Note: On the wording of Section 10 of the Rules Implementing P.D. No. 851, the Custom-Files booster and the lawphil text of the Rules diverge. The booster reads "Nothing herein shall be construed to authorize elimination or diminution of any employee benefits, supplements or privileges which they are enjoying at the time of the issuance of these rules"; lawphil reads "Nothing herein shall be construed to authorize any employer to eliminate, or diminish in any way, supplements, or other employee benefits or favorable practice being enjoyed by the employee at the time of promulgation of this issuance." This digest follows lawphil, because the phrase "favorable practice" — absent from the booster's version — is the textual hook for the ripened-practice holding. The decision itself cites the section by number without quoting it.
Facts
- Davao Fruits Corporation is a domestic corporation in agricultural and business operations; Associated Labor Unions (ALU) sued "for and in behalf of all the rank-and-file workers and employees," so the relief sought was a differential payable across the whole bargaining unit.
- On December 16, 1975 P.D. No. 851 required a thirteenth month pay not later than December 24 of every year. That deadline is why every act in this case happens in December. Its Rules of December 22, 1975 defined the benefit as one twelfth of "basic salary," including "all renumerations or earnings paid … for services rendered" but excluding COLA, profit-sharing, and "all allowances and monetary benefits which are not considered or integrated as part of the regular or basic salary." The broad opening clause is the language the company later said misled it.
- On January 16, 1976 — "barely one month after the effectivity of P.D. No. 851" — the Supplementary Rules declared in paragraph 4 that "[o]vertime pay, earnings and other renumerations which are not part of the basic salary shall not be included in the computation of the 13th month pay." This date is the most damaging fact in the record: the doubt the company claims to have laboured under until 1981 had been dispelled before its second annual computation.
- From 1975 through 1981 Davao Fruits nevertheless freely, voluntarily and continuously computed the thirteenth month pay with sick, vacation and maternity leave pay, rest-day and special-holiday premiums, and regular-holiday pay in the base. Its explanation was obedience: the inclusion had been directed by opinions and rulings of then Acting Labor Secretary Amado C. Inciong. No qualification, reservation or condition was ever attached; the payments were repeated every December and never made to depend on results. Length, consistency and unconditionality are the three elements a ripened practice needs, and the company supplied all three by its own conduct.
- On February 24, 1981 San Miguel Corporation v. Inciong held the Supplementary Rules "the later and more controlling" issuance and the excluded "earnings and other remunerations" to reach precisely these items. The company afterwards fixed this as the moment it "discovered" its mistake.
- In December 1981 — after that decision, in the very year of the claimed discovery — the company computed and paid again without excluding the items. A company that keeps doing the thing for a further year after the Supreme Court has spoken cannot describe itself as mistaken.
- In December 1982, for the first time since 1975, it excluded them, calling the earlier inclusions a rectifiable error "upon a doubtful and difficult question of law."
- On December 28, 1982, four days after the statutory deadline, ALU sued for the thirteenth month pay differential, alleging the items were dropped "in disregard of company practice since 1975."
- On March 7, 1984 Labor Arbiter Pedro C. Ramos ruled for the union, ordering payment of "the 1982 — 13th month pay differential to all its rank-and-file workers/employees." No peso figure appears in the record; the award is a differential to be computed. The NLRC affirmed and dismissed the appeal.
- The company came up under Rule 45 — the wrong remedy — and the Court, "in the interest of justice," treated the petition as certiorari under Rule 65. Decided August 24, 1993.
Issue
Whether the company's six-year, uninterrupted inclusion of leave payments, rest-day and special-holiday premiums and regular-holiday pay in the thirteenth month base ripened into a company practice protected by Article 100 and Section 10 of the Rules Implementing P.D. No. 851, so that its unilateral exclusion from 1982 was a prohibited diminution.
Secondary issue. Whether those items are, as a matter of law, part of "basic salary" under Section 2 of the Rules as clarified by the Supplementary Rules.
Ancillary issue. Whether solutio indebiti under Articles 2154 and 2155 of the Civil Code excused the company.
Ruling
Main issue. YES — six years of free, voluntary and continuous inclusion, persisting years after the clarifying Supplementary Rules and through one further December after San Miguel, established a practice that ripened into a benefit protected from unilateral withdrawal.
Secondary issue. NO — as a matter of law the items are excluded from "basic salary," which means the daily wage rate for the eight-hour day, "[a]ny compensation or remuneration other than the daily wage rate" being excluded. But that legal conclusion did not excuse the established practice of including them anyway.
Ancillary issue. NO — solutio indebiti is "a civil law concept that is not applicable in Labor Law," and in any event it requires the obligee to return what was received, whereas the company demanded no return of 1975–1981 payments and sought only to stop future inclusion.
"WHEREFORE, finding no grave abuse of discretion on the part of the NLRC, the petition is hereby DISMISSED, and the questioned decision of respondent NLRC is AFFIRMED accordingly."
Ratio
- The Court conceded the company's law. The express exclusion of COLA and profit-sharing "shows the intention to strip 'basic salary' of payments which are otherwise considered as 'fringe' benefits," emphasised by "the catch all phrase 'all allowances and monetary benefits which are not considered or integrated as part of the basic salary.'"
- Reduced to a workable test: "whatever compensation an employee receives for an eight-hour work daily or the daily wage rate in the basic salary. Any compensation or remuneration other than the daily wage rate is excluded."
- The Inciong opinions were disposed of in a sentence: "[t]he inclusion of these items is clearly not sanctioned under P.D. No. 851, the governing law and its implementing rules, which speak only of 'basi[c] salary.'" An administrative opinion cannot enlarge the base the decree fixes.
- The Court then destroyed the premise of doubt: "whatever doubt arose in the interpretation of P.D. No. 851 was erased by the Supplementary Rules and Regulations which clarified the definition of 'basic salary,'" San Miguel having turned "what has hitherto been the subject of broad inclusion" into "a subject of broad exclusion."
- The chronology carried the holding: the Supplementary Rules issued "as early as January 16, 1976, barely one month after the effectivity of P.D. No. 851 … And yet, petitioner computed and paid the thirteenth month pay, without excluding the subject items therein until 1981. Petitioner continued its practice in December 1981, after promulgation of the … San Miguel decision … when petitioner purportedly 'discovered' its mistake."
- From conduct the Court inferred intent: "The considerable length of time the questioned items had been included by petitioner indicates a unilateral and voluntary act on its part, sufficient in itself to negate any claim of mistake."
- That inference converts practice into obligation: "A company practice favorable to the employees had indeed been established and the payments made pursuant thereto, ripened into benefits enjoyed by them. And any benefit and supplement being enjoyed by the employees cannot be reduced, diminished, discontinued or eliminated by the employer, by virtue of Section 10 of the Rules and Regulations Implementing P.D. No. 851, and Article 100 of the [Labor Code]."
- On solutio indebiti the Court gave two independent answers — the concept "is not applicable in Labor Law," and it does not fit, since there "the obligee is required to return to the obligor whatever he received," whereas the company "merely wants to 'rectify' the error."
Doctrine
A benefit's inclusion over "a considerable length of time," freely and voluntarily, "indicates a unilateral and voluntary act… sufficient in itself to negate any claim of mistake," and "ripen[s] into benefits" protected against unilateral diminution under Section 10 of the P.D. No. 851 Rules and Article 100. Length of time is therefore not merely a threshold; it is evidence of state of mind, from which voluntariness and deliberateness are inferred without separate proof. Correlatively, "basic salary" for thirteenth month pay means the daily wage rate for the eight-hour day, so "[a]ny compensation or remuneration other than the daily wage rate is excluded." Solutio indebiti "is not applicable in Labor Law."
Limits. The error-of-law exception requires the error to be genuinely "doubtful or difficult" and the correction reasonably prompt once the law is clarified; continuing for years after the rules were clarified — and for one further December after the Supreme Court itself has ruled — defeats a claim of mistake. The ruling does not hold that erroneous inclusions can never be corrected; it holds that the delay and voluntariness here transformed a correctable mistake into a protected practice. Note the asymmetry: a benefit may be legally excludible and contractually owed at the same time — the company won the secondary issue and still lost the case — because Article 100 protects benefits "being enjoyed" without asking their source. Read against Globe Mackay Cable and Radio Corp. v. NLRC, where the error exception succeeded on a genuine "lack of administrative guidelines," and Central Azucarera de Tarlac, which rejected a claim of error repeated for "almost thirty (30) years," this case marks the middle of the spectrum and supplies the benchmark six-year period later cited for the proposition that no minimum number of years is fixed by law.
Full Digest — Recitation Format
Gist
Davao Fruits Corporation had, from 1975 to 1981, freely and continuously included payments for sick, vacation, and maternity leave, premiums for work on rest days and special holidays, and pay for regular holidays in computing its rank-and-file employees' thirteenth month pay under Presidential Decree No. 851; in December 1982 it excluded these items for the first time, calling the earlier inclusion a mistake it was entitled to rectify, and the union sued four days later for the resulting differential. The Labor Arbiter and NLRC ruled for the union, and the Supreme Court affirmed. Central to the Topic/Subtopic, although the Court agreed that these items are, as a matter of law, excludible from "basic salary" under Section 2 of the Rules Implementing P.D. No. 851 as clarified by the Supplementary Rules, it held that the company's own six-year, voluntary, and unconditional practice of including them anyway had ripened into a company practice and vested benefit that Article 100 of the Labor Code and Section 10 of the decree's implementing rules prohibited it from unilaterally withdrawing, rejecting the company's claim that its prior inclusion was a mere mistake of law.
Facts
- Davao Fruits Corporation is a domestic corporation engaged in agricultural and business operations in the Philippines. Associated Labor Unions (ALU) is a legitimate labor organization which brought this case "for and in behalf of all the rank-and-file workers and employees" of the company — not for any single complainant, so the relief sought was a differential payable across the entire bargaining unit.
- On December 16, 1975, President Ferdinand E. Marcos promulgated Presidential Decree No. 851, requiring all employers to pay employees receiving a basic salary of not more than P1,000 a month a thirteenth month pay not later than December 24 of every year. The December 24 deadline is why every act in this case happens in December.
- On December 22, 1975, the Secretary of Labor issued the Rules and Regulations Implementing P.D. No. 851. Section 2 defined the benefit as one twelfth of "basic salary," and defined "basic salary" to include "all renumerations or earnings paid by an employer to an employee for services rendered," while excluding cost-of-living allowances, profit-sharing payments, and "all allowances and monetary benefits which are not considered or integrated as part of the regular or basic salary" as of December 16, 1975. The broad opening clause is the language the company would later say misled it.
- On January 16, 1976 — "barely one month after the effectivity of P.D. No. 851 and its Implementing Rules" — the Department of Labor and Employment issued the Supplementary Rules and Regulations Implementing P.D. No. 851, whose paragraph 4 declared categorically that "[o]vertime pay, earnings and other renumerations which are not part of the basic salary shall not be included in the computation of the 13th month pay." This date is the single most damaging fact in the record for the company: the doubt it claims to have laboured under until 1981 had been dispelled before its second annual computation was ever made.
- From 1975 through 1981, notwithstanding that clarification, Davao Fruits freely, voluntarily and continuously computed and paid its rank-and-file employees' thirteenth month pay with payments for sick, vacation and maternity leave, premiums for work done on rest days and special holidays, and pay for regular holidays included in the base.
- The company's own explanation for doing so was that it was following the Department: it said the inclusion had been directed by the opinions, orders and rulings of then Acting Labor Secretary Amado C. Inciong, which expressly required these items to be counted. This is the company's good-faith story — not carelessness but obedience — and it is the story the Court had to dismantle rather than merely disbelieve.
- No qualification, reservation or condition was ever attached to these payments; they were repeated every December from 1975 to 1981, and never made to depend on the company's financial results. Length, consistency and unconditionality are the three elements a ripened practice needs, and the company supplied all three by its own conduct. This 1975 to 1981 span is what later decisions such as Sevilla Trading Company v. Semana and Honda Philippines, Inc. v. Samahan ng Malayang Manggagawa sa Honda call the "six (6) years" of Davao Fruits — seven annual computations, counted as a six-year practice.
- On February 24, 1981, the Supreme Court promulgated San Miguel Corporation v. Inciong (103 SCRA 139), holding that the Supplementary Rules are "the later and more controlling" issuance and that the excluded "earnings and other remunerations" reach precisely these items — sick, vacation and maternity leave pay, rest-day and special-holiday premiums, regular-holiday pay and night differentials. Davao Fruits would afterwards fix this decision as the moment it "discovered" its mistake.
- In December 1981 — after that decision, and in the very year of the claimed discovery — the company nevertheless computed and paid the thirteenth month pay again without excluding the disputed items. The Court treated this one December as decisive: a company that keeps doing the thing for a further year after the Supreme Court has spoken cannot describe itself as mistaken.
- In December 1982, for the first time since the thirteenth month pay was created in 1975, Davao Fruits excluded the items from the thirteenth month computation. Its stated rationale was rectification — that the earlier inclusions had been made "upon a doubtful and difficult question of law," created no vested right, and could be corrected prospectively without any diminution of benefits.
- On December 28, 1982, four days after the statutory payment deadline, Associated Labor Unions filed a complaint against the company before the Ministry of Labor and Employment, Regional Arbitration Branch XI, Davao City, docketed as NLRC Case No. 1791-MC-XI-82, for "Payment of the Thirteenth-Month Pay Differentials." It sought the 1982 differential equivalent to the excluded items, alleging that the company had dropped them "in disregard of company practice since 1975."
- In its answer, the company claimed it "erroneously included items subject of the complaint in the computation of the thirteenth month pay for the years prior to 1982, upon a doubtful and difficult question of law," and that the mistake "was discovered only in 1981 after the promulgation of the Supreme Court decision in the case of San Miguel Corporation v. Inciong."
- On March 7, 1984, Labor Arbiter Pedro C. Ramos decided for ALU, holding that the long-standing practice from 1975 to 1981 had ripened into a voluntary benefit that could not be unilaterally withdrawn or diminished. His dispositive portion read: "WHEREFORE, in view of all the foregoing considerations, judgment is hereby rendered ordering respondent to pay the 1982 — 13th month pay differential to all its rank-and-file workers/employees herein represented by complainant Union." No peso figure appears anywhere in the record as reported; the award is a differential to be computed, not a liquidated sum.
- The company appealed to the NLRC, which affirmed the Labor Arbiter and dismissed the appeal for lack of merit, reasoning that continuous payment of the benefits over a considerable period had established a company practice that could not be unilaterally eliminated, and that the civil-law concept of solutio indebiti did not relieve the company of the obligation.
- The company elevated the case to the Supreme Court by a petition for review under Rule 45 of the Revised Rules of Court — the wrong remedy, since no appeal lies from an NLRC decision. "This error notwithstanding and in the interest of justice," the Court resolved to treat the petition as a special civil action for certiorari under Rule 65 of the Revised Rules of Court, citing P.D. No. 1391, Section 5, Rule II, Section 7 of its implementing rules, Cando v. NLRC (189 SCRA 666 [1990]) and Pearl S. Buck Foundation, Inc. v. NLRC (182 SCRA 446 [1990]). The case, G.R. No. 85073, was decided August 24, 1993.
Arguments of the Parties
A. Petitioner Davao Fruits Corporation. The company's case was an argument about characterisation: everything turned on whether its 1975–1981 computations were a benefit granted or an error committed. It said they were error. Its factual rationale was that the inclusion had been dictated by the opinions, orders and rulings of then Acting Labor Secretary Amado C. Inciong, who had declared that these leaves and premiums must be counted — so the company had not been generous, it had been obedient, and one cannot deliberately give away what one believes one already owes. Its legal rationale was that this was "a doubtful and difficult question of law," resolved only by San Miguel Corporation v. Inciong on February 24, 1981, upon which it discovered the mistake. From that premise it drew the civil-law conclusion: under Articles 2154 and 2155 of the Civil Code, payment made through a mistake in construing a doubtful or difficult question of law creates no obligation and no vested right, so the exclusion beginning 1982 was mere rectification and not a prohibited diminution under Article 100. What it was trying to avoid was permanence — on the union's theory, an employer that once over-computes a statutory benefit is locked into the over-computation forever, with no route back short of collective bargaining.
B. Respondent Associated Labor Unions. The union met the characterisation argument with arithmetic of time. Six years of free, voluntary and uninterrupted inclusion, it argued, is not what mistake looks like: "the considerable length of time the questioned items had been included" is itself evidence of a unilateral and voluntary act, and negates any claim of error. Its rationale was reliance and stability — the payments had been repeated, unqualified and unconditional, the employees had come to count on them, and by 1982 they had ripened into vested benefits forming part of the employment relation. On that footing the withdrawal violated both Article 100 of the Labor Code and Section 10 of the Rules Implementing P.D. No. 851, which forbid the diminution or elimination of existing benefits. It answered the civil-law defense by denying its premise and its habitat at once: solutio indebiti has no place in labour law, which is governed by social justice, and a company cannot retract after years of continuous grant. Where any doubt remained, it invoked Article 4 of the Labor Code and Article 1702 of the Civil Code, both of which require doubts in labour legislation to be resolved in favour of the worker.
C. Common Ground. Neither side disputed that the company had included the contested items in its thirteenth month computations continuously from 1975 to 1981, that it excluded them for the first time in December 1982, or that no employee had ever been told the inclusion was provisional. Both sides also accepted San Miguel Corporation v. Inciong as controlling on what "basic salary" means. The dispute was over what the earlier payments meant — a benefit conferred, or a mistake made — and over what follows from six years of making it.
Issue
A. Main Issue (Topic/Subtopic-Centered). Did Davao Fruits Corporation's six-year, uninterrupted inclusion of sick, vacation, and maternity leave payments, rest-day and special-holiday premiums, and regular-holiday pay in the computation of its employees' thirteenth month pay ripen into a company practice protected under Article 100 of the Labor Code and Section 10 of the Rules Implementing P.D. No. 851, such that its unilateral exclusion of these items beginning 1982 constituted a prohibited diminution of benefits?
B. Secondary Issues. Whether payments for sick, vacation, and maternity leave, rest-day and special-holiday premiums, and regular-holiday pay are, as a matter of law, part of "basic salary" for thirteenth month pay purposes under Section 2 of the Rules Implementing P.D. No. 851 as clarified by paragraph 4 of the Supplementary Rules.
C. Ancillary/Incidental Issues. Whether the civil-law principle of solutio indebiti under Articles 2154 and 2155 of the Civil Code excused the company from continuing the practice.
Ruling
Main Issue: YES — the company's own six-year pattern of free, voluntary, and continuous inclusion of these items, persisting even years after the clarifying Supplementary Rules took effect and through one further December after San Miguel Corporation v. Inciong, established a company practice that ripened into a benefit protected from unilateral withdrawal by Section 10 of the Rules Implementing P.D. No. 851 and Article 100 of the Labor Code. Secondary Issue: NO — as a matter of law, these items are excluded from "basic salary" under the Supplementary Rules and San Miguel Corporation v. Inciong, since basic salary means the daily wage rate for the eight-hour day and "[a]ny compensation or remuneration other than the daily wage rate is excluded"; but this legal conclusion did not excuse the company's established practice of including them anyway. Ancillary Issue: NO — solutio indebiti is a civil-law concept inapplicable to labour law, and in any event it requires the obligee to return what was received, whereas the company sought only to stop future inclusion and demanded no return of what it had paid from 1975 to 1981, so the principle had no application. Standard of review: the petition, though filed under Rule 45, was treated as one for certiorari, and failed because no grave abuse of discretion attended the NLRC's ruling.
Dispositive portion (verbatim):
"WHEREFORE, finding no grave abuse of discretion on the part of the NLRC, the petition is hereby DISMISSED, and the questioned decision of respondent NLRC is AFFIRMED accordingly."
Ratio
- The Court began by conceding the company's law. Reading Section 2 of the Rules with paragraph 4 of the Supplementary Rules, it held that the express exclusion of cost-of-living allowances and profit-sharing payments "shows the intention to strip 'basic salary' of payments which are otherwise considered as 'fringe' benefits," an intention "emphasized in the catch all phrase 'all allowances and monetary benefits which are not considered or integrated as part of the basic salary.'"
- It reduced that construction to a workable test: "whatever compensation an employee receives for an eight-hour work daily or the daily wage rate in the basic salary. Any compensation or remuneration other than the daily wage rate is excluded." It follows that "payments for sick, vacation and maternity leaves, premium for work done on rest days special holidays, as well as pay for regular holidays, are likewise excluded in computing the basic salary for the purpose of determining the thirteen month pay."
- The Court disposed of the Inciong opinions in a sentence: whatever the Acting Labor Secretary had said, "[t]he inclusion of these items is clearly not sanctioned under P.D. No. 851, the governing law and its implementing rules, which speak only of 'basis salary' as the basis for determining the thirteenth month pay." An administrative opinion cannot enlarge the base the decree and its rules fix.
- It then destroyed the premise of doubt on which the whole defense rested: "whatever doubt arose in the interpretation of P.D. No. 851 was erased by the Supplementary Rules and Regulations which clarified the definition of 'basic salary,'" quoting San Miguel Corporation v. Inciong that the later issuance turned "what has hitherto been the subject of broad inclusion" into "a subject of broad exclusion."
- The chronology carried the holding. The Supplementary Rules "which put to rest all doubts in the computation of the thirteenth month pay, was issued by the Secretary of Labor as early as January 16, 1976, barely one month after the effectivity of P.D. No. 851 and its Implementing Rules. And yet, petitioner computed and paid the thirteenth month pay, without excluding the subject items therein until 1981. Petitioner continued its practice in December 1981, after promulgation of the afore-quoted San Miguel decision on February 24, 1981, when petitioner purportedly 'discovered' its mistake."
- From conduct the Court inferred intent: "From 1975 to 1981, petitioner had freely, voluntarily and continuously included in the computation of its employees' thirteenth month pay, the payments for sick, vacation and maternity leaves, premiums for work done on rest days and special holidays, and pay for regular holidays. The considerable length of time the questioned items had been included by petitioner indicates a unilateral and voluntary act on its part, sufficient in itself to negate any claim of mistake."
- That inference converts practice into obligation: "A company practice favorable to the employees had indeed been established and the payments made pursuant thereto, ripened into benefits enjoyed by them. And any benefit and supplement being enjoyed by the employees cannot be reduced, diminished, discontinued or eliminated by the employer, by virtue of Section 10 of the Rules and Regulations Implementing P.D. No. 851, and Article 100 of the [Labor Code], which prohibit the diminution or elimination by the employer of the employees' existing benefits," citing Tiangco v. Leogardo, Jr. (122 SCRA 267 [1983]). Note the order in which the Court lists its two authorities — Section 10 of the implementing rules first, Article 100 second. This is the sentence the subtopic exists for.
- On the ancillary defense the Court gave two independent answers. Solutio indebiti is "a civil law concept that is not applicable in Labor Law"; and even taken on its own terms it does not fit, because "in solutio indebiti, the obligee is required to return to the obligor whatever he received from the latter," whereas "[p]etitioner in the instant case, does not demand the return of what it paid respondent ALU from 1975 until 1981; it merely wants to 'rectify' the error it made over these years."
- Finally, because the case was reviewed as certiorari under Rule 65, the disposition is framed not as a holding that the NLRC was right but as a finding of "no grave abuse of discretion on the part of the NLRC."
Doctrine
B. Doctrines/Rules/Principles. A benefit's inclusion over "a considerable length of time," freely and voluntarily, "indicates a unilateral and voluntary act... sufficient in itself to negate any claim of mistake," and "ripen[s] into benefits" protected against unilateral diminution or elimination under Section 10 of the Rules Implementing P.D. No. 851 and Article 100 of the Labor Code. Length of time is therefore not merely a threshold to be crossed; it is evidence of state of mind, from which voluntariness and deliberateness are inferred without separate proof. Correlatively, "basic salary" for thirteenth month pay purposes means the daily wage rate for the eight-hour day, so that "[a]ny compensation or remuneration other than the daily wage rate is excluded," leave pay and rest-day, special-holiday and regular-holiday pay among them. Solutio indebiti, a civil-law concept requiring the obligee to return what was mistakenly received, "is not applicable in Labor Law," and cannot in any case support a claim to stop paying prospectively rather than to recover retrospectively.
C. Distinctions/Limitations/Qualifications. The error-of-law exception to company practice requires the error to be genuinely "doubtful or difficult" and the correction to be reasonably prompt once the law is clarified; continuing the challenged practice for years after the governing rules were clarified — and for one further December after the Supreme Court itself has ruled — defeats a claim of mistake. The ruling does not hold that erroneous inclusions can never be corrected: it holds that the delay and voluntariness here transformed what might have been a correctable mistake into an established, protected practice. Note also the asymmetry the case creates. A benefit may be legally excludible and contractually owed at the same time — the company won the Secondary Issue and still lost the case — because Article 100 protects benefits "being enjoyed" without asking what their source is. Finally, an administrative opinion (here, the Inciong rulings) neither enlarges the statutory base nor, by itself, supplies the doubt the error exception needs; what supplies or dispels doubt is the state of the published rules and decisions.
D. Topic/Subtopic Integration (Mandatory). As classified in Section I, this case is DIRECT: the Court applies Article 100 and its implementing-rules counterpart to find that a benefit, though not legally mandated, ripened into a protected company practice through six years of consistent, deliberate, unconditional grant, squarely illustrating the "ripened company practice" limb of the doctrine. Read against the rest of the Week 2 batch it occupies the middle of a spectrum, chronologically as well as doctrinally. Globe Mackay Cable and Radio Corporation v. NLRC (G.R. No. L-74156, June 29, 1988) came first and shows the error exception succeeding, because there the Court found a "lack of administrative guidelines" until the Rules Implementing Wage Order No. 4 supplied a conversion formula on 21 May 1984. This case, five years later, supplies the counter-rule — that time plus voluntariness is itself proof of deliberateness — and so marks the outer limit of the Globe Mackay exception. Central Azucarera de Tarlac v. Central Azucarera de Tarlac Labor Union (G.R. No. 188949, July 26, 2010) then applies that counter-rule at the far end, rejecting a claim of error repeated for "almost thirty (30) years" and corrected only when the union complained. Its six-year period is the benchmark later cited in Sevilla Trading Company v. Semana and Honda Philippines, Inc. v. Samahan ng Malayang Manggagawa sa Honda for the proposition that no minimum number of years is fixed by law.
Separate Opinions
None. The Decision, penned by Justice Quiason, was concurred in by Justices Cruz, Griño-Aquino, Davide, Jr., and Bellosillo.