Tacurong LGU hires 424 SPES workers
• 20:04 PM Wed Apr 22, 2015
1,581
By:
Edwin Fernandez and Jezereel Louise C. Billano, Tacurong LGU
SPES grantees listen during orientation in Tacurong City.
TCURONG CITY - This summer, 424 students and out-of-school youths will work for
the Local Government Unit (LGU) of Tacurong City under the Special Program for
the Employment of Students (SPES).
The SPES beneficiaries
attended the orientation conducted by the LGU on April 20, 2015 at the City
Cultural and Sports Center. Mayor Lina Montilla and other city officials
welcomed the newly-hired grantees during the event.
Mandated by Republic Act No.
9547, SPES aims to provide poor but deserving
high school, vocational or college students the opportunity to be employed and
compensated. SPES is one of the flagship programs of the Department of Labor
and Employment (DOLE) in partnership with LGUs and private employers nationwide.
SPES
follows the 60-40 salary scheme. On the part of the city government acting as
the employer, it only needs to pay the grantees sixty percent of the grantees’
salaries while the DOLE pays the remaining 40 percent.
All SPES beneficiaries will
work for a period of twenty days and will receive above minimum wage
compensation. Each of the 224 old SPES grantees is set to receive P7, 000.00
salaries while the 200 newly-hired ones will each receive P6, 000.00.
The increase in the
SPES budget this year also paved way for higher salaries compared to the meager
P4, 000.00 each grantee received last year.
The number of SPES
beneficiaries this year increased by more than a hundred as the LGU received
additional budget of P900 thousand out of the Bottom Up Budgeting (BUB) funds
intended for the summer employment program this year.
ProtestantBishop David Salazar,
representing the religious organizations in the Ugnayan ng Barangay at Simbahan
or UBAS, was also present during the orientation to inform the grantees on the
role of the church in monitoring the implementation of BUB-funded projects.
Aside from the BUB
fund, LGU Tacurong earmarked P1 Million from its regular fund for the summer
job program.
This
2015, DOLE Regional Office XII is the first in the country to implement the
Online SPES. Under the Online SPES, all steps in the SPES process (from
pledging to payment of their salaries) go online using the SPES portal created
by DOLE XII.
DOLE XII Regional Director Ofelia Domingo is happy to note that
other DOLE regional offices are keen of adopting the DOLE XII Online SPES
model.