THE legal row over Metro Manila’s P85 minimum wage hike has intensified, with two construction firms asking a Pasig Regional Trial Court (RTC) to preserve its injunction against the wage order but to reduce the P10 billion bond post.
In a manifestation with Omnibus motion, Readycon Trading and Construction Corp. and R-I Builders Inc. said they accept the court’s Aug. 13 grant of a writ of preliminary injunction against Wage Order 27 but sought partial reconsideration solely of the bond amount.
They also asked the court to deny four pending motions seeking intervention by labor and workers’ groups and to submit the case for decision based on position papers, saying the remaining controversy involves a pure question of law rather than disputed facts.
At the heart of the petition is the firms’ argument that the Regional Tripartite Wages and Productivity Board-National Capital Region (RTWPB-NCR) failed to properly apply the Labor Code’s capacity-to-pay standard when it approved the P85 increase.
Wage Order 27 raised the non-agricultural daily minimum wage from P695 to P780.
The first tranche took effect last July 25, and a second tranche is scheduled for Jan. 20, 2027.
The petitioners described the P85 adjustment as the largest single daily minimum wage increase ever issued in the NCR, compared with the P50 under the preceding Wage Order NCR-26 in 2025 and generally smaller increases over the previous two decades.
The firms’ latest pleading cites testimony from RTWPB-NCR witness Sarah Burnis Mirason, who reportedly acknowledged during cross-examination that the NCR had more than 2,000 recognized employers, but only 16 entities attended the employer consultation.
According to the petitioners, Mirason also testified that no specific formula was used to arrive at the P85 increase, and that no published study, company financial records, collective bargaining agreements or individual employers’ operating margins were considered in determining the employers’ capacity to pay.
They said these admissions support their argument that the wage board’s methodology requires judicial scrutiny.
They stressed, however, that they are not asking the court to determine what the proper wage increase should be.
Rather, they want the court to interpret whether Article 124 of the Labor Code requires the wage board to meaningfully consider employers’ capacity to pay together with the law’s other wage-setting factors.
The companies also rejected arguments that they should have exhausted administrative remedies before going to court, maintaining that the case involves statutory construction that is properly resolved through an action for declaratory relief.
They added that the Labor Code’s restriction on injunctions does not prevent the court from stopping the enforcement of an already-issued wage order, because the wage-setting proceeding itself had already ended when Wage Order 27 was issued and published.
The court, in its Aug. 13 order, already rejected those threshold objections and granted the preliminary injunction, according to the petitioners.
The firms said the bond should cover only damages that could actually be caused by the injunction attributable to their own lawsuit — not the potential region-wide impact of temporarily withholding the wage increase from all NCR minimum wage earners.
They noted that the court’s order linked the bond to the possible impact on millions of workers across the region.
The petitioners said this effectively transformed the bond into security for a region-wide economic impact, even though their case involves only two companies and their own employees, contracts and collective bargaining agreements.
By comparison, the firms said their documented additional payroll exposure is far smaller.
Readycon’s additional cost was cited at approximately P409,216.67 a month, or P4.91 million annually, based on figures placed on record by respondents.
The petitioners also pointed out that the court had required only a P1 million bond for the earlier temporary restraining order covering substantially the same relief.
A jump from P1 million to P10 billion, they argued, has no rational relationship to any specific additional injury caused by the preliminary injunction.
The firms further said they cannot realistically post P10 billion in cash or secure a surety bond of that magnitude.
The petitioners also claimed that the accreditation of insurance and surety companies authorized to transact bonds before the Pasig court had expired on July 31 and remained pending renewal when they filed their pleading.
The companies opposed what they said was the intervention of the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP), Akbayan and its co-movants, Federation of Free Workers and other groups, and the Association of Minimum Wage Earners and Advocates-PTGWO in the wage issue.
They argued that the groups have only a generalized economic interest in the continued implementation of Wage Order 27, and do not possess the direct, immediate and material legal interest required for intervention.
In a related development, the workers’ group Nagkaisa will ask the Pasig court to dissolve the preliminary injunction blocking implementation of Wage Order 27, arguing that the legal dispute is already costing workers an estimated P1.32 billion in lost wages.
The coalition said its five lawyers have prepared a counter-manifestation with a motion to dissolve the preliminary injunction, which it plans to file, even as its separate Motion for Leave to Intervene remains pending.
Nagkaisa Chairman and Federation of Free Workers (FFW) President Sonny Matula said the workers’ appeal comes on the anniversary of the Cry of Pugad Lawin, invoking the historic uprising as a symbol of workers’ demand to free the wage increase from what they described as an unnecessary legal “lock.”
Nagkaisa convenor and Sentro Deputy Secretary General Nice Coronacion said the coalition do not seek to bypass judicial procedures but wanted the court to act on an issue with immediate consequences for millions of workers.
“Public interest cannot be placed indefinitely in the waiting room,” Coronacion said.
