The Center for Trade Union and Human Rights (CTUHR) joins the employees of the country’s business process outsourcing (BPO) sector and the Filipino workers and people in lauding the Labor Department’s cease and desist order against a BPO company in Cebu whose lack of a disaster response plan was exposed during the September 30 earthquake.

We commend the BPO Industry Employees’ Network (BIEN) for upholding the health and safety of BPO employees and filing a complaint before the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) against 30 BPO companies for violating the country’s occupational health and safety laws.

The DOLE’s order is just. The magnitude 6.9 earthquake in Central Visayas left more than 70 people dead and more than 100 people injured, yet BPO companies, according to BIEN, forced employees to immediately return to their offices, had emergency exits in their offices which were blocked, and offered double pay to their employees to continue working.

BIEN also reports cases where managers verbally threatened employees to make them go back to work and belittled their safety concerns. Some BPO managers also marked employees who went home after the earthquake as unpaid, denied them attendance bonuses, and suspended them from work.

DOLE’s suspension of the BPO company’s operations is a victory in BPO employees’ long and continuing struggle for their occupational health and safety. Servicing clients outside the country does not mean that the labor rights and lives of Filipino employees, who live and work in the Philippines, do not matter.

The DOLE should enforce, and BPO companies should observe, the country’s Occupational Safety and Health Law (Republic Act 11058), which clearly states that “The worker has the right of refusal to work without threat or reprisal from the employer if, as determined by the DOLE, an imminent danger situation exists in the workplace that may result in illness, injury or death, and corrective actions to eliminate the danger have not been undertaken by the employer.”

The DOLE should not stop at suspending the operations of one BPO company. It should investigate all the 30 companies that BIEN complained about. The suspension of one BPO firm should serve as a warning to all BPO companies that employees will not take it sitting down when their lives and labor rights are being violated or taken for granted.

The BPO sector remains a “sunshine industry” of the country, where companies have the capacity to uphold labor rights and employees have the opportunity to assert their rights. BIEN’s demand for the legislation of the Magna Carta for BPO Workers – which mandates better protection for employees, a P36,000 entry-level wage, and increased HMO benefits – is most just.