G.R. No. 114290 - RAYCOR AIRCONTROL SYSTEMS, INC., VS. NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS COMMISSION AND ROLANDO LAYA, ET AL..

Ruling

WHEREFORE, the appealed Decision is hereby SET ASIDE and a new one entered ordering respondent to: 1. Immediately reinstate complainants (private respondents) to their former positions without loss of seniority rights and privileges; and 2. Pay them full backwages from the time they were dismissed up to the time they are actually reinstated." Petitioner's motion for reconsideration was denied by public respondent on February 23, 1994 for lack of merit. Hence, this petition. Issues Petitioner charges public respondent NLRC with grave abuse of discretion in finding private respondents to have been non-project employees and illegally dismissed, and in ordering their reinstatement with full backwages. For clarity's sake, let us re-state the pivotal questions involved in the instant case as follows: whether private respondents were project employees or regular (non-project) employees, and whether or not they were legally dismissed. In support of its petition, petitioner reiterates the same points it raised before the tribunals below: that it is engaged solely in the business of installation of airconditioning units or systems in the buildings of its clients. It has no permanent clients with continuous projects where its workers could be assigned; neither is it a manufacturing firm. Most of its projects last from two to three months. (The foregoing matters were never controverted by private respondents.) Thus, for petitioner, work is "not done in perpetuity but necessarily comes to a halt when the installation of airconditioning units is completed." On the basis of the foregoing, petitioner asserts that it could not have hired private respondents as anything other than project employees. It further insists that "(a)t the incipience of hiring, private respondents were appraised (sic) that their work consisted only in the installation of airconditioning units and that as soon as the installation is completed, their work ceases and that they have to wait for another installation projects (sic)." In other words, their work was co-terminous with the duration of the project, and was not continuous or uninterrupted as claimed by them. Petitioner also claims that the private respondents signed project contracts of employment indicating the names of the projects or buildings they are working on. And when between projects, there project employees were free to work elsewhere with other establishments. Private respondents controverted these assertions of petitioner, claiming that they had worked continuously for petitioner for several years, some of them as long as ten years, and thus, by operation of law had become regular employees. The Court's Ruling Ordinarily, the findings made by the NLRC are entitled to great respect and are even clothed with finality and deemed binding on this Court, except that when such findings are contrary to those of the labor arbiter, this Court may choose to re-examine the same, as we hereby do in this case nor. The First Issue: Pro