A TOTAL of 154 casual employees of the Cebu City Transportation Office (CCTO) will be unemployed by Jan. 1, 2023, two weeks before the Sinulog Festival at South Road Properties.
Most of these casual employees are traffic enforcers which gives CCTO head Raquel Arce cause for concern as there will be fewer personnel managing the traffic during the Sinulog, which resumes in-person activities on Jan. 15 after being halted the past two years because of the pandemic.
Arce told SunStar Cebu on Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2022 they have to lay off 154 casual employees as CCTO’s personnel services (PS) allocation for 2023 will breach the limit set by the Department of Budget and Management (DBM).
CCTO must only have 400 casual employees next year.
The traffic office has 554 casual employees, and most of them are deployed to the streets for traffic duties.
Because of this, Arce said the CCTO will have less manpower on the road to man traffic during the Sinulog.
“Mao nay akong problema kay come January busy baya kaayo akong opisina for Sinulog. So, mao na, unsaon ni nato pag-eksibisyon with the personnel nga mawala,” said Arce.
(That is my problem come January, because our office will be busy during the Sinulog. So, that’s it, how will we deal with the lack of personnel.)
Aside from casual employees, CCTO also employs 20 regular personnel and 100 job order employees.
A regular employee is a worker who has a civil service eligibility. According to the Civil Service Commission, a job order employee is a person appointed, usually by the mayor, who shall undertake a specific job for a limited period not to exceed six months, while a casual employee is appointed to undertake essential and necessary services where there are not enough regular staff to meet the demands of the service.
City Council appearance
Arce said that she will appear before the City Council on Friday, Dec. 9, for the public hearing of the proposed budget of the CCTO, and she will take that opportunity to ask the councilors to retain the number of personnel just for the month of January.
“Ang akoa ra gyud nga request karon lang gyud January, kung mahimo unta, as is lang ang akoang personnel,” she said.
(My only request is that in January, if possible, the personnel at CCTO will stay as is.)
According to Arce, the slashing of casual employees is not only happening in CCTO but also in other City Hall departments.
However, the traffic head is quite appalled upon knowing that CCTO is one of the offices with the highest number of casual employees who will not be renewed next year.
Arce did not answer why there are many casual employees in CCTO.
The CCTO head said she will ask Mayor Michael Rama to provide an additional budget for the employment of additional regular employees since this position is not covered by the PS ceiling set by the DBM.
There are still open slots for regular positions but there is no budget allocation for the hiring of personnel, she added.
“I am requesting the mayor to fill up the regular positions to offset the [impending] loss of casual (employees),” said Arce in a mix of Cebuano and English.
In the 2021 report of the Commission on Audit, the state auditors flagged the hiring of the Cebu City Government of almost 4,000 casual employees when it should have filled instead almost 3,000 vacant regular positions.
Despite the reduced workforce, Arce assured the public that they will do their best so that the CCTO’s implementation of traffic rules will not be greatly affected.
For the month of November, the CCTO has issued a total of 18,177 citation tickets to traffic violators, while a total of 672 motorcycles, 292 electronic bikes, 32 tricycles, and 56 private vehicles were impounded for illegal parking.