Vetoed ‘endo’ bill refiled in House

MANILA, Philippines — The Security of Tenure (SOT) bill vetoed by President Duterte more than a week ago has been refiled at the House of Representatives.

House Bill 3367, the House counterpart of the measure more popularly known as ‘anti-endo’ bill, was refiled by deputy speaker and Cibac party-list Rep. Eddie Villanueva last week.

The measure is a pet bill of the lawmaker’s son, Sen. Joel Villanueva, who also promptly refiled the Senate version of the bill last week.

“The battle for decades of the working class to be freed from economic injustice was delayed but we will not stop until social justice is served and the rights of the people are honored,” the preacher-turned politician said, vowing to support the bill pursued by their party-list group despite the setback.

“In the name of fairness and order in our business and labor sectors, and most of all, for the sake of our Filipino laborers who have been constantly living in fear of finding not just a new job but new means to support their families once their (supposedly illegal) contract ends, the passage of this bill is earnestly sought,” the House official added.

Villanueva also dispelled perception that the bill is anti-employer or anti-contractualization, saying it does not seek to end legal contractualization but instead simply aims to ensure that all parties involved in labor contracts are duly protected by the law. 

He explained that the measure would allow industry tripartite councils to determine the kind of jobs which are directly related to one’s principal business and would provide avenues for the labor sector to express their concerns about contracting certain jobs and the employers to present the realities of their businesses’ operations.

HB 3367 seeks to protect laborers from labor-only contracting, which refers to cases where the job contractor merely supplies workers to a contractee, where the workers supplied by the contractor perform jobs directly related to the contractee’s principal business, and where the job contractor does not control the workers deployed to the contractee.