Advocates gathering signatures to prove $25-OWWA fee illegal
by VILLY G. CABUAG
OFW Journalism Consortium, Inc.

PASAY CITY -- AS Filipinos tried to gather loans during the Overseas Workers’ Welfare Administration (OWWA) anniversary celebration in Pasay City, advocates were trying to gather signatures of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) against an OWWA practice: collecting $25 from OFWs.

There was no mention of how much OWWA disbursed to families of OFWs for a P50,000- interest-free grocery start-up loan. However, according to OWWA’s report, it had a cash fund of P867.51 million as of June last year.

More than half of these money came from the $25-payment from Filipinos departing for work abroad. Using estimate figures of the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), an average of 2,500 Filipinos leaving everyday and paying the $25 fee easily puts $62,500 into OWWA’s coffers every day or $1.875 million in thirty days. At P55 to a dollar, just the $25 membership fee payments would give OWWA P1.3 billion a year.

Ellene Sana, vice-president of the Philippine Migrants’ Rights Watch (PMRW), a network of non-government organizations, claims the way these fees were exacted is illegal.

“This is quite lamentable that we have to resort to this — taking it upon ourselves to state the obvious — that OWWA (membership) fee is being collected by OWWA [from OFWs] in violation of the law,” said Sana, who is also executive director of non-government Center for Migration Advocacy-Philippines (CMA).

“This has been the practice even prior to the promulgation of the OWWA Omnibus Policies,” she added, referring to the new set of rules that was enacted by the OWWA Board of Trustees on September 2003.

Sana said that the signatures they gathered until September this year will be used to prove a point that the OWWA violated the law on collecting membership fees from OFWs.

She said, using the official government figures, the 100,000 signatures are symbolic as it is ten percent of one million migrant workers going through government overseas deployment agencies each year. Celeste Marasigan, staff of the PMRW secretariat, said the network has gathered 5,005 signatures thus far – majority of these from Saudi Arabia.

This is the first time since the establishment of OWWA in 1982 that an organization has questioned the legality of collecting fees. Notably, some NGO members of PMRW worked with the OWWA two years ago for a government-initiated reintegration program.

Money trails
THE Implementing Rules and Regulations of the Letter of Instruction 537, issued in 1977 at the time of President Ferdinand Marcos, prescribed the fees that OWWA can charge from OFWs. Until today, the fare matrix issued 28 years ago is being still used by OWWA as guide and most of it hasn’t been changed.

The IRR, however, stressed that: “In no way shall the above fees be charge or collected from the worker.”

LOI 537 was the enabling law that mandated DOLE to create a Welfare and Training Fund for Overseas Workers. This fund was renamed into OWWA under then President Corazon Aquino. Many laws have amended the said LOI but, to this date, OWWA officials said they still base their operations, including the membership fees of the migrant workers, from the LOI.

The signature campaign was launched early May against the mandatory payment of the $25 OWWA membership fee to the OFWs.

According to PMRW president Carmelita Nuqui, the campaign is aimed at, among others, teaching OFWs that the OWWA membership fee should not be charged to them, especially for those who are taking their first employment contract abroad.

A number of migrant workers who had their first contract told the OFW Journalism Consortium that they themselves — and not their employers — paid the OWWA membership fee. One of them is William Ilagan, an industrial painter based in Saudi Arabia.

“Yes, I paid for my OWWA membership fee but I didn’t even know what that was for or who should really pay for it. Good thing there’s a movement (the signature campaign) clarifying this matter,” Ilagan said when, asked on who paid his OWWA membership fee.

Jowel Marquez, another OFW pawned a family farm so he can work as a secretary in Saudi Arabia, had a similar case. Marquez said he paid for the OWWA membership fee even if he had no idea what he was actually paying for.

“I don’t know any of my benefits. I just paid it because if I don’t, I wouldn’t be able to fly (abroad),” Marquez told the OFW Journalism Consortium. He added that he lacked time and tenacity to ask his recruiter what the fee was for.

Sana said OFWs simply pay their fees even if they are not well informed because “their focus is to work abroad”. “They (OFWs) leave it all up to (recruitment) agencies as long as they know that they would be leaving the country.”

Campaign trail
The signature campaign follows the case filed by PMRW in February last year against the legality of the OWWA Omnibus Policies, the ruling on how the trust fund for the migrant workers would be governed and spent by its Board of Trustees. The policies effectively superseded the previous laws, according to PMRW.

“The Board of OWWA exceeded its functions in a lot of matters,” said Atty. Henry Rojas, PMRW’s legal counsel for the case.

Rojas said their case may have opened a lot of questions on how OWWA should be governed by its Board. Rojas said OWWA is an entity that operates like state-owned pension fund manager Government Security and Insurance System (GSIS) to finance its own operations.
But [OWWA’s] not a government-owned corporation, he said. He added that collecting the membership fee from the workers is just a parcel of the much bigger picture.

As of June 2004, OWWA’s total assets, including those of the OWWA Medicare, stood at P8.1 billion. It is expected to grow further as most of its funds were placed in short term investments. The bulk of these funds were from the contribution of OFWs.

According to Rojas, whatever signatures collected will not be used in their case as it is not admissible in the courts. He later admitted that he did not know anything about PMRW’s campaign and what will they do with it after they gathered the signatures.

In a separate interview, OWWA Administrator Marianito Roque said the campaign is “just another one of their (PMRW) strategies” to condemn OWWA. “We are doing what we can (to follow the law) and we stand firm to that.”

Roque explained there are two ways in which the membership fee could be paid. The employer pays the membership fee for the first contract, while the OFWs should pay the fees upon contract renewals.

According to an OWWA staff at its public information division, there were cases that the employers were reimbursing to the Filipino migrant workers the OWWA membership fee that they had paid for their first contract. The staff said this is because it will be cumbersome for foreign employers to go here just to pay the fee.

This, however, does not convince Rojas who said OWWA should not be collecting the fees from workers in the first place but from employers. - with a report from KARLO JOSE PINEDA (contributor) end