Before I talk about the various ways the workers and their organizations promote compliance to labor standards, I will discuss first the Philippine setting and the present labor standards compliance situation.

Compliance to labor standards is usually used interchangeably with social compliance (SC), social accountability (SA), the practice of corporate social responsibility (CSR), compliance with ILO conventions on labor standards, and the like.  This is because compliance to labor standards is always a major component of the various social accords.

Presence of multiple sets of standards

Being a developing country, the Philippines has several sets of labor standards because of its segmented economy and industrial relations system.  Our country has a shrinking formal sector whose wage and salaried employees (around 18% of employed labor force in 2003) are covered by legislated labor standards set under the various ILO conventions[1].  In the private sector, the labor standards are mostly stipulated in the Labor Code of the Philippines, the Social Security System, PhilHealth, Pag-ibig Fund and Employees Compensation Commission.  In the government sector, the labor standards are governed by the Civil Service Laws and the Government Service Insurance System. 

The increasing informal sector where workers are mostly not on a formal labor-management relations (such as unpaid family workers, self-employed or own-account workers, piece rate and other local and overseas contractual workers) are directly or indirectly covered by several laws affecting informal sector workers.  Among these laws include the Barangay Micro-Business Enterprise (BMBE) Law[2], Cooperative Code of the Philippines, Cooperative Development Authority (CDA) Law, Local Government Code, laws governing the Overseas Workers’ Welfare Administration (OWWA) and the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (CARL), Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act, Magna Carta for Small Farmers, Social Amelioration Program in the Sugar Industry, Small and Medium Enterprises Development Council (SMED), Social Reform and Poverty Alleviation Act, certain provisions of the Labor Code of the Philippines, SSS, PhilHealth, and Employees Compensation Commission Law (Tolentino, Sibal and Macaranas 2001).

Bach Macayara (2005) noted: “The framer of the [Labor] Code at that time simply ignored the fact that in those developed countries, many of their workers already joined their formal sector of the economy; whereas in the Philippines, a large majority of our workers were still with the informal sector. As a consequence, we have a Labor Law that was focused on protecting the smaller segment of the workforce in the formal sector. Nonetheless, we consoled ourselves with the thought that as “economic development deepens, most of our workers will eventually end up with the formal sector of our economy” an assumption that now appeared premature as this was reversed when globalization was introduced”.