Some were happy and others felt sad on how the RESIDUAL trust fund in-charge selected their chosen recipient.
It makes me wonder where these garment workers gets their daily needs such as food, shelter and all other domestic personal needs since there were no garment factories that exist in the island for years now. I’ve seen them roaming around. These workers were be seen walking around on the streets, hitching to and one place to another from neighbors to friends to find a decent job in order to survive while waiting for their unpaid salaries and other collectibles due to them from their (former garment company) employer.
I wonder what will be their future in the island without possible employer that will hire them on their field of expertise. They said that they had been cheated by their employers and left behind in the island that is already affected by global economy. The impoverished foreign garment workers population in the island that were promised to have a decent job are now hopeless of having that promised. I wonder what their family’s back home thinking about them if they don’t receive a penny from their parents abroad; they left their homeland to work overseas and promised to give them education, decent living and enough food on the table, but now that they are jobless for almost two years how do they managed to send a penny to their family.
According to Timothy H. Bellas, the chairman of the Garment Workers Trust Fund “It is important to remember that only SCMs (former garment workers working for certain garment factories involved in the class action suit) were entitled to a distribution of this money. In other words, NOT EVERY GARMENT WORKER WAS ENTITLED TO A PAYMENT FROM THE SETTLEMENT.
I wonder why not all garment workers is entitled for payment from the residual fund. The reality was that they were (former) garment workers especially if they had been working in the industry for a decade. Please note that the Garment workers Trust Fund is a residual fund, forwarding certain amount from this funds to any charitable institution(s) is denying them their rights as direct garment workers simply because they were not participated in the class action suit or because they were suffering from hardship (which is not included as beneficiaries of the leftover fund according to the chairman of the trust fund). While it is true that only those SCMs is entitled to receive the FIRST distribution, the trustees of the garment workers trust fund should consider for HUMANITARIAN REASON that those garment workers who were not part of the class action suit be a party of the SECOND distribution because this money is only the residual amount from the first distribution. The garment oversight board should priorities all former garment workers who had been directly involve in the garment industry rather than giving it to the charitable institution based on the legal doctrine of cy press. Charitable institutions cover a lot of miscellaneous activities and with no specific beneficiaries (such as former garment workers only) and will not give a direct benefit to former garment workers not unless they are maybe living on the street and or begging for food and shelter.
Sometime on early June 5, 2001, a high court officials ordered garment factory workers (unnamed) to support the class action lawsuit against garment factory owners. A lot of these garment workers backed the class action suit by signing in their names on the class action suit document and as a result of that some received money sometime in 2004, but now they were neglected simply because their names does not appear on the list from the Department of Labor and from the Office of the Ombudsman that were forwarded to the Garment Workers Trust Fund office. To date, many of these garment workers were denied to receive part of the Garment Workers Residual Trust Fund.
I am one of those who volunteered to solicit “food for the displaced garment workers” spearheaded by the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration in 2004. As chairman of Overseas Filipino Workers Welfare Committee in 2004, many of these garment workers came to me for any assistance that we could extend. A lot of these garment workers are still in the island suffering from hardship due to unavailable job in line with their expertise. I am therefore APPEALING to the U.S District Court for NMI not to apply the doctrine of cy press (AS IN OTHER STATES) in this case and instruct the trustees to re-evaluate their list of recipient garment workers and entertain those garment workers who are PHYSICALLY present in the island rather than giving it to those who were already off-island and as a result of that, many are unclaimed. Thank you.
CARLITO J. MARQUEZ
Puerto Rico, Saipan
