Some DoLE execs not keen on having PRC under its wings

By Jerome Aning
Inquirer
Last updated 06:03am (Mla time) 09/28/2006

SOME OFFICIALS of the Department of Labor and Employment are not exactly happy over President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s executive order attaching the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) to the DoLE.

“The professional boards under the PRC are very assertive of their independence. We wonder how much control we would have over them, and whether these boards would even allow us to look into their processes,” said a senior labor official who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak with reporters.

“But the transfer is already there, so we cannot do anything about it any more,” the source said in the course of expressing his and other officials’ doubts on whether Malacañang had thoroughly studied the implications of such a transfer.

The source pointed out that most of the 43 boards under the PRC -- such as the Regulatory Board of Nursing -- were set up by law and were virtually operating as autonomous bodies to protect their integrity as exam-givers and their independence in deciding administrative cases involving professional malpractice.

The PRC has a bigger bureaucracy compared to other DoLE-attached agencies such as the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration and the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, the source said.

(The other agencies attached to the labor department are the Employees Compensation Commission, Technical Education and Skills Development Authority, Occupational Safety and Health Center and the National Wages and Productivity Commission.)

Only a labor undersecretary working full time as PRC supervisor will be needed, the source said in reference to the system in the department whereby undersecretaries and assistant secretaries are assigned as “overseers” of one or more DoLE bureaus and agencies.

The source wondered who had made the decision to transfer the PRC from the Office of the President to the DoLE. He said the PRC would be better off under the Commission on Higher Education because “the practice of a profession is clearly related to education.”

According to the source, the issue of the transfer of the PRC should have been separate from the controversy involving the leakage of test questions in the nursing board examination.