A Brief Biography of Marianito D. Roque, Acting Secretary of the Department of Labor and Employment
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DOLE Undersecretary Lourdes M. Trasmonte handing over the DOLE colors to OWWA Administrator and now Acting Secretary Marianito D. Roque in a turnover ceremony held last 24 March 2008.
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The reward of hard work, perseverance and loyalty to the Filipino people is how Marianito D. Roque regards every success that has come into his career as a public servant.
Born on December 8, 1954 of Mauro J. Roque, a contractor-entrepreneur, and Eliza Dineros, a homemaker, Nitoy, as peers, friends and family call him, completed elementary and secondary studies at the Lamao Bataan High School in 1971, in Limay, Bataan.
He studied at the De La Salle College in Manila, obtaining his bachelor's degree in economics in 1975. In 1978, he completed his master's degree in business administration at the Ateneo de Manila University.
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Early in life, Nitoy Roque demonstrated exemplary self-discipline and an enduring capacity for hard work and empathy, traits that would later serve him in good stead as he rose from the ranks.
From the university, he taught marketing courses at the Philippine Women's University. In 1976, he briefly joined the Overseas Employment Development Board (OEDB), the forerunner of the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) and the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA), where he started out as a statistician and planning officer.
He held the position for two years before he became employment marketing officer.
With the establishment of the OWWA in 1982, he was named technical assistant to the OWWA administrator and concurrent head of the agency's resources management unit.
From 1986 to March 2004, he held the post of OWWA director, and briefly held the post of deputy administrator until President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo appointed him OWWA chief on September 1, 2004.
He has drawn a wealth of experience and deep practical insight and wisdom from his lengthy public service career, enabling him to develop and cultivate a well-rounded arsenal of skills and knowledge in organizational development; crisis management, monitoring and intervention; programme development; migration diplomacy;
reintegration and return migration.
He is well-versed in overseas employment marketing, having traveled around the world either as head or member of Philippine delegations to various negotiations for the promotion of employment for Filipinos. He has led and joined employment survey missions, welfare and protection conferences, and dispute settlement negotiations.
Many times, he has traveled abroad to manage crisis situations involving OFWs.
He also has widely traveled as speaker and participant in numerous international training and conferences, and as member of Presidential State and Official Visits to Saudi Arabia, Spain, Italy, and Hong Kong. In 2005, Microsoft Corporation invited him in Beijing to deliver a lecture on the Philippine experience on the application of information and communications technology to migrant communities. He was member of the Philippine delegation to the Asian Labor Minister's Conference in Bali, Indonesia, also in 2005.
He was a member of the Philippine delegation to the 92nd session of the International Organization for Migration in Geneva, in 2006; and on the same year, delivered a lecture on Policy Responses by Countries of Origin on Labor Migration, in Moscow. The 10M-sponsored conference was attended by officials of the former Soviet Union's 11 new Confederation of Independent States. He was in San Francisco, also in 2006, as a participant in Microsoft Corporation's Unified Conference For Emerging Markets and New Technologies.
During the first Gulf War, he was the site in-charge-negotiating with Kuwait government officials on the implementation of an exit protocol-for the mass evacuation and repatriation of some 28,000 Filipinos from Kuwait caught on the crossfire of the Iraqi invasion of that tiny oil kingdom.
Of his many numerous achievements as an OWWA official, some of those that stand out include his development of the informal wage remittance program for OFWs; his conceptualization of the assignment of welfare officers to Philippine Missions as frontline providers of welfare services; and his innovative homecoming program for OFWs.
He had helped develop employment standards for migrant Filipinos consistent with the rules and regulations of labor-importing nations, and conceptualized and implemented the organization of Filipino communities abroad, as well as the establishment of associations of dependent families in the Philippines.
During the first 100 days of his term as OWWA administrator, Roque turned-around and revitalized the OWWA as a public-responsive and demand-sensitive national government agency; improved the delivery of services to migrant families throughout the Philippines; and negotiated with the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for the release of more than 500 OFWs from Saudi jails which eventually led to their repatriation to the Philippines. He had institutionalized a 24/7 Operations Center to monitor crisis and distress situations involving OFWs; and in 2006, at the height of the Israel-Lebanon conflict, he co-managed, together with the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Department of Labor and Employment, the evacuation of 6,000 Filipinos from Lebanon.
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