Manila City Hall pays up back wages

National Heroes Monument, Manila City Hall Park/ Photo by Obra19/ CC BY-SA 3.0

MANILA – Aside from their 13^th month pay, employees of Manila City Hall have something else to look forward to this coming Christmas season, and that is their long-overdue salary increase.

On Tuesday Manila Treasurer Liberty Toledo said that the Salary Standardization Law will be implemented this month, meaning all personnel will be receiving the due wage hike since 2013.

“We will pay employees the equivalent of the wage hike they [should have] received from January 2014 this year,” said Toledo added.

She added that the said law was supposed to be enacted January of last year.

However, due to budget constraints, they can only pay the back wages of the employees starting 2014.

Toledo noted that Manila Mayor Joseph Estrada wanted the employees to receive what was due them at least before Christmas.

“We have allocated P325 million for the retroactive salary payments to employees of the city government. As I understand it, the payroll is now being processed for the distribution of these payments,” she explained.

More than 8,000 regular and temporary government workers will benefit from the wage hike. However, both contractual and job order employees are not included.

Initially, the employees were supposed to receive their back pays last July. But Estrada said that they still needed to source the funding for this.

Toledo noted that although the employees would only get their back wages, the city government is still looking forward to giving them the rest of what is due to them.

“The mayor and the city council could decide on that if they think that it can sufficiently be implemented with the funds that we have in the future,” she added.