Chel Diokno filed House Bill 10362 to shield Filipino workers from AI
The Akbayan bloc's National AI Governance Act would give workers displaced by AI retraining, redeployment and a say before the machines are switched on. It is still only a filed bill.
Akbayan party-list Rep. Chel Diokno has filed House Bill No. 10362, the proposed National AI Governance Act, and is asking the House to start committee hearings on it soon. The bill's stated purpose is narrow and unusual for an AI measure here: keep Filipinos in their jobs while the technology spreads.
It was co-authored by Akbayan Reps. Perci Cendana and Dada Kiram Ismula, together with Dinagat Islands Rep. Kaka Bag-ao. The explanatory note lists four things a displaced worker would be entitled to: reskilling and upskilling, redeployment to another role, support while moving between jobs, and social protection. It also requires that workers get a real voice in decisions about adopting AI at their workplace, not just a memo after the fact.
The lawmakers built their case on two numbers. The International Monetary Fund has projected that AI could affect as much as 40 percent of jobs worldwide. Closer to home, the Philippine AI Report 2025 found that more than 92 percent of the organizations it surveyed have already adopted AI, and 54 percent have been using it for over a year.
Why it matters
Right now there is no national law telling a Philippine employer what it owes you if software takes over your work. Diokno's argument is that the gap is the whole problem, and he is blunt about how wide it is.
At present, there is no unified national framework that establishes safeguards against harmful AI systems, protects workers from AI-driven displacement, guarantees transparency in automated decision-making, promotes AI literacy, establishes accountability standards, or creates institutional mechanisms for AI governance.
The catch to watch
A filed bill is not a law. HB 10362 has not been debated in committee yet, and Diokno is publicly asking for that hearing, which tells you it has not been scheduled. Read the headline number carefully too: the IMF figure is jobs affected, meaning changed or partly automated, not 40 percent of jobs erased. The test of this bill will be who pays for the retraining it promises, and that is exactly the detail a committee tends to rewrite.