The job title trap in Philippine employment contracts

A client sent through five job titles and five duty lists for staff they’d sourced themselves. Four of the five were titled Compliance Agent. The duties underneath were quoting, pricing, scheduling, supplier procurement, freight coordination and warranty faults.

That isn’t a compliance role. That’s an operations coordinator.

We changed the titles before anyone signed. It took about ten minutes. Left alone, it’s the kind of thing that surfaces eighteen months later as an illegal dismissal finding.

Why the title matters more in the Philippines than you’d expect

Philippine employment is probationary for a maximum of six months, after which the employee becomes regular and can only be dismissed for just or authorised cause. That probationary period is the employer’s window to assess fit.

But the window only works if it was set up properly. Philippine jurisprudence is clear that the employer has to communicate the reasonable standards for regularisation to the employee at the time of engagement. The leading authority most practitioners point to here is Abbott Laboratories v. Alcaraz — where an employer’s failure to properly apprise the employee of the standards against which she’d be assessed was central to the dispute.

Here’s where the title comes in. Those standards have to relate to the position the employee was actually engaged for. If the contract says Compliance Agent and you later dismiss someone for underperforming at procurement and freight coordination, you are assessing them against standards for a job their contract doesn’t describe.

You are now arguing, in a forum that starts from a presumption in the employee’s favour, that the contract you drafted doesn’t mean what it says.

The second problem: authority

The same five contracts had another gap. The duties included procurement and freight — people committing the client’s money to suppliers — with no stated authority limit anywhere in the agreement.

If a coordinator commits to a shipment three times larger than anyone intended, what’s the actual breach? There’s no threshold in the contract to have breached. You’re relying on an implied understanding, which is worth very little when it matters.

A duties clause covering spend should say what the limit is and what needs approval above it. Same for supplier pricing and confidentiality — if someone sees your cost base, the confidentiality clause should say so specifically rather than gesturing at “confidential information” and hoping.

The third problem: pay parity

One of those five staff was on materially different pay to three others doing, by the client’s own written description, identical duties.

That might be entirely justified — more experience, a broader remit, a different market at the time of hiring. But if it’s justified, the justification should exist somewhere in writing before anyone signs, not be reconstructed later when someone compares payslips.

What to check before signing

If you’re about to put a Philippine employment contract in front of someone, read the title and the duty list side by side and ask four questions.

Does the title describe the work? Not approximately. If the duties are coordination, the title should say coordinator.

Do the regularisation standards relate to the actual job? These need to be communicated at engagement, in writing, and be measurable.

Is there an authority limit for anything involving money? Procurement, freight, supplier commitments, refunds.

Can you explain every pay difference between people doing the same work? If not, either document the differentiator or close the gap now.

Why this usually gets missed

It gets missed because the person writing the contract and the person who knows what the job involves are usually different people, and the contract gets treated as paperwork to be processed rather than a description to be checked.

When a client sources their own candidate and just needs us to employ them, the duty list comes from the client and the contract template comes from us. The mismatch lives exactly in that seam. It’s the single most common thing we correct on employer-of-record-only engagements, and it’s the cheapest possible fix — before signature, it’s a text edit.

This is general information about a pattern we see, not legal advice on your situation. If you have contracts already signed with this problem in them, get Philippine counsel to look at them specifically.