5/28/2020 E-Library - Information At Your Fingertips: Printer Friendly contracts; by establishing the responsible parties; and by providing the mechanisms for their enforcement that imposes direct and primary liability to the foreign principal employer.[18] Yet, Section 10 presents a hidden twist affecting the principal/employer’s liability. As worded, the Act “simply limits the OFWs’ recovery in wrongful dismissal situations. Thus, it redounds to the benefit of whoever may be liable, including the principal/employer – the direct employer primarily liable for the wrongful dismissal.”[19] From this perspective, Section 10 actually limits what is otherwise the foreign principal/employer’s full liability under the Act and exceeds what the Act intended – to grant incentives to recruitment/manning agencies.[20] “Section 10, in short, really operates to benefit the wrong party and allows that party, without justifiable reason, to mitigate its liability for wrongful dismissals.”[21] [Emphasis supplied] “Because of this hidden twist, the limitation of liability under Section 10 cannot be an “appropriate” incentive.”[22] [Underscoring supplied] Second, the chosen mode of granting the incentive, i.e., the liability limitation for wrongful dismissals of already deployed OFWs, effectively imposed, with legal sanction, a partial condonation of the foreign principal/employer’s liability to OFWs.[23] The incentive, therefore, “from a more practical and realistic view, is really part of a scheme to sell Filipino overseas labor at a bargain for purposes solely of attracting the market,”[24] a scheme that sadly reduces our OFWs to mere cash cows. And third, the “incentive scheme” effectively benefits the recruitment/manning agencies and foreign principal/employer at the expense of the OFWs from whom the salaries for the unexpired portion of the contract are taken and to whom these salaries rightfully belong.[25] In effect, “the principals/employers and the recruitment/manning agencies profit from their violation of the security of tenure that an employment contract embodies.”[26] The OFWs, on the other hand, are afforded lesser protection because: (1) they are afforded reduced recovery by operation of law; (2) the reduced recovery renders wrongful dismissal situations more alluring, easier to facilitate and less onerous to undertake which foreign employers will most certainly consider in termination of employment decisions.[27] These inimical effects obviously will remain as long as the subject clause remains in Section 10 of R.A. No. 8042, this time as reinstated by R.A. No. 10022. The “inherently oppressive, arbitrary, confiscatory and inimical provision [under Section 10 of R.A. No. 8042 should, therefore,] be struck down for its conflict with the substantive aspect of the constitutional due process guarantee.[28] Thus, I vote to declare as unconstitutional the phrase “for three (3) months for every year of the unexpired terms, whichever is less” in the fifth and final paragraph of Section 10 of R.A. 8042.” In sum, given these considerations and conclusions, further testing the validity of the assailed clause under the equal protection guarantee, particularly under the strict scrutiny standard that the ponencia in the present case deemed appropriate to employ, is clearly unnecessary. elibrary.judiciary.gov.ph/thebookshelf/showdocsfriendly/1/57319 36/39