My contract keeps getting renewed every five months. Am I already a regular employee?

Why

Article 295 of the Labor Code (formerly Art. 280) does not ask what your contract says. It asks what you do. An employee engaged to perform activities usually necessary or desirable in the usual business or trade of the employer is regular, and the provision expressly overrides 'any written agreement to the contrary'. Separately, a casual employee who has rendered at least one year of service — continuous or broken — becomes regular as to the activity they were engaged in.

That is why the five-month contract carousel does not work. Ending an engagement at month five and rehiring you at month six does not reset anything if the work is the same and the work is necessary to the business. The repeated renewals are themselves evidence that the job is not temporary.

There are legitimate exceptions, and it is worth knowing which one your employer is claiming. Project employment is valid where the project is specific and its completion was determined at the time of engagement — and the employer must report each termination to DOLE. Seasonal employment is valid for genuinely seasonal work. Fixed-term employment is valid where the term was knowingly agreed on by parties dealing on more or less equal terms, and not used to defeat security of tenure. A term used precisely to prevent regularisation fails that last test.

If you are on an agency's books, the question becomes labour-only contracting. Under Article 106 and DOLE Department Order No. 174-17, an arrangement is labour-only where the contractor lacks substantial capital or investment in tools, equipment and premises and the workers perform activities directly related to the principal's main business — or where the contractor does not actually exercise the right of control. The consequence is decisive: the contractor is treated as a mere agent, and the principal becomes your employer as if it had hired you directly. DO 174 also bars contracting out to defeat workers' rights, and repeated short-term hiring to avoid regularisation is named as prohibited.

One correction to a common belief: there is no statute that bans 'endo' by that name. The Security of Tenure Bill was vetoed in 2019. What protects you is Article 295 read with Article 106 and DO 174 — which is a slower route than a ban, but a real one, and it is the basis on which DOLE has ordered thousands of workers regularised.

Being regular does not mean you cannot be dismissed. It means you can only be dismissed for a just or authorised cause, with the procedure that goes with it.

What to do

• Collect every contract, ID, payslip and schedule you have. A chain of short contracts covering the same duties is the single most useful piece of evidence.
• Write down who actually directs your work day to day, who disciplines you, and whose equipment and premises you use. Control is the heart of the labour-only test.
• Check whether your contractor is registered with DOLE under DO 174. An unregistered contractor is presumed to be engaged in labour-only contracting.
• Ask DOLE for an inspection — a Request for Assistance under SEnA, or a complaint at the DOLE Regional Office, which can order regularisation after a compliance visit.
• If you were let go for asserting this, that is a separate claim for illegal dismissal, and it belongs before the NLRC.

The law behind this