Unabated violations of OFWs' rights

Kuwait and many countries in the Middle East have no respect for our human dignity. But the Philippines continues to allow itself to be insulted. This should stop. The government never learns. In the last 50 years, the cycle of deployment and repatriation has remained constant. No draconian measure is being put in place to cut this cycle of rapes, murders and trafficking of women. Just like modern slave trades, where traffickers earn millions of dollars, the number of Filipina maids who are raped, murdered and subjected to all forms of atrocities continues to escalate. No one is outraged in the administration, only Senator Raffy Tulfo is raising hell.

As the OWWA and the DMW, Department of Migrant Workers continue to repatriate thousands of stranded OFWs, mostly maids from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other labor migrants' destination, the POEA and the Labor Attaches, also under the DMW, continue to process and approve job orders and stamp their approvals on individual contracts, followed by deployment of women to work in dirty, difficult, dangerous, deceptive and degrading jobs. And they are too hesitant to ban deployment even temporarily. I miss the decisiveness of Secretary Bebot Bello. This administration seems to be more mindful of the recruiters' loss of revenue than to save the lives of OFWs.

The thousands of OFWs, mostly domestic helpers, subjects of repatriation have been victims of repeated and blatant violations of Article 34 of the Labor Code, which prohibits the following acts: recruiters' notorious charging of exorbitant placement fees, mindless that the rules prohibit collecting such fees from domestics. Also, many recruitment agency owners and their close relatives by consanguinity or affinity or their dummies and fronts also own travel agencies and they deploy workers as tourists precisely in order to illegally facilitate direct hiring in countries of migrant workers' country of destination. These are prohibited acts but many unscrupulous recruiters, abetted by corrupt officials continue to perpetrate them with blatant impunity.

The explicitly prohibited contract substitution is also rampant, whereby recruiters willfully alter, modify, amend or totally substitute material entries in POEA-duly approved contracts, including names of the contract workers, position covered by the work contracts, stipulated salaries, wages, benefits and other components of compensation, and other material terms and conditions of the work contract. More reprehensibly, many recruiters compel OFWs to pay many unnecessary and even prohibited fees, and shamelessly withhold passports and deny travel documents to OFWs, who refuse to pay more or to succumb to many illegal exaction and unjust imposition of unauthorized fees.

Under Republic Act 8042, otherwise known as the Magna Carta For Migrant Workers, the law prohibits false advertising to lure migrant workers and motivate them to apply for jobs in risky and hazardous destinations. Such false ads are luring OFWs based on distorted information designed only to mislead them and part with their hard-earned money. Many recruiters are engaged in luring workers to be deployed to jobs harmful to health, safety, and dignity of the workers. Many recruiters are very fast in collection of placement fees but very slow and indefinite in their actual deployment. Many of them collect huge amounts of money and fail to deploy despite the lapse of extended periods of time and even after a series of repeated follow-ups and inquiries.

Many recruiters, who fail to deploy the OFWs in gross violation of the work contracts and the law, refuse to return the huge amounts of placement fees paid a year back or longer, despite repeated demands and multiple follow-ups. The law also prohibits recruiters' notoriously nefarious practices of lending money to overseas job applicants with onerous interests higher than 8 percent per annum. However, many recruiters who also own lending companies in adjacent offices or shops are precisely practicing these highly oppressive and exploitative acts of blatant usury, taking advantage of poor, naive and mostly unlettered migrant workers.

Many recruiters also own health and medical clinics or have joint ventures with some unethical medical practitioners. The recruiters would compel the job applicants to go to these specified clinics and would accept medical certificates only from them. This is strictly prohibited by law. The same is true to seminar providers that give the mandated PDOS or Pre-Departure Orientation Seminars. Many recruiters prescribed specific outfits and would refuse to accept PDOS certificates from other providers. These are strictly forbidden with corresponding penalties attached for violations.

 It seems that this government has become used to all these horrendous injustice against our migrant maids, that no one among our executives have even considered a ban of deployment. There are no tyrants if there are no slaves. We should stand up to redeem our dignity as a people. The time is now.