DBM: Gov't has over 832,000 contractual employees

There are 832,812 contractual employees in the government, most of them in local government units, the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) told a congressional budget hearing on Monday.

"The bulk of this number of contract of service and job order workers in the government are in the local government units at 580,323 or 69.68% as of June 30, 2023," DBM Secretary Amenah Pangandaman said during the budget deliberations on the proposed P6.32-trillion budget for 2025 before the Senate finance sub-committee.

The rest of the contractual government employees work under the following:

• national government agencies (173,227 or 20.8%)
• state universities and colleges (44,168 or 5.3%)
• government-owned and -controlled corporations (28,667 or 3.44%)
• local water districts (6,427 or 0.77%)

Senator Joel Villanueva, who chairs the Senate Committee on Labor, then quizzed Pangandaman on how to address such huge number of contractuals as against the high number of unfilled positions in the government.

Pangandaman responded that the DBM and the Civil Service Commission will be issuing a joint circular requiring all agencies to submit positions for reclassification and all unfilled positions so the DBM could allocate budget accordingly.

“The DBM and Civil Service can publish a circular of sorts to really encourage, across the board, all agencies, to reclassify and fill out their [unfilled] positions. Because not all agencies request this,” Pangandaman said.

“One of the things we are looking at for the circular is that for positions which have been left unfilled for more than 10 years, maybe we can scrap it and reclassify it, and create new positions,” she added.

Villanueva said he is counting on Pangandaman to deliver on her promises, noting that the government cannot set a standard of providing job security when it employs that many contractuals.

“I trust the secretary to take a lead on this because it's been a while. We talked about this last year, and unfortunately, there are still many agencies that are not responding to our calls,” Villanueva said.

“Unfortunately, the improvement has been so slow. Because it is very hard to push for an end to contractualization, asking the private sector to get away or reject the idea of end of contract [after every six months], and yet the government is the number one violator. That would be tough,” Villanueva said.

Pangandaman said there are already agencies doing restructuring and reclassification of positions. She said she will submit a list to the committee. —KBK, GMA Integrated News