📷Vladimer Quetua, ACT Chairperson
Following Senate President Escudero’s recent remarks wrongly blaming non-teaching principals for large class size in public schools, the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) Philippines said that the Senate is looking at the wrong direction in its purported bid to improve government efficiency through the proposed right-sizing program.
“The government’s approach to enhancing efficiency in education and public service is fundamentally flawed. Reviewing the functions of frontline workers with the aim of reducing the workforce when in fact they are already overworked due to understaffing will not lead to efficiency but to the collapse of service delivery. Our rank and file employees and low-level managers- in the case of schools, our teachers, education support personnel and principals- are the lifeblood of education delivery. While they have long been suffering from low salaries, contractualization and work overload due to underfunding, threatening their jobs is pure disservice to our civil servants,” criticized Vladimer Quetua, ACT Chairperson.
“For the education sector, right-sizing as imagined by the current regime will not address the shortage of teachers and education support personnel but will instead jeopardize school administrators’ job security, increase teachers’ workload, and disrupt school operations. On the contrary, what we need is for the Senate to prioritize legislating substantial salary increases for teachers and all government employees, creating more regular teaching and non-teaching positions, and expediting the hiring of qualified teachers and education support personnel,” pressed Quetua.
“If the Marcos Jr. administration is serious in rightsizing, it should look into the glaringly top-heavy bureaucracies in government departments and agencies with too many undersecretaries and assistant secretaries, consultants, and advisors, with salaries and perks seven to nine times that of ordinary government employee, while over 800,000 government workers are stuck in contractual, job order, and casual positions with pitiful pay and almost no benefits,” Quetua added.
“It is hypocritical for the government to push for austerity measures through right-sizing when billions of pesos go down the drain with huge misallocations in the national budget and rampant corruption of public funds especially by top officials in government. What we need is an end to impunity and holding accountable those who plunder the state coffers, recover our stolen resources and use these to expand the social services for the people,” stressed Quetua.
ACT already sought a dialogue with the Senate President to engage in a constructive discussion on the potential implications of the proposed rightsizing program to public sector and education workers, including its effects on job security, public service delivery, and the broader educational landscape, and to present pressing issues of the education sector and lobby for legislative actions. #
