For three days, barely a week into the second semester, the University Virtual Learning Environment (UVLê), the online learning management system of UP Diliman, went down. The website’s shutdown left faculty and students in distress and disarray since the majority of this semester’s courses rely on the remote learning capabilities of UVLê. When, finally, students could access the website on March 7, displayed against a bright red background on its homepage was a call to action: “UP dinggin ninyo ang isang natatanging protesta.”

Along with the message were several hashtags calling attention to UP contractual employees’ longstanding demands for regularization and promotion. Hours after the online protest, the webpage directed users to the UP Diliman website. UVLê was back up and running on March 15.

The UP Diliman administration said that they were still investigating the “defacement” of the UVLê website, in a statement released hours after the protest, but it did not address the calls made during the online protest.

The UVLê site is maintained and operated by the Interactive Learning Center (ILC) Diliman under the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs (OVCAA). The ILC Diliman has declined to release a statement about the issue, as of press time. 

“Ang immediate naman na ginawa is to restore the system and we posted advisories,” Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Ma. Theresa Payongayong told the Collegian. “Maraming meetings were held, and we started the investigation,” the details of which, Payongayong said, are considered privileged information, upon the OVCAA’s consultation with the Diliman Legal Office and other concerned offices.

The university has mainly depended on online management systems such as UVLê to conduct classes since the shift to remote learning setup during the COVID-19 pandemic. The technical staff of the university consistently maintains and updates the system to cope with the demands of virtual learning.

But UP contractual workers, including the developers of UVLê, have long suffered from delays in the release of their salaries and, in general, the effects of contractualization that have stripped them of their rights and benefits, the Alliance of Contractual Employees in UP (ACE UP) wrote in a statement.

This is true even for employees who have worked for UVLê before. Dawn Benigno, one of the first two developers of the website, worked with the university from 2009 to 2018 as a project-based contractual worker.

Benigno recalled how challenging his work for UVLê was due to resource constraints and how few the people in his team were that catered to the whole UP Diliman campus. Although the team had received support from the Office of the Chancellor for the maintenance and upgrade of the website, they lamented the comparatively paltry compensation they got.

“Benefits lang are just the salary themselves. So we do get some honorarium in other projects, but we don’t get the other benefits that regular employees enjoy, such as yung leave,” Benigno told the Collegian. “So all of the benefits that are available to regular employees, they are not available to us as the developers.”

But even the release of their salaries was delayed at the start until the processing became regular which made it predictable, Benigno said. “The delay is usually after the cutoff for a certain month. You’d expect it to be released maybe a week or more after. I think it’s the standard process for UP’s release,” he added.

Up until Benigno left in 2018, there was steady progress in the increase of their compensation, but it was not aligned with the Salary Standardization Law, unlike for employees with plantilla items. There was no assurance as to when their salary would be increased since it did not follow any formal pay structure.

At least 3,343 workers in the entire UP System are hired under job orders or contracts of service, or are considered non-UP contractuals or lecturers, based on the June 2020 data of ACE UP. This number does not include the janitors and security personnel, among other agency-hired personnel, and even project-based contractual employees.

Contractual employees do not have an employer-employee relationship with the university. The absence of such a dynamic is the root cause of all the struggles faced by non-UP contractual workers, Gabriel*, a member of ACE UP, said.

“Diyan nagsisimula lahat kung bakit delayed yung sahod, bakit may issue sa PhilHealth, bakit wala silang internet, clothing, at rice allowance, bakit may moratorium o ba’t walang security of tenure. Lahat yan nakaugat dahil hindi sila nire-recognize as employee ng UP,” Gabriel said.

“Ang taas-taas ng ranking ng UP. Ang nagtatrabaho diyan ay mga kawani at almost half ng kawani ng UP ay mga kontraktwal at hindi kabilang, hindi nare-recognize yung contribution ng mga non-UP [contractuals] sa ranking ng university pero sa trabaho, kasama sila. Actually, sila yung may mabibigat na trabaho sa university.” ●

*Not his real name. The source was granted anonymity, on his request, due to the sensitivity of the issue.