A three-pronged challenge beleaguers student assistants and graduate assistants (SAGA): juggling academic load, their personal issues, and the hours they must render at work. SAGAs’ work comprises easing older professors through the online ecosystem, controlling paperwork overflow in college offices, and, in the case of computer science junior Narra* and business administration sophomore Pat*, keeping the order in student dormitories.
A fourth burden, however, manifests at the end of every month: figuring out how to scrape by without pay.
Student assistantship, one of the university’s financial aid mechanisms, aims to “help prepare them (in their) employment, entrepreneurship, and community service after they leave the University.” Months-overdue pay, however, has long been a fixture of the SAGA experience.
A long-winding bureaucracy and bookkeepers spread thin are the main culprits behind this sluggishness. These chronic delays in pay are symptomatic of greater, more entrenched ills that span all the way from the university’s Accounting Office to the national budget department.
Care Without Compensation
Since it was their own dorm* that posted a call for SAGAs, the cash-strapped Narra and Pat saw assistantship as a convenient choice. They have been serving as assistants for the past two years, usually working with five or six others.
Narra and Pat are tasked with keeping the order in their dormitory spaces. Their nightly bed checks and maintenance inspections start at 5 p.m. and end at around 10:30 p.m. This is on top of administrative work, which includes taking tabs on late-coming co-dormers, monitoring check-in requirements at the start of the semester, and organizing weekly movie nights. Their workdays span from Monday to Sunday and count holidays.
“Part din kami sa bumubuo sa community, and everyone feels included,” Pat said. But stewardship has its limits without timely recompense.
The SAGA guidelines state that hiring priority is given to students who “[need] help to pay for their education.” Narra is a beneficiary of Diliman’s Student Learning Assistance System (SLAS), and receives a P5,000 stipend every month. Pat’s SLAS application two years ago was rejected, and she now subsists on a monthly P1,500 allowance from her parents. These are a drop in the bucket, however, against their expenses, with an individually paid monthly room and board of P1,500 being just among them.
Thus, the monthly return of P7,200 is invaluable for SAGAs like Narra and Pat. They maximize the 120 hours they are permitted to work monthly at a rate of P60 every hour; other SAGAs are only given 60-hour and 30-hour work months, depending on the load.
Yet, what this diligence affords them is wages delayed for more than a month. Narra recounted that they only received last February’s pay around the second week of April.
This is, in fact, already an upgrade. Last year, their pay was delayed for five months. “Naka-full sem kami bago kami nagkasahod. Second sem na namin nakuha,” Narra said.
Drastic lifestyle changes ensued for the two. Both lodged appeals for late payment of rent and subsisted on rotations of canned tuna and pancit canton. Pat took on side gigs for P200 a day–barely enough, she learned when she caught a fever: “Gamot pa lang, 100 pesos na. Paano yun?” Narra, whose SLAS stipend also happened to be delayed, was not able to return home to Negros in the holidays.
Volatile Vacancies
Frustration led to desperation. “Hindi kami na-orient kung bakit matagal [ang salary] or kung ano yung process na dinadaanan niya,” Pat said. Clutching at straws, the two regularly trooped to management to inquire about their pay. But at every turn, the reply would be “Nasa accounting pa.”
Yet, the Accounting Office, the main cog in the disbursement process for workers’ pay, is one with SAGAs’ struggle. Alongside the SAGA’s Distribution Voucher (DV), which is a record for the disbursement of pay, the hiring unit must also submit documents like daily time records and/or certificates of service, which tell Accounting the number of hours rendered by the SAGA.
The process for student assistants to receive payment requires several steps with the entire procedure taking approximately nine days. (MK Gerbas)
According to DAO director Cecilia Morales, DV requests are usually returned to the end-user due to the following reasons. (MK Gerbas)
It is from these documents’ sluggish or incomplete submission, however, where delays stem, said Accounting Office director Cecilia Morales. In fact, the processing of SAGAs’ pay is prioritized by the office, and they are able to meet the three-day cap set by the Citizen’s Charter for DV processing, according to Morales.
“Once makitang kulang, hindi po mag-start yung [processing] namin. Kung kailan nila ulit binalik nang complete, that’s when we will start again from zero,” Morales elaborated. Other than lacking documents, common lapses also include incorrect signatories and erroneous approximations of hours rendered.
The experience of the staff of the College of Mass Communication (CMC) Library, which has four SAGAs under its wing, corroborates Accounting’s explanation. According to them, they pass documents to the CMC administration on time. The delay, they said, stems from the fact that no function in Budget Utilization and Liquidation System Analytics (BULSA) directly notifies DV submitters that they have submitted wrong or lacking documents, forcing them to regularly check BULSA for such updates.
“Di naman tayo nagkulang ng follow-up sa mga opisina na dinadaanan [ng sahod ng SAGAs]. Kulang na lang umiyak ka para makipag-usap sa mga opisina para i-process na nila (Which is nagawa na natin makiusap ng ganito..),” the library staff wrote in an email to the Collegian.
Yet, these follow-ups do not address the root of the problem. The university still struggles to fill 1,201 plantilla items—up by 107 from last year’s count. Accounting finds difficulty in filling its needed Accountant II positions, those tasked with pre-auditing the documents submitted by end-users. The office currently only has 16 analysts, who are forced to sieve 200–350 DVs a day. Only two screen DVs under Personnel Services, where SAGAs’ pay is derived.
“I think the salary grade of Accountant [II] is masyado nang malayo sa industry. Mas mataas ang offer sa private [sector],” Morales explained. Per the Department of Budget and Management’s (DBM) Budget Circular 2022-24, Accountant II falls under salary grade 15, paid P39,000 to P42,000 monthly. This is dwarfed by other Accountant posts saved usually for private firms, whose monthly salaries are pegged at P52,000 to P79,000.
In 2021, former Vice President for Public Affairs Elena Pernia confirmed that the main reason behind the sluggish filling of plantilla items was their low salary grade levels.
In response to these vacancies, the administration gives Accounting personnel bound by contract-of-service agreements. One-third of Morales’s workforce is now composed of these workers. Yet amid the extra labor, Accounting is still stretched thin. “Kung pito ang [DVs] at isa lang ang tao mo, sadyang hindi ka magsi-CR, hindi ka sasagot ng telepono. We’re operating at the maximum,” Morales said.
As per the All UP Workers Union last June, the administration has already lodged a request for 1,200 additional regular items to the DBM. However, a report by the Collegian found that the department only gives leeway for additional items once an institution’s permanent positions are already filled.
The Board of Regents is supposedly vested with the power to “adjust salaries and benefits of the faculty members and other employees,” per the UP Charter. Though Morales’s office has sent proposals to the DBM for salary increases for their Accountant items, the DBM has time and again snuffed their pleas, she said.
Long-vacant items wrought by cut-rate salary grades force offices to continue undermanned and with backlogs abounding. SAGAs’ pay remains processed at a snail’s pace—along with the rest of the university’s contractual employees. For instance, research assistants’ salaries, which also pass through Accounting, were consistently staggered by months in 2019.
Narra thinks that the chronically low salary grades of vacant items fit perfectly into the administration’s penchant for contractualization. It does not help that even scholarship opportunities are scarce, leaving some with no other choice but to grapple with whatever employment option is readily available.
“Ginagamit nila yung [student assistantship] para sabihin na ‘It’s more opportunity for you guys,’ when in fact it’s just them not wanting to cover the expenses of a regular employee talaga,” Narra asserted.
Bearing the Brunt
Even with an uncooperative national government, the university administration maintains its imperative to secure workers’ tenures. What AUPWU asks is for UP to absorb qualified contractuals into unfilled items. Unqualified workers, on the other hand, can be promoted from non-UP contractuals to UP contractuals, so that they can be entitled to more benefits like health support grants.
Some university offices, after all, pick up the administration’s dead weight in solving delayed pay and insufficient services. Shari Oliquino, assistant vice president for academic affairs and student affairs, has for instance mobilized her office to fill this hole. They have devised a number of financial aid programs for students beleaguered by ungranted stipend applications, like SLAS. The SAGA program is just one of them, she said.
Still, Oliquino stressed that student assistantship must not be viewed as a panacea to the university’s ills. “Hindi siya dapat tinitingnan na solusyon, pero isa lang na mekanismo para may assistance yung estudyante,” she said in an interview with the Collegian.
But hopes are dire for a change of tack. In the 56th General Assembly of Student Councils last February 2024, the USC of UP Manila (UPM) lodged a resolution pushing for a whole-of-system SAGA wage hike—a clamor revived later in June 2024, when a student assistant sought to increase the hourly rate of undergraduate student assistants from P60 to P100.
Until now, both the long overdue petition and the resolution remain in the air, and the rate is still the same.
But until such a hike and timely pay can be attained, Pat and Narra will choose to louden their calls. Upon receiving their previous compensation, Narra was able to go back to her home in Negros, and as for Pat: “Ayan, second sem, may pang-Jollibee kami.” But they know that such things should not be luxuries to them.
They are aware that these are rights wrested from them by a university and a state callous to the needs of its workers. The struggle of the SAGA, then, is not confined only to fulfilling their contracts, but extends to uplifting the conditions of all campus workers whose plights are linked. ●
*Real names of Pat, Narra, and their dorms were concealed upon the two’s request.
