The 1,500 Bacolod City government job order (JO) workers without any official appointments are considered volunteers and will not be paid, Bacolod Mayor Alfredo Abelardo Benitez said Friday, November 18.
Only about 3,500 JOs officially appointed from October to December will be paid, he said.
Benitez said 800 of the JOs with appointments are assigned to schools and 2,700 to the Bacolod City Government Center.
“We cannot accommodate all because of the restrictions of the amount of budget that we have left for this year,” he said.
“If you are not officially appointed for a three-month period, we will now consider you as volunteers…do not expect to be paid,” Benitez said.
Benitez said by December the names of the officially appointed JOs for January to March will be released.
Renewal of the JO workers’ appointments will be done every three months based on an assessment of their performance, he added.
“There has to be a basis for why we hire JOs,” Benitez said.
Next year the city government is looking at hiring about 3,000 JOs, that is about 50 percent less than the previous administration, he added.
“There were a lot of people who joined as JOs without official appointments causing a lot of confusion and discontent. They entered and expected to be appointed only to find out that they were not,” Benitez said.*