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MANDAUE CITY, Philippines – While the mayor and legislators of the Mandaue City government continue to squabble over budgets, 1,794 employees at City Hall have been working without pay since July.
The last time the program and job-order employees received their pay was in June, according to City Administrator Briccio Joseph Boholst.
Their pay for July, August and the rest of the year hinge on the P35-million allocation that Mayor Jonas Cortes included in his proposed Supplemental Budget No. 1, which is still pending with the City Council.
The council, however, was not keen on approving the allocation unless it is given details of the program and job-order employees.
Despite the delay brought about by the council’s demands, “we will comply with the requirements asked by the council so that they’ll have nothing more to say and there will be no more reason to delay the salaries,” Boholst said.
“If they need all the names of the program employees, then we will give them. The mayor has instructions to the HRMO (Human Resource Management Office) to comply with the documents asked by the council. I think the HRMO has already sent them the names of all the job-order and program employees,” Boholst added.
The City Council, however, came up with its own plan to get the details it wanted.
Just for Wednesday, 20 “ghost buster” stations will be set up in different locations of City Hall, where program and job-order employees would be asked to register.
This would enable the council to come up with the names and other information of each program and job-order employee working for City Hall.
Vice Mayor Carlo Fortuna, in a press statement, said the stations was the council’s way of “assisting” the mayor in providing the council with supporting documents and hasten the release of the budget.
Fortuna, in a separate phone interview, said the stations would verify the number of program and job-order employees at City Hall and “dispel rumors” that there were “ghost employees” working for the city.
The stations will be open from 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.
“We strongly encourage all program and job-order employees to avail of this one-day registration service offered by the City Council in our bid to help the city executive in providing us with the needed documents for the approval of the budget and to fast-track the release of their salaries,” Fortuna said.
“We are concerned with news reports that a job-order employee is being assigned to a ranking barangay (village) official to feed his pet dogs. We are also very much concerned of persistent reports that there are job-order employees working as domestic helpers for a certain city official.”
