A labor group has asked the Supreme Court (SC) to reopen the 35-year-old, $609-million labor dispute, involving American military contractor Kellog-Brown & Root and some 2,300 former over overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in the Middle East.
In a report by the Philippine Star, the Bagong Bayani Organization, led by Ricardo Bautista, has filed a petition before the high court, seeking the reversal of its earlier ruling, which junked the claims by the OFWs for overtime pay, annual leave differential pay, vacation leave compensation and other claims of petitioners.
In a three-page letter to Chief Justice Lucas Bersamin, the labor group said that the high court should instead affirm the December 2002 decision of the National Labor Relations Commission (NLRC), ordering Texas-based Kellog-Brown & Root to pay them $609 million plus 12 percent interest.
The NLRC decision was considered as the country’s biggest award in labor adjudication.
To date, the total awards now reached $5.7 billion due to accumulated and compounded annual interest earnings since June 6, 1984.
The petitioners in this case were OFWs from Batangas, Laguna, and Cavite who were employed with Brown & Root International Inc. (now Kellog-Brown & Root) in overseas projects in the Middle East, particularly in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, from 1976 until the 1990s.
Most of these OFWs worked in Vietnam during the war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam in the 1960s before they transferred to Bahrain and the UAE.
