BSP employees complain of low salaries

By Jun Vallecera
Reporter

RANK-and-File employees at the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas remain restive and complained Friday of continued BSP inaction on their petition for salary adjustments.
           
Their main complaint is the fat salaries of executives while rank-and-file pay scales remain inexplicably slim, which they said have not been addressed.
           
Documents indicated the matter has been raised again before Monetary Board member Nelia Villafuerte showing the increasing frustration of the rank-and-file employees over the BSP's inability to address their gripes in full.
           
Villafuerte is one of the more enlightened members of the policymaking board and has a fondness for taking issues that benefit the less financially endowed such as the BSP microfinance program.
           
BSP security officer Jesus T. Tacata revealed he had been summoned to a meeting with human resources management director Dominador O. Asperilla where his petition for a salary increase was discussed in great detail.
           
He said he was presented endless slides that explained the BSP salary scheme, one that did not bother to address why he continues to receive a minuscule salary.
           
As a BSP employee, Tacata, and many more like him, has been declared exempt by the Supreme Court from the capping provisions of the Salary Standardization Law and deserves a justifiable salary increase just like his superiors.
           
He has questioned the current BSP salary scheme and its basis and has asked to be informed on the implementing guidelines to an ongoing job evaluation program.
           
Employees fear, Tacata said, the program will condemn simple employees like him to a life of low pay checks even as those of superiors fatten.
           
"In my follow-up, I was told the requested information is hard to do. I insisted this be made because this is the only way I could understand the salary given to me," he said.
           
Tacata said he has the support of the BSP employees' association president, Raul Montero, a lawyer.
           
His greatest fear, and that of colleagues as well, was that nothing would happen to his petition that director Asperilla discussed with him in September this year.

Business Mirror
October 30, 2006