ghost employees

THE YEAR began quietly, over a canteen breakfast. There were no speeches or resolutions—just hot coffee, cold Coke sakto, and the familiar, careful conversation of job order friends. Someone joked about holiday weight gain. Another spoke, with relief, about a child returning to school. For a moment, there was gratitude—work would continue, at least for now. Then, without drama, the familiar refrain surfaced: no one knew what the next month would look like. Not from lack of work, but because their pay—like their contracts—depended on renewal. The uncertainty stayed at the table with us, unspoken but understood.

Most people who do not work alongside job order workers imagine them as peripheral. In reality, across many public institutions, they arrive before sunrise and leave after offices empty out, keeping classrooms, corridors, and offices functional. Much of what runs smoothly does so because they were there first and stayed last. When it does not, they are often the first to be blamed. Many have families to feed, children to send to school, parents to care for, and bills that never wait—rent due, medicines to buy, food to purchase, fares to pay, loan interests to settle, and tuition to stretch across the month. Their labor is constant. Their security is not.

This precarity persists not because of individual neglect, but because job order arrangements—by design—sit outside the protections built into the public sector’s employment framework. As of June 2025, an estimated 940,000 job order workers serve in government institutions, likely mirrored by similar numbers in the private sector.

Operating on a “no work, no pay” basis, holidays, class suspensions, and emergency closures do not bring relief; they bring anxiety. For some, Christmas and New Year are not seasons of rest but periods without income. Several quietly admit they pray there are no sudden cancellations, because one missed day means one less meal. For many JOs, daily pay for services rendered (technically wage, not salary) ranges roughly from ₱400 to ₱700—a sum that must already stretch to cover food, transport, rent, medicine, clothing, and school needs, on top of the supposed ₱1,221 daily living wage (IBON, 2025). This reality is not unique to one institution or administration. It is woven into a nationwide system that treats their work as necessary, yet their lives as provisional.

Many job order workers remain in that status not because they lack diligence, but because permanence is filtered through narrow gates. Some were forced to leave school early due to abject poverty. Others never had the resources or preparation for the civil service examination. Many lack access to training, mentoring, or the quiet confidence that comes from knowing someone inside. In a country where opportunity often follows proximity to power, JOs are frequently held by those who started farthest from it. Studies on job order and Contract of Service (COS) workers consistently show that while many meet qualification standards, regularization remains elusive and heavily dependent on administrative discretion rather than transparent pathways (Villena, 2021).

There are, of course, administrators who try. This deserves to be said clearly. Within institutional and legal limits, some work quietly to support job order workers—encouraging training, helping them prepare for civil service examinations, extending contracts where lawful, and insisting on respectful treatment. These efforts rarely make headlines, but they matter. They do not erase structural limits, but they soften daily life. The failure lies not in intention, but in systems that cannot translate care into policy.

The more troubling side of the job order phenomenon appears when rules bend selectively. The same contractual flexibility that keeps many hardworking JOs insecure has, in documented cases, been misused—job order slots extended to relatives, political supporters, or, worse, ghost employees who appear only on payrolls (Adan, 2015). These cases do not define public service, but they expose vulnerabilities in oversight that deserve attention.

In government agencies, some job order workers now perform core institutional functions—frontline public service, records and data management, technical and field operations, program implementation, instruction, research assistance, and extension work—despite procurement rules originally limiting JO arrangements to temporary support tasks. When discretion goes unchecked, merit weakens, morale erodes, and injustice quietly normalizes. This is not an indictment of administrators, many of whom operate within tight constraints, but of a system that grants discretion without consistent safeguards. It is also worth stating, without minimizing public-sector realities, that job order workers in private institutions often face even harsher conditions—longer hours, fewer protections, and little recourse when abuse occurs. In these spaces, the absence of public scrutiny makes precarity easier to hide and harder to challenge.

Public frustration resurfaced recently after reports circulated of a public institution in Mindanao recognizing a worker’s 32 years of service under a job order arrangement. The recognition, intended as gratitude, was widely received as painful irony. Many former JOs did not see honor; they saw exposure. Decades of service without security, benefits, or retirement protection felt less like loyalty rewarded and more like endurance stretched too far. The reaction was not aimed at individuals, but at a system capable of keeping someone temporarily for a lifetime.

Attempts to soften this reality sometimes backfire. A recent viral post claiming that JO and COS workers enjoy “unknown or often denied benefits” was met with disbelief. Workers responded with lived counter-evidence: no paid leave, no bonuses, no maternity protection, no fixed gratuity pay, no employer-employee relationship. Many shared stories of leaving government service after a decade or more with nothing but memories. The gap between policy language and daily experience could not have been clearer. Recognition without rights, one commenter wrote, feels hollow.

Research supports these accounts. Phenomenological studies listening closely to job order workers—from Davao’s street sweepers to contractual staff in national agencies—describe a familiar mix: insecure work, delayed pay, thin benefits, emotional strain, and quiet pride in work done well (Lagura & Ligan, 2018). Most cope through side jobs, small loans, and hope that rarely makes a noise. Some invest in further education, believing it may one day open a permanent door, even as uncertainty persists. Recent measures, such as expanded SSS coverage for JO and COS workers, are steps forward, but remain partial responses to a deeper structural issue (Sy, 2024).

So the question remains: how do we fix the job order problem without costing people their livelihoods or turning institutions into villains? The answer is not in praising sacrifice or relying on stopgap fixes, but in fairness that people can count on. National laws can help—by setting limits on long-term JO use, fair pay floors, basic protection, exam access, and due process—but so can clearer institutional policies, honest timelines, and leaders willing to explain decisions. Quiet governance rarely announces itself, but it shows up in fewer anxious mornings and fewer lives lived on hold.

Job order workers already do the work that keeps institutions together. They usually arrive early, leave late, and carry more than most people notice. What they ask for—often quietly, careful not to be misunderstood—is not praise, but fairness they can trust. When systems listen, survival no longer has to cost dignity.

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Doc H fondly describes himself as a “student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with.