Migrant Group Hits POEA’s `Extortion’
How can
pre-qualification requirements become mechanisms for extortion? For a
migrant workers’ organization, this situation happens when the
government imposes these on Filipinos who are forced to work abroad and
have no other choice but to comply and to pay the corresponding fees.
BY KIM QUITASOL
Northern Dispatch
Posted by Bulatlat
|
DECRYING “EXTORTION”: Hong Kong OFWs
protest the new “pore-qualification” requirement imposed by the POEA |
A Baguio City (246
kms from Manila) chapter of a migrant workers’ organization dismissed
the new guidelines of the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration
(POEA) as just “another ploy to collect more money from overseas
Filipino workers (OFW).”
Migrante-Metro
Baguio Chair Flora Belinan criticized the POEA for requiring OFWs to
undergo training and obtain the National Certificate for Household
Service Workers from Technical Education and Skills Development
Authority (TESDA), Language and Culture Certificate of Competence from
the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) and imposing the
minimum wage policy.
“At first glance,
these policies seem good but in reality it is extortion. This only
proves that the government regards OFWs as milking cows,” Belinan
stressed. She further questioned the timing of the implementation of the
POEA prerequisite. “Just like other OFW funds, the funds derived from
these new guidelines are vulnerable to graft and corruption, especially
with the approaching 2007 elections.”
She admitted that
it would be good to establish a minimum wage for OFWs all over the world
but she doubts if the Philippine government would be able to assert this
to host countries. “In the hundreds of cases we handled and are
currently handling, the government has consistently failed to uphold and
protect OFW rights and welfare. The present administration has been
compromising with host countries at the expense of OFWs.”
Belinan said that
on Jan. 7, two of the 15 OFWs who protested unfair labor practices of
Annasban Groups in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia came home after their
families paid the said employer the fines that their respective
recruitment agencies should have shouldered. She said the Philippine
government failed to assist the OFWs. “They could not even protect OFWs
from simple contract violations how much more to assert a minimum wage
to host countries?”
Moreover, Belinan
said that the government has failed to come up with mechanisms and
procedures to enforce such policies. She also said that earlier in 2005,
when OFWs in Hong Kong protested the wage cut, the Arroyo administration
even acted favor of the Hong Kong government. “Ultimately, and again we
call on, the government to create more decent jobs in the country to
accommodate its work force.” Bulatlat
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