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Octaviano V NLRC
Octaviano V NLRC
January 20, 1986, she was rehired on a probationary status her third and was
again terminated on June 5, 1986. Thus, we can readily see that Lina had been hired
and again and again rehired and again and again and again fired. We perceive these
successive hirings and firings as a ploy to avoid the obligations imposed by law on
employers for the protection and benefit of probationary employees, who, more
often than not, are kept in the bondage, so to speak, of unending probationary
employment without any complaint due to the serious unemployment problem
besetting our country today. The Court can not countenance this overreaching. No
member of the country's work force must be allowed to be taken advantage of by
any employer.
An employee who is allowed to work after a probationary period, shall be considered
a regular employee. 11 The fact that Lina worked on a contract-to-contract basis
can not alter the character of her employment, because contracts can not override
the mandate of law. 12 Hence, by operation of law, she has likewise, become a
regular employee. 13
We find self-defeating the private respondent's arguments that the petitioner, while
in her probationary periods, had failed to measure up to the standards of her work
and had been found unfit for her job, in the light of the circumstance discussed
earlier. Second, the private respondent failed to establish that there had beer
reasonable standards set forth by the company by which Lina would measure up to
as a regular employee. If indeed there were, the respondent should have attached
copies of those standards, as annexes to its pleadings; the records reveal nothing of
the sort, hence, we dismiss such trivial justifications.
We agree with the petitioner that she was unceremoniously terminated by the
respondent company to prevent her from becoming a regular employee and exclude
her from all the benefits thereto. As we previously stated, this is not only a common
but a convenient practice of unscrupulous employers to circumvent the law on
security of tenure. Security of tenure, which is a right of paramount value
guaranteed by the Constitution, should not be denied to the workers by such
strategem. We cannot permit such a subterfuge, if we are to be true to the law and
social justice. The law and social justice mandate that an employee whose
termination was illegal is entitled to reinstatement with full backwages. 14
Under Article 279 of the Code, "[a]n employee who is unjustly dismissed from work
shall be entitled to reinstatement without loss of seniority rights and other
privileges and to his full backwages, inclusive of allowances, and to his other
benefits or their monetary equivalent computed from the time his compensation
was withheld from him up to the time of his actual reinstatement." Backwages, as
we have defined, represent compensation that should have been earned but were
not collected because of unjust dismissal. 15 Such being the case, the award of
backwages computed from the time of Lina's dismissal up to the time of her
reinstatement is not tantamount to rewarding idleness but to enable her to recover
her loss of income during her lack of employment caused by her dismissal. Clearly
then, the NLRC committed a grave abuse of discretion when it reduced the award of
backwages to one year and compounded that abuse by giving the reason that the
petitioner could have easily landed a better-paying job if she seriously looked for
one, she being a chemical engineering graduate.