Seek ‘Quality Employers’ for OFWs, Government Urged
MANILA – The government needs to look for “quality” employers for Filipinos overseas to prevent future abuses, even at the cost of stricter screening, a migrant workers’ advocate said Thursday.
The government recently banned the deployment of Filipino workers to Kuwait after a Filipina who had been missing for over a year was found dead in a freezer.
“Let’s go for quality employers. No matter how long it takes to validate, no matter how stringent our screening measures would be,” former labor undersecretary Susan Ople told ANC’s Headstart.
More Filipinos are seeking work as domestic helpers abroad, with 300,000 deployed last year, said Ople, who heads a policy center for migrant workers named after her late father, former Sen. Blas Ople.
“If you keep adding to those numbers, hirap talaga ang embassy mag-monitor ng lahat and even yung recruitment agency dito dahil sa volume ng job orders nila. Palabas lang yan ng palabas, hindi na rin nabe-vet yung quality at yung kahandaan ng domestic worker,” she said.
(If you keep adding those numbers, it will be very hard for the embassy to monitor everyone, even the recruitment agencies here, the volume of job orders will increase. With all these departures, the readiness and the quality of domestic workers can’t be vetted.)
In Kuwait alone, Ople said 65,000 new hires were deployed in 2016. Of the number, 50,000 or more were domestic workers.
“Gaano ba kalalim ang verification system natin pagdating sa quality ng employers? It’s not that deep. Sa Kuwait, marami rin swerte pero yung malas, sobrang malas,” she said.
(How thorough is our verification when it comes to the quality of employers. It’s not that deep. In Kuawit, many are lucky, but when they’re unlucky, it’s too much bad luck.)
Last year, Ople said there were 65 reported rape cases involving Filipina domestic workers, almost double the number in 2014 with 34. As for sexual abuse and harassment, 243 were reported in 2017, compared to 157 in 2014.
“Multiple rapes, sodomy, murders—this has been historically problematic especially for domestic workers,” she said.
She also shared one of the “barbaric” cases they’ve handled involving a Filipina domestic worker starved to death by her employers.
“When she was too weak already, they ran over her with their car, killing her,” she said.
The best protection for any OFW is his or her skill set. Higher skilled workers are more valued and protected, she said.
A similar deployment ban to Kuwait in 1989 failed to force the Middle East state to sign a bilateral agreement with the Philippines to better protect OFWs, Ople said.
“Even if we sign a bilateral agreement it’s not the magic bullet. It will take time for the mechanisms to be set up. But at least you can sit across the table as equals and discuss all these patterns of abuse and particular cases,” she said.
China and Russia are “untested markets” even as the labor department offered these countries as alternatives for Filipinos coming home from Kuwait, she said.
(Source: ABS-CBN.com)