Employers are weaponizing the courts against workers’ wage increases
Two employer groups have now gone to regular trial courts to block Wage Order No. NCR-27, the P85-minimum wage increase that took effect for its first tranche of P60 on July 25. Readycon Trading and Construction Corp. and R-II Builders Inc. obtained a temporary restraining order (TRO) from Branch 152 of the Pasig City Regional Trial Court (RTC) on July 30, suspending the wage order until Aug. 13. Days later, the Alliance of Philippine Fishing Federations Inc. filed a similar petition for declaratory relief before Branch 287 of the Navotas City RTC, naming the Regional Tripartite Wages and Productivity Board-NCR and the National Wages and Productivity Commission (NWPC) as respondents.
This is not an isolated legal skirmish. It is fast becoming a tactic, an anti-wage order playbook. When employers lose a wage case before the regional tripartite wage board, they now run to a regular court for a TRO instead of exhausting the remedy the law itself provides.
The remedy is crystal clear. Article 126 of the Labor Code expressly bars any court, tribunal, or other entity from issuing an injunction or TRO against proceedings before the NWPC or the regional wage boards. Article 123 gives any party aggrieved by a wage order exactly one avenue, that is, an appeal to the NWPC within 10 calendar days after publication of the wage order. Readycon and R-II Builders had that remedy available and chose not to use it. The Pasig RTC granted their TRO anyway.
The human cost of that overreach is staggering next to what it cost the petitioners to inflict it. The TRO froze the P60 first tranche wage increase for an estimated 1.1 million minimum wage earners in Metro Manila, according to the Department of Labor and Employment. This amounts to a daily loss of P66 million a day. The P60 a day wage increase is modest, barely enough for a kilogram of rice, but it is the difference between a meal and hunger for a worker’s family.
Readycon and R-II Builders secured the power to withhold that amount every working day for a bond of just P1 million—a rounding error against what workers stand to lose, and a bargain price for suspending a statutory wage increase that even at P780 a day remains roughly P520 short of the P1,300 family living wage Ibon Foundation has estimated for the region.
This episode exposes a structural weakness in a wage-fixing mechanism that has stood for more than three decades. The regional wage board system was designed to keep wage-setting out of politics and out of litigation, entrusting it instead to tripartite bodies weighing labor, capital, and the public interest. It has now been shown vulnerable to capture by ordinary civil litigation. And even when working as intended, the regional wage boards have never lifted minimum wage earners above the poverty threshold. Two lawsuits in two weeks should not hold an entire region’s wage increase hostage.
Congress must treat this episode of weaponizing the regular courts to steal workers’ hard-fought wage increase from the outdated and ineffective wage fixing mechanism as a wake-up call. Therefore, we call on the Senate and the House of Representatives to conduct an urgent review of the regional wage-fixing mechanism under Republic Act No. 6727 or the Wage Rationalization Act of 1989, with the end goal of abolishing the discriminatory provincial wage rate system altogether and replacing it with a single national minimum wage set solely on the basis of the cost of living. Whatever reform or mechanism replaces the prevailing wage setting system, it must be explicitly insulated from the jurisdiction of regular courts and other tribunals, so that no employer can again turn a wage increase decision into a courtroom hostage situation.
Workers waited months for this wage order. They should not have to wait on the whim of a civil court to finally receive it. Junk the TRO! Reform the wage fixing mechanism now!
Ka Rene Magtubo
chair, Partido Manggagawa
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