For legal research purposes of the visitors of this blog, I am quoting the salient parts of two feature articles recently published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on the topic of social justice for the Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW), the new economic heroes of the Philippines who, for many decades now, continue to live in extreme suffering and solitude in foreign lands due to the gross negligence of the entire Philippine government.
Meanwhile, the empty motherhood statements and promises of corrupt, lazy, and incompetent Filipino politicians and bureaucrats continue unabated for publicity purposes, especially in time for delivery of the annual state of the nation address of the President and in the press releases on the window-dressed performance reports of the Department of Labor and Employment, the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, the Department of Foreign Affairs, and other concerned agencies.
Please note that ten percent of the Philippine population live and work abroad in more than 230 countries and that almost one million Filipinos leave the Philippine per annum as foreign contract workers. They remit more than 15 billion US Dollars yearly to their families in the Philippines, thus saving the sagging and depressed Philippine economy from total collapse.
Pres. Gloria Arroyo and her cabinet members accredit to themselves the huge remittances being made by the poor and sufferings OFWs.
As the lonely and hapless OFWs eke out their humble living in God-forsaken foreign lands every day of their hopeless and solitary lives, corrupt Filipino politicians, led by Pres. Gloria Arroyo, enjoy their multi-billion junket foreign trips, pork barrels, kickbacks from government contracts, and comfortable vacations in expensive foreign resorts and spas.
PHILIPPINE DAILY INQUIRER
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Page A19
9 years under GMA: What was then temporary, now an official policy
By Rhodora Alcantara Abano
Center for Migrant Advocacy
1. President Macapagal Arroyo’s Administrative Order No. 247 issued in December 2008 tells the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) to “execute a paradigm shift by refocusing its functions from regulation to full blast market development efforts, the exploration of frontier, fertile job markets for Filipino expatriate workers, in the heat of the global economic meltdown when hundreds of Overseas Filipino workers were being laid off elsewhere.
2. This order and the government’s one-million OFW’s per year target for the whole of her term are quite contrary to the intent and spirit of Republic Act N0. 9422, which strengthens the regulatory functions of the POEA.
3. In the administrative order, she went on record on her export policy on OFW’s that presidents since Ferdinand Marcos called temporary.
4. Thus, by 2006, more than a million Filipino workers had been forced to migrate every year. Around half are women. As of December 2007, the government estimated the number of OFWs at 8.7 million, around 10 percent of the country’s population. In 2008, 1,236,013 more followed. Sixty percent of OFW’s leaving for land based jobs renew their work contracts several times, working for as long as 25 years, instead of coming home for good.
5. RA 8042, or the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act of 1995, commits in Sec. 2 (b) thus: “The state shall afford full protection to labor, local and overseas, organized and unorganized…Towards this end, the state shall provide adequate and timely social, economic and legal services to Filipino migrant workers.” Further in Sec. 27: “The protection of the Filipino migrant workers and the promotion of their welfare…shall be the highest priority concerns of the secretary of Foreign Affairs and the Philippine foreign service posts.
6. This is not surprising. OFWs are in 238 foreign countries and territories worldwide. But the Philippines has only 89 diplomatic posts, broken down as follows: 63 embassies, 24 consulates and 2 permanent missions, excluding the three offices of the Manila Economic and Cultural Office in Taiwan, around the world.
7. In 20 posts with OFWs numbering up to 540,000 and up to 13, 048 cases to attend to, according to the 2005-2006 COA report, only two to six POLO/Overseas Workers Welfare Administration personnel were assigned. OFWs and POLO/OWWA personnel had a ratio, ranging from 1:5,712 to 1:100,000. The ratio of POLO/OWWA personnel to cases was anywhere from 1:84 to 1:6,524.
8. Disparity in personnel at the posts may have contributed to the delayed resolution of OFW cases.
9. The embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia also covers the OFWs in Yemen. Two posts are in charge of almost half a million OFWs in UAE.
10. The post in Lebanon where there were around 25,000, mostly domestic workers, was also in charge of OFWs in Syria, until the Philippine government opened a post in Syria in 2008.
11. The Abuja post in Nigeria covers 19 countries in Africa, the one in Nairobi in Kenya, 16 countries; Tripoli in Libya, 10; and that in Pretoria, South Africa, nine. Even the embassy in Washington D.C. covers 18 countries and territories in the Americas. The embassy in Mexico, eight.
12. There is this post that retreated from Baghdad during the Iraq War, to Amman, Jordan, leaving behind OFWs who were not supposed to be there in the first place because of the deployment ban.
13. Or the post is overstretched to attend to so many OFWs of so many other countries and/or territories. Or the post is situated far from where the OFWs are, as in the case of embassy in Kuala Lumpur that is miles away from some 100,000 Filipinos in Sabah. So how could you expect a maid in the country side to see a Philippine labor attaché in a faraway city?
14. First, OFW organizations and migrant NGOs have been calling on the government to seriously attend to a national development plan that would generate sufficient jobs with decent wages and benefits for its fast growing workers.
15. Second, a culture of public service should be deeply inculcated in the minds and hearts of all DFA personnel so that embassies and consulates abroad are genuine “centers of care” for Filipinos, where they can trustfully seek assistance from public servants instead of feel like second-class citizens begging for crumbs.
16. Finally, embassies and consulate officials and personnel should be adequately oriented on the particularities and peculiarities of migrant issues, including the laws of the host countries.
PHILIPPINE DAILY INQUIRER
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Page A19
PRICE TO PAY: ABANDONED WIVES, ORPHANED CHILDREN
By Roy V. Seneres
1. Of the eight million OFWs, there are one million professionals such as doctors, engineers, architects, nurses, seafarers and others; skilled like master mechanics, electricians, carpenters—two million; semi-skilled like hotel workers, restaurant waiters and others—three million; domestic helpers, caregivers and others—two million.
2. The two million domestic helpers are females. They are the ones who, by the very environment of their jobs, are highly vulnerable to all sorts of abuses, from non-payment or under payment of salaries, to physical and verbal abuse, acts of lasciviousness, and worse, rapes. The abusers, criminals as they are, do not discriminate whether the victims of their bestial instincts are virgin or not; married or unmarried; teeners or in their 40’s; Christians or Muslims or neither.
3. After solving the problems of some of them, others would take their place. At present, the population of Filipino domestic helpers in UAE has sextupled to 100,000 out of total population of 300,000. The total number of domestic helpers world wide in 1989 was only half a million as compared to today’s total of two million.
4. This government, wittingly or unwittingly, has been playing the role of providers of the insatiable sexual appetites of rapists and perverts all over the world.
5. The law is clear. Section 27 of Republic Act No. 8042, otherwise known as the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipino Act, says: “The protection of the Filipino migrant workers and the promotion of their welfare, in particular, and the protection of dignity and fundamental rights and freedoms of the Filipino citizens abroad, in general, shall be the highest priority concerns of the secretary of foreign affairs and the Philippine foreign service posts.” The other two concerns of the department of Foreign Affairs are: economic diplomacy and furtherance of national security.
6. Notwithstanding the clear mandate of our DFA, we have foreign secretary in person of Alberto Romulo who is apparently clueless about his role as the vicar of Philippine foreign policy. It is of public knowledge that it is Vice President Noli de Castro who is playing out Romulo’s role insofar as the OFW’s are concerned.
7. We fervently wish this government shed itself off its affliction and issue forthwith several directives in line with Section 27 of Republic Act 8042: One, to issue an executive order requiring ambassadors to exercise the extra ordinary diligence to a good father of a family in over seeing the welfare and protection of OFWs in their host countries. Their job performance should be measured on how true and dedicated they and their subordinates are in discharging their roles as surrogate fathers and substitute families of the OFWs; two, the government must like wise put more teeth to the citizen’s arrest law by requiring the police to swiftly come to the assistance of victims of illegal recruitment who decide to arrest on the spot their illegal recruiters; three, the government should authorize ambassadors and consuls to withhold approval or cancel the passports of irresponsible OFW husbands and fathers until they resume their support to their dependents.
8. Four, using its profound power and influence upon every sector in society, the government should prod big businesses, especially those who have tremendously benefited from OFW remittances like Henry Sy’s SM, Lucio Tan’s airlines, the Ayalas and the Villars, Gotianum’s real estate conglomerates, many Pangilinan’s and the Indonesians’ PLDT, Globe’s and the Lhuilliers’ remittance companies and other banks owned by Tan’s, Sys, Yuchengcos, to contribute to a private fund that will underwrite the education of children who have been orphaned y the death of their fathers or mothers overseas.
9. Five, the government must acknowledge in more concrete terms the major OFW contributions to the economy by placing them under the coverage of the Social Security system to enable them to avail a loan, and most especially, its retirement benefits. The government must play the role of being their surrogate employer by paying the counterpart amount that employers in the Philippines are normally required to pay; six, government must regulate the rates of remittance fees; seven, government must augment the present budget of embassies, consulates and overseas labor offices. What they have there now, to use a metaphor, are tricycles, when what they need are buses to ferry out of danger thousands of distressed OFWs; eight, local governments must establish special desks fro the spouses and children of absent OFWs who have lost a pillar, permanently or temporarily, due to overseas employment.
read also:
Arroyo administration has no welfare program for OFWs
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 22:18:00 02/09/2010
MIGRANTE-MIDDLE EAST joins other sectors criticizing the Arroyo administration’s engaging in massive advertising of its “accomplishments.”
The intensified campaign is just a pure waste of public funds. It reveals her administration’s growing desperation to boost her image in the face of her plunging popularity. There is no need for this campaign; the Arroyo administration has accomplished nothing worthwhile to alleviate the socio-economic plight of the majority of the Filipino people.
Most Filipinos would know better their situation—that during Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s nine years in the presidency, they have been living in misery and deep poverty.
The more than 10 million overseas Filipino workers abroad and their families have been witness to Ms Arroyo’s continued neglect of runaway and distressed OFWs.
Many of our fellow OFWs are from families of workers and farmers in the provinces who have been forced to accept “demeaning, dirty, and dangerous” jobs abroad amid the scarcity of available jobs in the homeland, only to end up victims of employer abuse, maltreatment and labor malpractices.
For instance there are numerous requests to the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration and Department of Foreign Affairs for airfare tickets from the stranded OFWs, but under Ms Arroyo’s regime, OFW needs and concerns have not been properly attended to.
The Arroyo administration is only paying lip service to OFWs and their families for whom the government has no welfare programs that provide meaningful benefits. This despite the huge amount of OFWs funds—estimated to have reached P14 billion—held in trust by the government through the OWWA, the OFWs and their families.
The huge amount of money spent by the Arroyo administration for its “legacy ads” could have been better spent for more valuable social services and welfare programs to alleviate the condition of the majority of the poor Filipinos—workers, farmers, urban poor and OFWs.
—JOHN LEONARD MONTERONA,
regional coordinator,
Migrante-Middle East,
migranteme@gmail.com
See:
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/letterstotheeditor/view/20100209-252275/Arroyo-administration--has-no-welfare-program-for-OFWs
