Mayor Herbert “Bistek” Bautista has delayed yet again the allowances of over 12,000 public school teachers in Quezon City.
The implementation of Memorandum Circular No. 7, Series of 2014, signed by Mayor Bistek, held up the monthly supplemental allowances of 12,887 teaching and non-teaching personnel, including the principals of 143 public schools and Division Office personnel in Quezon City, for April, May, and June 2015.
Under the memorandum, the teaching and non-teaching personnel of Quezon City are required to submit their Proportional Vacation Pay (PVP) report, which will determine their supplemental allowance for April and May. Mayor Bistek patterned this scheme after the Department of Education’s guideline deducting the equivalent of the total number of absences the teachers incurred in the previous school year from their allowances for the said two months.
Aside from the monthly P2,000 supplemental allowances, the teachers are supposed to receive a P1,500 rice allowance every quarter. Their rice allowances for the second quarter of 2015 has likewise not been released.
Cash Cows
This huge blow was even aggravated by the transfer of the teachers’ ATM allowance payroll from government-owned Land Bank of the Philippines (Landbank) to the private firm Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) – Globe BanKO last year.
The public-private partnership (PPP) scheme has been torturing the teachers since it was first announced in 2013.
That year, City Administrator Aldrin Cuña made a guarantee that the ATM card of BanKO will be given for free and that the service charge will be waived because it was for a payroll account.
But the ATM payroll shift required the teachers to buy a Globe simcard and purchase the network’s load so they could make use of the system.
The teachers also found out that BanKO is a virtual bank with no ATM machine of its own and no bank outlets. Account holders are deducted P15 for every transaction when they use BPI’s ATM machines and P2 when they do it with a teller. Also, they will be deducted 2% service fee if they cash out from BanKO partner outlets like Generika, Villarica, and Tambunting.
In November 2014, members of the Quezon City Public School Teachers Association (QCPSTA) and Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) Quezon City trooped to Quezon City Hall to demand the release of their four month allowances.
US-Funded Scheme
Manila Today has discovered that the United States (US) government was behind the exploitative payroll scheme.
On June 8, 2012, President Benigno Aquino III and US Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Rajiv Shah signed an agreement in Washington to enforce the Scaling Innovations in Mobile Money (SIMM) Project. It makes use of mobile phones for “business transactions” and access bank accounts using a mobile money technology.
USAID financed and carried out this project. It chose BPI Globe BanKO, a merger of Ayala Corporation, BPI, and Globe Telecom in 2009, as one of the implementors of the SIMM project in the country.
On March 25, 2013, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed by USAID Mission Director Gloria Steele and Mayor Bistek, selecting Quezon City as one of the pilot areas of the SIMM project.
Quezon City public school teachers have been demanding to revert their allowance payroll back to Landbank. They still receive their regular salaries using their Landbank ATM. Aside from the technical problems on the BanKO system, the private nature of the scheme has only prolonged the process of cashing out their allowances.
The teachers vowed that they will take this issue to the streets, together with their calls for wage increase and for the suspension of K-12.
