After their respective contracts expired, petitioners filed a complaint for illegal
dismissal claiming that Innodata had made it appear that they had been hired
as project employees in order to prevent them from becoming regular
employees.
The petitioners maintain that they should be accorded regular status to the
employees because the work they performed were necessary and desirable to
the business of data encoding, processing and conversion.
Ruling: In holding that their contract of employment were valid, the Court
reiterated that a fixed period in a contract of employment does not by itself
signify an intention to circumvent Article 280 of the Labor Code.
Also, the necessity and desirability of the work performed by the employees are
not the determinants in term employment, but rather the "day certain"
voluntarily agreed upon by the parties. It would be unusual for a company like
Innodata to undertake a project that had no relationship to its usual business.