THIRTY-EIGHT construction workers are claiming that their employer asked them to pay for their own airfare from Manila to Saipan and a placement fee totaling 48,000 pesos or nearly $1,000 each.
“It’s a big amount to us, but we had to take it because we want to work,” Magno Graneta, an employee of the construction firm said in an interview with Variety yesterday.
Alien workers in the CNMI are paid $3.05 an hour.
Graneta, together with 37 other employees, went to the Department of Labor and Employment yesterday to file a complaint against E.C. Gozum.
E.C. Gozum currently works in partnership with Guam Pacific Powers Corp., the contractor handling the Kagman High School project.
The case was earlier filed with the U.S. District Court.
Under the current procedure, a worker directly hired through the Philippine government pays a $125 processing fee.
Workers who apply through a recruitment agency pay a maximum placement fee that is equal to a one month salary, authorities said. A worker could pay by installments.
Local law obligates an employer to pay for the worker’s two-way airfare.
Graneta said they decided to file the case because they feel that they were being shortchanged and cheated.
“We can’t tolerate this arrangement anymore,” he said.
For instance, he said, their contracts provided that their employer would pay for their meals everyday.
But when they arrived on Saipan beginning January this year, their employer deducted $65 for their food from their pay checks every 15 days.
“This is a blatant violation of the contract,” Graneta said in Filipino.
In an interview, E.C. Gozum manager Eleazar Macaspac said the free meal was “not in the DOLI-approved contract.”
Macaspac denied that the company breached the employees’ contract.
“That’s not true,” he said.
Macaspac said attorney Danilo Aguilar has already responded to the complaint in behalf of the company.
Meantime, attorney Timothy H. Bellas, legal counsel of the employees, said the company could be found liable for alleged failure to pay overtime work, breach of contract, fraud and violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act and related laws.
“There are several contracts—one for the Philippine Consulate General, one for (DOLI),” the former judge said.
