Ms. Celeste M. Valderrama, Director, International Labor Affairs Bureau, Department of Labor and Employment, Philippines, describes the organization of the authority responsible for ILS and ILS reporting (December, 2011).
“I am Maria Celeste Valderrama and I head the International Labor Affairs Bureau which handles the International Labour Organization’s concerns like compliance to the international labour standards, as well as of course our reportorial obligations under the ILO constitution. The International labor affairs bureau under the Department of Labor and Employment has four major functions. One is ensuring our commitment under the ILO, second is maintaining our technical cooperation program with multilateral, bilateral and other international organizations and the third is supervising a group of labor attachés posted in about 38 posts abroad. Our labor posts actually provide services to the Filipino workers who are overseas, numbering… it’s about, it’s estimated at about 8 millions. We also have a group which handles the resource requirements of these posts, which is still a fairly large responsibility on our part. To do our work in ensuring that we are able to comply with the reportorial obligations of the ILS, we coordinate quiet extensively with our frontline officers with other bureaus handling the major programs of the department. ILAB has a personnel complement of 24 people and five of them take charge of the international labour standards monitoring. About seven of the remaining 19 people take charge of Middle East affairs, about seven handle Asia and the Pacific affairs and then we have another group handling Europe and America. So three operational units plus one group handling multilateral cooperation. They are the ones handling the ILS and the ILO concerns… All of the ILO concerns.”
Special thanks go to the Honorable Secretary of Labor and Employment of the Philippines, and the Director and staff of the International Labor Affairs Bureau of the Department of Labor of the Philippines for their generous cooperation in the production of this video.