The death of presidential candidate and OFW Family Club party-list Rep. Roy V. Señeres last Feb. 8 came as shocking news to his friends and the working class who believe in his advocacy of promoting their welfare through social justice.
His main platform was to end the practice of “contractualization” wherein workers are terminated upon completion of a six-month contract. Señeres saw this as unjust and oppressive as it gravely violates the constitutional mandate of securing workers’ right to gainful employment. He also assured overseas Filipino workers of full protection in their workplaces abroad against indiscriminate substitution of overseas employment contracts and other abusive acts of foreign employers.
Incidentally, Señeres was also an exponent of peace and reconciliation. When he asked me to edit his book “Absence from the Presence (My Faith, My Life, My Politics)” where he urged people to have the Eucharist as the center of their presence in God, he advised me days before his death to disregard his incisive comments on graft and corruption that attended past administrations. Obviously, he wanted peace and unity to prevail among all sectors of Philippine society when he junked the idea of a revolution as an option for change. This, he believed, is attainable if leaders only make themselves present in the eyes of God.
With his unexpected death, however, OFWs lost a champion of a noble cause, and a crusader for social justice and good government. Señeres is gone but definitely he will always be alive in the hearts of the working class and those who believe in his ideals and conviction.
—EDGAR J. TAMAYO, editor-publisher, Philippine Observer, ejtamayo@yahoo.com