The threat seems categorical enough: no bonus if not all the employees are vaccinated. Yet the purpose of the condition could negate the purpose of the bonus if some, or even a single individual, is found to be unvaccinated when the time for its release comes.
So the interpretation, City Hall watchers speculate, must be flexible enough to allow the majority, who are already vaccinated to receive their bonus on or before their Christmas party, initially set for next Friday, December 17, unless bad weather would not allow it.
APPROPRIATION BY SANGGUNIAN. Significantly, the City Council passed Wednesday, December 8, Supplemental Budget #2 for this year, with no condition about the recipient being vaccinated, let alone the condition that ALL must be vaccinated before its release. SB #2, series of 2021, appropriates P540.92 million for general fund and P47.56 million for special accounts on urgent and necessary expenses. Minority Floorleader Nestor Archival drew the information from Majority Floorleader Raymond Alvin Garcia that SB #2 included “the bonus.” No mention about Mayor Rama’s condition on total vaccination at City Hall. The figures earlier floated were: P20,000 each for regular employees and P6,000 and a pack of rice for each job-order worker.
Somebody publicly explained that it’s the mayor’s right to set the vaccination qualifier as he executes the ordinance passed by the legislature. The prerogative though does not include defeating the purpose of the bonus, which motivated the legislators to approve it.
TENTATIVE SIGNAL FROM MIKE. Friday, December 10, Mayor Mike was still trying to be firm. He was quoted in a news report thus: he’d “stay true to his word that ALL employees must be vaccinated so they could get their bonus.”
But at the same time the mayor said: “We are now coming, we will take it one after another. In the days to come, we will listen to those who do not want to get vaccinated. if they have the requirement ‘nga dili gyud sila mahimo magpa-vaccinate, okay. ‘Pero kato dili lang gyud’ by way of idiosyncracy, ‘ato gyud nang istoryahon.’”
That sounds anything but categorical and fixed. He’d find out first the reason for rejecting vaccination: An authority, other than the City Government,
orders them to refuse to be vaccinated. Or they stay unvaxxed out of “unreasonable behavior.” Then, Mayor Mike said, he’d talk to them personally (“ato gyud nang istoryahon”):
Apparently, he doesn’t have a fixed policy yet, but they’re “now coming” to it.
He said he’d gather them and talk to them. Meantime, majority of the employees who already got vaccinated must wait for their Christmas joy until the mayor can resolve the problem.
RELATED ARTICLE: Acting Mayor Mike Rama not clear on release of bonus: must all be vaccinated? (Explainer: November 8, 2021)
HOW MANY ARE THEY? But how many unvaxxed City Hall workers does Mayor Rama have to assemble so he can talk with them?
A December 8 news story said 8,499 out of 9.999 employees of Cebu City Hall or 85 percent have been vaccinated, leaving only 15 percent or 1,499 of them not yet vaccinated. The story didn’t name the source.
The source of the numbers is probably not the mayor as an oft-repeated question of his is about the number of people working at City Hall. Last Friday, at his press-con, he asked again City Hall’s numbers on regular, casual, and job-order employees. Attention HRD, he seemed to call out.
Has it been rhetorical, just a prop to his purpose of knowing other things? He said he doesn’t just want to know how many there are but where they are and what they do. Which suggests the mayor suspects some of them are not doing much for their pay, are wrongly assigned, or may even be, scary but not impossible, ghost workers.
The two sets of figures not only don’t match (by almost 1,000), they don’t tell what the mayor wants to know other than the cause of non-vaccination: where and what work they do at City Hall.
But then, last November 19, Mayor Rama was himself the source that reportedly provided these numbers: 1,000 regular employees, 3,000 casuals, and 5,000 job-order workers. Mayor Mike’s total of 9,000 is 999 short of the total on which someone based the 15 percent of City Hall hires who’re still not vaxxed.
MORE THAN VACCINATION. Rama’s end-goal may not just be to boost vaccination numbers, especially from people located right at City Hall.
It could be an honest-to-goodness wish to correct a long-running problem: a bloated local government bureaucracy. Or, given just seven months before his term ends on June 30 and less than five months before the May 9 elections, Mayor Mike has to impress the electorate about his policy on good governance and tap the mass of voters right in his own work yard.
