Expiration of some workers’ contract ‘won’t affect City Hall operations’

THE operations of the different offices of Cebu City Hall will not be affected should there be casual and job order (JO) employees whose contract will expire in September.

This was the assurance of Cebu City Administrator Collin Rosell after the announcement of Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama that only 3,000 employees will be left before 2025.

Rama, during the flag ceremony on Monday, August 14, 2023, announced before the City Hall employees that he will trim down their number.

Rosell, in an interview with SunStar Cebu on Tuesday, August 15, said most of the contracts of casual and JO employees will end in September.

Rosell said the plan of Rama is to implement rightsizing of City Hall employees to save and spare expenditures, which can be used for other programs of the City.

But he was not able to provide the details on the departments that have the most number of casual and JO employees.

In the 2022 audit report of the Commission on Audit (COA), the state auditors noted the City Hall's hiring of 4,091 JO employees, incurring a total cost of P602,247,468.96 in their wages in 2022.

COA has flagged the City after finding out alleged several gaps in its JO employees hiring, including a weak internal control in the recruitment, repetitive hiring of JOs, job mismatch, overlapping or redundancy, and unclear and unverified accomplishments "resulting in potential bureaucratic inefficiency and wasteful government expenditures."

At the end of 2022, City Hall has 4,091 JO employees, and this constitutes 45 percent of the total workforce; 3,545 casual employees; and 1,389 permanent employees. (JJL)