Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, May 22) — The Senate has passed a bill that seeks to strengthen workers' security of tenure and prohibit the practice of labor-only contracting.

The upper chamber, voting 15-0, on Wednesday approved on third and final reading Senate Bill 1826, also known as the "Security of Tenure and End of Endo Act of 2018."

President Rodrigo Duterte earlier certified the bill as urgent as labor groups called on him to fulfill his campaign promise of ending all forms of illegal contractualization or "endo."

"Endo" or "end of contract" is a highly contested form of contractualization widely practiced in the country -- workers are hired for not more than five months, so employers don't need to regularize them on the sixth month as mandated by the Labor Code. It strips millions of workers of all the benefits granted to regular employees by law.

What the Senate bill prohibits is a labor-only contracting, which is defined as a practice where a job contractor or a person supplying workers to employers, "merely recruits and supplies or places workers to a contractee." Once the bill is passed into law, employees would have to be directly hired by companies and not through labor-only contracting agencies. Should employees remain under the supervision of these agencies, the company would have to absorb them or regularize them.

It also states that all employees, except those under probationary, are deemed regular, including project and seasonal employees. The services of any employee cannot be terminated without just and unauthorized cause.

A similar bill has been passed at the House of Representatives. A bicameral committee will iron out differences in the two versions to come up with the measure that will be submitted to the President for his signature.

"The next phase of our struggle to end endo is in the bicam. We are determined to pursue this, especially that this measure has been certified urgent by the Executive," Senator Joel Villanueva, chair of the committee on labor, employment and human resources development, said in a statement shortly after the passage of the bill in the Senate.