Duterte's urgency appeal to clear path for contentious OFW department
MANILA, Philippines — President Rodrigo Duterte’s call for the speedy establishment of a separate department for migrant Filipino workers appears to clear the path to enactment for the controversial priority legislation.
“Certification helps us convince the entire Executive (department) not to give us mixed signals,” Senator Joel Villanueva, chair of the Senate labor committee hearing the bill, said in a text message on Thursday.
On Tuesday evening, Duterte certified as urgent Senate Bill 1949 just filed last December 14 by Senator Christopher “Bong” Go, his long-time aide. The bill establishes a Cabinet-level agency for handling concerns of overseas Filipino workers currently dealt with separately by the foreign affairs and labor departments.
A counterpart bill at the House of Representatives had already been approved.
Before Go’s measure, two bills from Villanueva and Senate Majority Leader Juan Miguel Zubiri were left stuck at the upper chamber since 2016 despite being an administration priority bill. A critical factor for the delay were reservations from no less than Duterte’s economic managers who see another agency as only ballooning an already bloated bureaucracy, while inadvertently making permanent a Marcos-era band-aid solution of labor export.
Among those agencies resisting was the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA), which while supportive of the measure, wants Congress to limit the new agency’s life. Villanueva is bound to follow this suggestion, putting in a sunset provision of 10-12 years for the OFW department.
“We have to put a sunset provision to affirm our policy of not sending our kababayans abroad,” he said.
At NEDA, acting chief Karl Kendrick Chua also said legislators should be mindful of the bill’s timing, amid growing public needs from the health crisis. “(We need) to frame our priorities to determine what are the urgent priorities in this economic crisis,” Chua said in a briefing.
This was the same concern of the finance and budget departments which would ultimately fund the new agency. In previous Senate hearings, both agencies said that inevitably, a new department would raise government costs and potentially widen the budget deficit already under strain from pandemic needs. A huge deficit indicates more needs to borrow.
Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III did not reply to request for comment.
Rising costs, deficit
Indeed, a separate agency entails cost. Under the proposed bills, the OFW department would have one secretary and four undersecretaries, all adding to the current government payroll. There would also be new “assistance-to-nationals” offices, which while absorbing current functions of Philippine overseas labor offices, would still have a bigger mandate to perform, and thus require bigger budgets.
Costs of the OFW department would also come on top of that of the relatively new housing agency just established in 2018. The shelter office is unable to perform its mandate, with senators complaining that the Executive department’s budget proposals have left the agency severely underfunded.
In Congress, bills to put up separate departments for the water sector and disaster resiliency, both also government priorities, run against the rightsizing measure that wants to trim the bloated bureaucracy.
Beyond costs, the labor department initially complained that the bill would abolish the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) and Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) and left thousands jobless. Proposals now just transfer these agencies under the new office from the labor agency.
“(This is) cognizant of the value of the experience of these agencies” in handling OFW concerns,” Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III said in a separate online briefing on Thursday.
Sought for comment, Jeremaiah Opiniano, executive director at non-profit Institute for Migration and Development Issues, said funding, not an agency, is what is lacking in addressing OFW needs.
“What is wanting is a strategy to utilize the resources of overseas Filipinos for their benefit and the country's development while we provide protection and social services to aggrieved Filipinos abroad. Coordination on this specific task is happening already (through the NEDA),” he said in an email. — Bella Perez-Rubio with reports from Xave Gregorio
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