A senator and a congressman have filed separate bills seeking to provide overseas Filipino workers welfare insurance, the head of a group of recruitment agencies said on Tuesday night. The bills were filed by Senator Manny Villar and Congressman Rufus Rodriguez in their respective chambers of Congress. The proposed laws seek to give $15,000 benefit for the family of an OFW who dies in an accident, $10,000 if the OFW dies a natural death and $7,500 for permanent disability, Victor E. Fernandez, president of the Philippine Association of Service Exporters Inc. said. The bills also seek to cover the repatriation of the OFW's corpse, including burial cost, of up to $4,000, force evacuation in case of emergency situations of up to $1,000, subsistence allowance of $100 a month when a worker files a case against his employer and up to $4,500 legitimate monetary claims for unpaid wages during emergency evacuations. Fernandez said the workers won't be required to pay anything to be entitled to such claims. but only the regular membership fee collected by the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) for each duration of his employment contract. “No cost to the government and no cost for the workers. We will pay for all these for the benefit of the workers once the bills are consolidated and passed into a law,” said Fernandez who came over to Jeddah to make personal contacts with employers who have been taking workers from his own job placement agency. Early this week, Fernandez went to the OWWA office at the Philippine Consulate General in Jeddah and heard the complaint of runaway OFWs, mostly maids, who have sought shelter at the OWWA's half-way house. The usual complaints were physical abuse and mental torture from their employers. non-payment of wages, excessive fees being charged by the recruitment agencies in the Philippines. They said some agencies also threatened them to pay about P100,000 or get jailed after they ran away from their employers. During the dialogue, it came out that many of them were sent abroad of false job offers. For instance, some agencies told them that they would work as seamstress or dishwashers in restaurants but ended up as maids. OWWA Welfare Officer Nini Lanto said such kind of practice had to stop so that the number of runaway workers would decline. Fernandez and the OWWA welfare officers agreed that the pre-parture orientation seminars (PDOS) have to be strengthens so that the workers could adjust well when they come to their job sites.
