Capitol to implement last phase of salary hike in July

By Dolly Yasa

BACOLOD City – Negros Occidental Provincial Administrator Atty. Rayfrando Diaz said Friday that the provincial government will implement the last phase of the Salary Standardization Law (SSL) in July 2023.

Diaz said the Capitol recently implemented SSL 2 in early 2022 and SSL 3 in July 2022.

“Initially we were behind in implementing the law but last year we implemented two phases of the SSL,” he pointed out.

Diaz also said that job orders and contract of service (COS) employees are covered by the salary increase.

“We already increased the rates of our casual employees from P477 to P481 because employees with salary grade 1 also increased their daily wage rates,” he added.

The SSL 5, signed by former president Rodrigo Duterte, states that the basic salaries of government workers would increase by a weighted average of 23.24 percent by 2023. It also covers public school teachers and nurses.

Based on SSL 5, employees under salary grades 10 to 15 would be granted the highest increase ranging from 20 to 30 percent, while those under SG 25 to 33 would have the lowest increase of eight percent.

Government workers under SG 1 to SG 10 would also get an increase from 17.5 percent to 20.5 percent over four years.

This is a continuation of an executive order signed in 2016 which also provided four tranches of compensation hikes for government and military personnel from 2016 to 2019.

Republic Act 11466, or the “Salary Standardization 5 Law” will be the fourth and final tranche.

Meanwhile, Diaz said that Governor Eugenio Jose Lacson renewed the contracts of all 1,740 JO and COS employees of the provincial government on Thursday.

Those whose contracts were not renewed were those with recommendations from their department heads because of performance, attitude, and other misconduct, Diaz said.

The operation of the provincial government manned by JOs and COS workers continues to run normally, he added.