Also the Department of Labor and Employment should inspect hospitals for violations of labor standards, including the charging of so-called on-the-job-training (OJT) fees on registered nurses. The exploitative practice of charging fees from trainee-nurses must end. The labor department must do its job of enforcing the Labor Code. Instead of hospital owners challenging young nurses to file complaints, it should inspect health care facilities and investigate the way they satisfy their labor requirements.
Paying nurses to be deployed in rural areas P8,000 in allowance is well below the Salary Grade 15 stipulated by law for entry-level public sector nurses. Hazard pay, night differential and other allowances are also mandated for public sector nurses but the DOLE is silent whether RN HEALS provides for such mandatory benefits.
In Tunisia, a popular uprising was sparked by the desperate suicide of a 26-year-old unemployed university graduate. That same hopelessness haunts the lives of more than a hundred thousand registered nurses who are unemployed, and some 20,000 to 40,000 more will be added to their ranks when the next batch of nursing students graduates in April. The problem of nurses who are unemployed, underemployed are abused is reaching crisis proportions and has resulted in various forms of abuses like the OJT fees. Meanwhile nurses who are employed are overworked but miserably underpaid.
New nurses should be treated as probationary employees who must be paid the legally mandated entry-level wages and benefits, plus the opportunity to become regular after six months of temporary status. It is a triple whammy on young nurses to pay tuition fees while studying, then while working as a “trainee,” to be denied a wage or charged an exorbitant fee.
—RENATO MAGTUBO,
chair,
Partido ng Manggagawa,
114 Legaspi St., Project 4,
Quezon City
Nikon DSLR
