The Department of Labor and Employment (DoLE) announced that around that around 564,000 workers have been regularized by employers as of 2019 – of which 65 percent were regularized due to voluntary commitments of employers, while the rest were a result of compliance orders by the department.

In a statement, DoLE Secretary Silvestre Bello III said that the workers’ regularization shows that employers are following the order to regularize their employees, noting that while the accomplishment represents a step forward in the effort to end contractualization, much more needs to be done as there are an estimated 1.3 million contractual employees in the Philippines.

Ending contractualization was one of the campaign promises of President Rodrigo Duterte and the Labor agency’s efforts against endo – the practice of continuously hiring a worker on a fixed-term basis – has been through voluntary compliance of the employers and labor inspections.