CLARK FREEPORT – The Samahan ng Progresibong Kabataan (Spark) aired yesterday objection to the government’s plan to require youths undergoing various skills training under the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) to undergo more on-the-job trainings (OJT), a move allegedly meant to serve the interests of private corporations.
In a statement, Spark said this was the reason why TESDA has been transferred from the Office of the President to the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). The transfer was mandated by Executive Order 67 issued last Oct. 31.
The group said the transfer “will only make the youth more vulnerable to exploitative cheap if not totally free, labor schemes by private companies that circumvent labor laws under the tutelage of the DTI.”
The EO stated that the transfer aims “to ensure responsiveness and efficiency and efficiency in the delivery of essential public services and the attainment of the Administration’s ten-point socio-economic agenda and the development goals as articulated in the Philippine Development Plan”.
Spark spokesperson Shara Mae Landicho said “one of its development goals is to accelerate development of human capital which explicitly mentions the strengthening and expansion of internship, apprenticeship, and dual training programs as its deliberate strategy.”
“Under the guise of enhancing employability and addressing the abused alibi of corporations of jobs mismatch, the Duterte administration aims to expand the ranks of the youth that are not in schools but are enslaved in factories,” she said.
“If this is not proof of the deceptiveness of this administration’s much vaunted free tertiary education program then we longer know what is,” Landicho added.
The statement aired fears that “under DTI, TESDA’s mandate to manage and supervise technical education and skills development will be be altered into a serving as a recruitment and training agency that will supply companies with cheap labor.”
“The OJT program is cheap labor for corporations,” Landicho said.
She noted that last September TESDA and Philippine Business for Education (PBEd), a non-profit organization founded by the country’s top CEOs established YouthWorks PH, a workforce development project, to provide skills training to youth but not in education, employment or training (NEET).
“The curriculum they are developing for NEET will require eighty percent of the trainings to be on the job, similar to apprenticeships and only twenty percent on classroom instruction settings allowing host companies to profit out off their trainees,” she said.
Landicho said “it is common practice for companies to partner with academic and technical vocational training institutions to administer internship programs for undergraduates in exchange for a certificate of compliance. In worse cases, the students end up paying the company instead of being paid for their labor.”
“It is condemnable enough that the government has year-in, year out abandoned the education sector with severe budget cuts, now they are hustling us into factories and luring us to work abroad under its labor export policy,” she lamented.
Spark has been campaigning for the inclusion of a special subject on labor rights in the curriculum for senior high school students and technical and vocational institutions. “This subject should cover topics such as salaries and wages, employment policies, state-sanctioned benefits, grievances procedures and other political rights in the workplace,” Landicho also said.
