Stop sending maids to Kuwait and to all countries
Concerning the latest murder of a Filipina maid in Kuwait, the partial and temporary ban issued by DOLE Secretary Silvestre Bello III is, with due respect, a band-aid solution to a lingering social cancer. It is designed to ease the pain but will never totally heal the malady.
I have worked as a diplomat in Kuwait for a number of years, and I know the real score. I have written a number of memos to my superiors pleading for a total and permanent ban, but no one was listening. Sending maids to Kuwait and to any country, most especially to the Middle East, is a shameless repetition of the slave trades in the olden times. Maids are paid a pittance, less than P20,000, for difficult, dirty, dangerous, and degrading work lasting no less than 18 to 20 hours each day. Every maid is held as a virtual prisoner in the private domains of cruel and arrogant masters who do not have basic respect for human dignity. Many of our maids had been murdered, raped, physically mutilated, and verbally abused, they end up a total wreck, maimed or psychologically damaged.
Every Arab or Kuwaiti employer wanting to get a maid would pay a foreign-based agency hefty amounts ranging from $5,000 to $7,000 just to get one Filipina domestic helper. The foreign agency would then solicit from other households and get enough employers for it to submit a job order to the Philippine Embassy and have it approved by the Labor attaché. During my time, as such attaché, some 50 to 100 job orders are on my table for approval every day. Each job order contains request for 50 to 100 maids from the Philippines. After examining the worthiness of each applicant, the attaché approves some and denies others. His denial, however, would be seen by DOLE and POEA officials as unduly wasting job opportunities for OFWs.
Once approved, the foreign-based agency will transmit the approved job orders to a Philippine agency that will process the same with the POEA. The two agencies, one based in Kuwait and the other based in Manila would divide the $7,000. After the POEA says yes, then recruitment is done mostly in the Visayas, Mindanao, Bicol, and the Ilocos regions. Applicants for maids are not required by law to pay placement fees, but most agencies still collect a lot of money from them. Individual contracts are again submitted to the Labor attaché for approval and to the POEA for registration. After medical exams and pre-departure seminars, the maids are set to go.
When they reach Kuwait, they are brought to their employers who shall immediately confiscate their passports and cellphones. They are made to work not only in one households but are sent from one family to another cleaning toilets, washing windows, scrubbing whole buildings, washing, ironing, and all sorts of work. They are not allowed to go out not even to go to church. And if and when they escape, they are charged criminally for all sorts of crimes, including simulated thefts and robberies. Many of them were raped and murdered, some were buried in the desert after being gang raped. Those who fight back to protect their dignity often end up in jails. The Labor attaché has to find them and bring them to the embassy, where they stay for months awaiting their employers' approval for them to go home. And these employers would collect back the $7,000. No dollars, no going home.
With all these atrocities, why is it seemingly very difficult for the government to put an end to this shameless trading of modern slaves? A ban is just a band-aid solution. To put an end to this slap on our national honor, it only takes one signature to stop all these injustices once and for all.
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