‘What a waste of time and money, and dreams of working abroad with better pay vaporizing out the window, leaving the hapless victim angry and desolate.’
DESPITE the mountain of laws, ordinances, executive orders, and department orders purportedly to better regulate the labor exporting industry and safeguard the rights of overseas Filipino workers, reports of old and new shenanigans still reach the authorities and the media up to now — decades after Blas F. Ople discovered and nurtured the gold mine that is the overseas labor contracting arrangements in the 1970s.
Problems such as contract violations, denial of passport safekeeping, sexual and mental abuse, maltreatment, illegal detention, beatings, discrimination, etc. have all been experienced by OFWs, with the COVID-19 pandemic even exacerbating the situation because of the need for emergency repatriation, quarantine protocols, etc., not to mention retrenchment and loss of jobs.
The latest racket in overseas employment and human trafficking was uncovered by the Bureau of Immigration, particularly its Travel Control and Enforcement Unit in Manila and in Pampanga, involves fake itineraries. According to Immigration Commissioner Jaime Morente, several female workers have presented work documents saying they were bound for the Maldives when in fact they were going to the United Arab Emirates to work.
Morente said this is another variant of the illegal scheme called “third-country recruitment” wherein overseas Filipino workers are being deployed to work in a certain country, but are later illegally transported to another country.
Time and again, authorities at the Department of Labor and the Bureau of Immigration have raised the flag on this and similar devious schemes to circumvent the law and profit from the gullibility of applicants. They have assailed this practice among the more unscrupulous members of the recruitment industry who trick those desiring to work abroad into accepting offers below standard rates. When they get to the third country, these workers are in danger of being abused, and if this happens, they do not report to the authorities for fear of being deported.
The female applicants in these cases paid their recruitment agencies amounts ranging from P37,000 to P50,000 just to be given visas for UAE and plane tickets for the Maldives that they could no longer use, as immigration authorities have been alerted by the illegal scheme. What a waste of time and money, and dreams of working abroad with better pay vaporizing out the window, leaving the hapless victim angry and desolate.
The BI did the right thing in collating the documents and other pieces of evidence and furnishing the POEA a copy of their reports, with the hope that this office would suspend or cancel the accreditation of the erring agencies. The Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking will also assist the victims in filing charges against their recruiters, but all these legal recourse will take time to serve justice.
We believe the government should ramp up more sanctions against the perpetrators in the short term, and in the long term, the bill creating the Department of Overseas Filipinos (DOLFIL) must pass the Senate, the better to strengthen the government’s regulatory power over the overseas labor sector.
