General Provisions

Question 1

What is labor legislation?

Answer 1

these consists of statutes, regulations and jurisprudence governing the relations between capital and labor by providing for certain employment standards and legal framework for negotiating, adjusting and administering those standards and other incidents of employment.

Question 2

What are Labor standards?

Answer 2

Labor standards are the minimum requirements prescribed by existing laws, rules and regulations relating to wages, hours of work, cost-of-living allowance and other monetary and welfare benefits including occupational, safety and health standards.

Question 3

What is labor relations?

Answer 3

Labor relations - defines the status, rights and duties and the institutional mechanisms that govern the individual and collective interactions, of employers, employees or their representatives.
- the challenging task of balancing the rights and interests of the employer and the employee.

Question 4

What is social justice as defined in the case of Calalang vs Williams?

Answer 4

Social justice is “neither communism, nor despotism, nor atomism, nor anarchy,” but the humanization of laws and the equalization of social and economic forces by the State so that justice in its rational and objectively secular conception may at least be approximated. Social justice means the promotion of the welfare of all the people, the adoption by the Government of measures calculated to insure economic stability of all the competent elements of society, through the maintenance of a proper economic and social equilibrium in the interrelations of the members of the community, constitutionally, through the adoption of measures legally justifiable, or extra-constitutionally, through the exercise of powers underlying the existence of all governments on the time-honored principle of salus populi est suprema lex.

Question 5

Are Philippine Labor Laws Pro-labor?

Answer 5

• A constitutional commissioner has characterized the 1987 Constitution as “especially pro-labor,” for the rights of workers and employees have acquired new dimensions while some concepts have been constitutionalized

Question 6

What is the labor code?

Answer 6

• a set of substantive and procedural laws that prescribe the principal rights and responsibilities of employers, employees and other industrial participants, as well as the role of Government, in employment and related activities, so as to institute social justice.

Question 7

How is labor law construed?

Answer 7

1. The Supreme Court adopts the liberal approach which favors the exercise of labor rights

Question 8

What are Management rights?

Answer 8

• The employer has the right to return of investments and to make profit. (Right to ROI)
• Employers have the right to make reasonable rules and regulations for the government of their employees (Right to prescribe rules)
• An employer has a right to select his employees and to decide when to engage them. (Right to
• An employer has the perfect right to transfer, reduce or lay off personnel in order to minimize expenses and to insure the stability of the business, and even to close the business.

Question 9

Is the labor law applicable to GOVERNMENT CORPORATIONS?

Answer 9

• Government corporations created by Congress are subject to Civil Service rules, while those incorporated under the general Corporation Law are covered by the Labor Code.

Question 10

When is the labor code NOT applicable to government corporations?

Answer 10

• Agencies to which the state delegates government power for the performance of a state function are covered by the Civil Service Commission.

Question 11

Is the labor code applicable to cases without employer-employee relationship?

Answer 11

• Yes. The Labor Code may apply even if the parties are not employers and employees of each other.