The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) successfully launched a new Maritime Office geared at ensuring the country's leadership in shipmanning and boosting coordination among stakeholders in order to sustain the global opportunities for the overseas Filipino seafarers and promote their welfare.

The Maritime Office will be under the direct supervision of Labor and Employment Secretary Arturo D. Brion and will be manned by a maritime officer, LCDR Eustacio Nimrod Enriquez, who is also the Deputy Executive Director of the DOLE's National Maritime Polytechnic.

Speaking in behalf of Secretary Brion during today's inauguration ceremony of the Maritime Office, Labor Undersecretary for Employment Luzviminda G. Padilla said that the new facility will basically undertake a coordinative function doing full time work to push and follow up the country's initiatives on the maritime sphere.

Padilla said that essentially, the new office replaces the government's Technical Committee on Maritime Affairs, and will assist the Labor Secretary in identifying the responses to challenges and issues that affect the maritime industry.

"This industry is responsible for facilitating employment to some 247,497 overseas Filipino seafarers as of 2006," she said, adding that, "the DOLE hopes that with its own initiatives and those of the industry, we could provide solutions [to] further boost the competitiveness of our seafarers in the world shipping community."

Padilla cited that last week, a major shipping company, the Magsaysay Mitsui OSK Lines, Inc., successfully launched its own training ship, the Spirit of MOL, to provide shipboard training to cadets, in order for them to complete their degrees, and to give them better chances at bagging officers' positions. "There are other practitioners in the industry who have established ahead their own training institutes and I congratulate all of them," she further said.

Finally, Padilla said that the Maritime Office will come up with programs and actions, as it pushes and follows up the maritime initiatives undertaken by government agencies and the other stakeholders in the maritime industry. She said these are the Maritime Training Council, the National Maritime Polytechnic, the Professional Regulation Commission, Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, as well as other stakeholders like the Commission on Higher Education, the shipping and manning sectors, and the unions.