Labor department to form help desk for OFWs

February 20, 2017

To improve delivery of services to overseas Filipino workers, Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III has ordered the creation of a help desk to help verseas Filipino workers (OFWs) and their families.

“In view of the increasing demand for assistance from OFWs and their families, we are creating an assistance desk that will handle OFW-related issues and concerns,” Bello said.

In Administrative Order No. 40, the Assistance to Migrants and their Families Desk (AMD) will be under the Office of the International Labor Affairs Bureau (ILAB) director.

The AMD will be headed by a labor attaché and manned by overseas plantilla personnel, particularly those serving the mandatory three-year government service requirement before deployment and those who are on two-year home office assignment after their end of tour of duty.

The AMD shall attend to clients who personally appear at the DOLE Central Office; and also respond to requests received through phone, text, electronic mail, or the official ILAB Facebook account.

It shall also monitor news reports concerning OFWs and report to the DOLE Secretary immediately before endorsing to the concerned offices for their appropriate action.

All cases handled by the AMD shall be encoded in the Foreign Labor Operations Information System (FLOIS). It is an interactive database system designed to accelerate the monitoring and reporting system of the DOLE in terms of job gains and losses, labor market information, labor and welfare cases and repatriation, security, safety, and protection of the OFWs.

Weekly reports shall be submitted to the labor secretary, through the cluster head, to monitor the actions taken and status updates of the requests handled by the AMD.

“This innovation is one way of strengthening and expanding our delivery of services to OFWs. As long as there are Filipino workers overseas, it is our responsibility to protect them. That is why part of our agenda is the continuous strengthening of protection and security of our OFWs,” Bello said. DMS