John Jonas breaks down the Philippines' 2023 holiday calendar for outsourcing managers. The government removed special working holidays, leaving regular holidays and special non-working days. Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha are now regular holidays, and you'll need to decide whether to give employees only those or include special non-working days too, which matters for parents with school-age kids.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 192, the 2023 Philippines holiday calendar. So the Philippines government just released the Official calendar for 2023 with updated holidays on it. And we have updated our calendar. So let me talk about our calendar really quickly. If you go to onlinejobs ph Holidays we have a blog post about how we handle holidays and paid time off there. We also have a link to a calendar that you can a Google calendar that you can subscribe to and it will put the Philippines holidays in your personal calendar. Now you can set it. So it's like a different color. In my calendar I have it as yellow. It's kind of less important to me, but at least I know when the holidays are. When they're coming up. I see it on my personal calendar, which is really awesome. So there's something different this year with the holidays in the Philippines. So in the past they, they had three different types of holidays. They had regular holidays which are like Bank Holidays, that's January 1st, New Year's Day and Christmas Day. Those are regular holidays. They had special non working days, that's another type of holiday. And then they had special working holidays where people would still work very often this year the government, I mean it's been a couple of years now they've been trying to simplify this and the government did away with the special working holidays this year. So there's only just two types of holidays. There's main regular holidays where everybody takes it off and then there's these special non working days where not everybody takes it off, but a lot of people will. Another difference between the two is it only really matters if you have a legal entity in the Philippines because which you don't. In the Philippines there's a pay difference between regular holidays and special non working days if you're requiring someone to work on those days. So for you, what do you offer? Do you offer just regular holidays? Do you offer holidays and special non working days? So there's a couple things to consider. Number one, when I looked at this list I was like wow, that's a big long list. And then I looked at the list of US holidays and realized oh, we actually have more US holidays than they have regular holidays. Now when you add in the special non working days, there's more Filipino days, Filipino not working holidays than there are us, but it's not that many more. So that's number one. Number two, you can Just offer the regular holidays off. You don't have to offer both. But the special non working days are almost always days off of school. So if your OFs have kids, it's really nice for them to have that day off because their kids are at home where usually their kids are going to school and so they're going to work while they're at school. Okay, so there's one last thing to talk about in this. There are two holidays that are newly considered regular holidays. In the past they've been special non working days. And these are the two Muslim holidays in the Philippines. They are Eidol Fitr and Eidol Ada. And these two are on the calendar with dates but with a, with an asterisk because the, the I don't know exactly how this works. The Muslim community, the Muslim leaders decide when those days are like within a week before the actual holiday and they can change it a couple days. And so the Philippines government just says look, these are actual regular holidays, but we don't know exactly when they are yet. And so we're just going to give you an approximate date. So when you look at this list, just recognize those two are kind of different. It's not exact when they fall. On a personal note, my son, I've talked about him before going on a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. He's flying today as I record this to the Philippines, which is really exciting. He's been, he spent a couple weeks here at home training as a missionary and they spent a couple weeks in Provo, Utah training as a missionary in the Missionary Training Center. And then he's flying on his way to the Philippines. He'll fly to LA and then to Korea and then to Manila. He's super excited and I'm super excited for him and it's a really big step for him in this two year process.
