. And how to embrace alternative work arrangements like compressed work week, work from home, and a combination of many other schemes, with corresponding alternative systems of paying wages.

The questions include whether employer and employee can validly agree to reduce wages and withdraw certain benefits as joint survival mechanisms. Is such agreement not contrary to law, public policy and business ethics? Will DOLE and NLRC intervene if some employees file a case questioning such an agreement concurred by the majority of the workforce? Is it valid for management to defer or to fail to fulfill a CBA provision granting wage increases or bonuses due to the pandemic? Is a moratorium on annual salary review and increases allowed if imposed by management unilaterally, deviating from a practice for more than 10 years already? Suppose the majority of the employees agree to the moratorium, should the minority insist to proceed insofar as the non-conformists are concerned?

On the non-legal issues, there are issues on how to ARM the employees, ARM being Attract, Retain, and Motivate the human resources from the top executive to the lowest rank-and-file. What are non-monetary rewards like foreign travel, training opportunities, stock options, and housing privileges, HMOs especially for pandemics like this, transportation, and other perks. The speakers from other countries will present comparative matrices on basic pay for executives, managers, supervisors, and technical personnel. There shall be data on industry surveys across industries.

One of the issues that our local HR and business leaders are interested in is who shall pay the contractual workers their separation pay if and when the principal should decide to discontinue the service agreements between the agencies and the principal employers. DOLE needs to clarify many issues like who shall pay the COVID tests, which are quite expensive. Their officials should also tell the participants whether the inspections of the establishments shall resume despite the pandemic, and whether or not the inspectors should focus only on occupational health and safety issues or include general labor standards and security of tenure. Can DOLE not give the industries a little breathing space by a moratorium on inspections?

These questions are going to be raised and the participants should go home with clear answers so that they can decide and act accordingly. We thus call on all the members of the HR community and even the business owners and top executives themselves to be graced by Vice President Leni Robredo as keynote speaker. Undersecretary Bejo Benavides and DOLE Region 7 director Mimi Siaton will be there as speakers too. So, unless you want to be left behind, you need to be in this huge event.