Crumbs

Sabi ni DepEd Sec Florencio Abad, maging happy na raw tayo sa P3k
matatanggap (di pa dumarating, kaya wag usugin) na "Valentine's Day
Bonus" simula bukas, 14 Feb na galing sa kabutihang palad ni PGMA. At dahil mga 75% ng Team Angas ay government workers,heto ang report galing sa inq7:


Be happy you're getting P3,000 bonus, Abad tells workers

Posted 04:07pm (Mla time) Feb 13, 2005
Inquirer News Service

GOVERNMENT employees should be thankful they are getting a belated
P3,000 bonus this month considering they were not supposed to get
any cash gift at all, Education Secretary Florencio Abad said
Saturday.
"I'm happy with that (P3,000) because for a while I thought there
would be no bonus at all," Abad said.

He said Malacañang had been considering not giving a bonus anymore
to the 1.2 million state employees.

Several state-employee unions had balked at the amount of the bonus,
P3,000, as it fell short of the P5,000 they had received in December
2003.

The head of the DepEd non-teaching employees union, Domingo Alidon,
said the amount was too low considering that salaries had not risen
over the past four years.

Abad said state employees should look at it as a case of the glass
being half-full instead of half-empty.

It was "something positive" that should be appreciated, he said.

With 500,000 teachers and non-teaching staff, the education
department accounts for nearly half of the entire government
bureaucracy.

Malacañang announced in December that it was scrapping its
traditional practice of handing out a P5,000 cash gift to each state
employee at the end of the year, known as the productivity
enhancement pay.

Confronted by protesting employees, the Palace promised to give the
bonus in February.

Last week, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo said the government
could afford to give bonuses of from P1,000 to P2,000 only.

But the employees again protested, and the President raised the
amount to P3,000, calling it a "Valentine's Day bonus."

"The reason it got so delayed was because the (Department of Budget
and Management) had to compute the savings generated by all
departments," Abad said.

The bonus is supposed to come from the savings of each department or
agency.

Abad said the bonus was meant to thank all employees for helping to
bring down the budget deficit. Dona Pazzibugan