The House of Representatives has approved House Joint Resolution (HJR) 18 doubling the salaries of military and police personnel. It has now been forwarded to the Senate for a concurring resolution.
We did not realize until now how low the salaries of soldiers and policemen are. We saw uniformed combatants bravely advancing into the battle area in Marawi City in the last few months. Some subsequently received medals in their hospital beds, but others lost their lives in the fighting.
Many of those troopers are paid only P14,834 a month, the base pay for a private in the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and a Police Officer 1 in the Philippine National Police (PNP). From the beginning of his administration, President Duterte said he would double their pay and last week, the House approved HJR 18. The base pay of a private would now be doubled to P29,668.
There are varying rates of pay increases for the higher ranks of uniformed personnel . A chief master sergeant in the AFP would receive P35,456 a month, a general P121,143 beginning January 1, 2018. Further increases would be given by January 1, 2019.
Considering today’s cost of living, these increased salary rates are welcome indeed. But, as some members of Congress pointed out during the deliberations on Joint Resolution 18, they will result in a great distortion in the government’s system of salaries. For while they double the salaries of AFP and PNP personnel, the salaries of civilian government employees are covered by the revised Salary Standardization Law (SSL 4) which provides for much more modest increases.
Teaches, clerks, aides, and other rank-and-file workers who have been in the service for as long as 10 to 20 years have never received pay as high as P20,000 to P30,000, ACT party-list Reps. Antonio Tinio and France Castro said. The doubling of AFP and PNP pay is thus an injustice that might lead to demoralization in the ranks of the civilian bureaucracy, they added.
They thus proposed that HJR 18 be amended to include all government employees – civilian and uniformed – and that they all be given P3,000 increases in their monthly pay. They were, however, overwhelmed by the majority which quickly approved the doubling of the pay only of soldiers and policemen. The House resolution now goes to the Senate.
There is truly a need to raise the pay of our uniformed personnel, especially since it was personally promised by President Duterte. But there is also a need to raise the pay of other government employees. Only recently, there were reports of teachers so indebted to moneylenders that most of their year-end bonuses went to payment of their debts.
Perhaps the pay increases for civilian government workers need not be as much as those for soldiers and policemen who put their lives on the line every time they go off against rebels and criminal gangs. But they should not be totally forgotten.
