THE GOVERNMENT JO, THE MOST ABUSED SPECIES IN PUBLIC SERVICE

by Dr. Roger B. Rueda

Let us speak of the government Job Order worker—the employee who works full-time, thinks full-time, sweats full-time, but is paid as if labor were a hobby and survival an optional add-on. The JO is the only creature in the bureaucracy expected to deliver outputs with civil-service efficiency while enjoying contractual security roughly equivalent to a paper umbrella in a typhoon. In ASEAN folklore, this figure is familiar: like the water buffalo (carabao/kerbau) praised for strength yet fed last, or the anak-dalangin of Malay tales who bears the village’s burdens without inheritance, the JO is valorized for endurance while denied protection. This condition is not accidental; it is what sociologist Guy Standing identifies as the deliberate manufacture of the precariat—a workforce kept flexible, anxious, and politically quiet (Standing, 2011).

From the lens of Sikolohiyang Pilipino, the persistence of the JO system is sustained by culturally potent values such as tiis, pakikisama, and utang na loob, which quietly moralize endurance and discourage complaint. As Virgilio Enriquez argued, when survival is framed as virtue, structural injustice is easily misrecognized as personal sacrifice rather than institutional failure (Enriquez, 1992). The JO is thus trapped in a double bind: culturally praised for resilience yet structurally punished for asserting need. Like the aswang’s victim who is told to stay silent lest the village panic, the JO learns that speaking up risks social sanction. In this way, folklore, psychology, and modern labor economics converge—revealing that precarity survives not only through contracts, but through stories we have been taught to endure rather than resist.

They are told, with a straight face, that they are not employees, merely “engaged services.” This linguistic acrobatics allows the State to enjoy their labor without the inconvenience of benefits, tenure, or moral discomfort. In ASEAN folklore, this is the old trick of renaming the burden: like the trickster datu who calls forced labor “voluntary service,” or the Thai phi that drains life at night while insisting it offers protection by day. Words are used not to clarify reality but to soften exploitation. Max Weber would recognize this instantly—bureaucracy rationalizing itself out of ethical responsibility by hiding behind technical language, converting moral questions into administrative categories (Weber, 1922).

From the perspective of Philippine psychology, this denial is made palatable through hiya and pakikisama: the worker is subtly taught that questioning labels is impolite, disruptive, even ungrateful. As Virgilio Enriquez observed, colonial and bureaucratic systems survive by training people to internalize restraint, mistaking silence for harmony (Enriquez, 1992). Thus, “engaged services” becomes not just a contract term but a psychological leash—employment by denial. You work, therefore you exist, but only until payday, and even that is negotiable. Like the folk hero who saves the village yet is written out of the ending, the JO labors in full view, then disappears from the story the moment rights are mentioned.

Government JOs draft reports, manage offices, teach classes, process claims, respond to emergencies, and keep agencies alive while plantilla holders attend seminars on “work–life balance.” Yet when JOs ask for security, they are accused of being impatient, ungrateful, or—my favorite—political. As if wanting PhilHealth were a revolutionary act. Labor leader Leody de Guzman has repeatedly pointed out that contractualization in government is not an economic inevitability but a policy choice—one that transfers risk to workers while insulating institutions from accountability (de Guzman, 2019).

Let us be clear: defending JOs is not an attack on government—it is a defense of its credibility. A State that preaches social justice while running on disposable labor is practicing ideological plagiarism. Karl Polanyi warned that when labor is treated as a mere commodity, detached from human life and social protection, society pays the price in instability and moral decay (Polanyi, 1944). You cannot sermonize about dignity while institutionalizing precarity. That is not governance; that is gaslighting with letterhead.

Some argue, “But they agreed to the terms.” Yes—and people once agreed to indentured labor, too. Consent extracted from economic desperation is not freedom; it is coercion with paperwork. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum, through the Capabilities Approach, reminds us that work must enable a life worth living, not merely prolong survival (Nussbaum, 2011). The JO accepts not because the system is fair, but because hunger is persuasive and rent does not wait for plantilla items.

Government JOs are not asking for privilege. They are asking for the radical idea that if you work for the State, the State should not treat you as temporary furniture. They want benefits because sickness is not contractual. They want security because rent is not seasonal. They want respect because patriotism does not pay electric bills. Futurist Yuval Noah Harari warns that societies that normalize worker insecurity in the name of efficiency are not preparing for the future—they are breeding anxiety and resentment (Harari, 2018).

So let us stop pretending that Job Orders are “cost-saving measures.” What they save is not money but conscience—by outsourcing injustice to the most powerless workers. Storyteller George Orwell showed us how systems endure by normalizing humiliation until it feels ordinary (Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933). The JO system survives not because it is right, but because it has been made routine.

Defending government JOs is not charity. It is constitutional housekeeping—the unglamorous but necessary act of sweeping injustice out of the very institutions that claim to uphold social justice. In ASEAN folklore, the house that refuses repair eventually collapses on its own occupants; the bahay na binayaan in Philippine tales rots not because storms are strong, but because caretakers look away. So it is with the State: a government that tolerates injustice within its own workforce cannot credibly lecture the nation on fairness.

As F. Sionil José reminded us, injustice persists not because it is unseen, but because it is tolerated when convenient—normalized through habit, excused by procedure, and justified by silence. Philippine psychology names this dangerous accommodation as sanayan sa mali: the slow training of conscience to accept what should have been resisted from the beginning (Enriquez, 1992). This tolerance has gone on long enough. What began as a temporary arrangement has hardened into institutional neglect, and folklore, psychology, and history agree on one lesson: when injustice is allowed to settle in, it does not stay small—it grows roots.

I hope that they be given at least a minimum wage of ₱800–₱900 a day by 2026, especially in a country where billions are routinely wasted on ghost projects that exist only on paper and in press releases. In ASEAN folklore, the village that feeds its idols while starving its people is always the one cursed with drought; the gods, after all, do not eat cement. Philippine psychology would call this a failure of kapwa: we invest in abstractions and monuments while neglecting the living humans who keep the State running day to day.

Their existence is worth more than any project that never materializes. A road that is never built does not feel hunger. A bridge that exists only in reports does not get sick. But Job Order workers do—and they still show up. As Amartya Sen’s human-centered view of development reminds us, the true measure of progress is not infrastructure counts but the expansion of people’s real freedoms and well-being. If the State can afford billions for nothing, it can afford dignity for those who actually make government function.

 

THE CONTRADICTIONS OF CHRISTMAS IN THE REPUBLIC

 by Dr. Roger B. Rueda

That season when the archipelago is punctured by both cash bonuses and conscience deficits falls on the Philippines is a kind of ironic halo. Christmas in the Philippines is not so much celebrated as performed with the devotion of a Shakespearean tragedy and the consistency of a government alibi. We are, as Gabriel García Márquez might sigh, in a Season of Miraculous Forgetting. 

Right now, in some shanty village of the Philippines, a mother is stirring a pot of instant noodles and calling it Noche Buena. She is neither a snob nor an idealist. Pure of heart and simple in spirit, she is, after all, following the example Christ himself set: “Man shall not live by bread alone,” as Matthew (4:4) tells us. But alas, reader, sometimes there is no bread—only boiling water and borrowed faith. And yet, the Department of Trade and Industry—a veritable master of comedy in the guise of public service—has the nerve to say that a ₱500 Noche Buena is all any family of five needs! My goodness! Somewhere a senator is robbing ₱5 billion, a governor hiding ₱50 million in confidential funds, and a mayor “auditing” her conscience with a designer handbag. And there comes DTI to tell the poor to make up low-fat meatloaf or imaginative sardines.

This is not economics; it is theology in drag. The miracle of making do without any money is, in substitution for loaves and fishes, merely survival against shortages all around. So when DTI grins and says, “₱500 will do,” just remember—it is not a budget; it is an obituary for dignity, delivered with press releases, straight faces, the lot!

When poor people sing Christmas carols wading in floodwaters, they are more than just hopeful; they do resilience as the national pastime. They are true disciples of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, finding purpose in suffering while those in power look for a way out. Their parol is not made of capiz but of courage; their nativity scene, persistence, not porcelain. And somewhere in the same archipelago, politicians and high-ranking officials are pocketing billions, grinning like choirboys in congressional hearings. Meanwhile, the Department of Health has left its so-called “mega health centers” halfway through, hardly constructed, so that all they stand as are concrete carcasses to mediocrity. The irony? Poor and sick they may be, yet it’s a sick land that awaits them—“under construction.”

We are told to wait, patiently endure, as if divine mercy were a substitute for good governance.

My friends, this is not faith. This is state-endorsed martyrdom—poverty as policy, resilience as anesthesia, and corruption as the country’s only illness that even the DOH will not admit. Yet somewhere uptown, the officials whose neglect turned this annual Atlantis into Christmas Chaos parasol in their solemn annual handouts, distributed with flood bolts labeled “From your public servant.” They call it charity. We call it crime with ribbons.

For the corrupt Filipino, Christmas is the Fourth Quarter of Damnation. Luke 12:15 warns us, “Take care to guard against every kind of greed, for even though he is rich, the man’s life does not result from all his possessions.” But our political class treats this verse like a footnote that didn’t get it.

In this day and age, they are like modern-day Pontius Pilates, washing their hands with sanitizer after underwriting a bloated contract—even adding that they are Scrooges without redemption. They use spreadsheets to rewrite Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth. They throw charity balls where the chandeliers cost more than the donated funds. They even quote that “it is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35)—conveniently forgetting that what they give is first from the society’s exchequer.

And when the Commission on Audit appears like the Ghost of Christmas Past, they feign surprise—as if their villas were built by elves, their luxury cars delivered by the Three Kings. Each auditor’s report becomes a morality play in which robbers feign victim, and taxpayers are the laugh of fools. They clutch their pearls, issue statements of “transparency,” and chant the favorite hymn of the guilty: “We welcome any investigation.” Of course—investigations are like novenas in this country: said regularly, seldom answered. So the public watches the game, fully realizing that each thousand pesos hence embezzled is a centimeter widening that one pothole, the next project delayed, another Filipino’s dream being whittled down.

The simple soul, like Thoreau at Walden Pond, spends Christmas in silence. One candle, one petition prayer, one song—this suffices. To him, God dwells not in theatrical splendor but in the simple fact of being alive. He knows that life’s truer meaning, like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, is found not so much in things as in being.

But the ambitious soul—oh, here is rich comedy and laughter! Christmas for them is, as pointed out, a PR campaign veiled in piety. They post “gratitude reflections” on Facebook with all the sincerity of a corporate press release and attend Simbang Gabi not for the novena but to be photographed. They are the epitome of Kierkegaard’s “aesthetic stage”: living in irony and excelling in profundity, sinking deeply into superfluousness.

But in the midst of contradictions, something sacred still flickers. The poor who share their last can of sardines. The nurse who works through Christmas Eve. The teacher who buys her own chalk. These are the real Magi of our age—bearing gifts of endurance. But they do not, in display, come on camels. With hands frozen from empty electricity bills, they do not follow a star but rather the faint light of unpaid bills. Every day, in the ruins of false promises and half-built hospitals, these ordinary citizens perform miracles—resurrecting hope with nothing but faith and the hard-scrabble obstinacy of the Filipino people itself. If holiness were assessed not by wealth but by sacrifice, then the nation’s saints are not in the Senate but in the slums; not in the Cabinet but on our streets, in schools and hospitals, in wet markets where piety has not yet died completely. If Christ were born today in Baseco, not Bethlehem, his manger would be a cardboard box under some bridge somewhere. The shepherds would be security guards; the wise men, Grab drivers held up by traffic. And King Herod would have his own vlog entitled “The Truth Behind the Nativity Scam.”

In the words of Dostoyevsky, “You can judge the culture of a society by going into its prisons.” But here, you don’t even need to go inside one of those bars. Just look at any Christmas party—and then see who gets their place where it says “Reserved.” A man convicted of pillaging the public purse is now the guest of honor. Perfectly healthy architects of overpriced projects are leading prayers. Those same hands which signed ghost contracts now raise glasses of merlot to “public service.” Civilization, it seems, has degenerated into this. In this republic, which has no recall, the corrupt one struts pompously upon history’s stage in sequined gowns and tells us about “nation-building.” As waiters serve lechon to lawmakers with cholesterol in their consciences, the rest of the country watches from twisted television screens. They ask not for justice but only for any crumbs that might be left over. So, before we cry out “Merry Christmas!” let us remember the Lord’s thunder in Isaiah 1:23: “Your rulers are rebels, partners of thieves; they all love bribes and chase after gifts.” But this same passage also offers hope: “Come now, let us reason together… Though your sins are as scarlet, they will become white as snow.”

The miracle of Christmas, my friends, is not in shopping plazas nor in the palaces of public officials but in the innocence and laughter when uncorrupt hearts gather lighted candles, perhaps even music! It is also among poor people who get nothing but still find ways to contribute to others. The powerful may feast themselves on tricks, but the humble already dine in grace.

 

The Pickled Poem

by Roger B. Rueda

Writing a poem is like pickling mango:
first the fruit—green, hard-headed, feigning innocence.
You cut into it with a modicum of insensitivity,
see the pallid flesh recoil, from air and meaning.
That’s the raw, defensive, sour first version.

You salt the lines to draw sweat,
to drive out of them the too much feeling,
the wrong sweetness the poets all love to keep.
Then you wait — oh yeah, the waiting is the kicker.
They never teach that in workshops.

The vinegar of revision stings your hands;
and you stir both truth and memory,
ignoring the bitterness of each in turn.
Too much sugar, and the poem is polite;
too little, and no one will taste its pain.

And then days or years later, you go back to the jar—
the poem has darkened, deepened,
tasted like something one had to put up with.
You open it carefully,
and then it meets you: sharp, acidic, unapologetic.

To write, as to pickle,
is to fix the instant before it is lost,
to trust that rot and beauty
can share the same glass.
And when you taste it—your tongue is burning,
but you ask for more.