1. Summary
▪ Field personnel refers to non-agricultural employees who regularly perform their duties away from the principal place of business or branch office of the employer and whose actual hours of work in the field cannot be determined with reasonable certainty.
2. Concept
Field personnel refers to non-agricultural employees who regularly perform their duties away from the principal place of business or branch office of the employer and whose actual hours of work in the field cannot be determined with reasonable certainty. (Paragraph 3, Article 82, Labor Code)
Field personnel and other employees whose time and performance are unsupervised by the employer including those who are engaged on task or contract basis, purely commission basis, or those who are paid a fixed amount for performing work irrespective of the time consumed in the performance thereof. (Section 1[e], Rule II, Book III, Omnibus Rules Implementing the Labor Code)
They are those whose performance of their job/service is not supervised by the employer or his representative, the workplace being away from the principal office and whose hours and days of work cannot be determined with reasonable certainty; hence, they are paid specific amount for rendering specific service or performing specific work. If required to be at specific places at specific times, employees including cannot be said to be field personnel despite the fact that they are performing work away from the principal office of the employee. (Auto Bus Transport Systems, Inc. v. Bautista, G.R. No. 156367, 16 May 2005)
The definition of a “field personnel” is not merely concerned with the location where the employee regularly performs is unsupervised by the employer. As discussed above, field personnel are those who regularly perform their duties away from the principal place of business of the employer and whose actual hours of work in the field cannot be determined with reasonable certainty. Thus, in order to conclude whether an employee is a field employee, it is also necessary to ascertain if actual hours of work in the field can be determined with reasonable certainty by the employer. In so doing, an inquiry must be made as to whether or not the employee’s time and performance are constantly supervised by the employer. (Ibid.)
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