Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, May 29) – The coronavirus pandemic is pushing Filipinos to embrace digital transformation across several aspects of their lives – job hunting included.
The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) has warned job seekers against falling prey to illegal online recruiters.
The agency says COVID-19 has an unexpected benefit. It fast-tracked the Philippines’ bid to enter the age of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution.
But the DOLE admits the government is not yet 100 percent ready for the digital upheaval.
The Philippines’ IT policymaking agency — the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) — is young, while government services have yet to be made seamless as transactions with the public still are largely done face-to-face.
“COVID-19 has really given the Fourth Industrial Revolution full speed and therefore, your infrastructure for information and communications technology must also be in place,” Labor Assistant Secretary Dominique Tutay said in a May 28 interview via Zoom.
“While it’s in place, it’s not enough. You need to strengthen it because more people are doing their things online,” she added.
Under the existing rules, manpower agencies setting up business have to first register with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and in some instances, with the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI).
But it is the DOLE that issues licenses to recruit locally, and the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) for licenses to deploy workers abroad.
But the rules are decades old and new issues have cropped up, including data privacy protection in the digital age.
With government agencies yet to fully digitize their services and connect their databases with each other in a seamless electronic network, regulatory arbitrage becomes a problem. Companies that have secured a primary license from the SEC upon registration can easily do a hybrid online recruitment business and get away with it.
“There’s no specific agency regulating these online [recruitment] platforms,” Tutay said.
“Prior to COVID-19, we’ve already had initial talks with different online platforms. They say they don’t recruit but some of them recruit. They say it’s job placement or advisory or advertisement. But we’re saying the way you define recruitment is very broad. Even advertisement itself of job vacancy already forms part of recruitment so if you don’t have a license to recruit, then you can be charged with illegal recruitment.”
The DOLE is trying to plug those loopholes in the regulatory system so that SEC-registered companies that later venture into online recruitment will not be able to circumvent the DOLE rules.
Its solution: A department order that spells out the guidelines governing online recruitment platforms.
And the DOLE has the DICT, the National Privacy Commission and the NBI involved in writing those guidelines.
The Labor department wants the directive released within this year. “We want the industry to flourish because we know this is a requirement of the Fourth Industrial Revolution but you cannot just do your thing… If the jobseekers get hurt, whom will they turn to?” Tutay said.
