Summary executions of micro enterprises and small start-up firms

While the COVID-19 virus is killing thousands every day, the DOLE inspectors and other government agencies are also subjecting small and struggling firms to endless inspections, visitations, intrusions, and all forms of interventions in the exercise of management prerogatives, and the directors keep on issuing orders that involve outrageous amounts and peremptorily ordering principal employers to absorb workers belonging to legitimate agencies.

We do not refer to DOLE in Region 7. The leadership here is more reasonable and level-headed. We refer to the whole nation in general. A small shop with limited operating hours due to the pandemic lockdowns and quarantines, with heavy bank loans and with very high taxes and labor cost, for instance, is never free from the endless array of inspections coming from various government agencies aside from DOLE. The fire department makes inspections for fire hazards. The city sanitation office comes to see if there are piles of garbage that invite flies, rodents, and pests. The city engineers' office comes to make sure that the installations can pass safety standards according to the building code. The BIR comes for you-know-what, taxes audit and whatnot. The licensing and business permits office, the office of the mayor and other subalterns and underlings, also come for their own reasons.

Then the DOLE comes, my God! They examine payrolls, demand to see the books, and interrogate workers without any search warrant or any judicial authority, but a letter from the office. In a company with many workers they talk to one or two, then make conclusions that bind all the workers. The workers had no complaint; they had been silently and harmoniously working with management for many years, and then come the almighty inspectors who seem to have the total and flawless mastery of the Labor Code. Their mandate on the visitorial powers of the secretary of Labor is taken from Article 128 of the Labor Code, which is in Book Three. Then why are these inspectors making statements and drawing conclusions on security of tenure, which is found in Bok Six? Are they empowered to make rulings that involve intricate questions of law?

Because of cruel and unusual interventions made by the government, many small businesses had been closed. Existing jobs were eliminated by the iron hands of inspectors. Outrageous amounts had been ordered to be paid. How can small establishments afford to pay hundreds of thousands of pesos? Even barber shops, carenderias, mini-shops, beauty parlors, food stalls, and other small-time operations have been massacred. When I was an inspector of DOLE in 1974, I ordered a small restaurant in Quiapo to pay P300,000 to its four waiters. Secretary Blas Ople scolded me. Because of my order, 12 other waiters lost their jobs because the restaurant decided to close. When I was a labor arbiter in 1977, I ordered a small hacienda in Guihulngan to pay half a million pesos to its plantation workers. The hacienda was foreclosed by the bank and all the workers lost their jobs. Secretary Ople called me the executioner of jobs.

Today, what I did wrong in the ‘70s is being done with impunity, and I am sorry to say that because I love DOLE as an institution. I hope that they should wake up knowing that we are killing the patient with the injections we are giving them. The cure is more deadly than the malady.