Migrants News Monitor

Maids Not Aware Of Their Rights And Contract Terms In Bahrain: Unionist

2008-07-12T17:28:00.000+08:00

http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7011580240
July 11, 2008 6:15 p.m. EST

Sandeep Singh Grewal - AHN Middle East Correspondent

Manama, Bahrain (AHN) - Being a maid here equals money troubles and misery. That sums up what many domestic workers go through after they leave their countries to earn a better living for their families, according to a union official.

Bahrain, like many other Gulf Cooperation Council states, is heavily dependent on maids. Almost every household has housemaids, an essential commodity in the country's changing lifestyles. Maids are supplied by local recruitment agencies at a fixed price stipulated in the contract. But a leader in a union that represents many foreign workers says that the terms of the contract are violated, as the agencies illegally take three months of advance salaries of the maids from their sponsors without informing them.

Suad Mubarak, assistant general secretary of women and child affairs at the General Federation of Bahrain Trade Unions (GFBTU), told AHN, "I was shock to come across an Ethiopian maid who was crying when she was told that she had to work for free for the next three months or risk losing her new job. The agencies cannot take advance salary from the maids who are eagerly waiting in vain for their pay at the end of the month."

The unionist took the case to the Ministry of Labor, which said the advance salary practice was illegal.

"These agencies exploit the maids by pressuring them to work against their wish and warn them to send them to their country," Mubarak said. "The maids in Bahrain are unaware of their contract terms and they continue to suffer as returning home is not an option. Sponsors should not support recruitment agencies by refusing to pay them the salaries."

Mubarak said what was more disturbing was cases where domestic help of some nationalities were excluded from the practice.

"This is clearly a case of discrimination. They take advance salary from families who select a maid from certain nationality, but on the other hand they do not open their mouth when a maid is from another country," the unionist said.

Mubarak said the GFBTU represents all workers whether Bahraini or non-Bahraini and works for their welfare. Activists have been lobbying for years to include domestic workers in the Bahrain labor law. A bill now being considered in parliament does not include housemaids.

That situation may soon change. The Labor Market Regulatory Authority, a government body mandated to issue work visas, regulate and control manpower licences, recruiting agencies, employment offices and business practices of self-sponsored expatriates, and Ministry of Labor officials have said there would be a separate law to address the plight of foreign maids. The law is due to be discussed after the summer break and is expected to be enacted this year.

"A temporary mechanism to protect the rights of these workers should be enacted immediately," Mubarak said. "They should have medical insurance, compulsory day off and other privileges which is not a demand but a right of every worker. Expatriate welfare bodies and associations should join hands to push for enacting this mechanisms till the law is approved."

Marietta Dias, a noted migrant's welfare volunteer, has said that 50 percent of domestic workers had no clue what was the nature of their job. "Women from the interiors of the country who have not even seen a refrigerator come here to work as housemaid and face cultural shock. They do not know what to do and run away from their employers within a month."

Dias heads the action committee of the Migrant Workers Protection Society (MWPS), which runs a temporary shelter for abused women and victims of human trafficking here. She said in the past three years they have repatriated 250 women to their respective countries.

"These were cases of nonpayment of salaries, rape and mental abuse," Dias said.

Bahrain earlier this year signed a Memorandum of Understanding with India and Sri Lanka to ensure protection and welfare of the workers. India, the Philippines and Sri Lanka are the main countries supplying domestic workers in the Gulf States.

In recent times, the sending countries have taken initiatives to protect their countrymen. India has set a mandatory security deposit of $2,500 in the form of bank guarantees at the Indian missions of the destination countries. The Philippines has implemented a $400 minimum wage for its nationals working as domestics in the GCC.

According to reports, the Bahrain Recruiters Society (BRS) said the average Bahraini household can only pay $160 to $200 monthly to foreign housemaids - a wage that the foreign governments will no longer accept, particularly with the rise of their currencies over the past year.

The Bahrain government conducted a five-month general amnesty for illegal workers to legalize their situation that ended Jan. 31. According to official statistics, a total of 12,977 people left the country, of which 507 were housemaids.

The total population of the kingdom in 2007 was 1,046,000, of which 517,000 were non-Bahrainis.

Foreign labor policy to remain unchanged for a while: CLA

2008-07-10T23:26:00.000+08:00

http://www.chinapost.com.tw/print/164784.htm

Thursday, July 10, 2008
The China Post news staff

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- The Cabinet-level Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) yesterday decided to keep its existing foreign labor employment policies for a while, but it will revise laws to allow foreign workers to enjoy a maximum stay of three years in Taiwan for every legal entry, a top CLA official said yesterday.

Pan Shih-wei, vice chairman of the CLA, announced the decision reached during the first foreign labor policy consulting panel meeting held by the CLA after the new government took office on May 20.

Pan said that the pay for foreign workers will remain hooked to the basic monthly labor wage, lest the foreign labor market should become out of control and undermine the benefits of domestic workers. Pan stressed that foreign workers can hardly replace domestic ones.

During the meeting, the consulting panel also rejected a request filed by the Chinese National Federation of Industries to allow the construction industry to introduce more foreign workers, on grounds that the jobless rate registered by domestic construction workers has remained high.

Meanwhile, whether the ratio of foreign workers employed to serve at the so-called "3K" industries will be boosted further from the existing 20 percent will not be determined until the end of the year, when the Bureau of Employment & Vocational Training will release a feasibility study report on the issue.

The so-called "3K' industries refer to the "kitsui, kitanai and kiken" industries, based on Japanese spellings for "hard, dirty and dangerous" jobs.

In addition, the ratio of alien labor allowed to take jobs for those investment projects valued at over NT$10 billion each will remain unchanged at the current range of 20 percent to 40 percent.

The only good news for foreign workers is that the CLA will amend the Employment & Services Law to extend the maximum stay of any foreign worker by one year to reach three years for each of their legal entries.

Immediately after taking office on May 20, Jennifer Ju-hsuan Wang, chairwoman of the CLA, did say that her CLA would soon move to review all the existing foreign labor policies.

Accordingly, local enterprises expected to get some positive responses to their calls for relaxing restrictions on employment of foreign workers during the consulting panel meeting. But local labor groups insisted that now that domestic jobless rate lingers at a high level, and as commodity price inflation pressure intensifies, it is inappropriate for the government here to ease entry for foreign workers.

Congress oversight of OWWA funds sought

2008-01-14T16:45:00.000+08:00

01/13/2008 | 04:07 PM

http://www.gmanews.tv/story/76307/Bulatlat-Congress-oversight-of-OWWA-funds-sought
http://www.bulatlat.com/2008/01/congress-oversight-owwa-funds-sought

BY AUBREY MAKILAN, BULATLAT

A migrant group supported a senator's call for congressional oversight of the P10 billion ($246,305,418 at an exchange rate of $1=P40.60) Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) funds - which is being sourced from membership fees levied on overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) - to avoid misuse and prevent the repeat of the $25 membership fee overbilling.

Oversight

Senate President Manny Villar has called for "stringent oversight" of the P10-billion OWWA funds to ensure that it is used properly and to avoid "lapses" such as the recent overbilling of the $25 fee collected from each departing worker.

The supposed overcharging of OFW membership fee of $25 was reportedly implemented by the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency (POEA). The overcharging emanated from the computation of the POEA, which based the fees to be collected on an exchange rate of P51 to $1. Senate President Manuel Villar Jr questioned this and said the fees should be based on the prevailing exchange rate of P41 to $1, thus, amounting to only P1, 025 instead of the current P1, 275 being collected. The Overseas Workers Welfare Administration said that it reduced the membership fee being collected from OFWs to P1, 044 since January 1, 2008. This, they said, is based on the preceding month's average peso-dollar exchange rate.

"We have to make sure that the fund for overseas workers really works for the improvement of the conditions of our OFWs," said Villar, noting that a system that could check its performance should be in place.

Villar’s proposal is being supported by the United Filipinos in Hong Kong (Unifil-HK). Unifil-HK chairperson Dolores Balladares said that their money in the OWWA should go through serious scrutiny and that the "plundering" of their money must stop.

The Senator said that the OWWA is classified as a government corporation with a budget outside congressional budget review.

"The President, for all her powers, has to go to Congress for money but OWWA with all membership contributions coming from OFWs is exempt (from going through Congressional budget allocations)," he said. "It can allocate and spend its own money without congressional authorization."

The Senate President said that the OWWA funds, at the least, should pass congressional scrutiny like in the case of the National Power Corporation, also a government corporation. The NPC submits its budget to Congress even if the latter does not approve it, he said.

"This way we will have an idea and it becomes part of public record how much of every peso OWWA earns goes to direct services to OFWs and how much goes to overhead expenses, "he said.

Anomalies?

But aside from the congressional review, migrant group Unifil-HK also called for the scrapping of the OWWA Omnibus Policies. The policy implemented in 2003, said migrant leader Balladares, "further constricted the funds allocated to the welfare of Filipino migrant workers while, at the same time, strengthening the stranglehold of the government to the funds." She added that the OWWA Omnibus Policies implemented a mandatory per contract collection of membership fee, suspended programs such as the General Financial Assistance Program, and gave the president the opportunity to place more of her people inside the agency governing board.

"The OWWA Omnibus Policies was created for the sole reason of increasing the collection of OWWA and giving freer rein for GMA to dip her hands into the fund, she said, noting that the policy never included provisions to improve services to OFWs who had to go through numerous loops to get assistance from this office.

Balladares said that almost P1 billion ($24,630,541) goes to the OWWA Fund annually but argued that its fund allocation has remained minimal. Worse, she said, the allotment for OFW direct services is greatly overshadowed by its cost of operations.

OWWA started as a "welfare and training fund for overseas workers" created by former President Marcos in the late 1970s. It has grown into an agency with total audited assets of P9.95 billion ($245,073,891) as of end 2006. In 2005, it collected P1.258 billion ($30,985,221) from 994,191 about-to-be-deployed workers with the promise that for a $25-fee, a member will receive up to P100, 000 ($2,463) in disability benefits and P200, 000 ($4,926) in accidental death benefits.

But Villar said that this year, total payout in insurance benefits reached only P163 million ($4,014,778), an amount dwarfed by OWWA's payroll and operating expenses. The argument for stricter "executive and legislative oversight" of OWWA, he said, was put forward after audit observations made by the Commission on Audit for fiscal year 2006.

Balladares noted that only $2 from every $25 that migrant workers pay is allocated to direct services to OFWs, while the big chunk of the money goes to operational expenses, controversial investments and unaudited appropriations, citing the Smokey Mountain Rehabilitation Project and the Middle East Preparedness Team funds for the evacuation of Filipinos from Iraq that allegedly never happened.

Balladares also said that the transfer of the OWWA Medicare Fund to PhilHealth was also anomalous. In February 2003, she said, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo issued Executive Order 182 ordering the transfer following a letter by then PhilHealth president Francisco Duque allegedly saying that the transfer will have a significant bearing on the 2004 elections.

"The government's handling of the OWWA fund stinks to high heavens and must be addressed as soon as possible," she said.

In the proposed congressional review of the OFW money, Unifil-HK encouraged the Congress to involve OFW groups in uncovering the alleged "mismanagement and misappropriation of the OWWA Fund and eventually, in instituting reforms in the OWWA that can genuinely benefit OFWs," such as a system of check and balance in the management of the OWWA fund and placing more OFW representatives recommended by OFW organizations to the OWWA board of trustees.

Negligence

Aside from the possible misappropriations, Villar said, uncaring foreign post personnel also aggravate the plight of distressed OFWs.

Villar called for the identification and punishment of embassy and consular officials and personnel who refuse assistance or display incompetence in extending help to Filipinos, which further aggravates the condition of distressed OFWs around the world.

The Senate President received a letter from the Center for Migrant Advocacy (CMA) accusing some members of the diplomatic corps of bad attitude, negligence and incompetence in attending to the cases of Filipino migrant workers in distress.

CMA cited the case of Teresita Santos, a sewer who was gang raped in August 2005 by five Saudi nationals. The perpetrators were found guilty and were sentenced to four years of imprisonment and 500 lashes each. But Santos accused Philippine consulate personnel in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia of depriving her of proper legal advice that allegedly almost caused her to lose her case.

In a letter-complaint submitted to the Department of Foreign Affairs, Santos said it was only through the help of fellow OFWs that she was able to file a case against her perpetrators. Moreover, she accused Assistance to Nationals personnel of blocking the hearings.

Villar also cited the case of Julian Camat, Hermilo Ramos and Napoleon Fabregas, who worked for a cargo handling company in Jeddah. They were sentenced by a Saudi court to one and a half years of imprisonment for stealing computers in January, 2003. But, Villar said, the three actually served four years and four months in detention because of the alleged negligence of the Consulate General in Jeddah.

"The seeming insensitiveness and indifference of a number of our diplomatic and consular officials and personnel have been reported and they are destroying the image and dignity of a larger, more committed, devoted and excellent public servants in foreign service," Villar said.

CMA also presented the case of Esnaira Angin, a Muslim woman from Maguindanao, who was one of the four OFWs in Dubai whose house was broken into by three Emirati and one Omani national in November, 2005. She was stabbed on her chest and back while trying to resist her attackers. Angin, an undocumented OFW, said she sought the help of the Assistant Labor Attache for her repatriation to the Philippines before the incident took place but was allegedly denied help and shelter at the labor office because she lacked money to pay the necessary fees.

"The mindset and thinking of our corps of foreign service must be changed to realize that their existence in countries where they are detailed and stationed is a gift to our citizens, particularly the OFWs. They must show compassion, which OFWs richly deserve," Villar asserted.

With these reports, Villar filed Proposed Resolution No. 248, urging the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to conduct an inquiry on allegations of bad attitude, negligence and incompetence in handling cases of distressed OFWs by some Philippine embassy and consular personnel stationed in various countries.

He also filed Senate Bill 1879, which seeks to amend Republic Act 8042 or the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act of 1995. SB 1879 seeks to impose penalties on Philippine consular officials and other government personnel who fail to act on complaints of, or to give assistance or render service to migrant workers, their families and overseas Filipinos in distress.

"Over a decade after its enactment, RA 8042 has not entirely lived up to its intended purpose," said Villar, noting that Filipinos abroad continue to suffer under abusive employers, inhumane working conditions and various human rights violations.

Under SB 1879, officials and personnel who fail or refuse to render service and/or assistance will be punished with suspension from office of not less than 30 days to dismissal from the service with forfeiture of retirement and other benefits depending on the gravity of the offense, and shall be disqualified from holding any other government office in the future.

Villar has earlier filed Proposed Resolution No. 189 urging the Senate Committee on Labor and Employment and Foreign Relations to conduct an urgent omnibus inquiry on the plight of detained Filipino workers in various countries in order to formulate remedial measure and devise a package of assistance to protect OFWs.

"An assessment of the legal and social remedies being afforded by our embassies and consular offices to our kababayans (countrymen) detained abroad for various offenses is imperative to ascertain sufficiency of assistance for the protection of OFWs," said the Senate President. - Bulatlat

DUE TO STRONG PESO: OFWS LOSE P700 PER $100 REMITTED

2008-01-13T15:43:00.000+08:00

10 January 2008
IBON

The strengthening peso has resulted in a sharp cut in overseas Filipino
workers’ (OFWs) incomes, costing them over P700 per $100 remitted,
according to independent think-tank IBON Foundation.

From January to December 2007, the exchange rate of the peso to the
dollar has strengthened by almost fifteen percent. This means that over
the period, the family of an OFW who remitted $100 in January were able
to exchange it for P4,891. By December this had fallen to P4,174 or a
decline of P717.

Such a reduction is especially painful given the increasing prices of
basic goods and services in the country. For example, from January to
November 2007 the cost of an 11-kg liquefied petroleum gas (LPG)
cylinder increased by P76.94 to almost P600. Manila Water also recently
implemented a rate hike that will cost consumers who consume 30 cubic
meters per month an additional P60 on their bills.

“Overseas workers were forced to tighten their belts and remit more of
their income to make up for the lost value,” said IBON research head
Sonny Africa. Monthly remittances grew 26% from P1.1 billion in January
to P1.4 billion in October.

The strengthening peso and its effect on OFWs’ incomes reveals the folly
of the government’s labor export policy and its continuing reliance on
migrant workers’ remittances. (end)

Migration no guarantee out of rural poverty -WB

2007-11-02T22:02:00.000+08:00

ISAGANI DE LA PAZ, OFW Journalism Consortium
11/02/2007 | 03:36 PM
http://www.gmanews.tv/story/66919/Migration-no-guarantee-out-of-rural-poverty--WB

MANILA – Contrary to popular beliefs, migration, despite the volume of money it brings, has neither brought rural folks out of poverty nor is it a sure fire way for farm people to clamber aboard the prosperity wagon.

“Where migration is more or less permanent, income from migration depends on the success of the migrant and the reason for migration. So migration is not a guaranteed pathway out of poverty," the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development said in its recently released report, debunking several myths on agricultural development.

The Washington, United States-headquartered IBRD, popularly known as The World Bank, cited in its 386-page report that “despite massive rural-urban migration, rural poverty will remain dominant for several more decades in Asia."

The bank’’s World Development Report 2008 that focused on identifying ways for governments to lift some 600 million rural people from extreme poverty has said that while this has been achieved, it is not due to migration.

“More than 80 percent of the decline in rural poverty is attributable to better conditions in rural areas rather than to out-migration of the poor," the report titled “Agriculture for Development" said.

“So, contrary to common perceptions, migration to cities has not been the main instrument for rural (and world) poverty reduction," it added.

In fact, authors of the World Bank report noted that out-migration of people from rural areas has even contributed to the constant rate of poverty rate in cities.

The report, released October 19, noted that while the poverty rate of US$1-a-day has been declining in developing countries –from 28 percent in 1993 to 22 percent in 2002- , this “has been mainly the result of falling rural poverty (from 37 percent to 29 percent) while the urban poverty rate remained nearly constant (at 13 percent)."

The report also noted that during the period under study, 1993-2002, there was an 81-percent reduction in rural poverty worldwide. But this is “ascribed to improved conditions in rural areas; migration accounted for only 19 percent of the reduction."

Migration, the report said, “lifts some of the rural poor out of poverty but takes others to urban slums and continued poverty."

Notional

Even remittances from abroad are downplayed by the report on contributing to national poverty rate declines.

While the report acknowledges that there are “indirect effects of urbanization on rural poverty through remittances and rural wage changes," this is “through tighter rural labor markets."
But this argument, the report’s authors said, has a conservative but unlikely assumption: all rural-urban migrants are poor.

The bank computed migration’s contribution to rural poverty reduction using the US$2.15 poverty line rather than the US$1.08 extreme poverty line “because it is unrealistic to think that all migrants are extremely poor."

Even so, using the same assumption that all those who migrate are poor, the report noted that reduction in rural poverty would still hit 81 percent, “not to migration."

“Indeed, almost all the decline in South Asia and East Asia is because of a genuine decline in poverty in rural areas. Even when China is excluded from the sample, 67 percent of the reduction in rural poverty is from causes other than migration," the report said.

According to data compiled by the Institute for Migration and Development Issues (Imdi), there is no direct correlation between the number of Filipinos going overseas for temporary or permanent work and stay, and the poverty incidence levels.

For example, the National Capital Region, composed of more than a dozen cities, has posted a 4.3-percent poverty incidence level in 2003. In an eight-year period beginning 1998, almost a million overseas Filipinos came from this region.

However, the data that the nonprofit group Imdi compiled couldn't cite if these Filipinos just used the NCR as temporary residence prior to going overseas or which rural area they came from if they, indeed, migrated from farm villages.

It is difficult to determine so since the NCR is the reservoir of major government agencies processing the export of Filipino labor as well as the receptacle for the air travel and remittance industries.

Likewise, despite Davao del Sur, for example, posting a 24-percent poverty incidence rate and having recorded 55,117 Filipino migrants, Batanes island posted only a 9.2-percent poverty incidence level despite only 72 of its residents having left that fishing and farming province that’s the tip of the Philippines.

Another example is Pampanga, President Gloria Arroyo's home province, which posted a six-percent poverty incidence level. It is second to the NCR for having the most number of Filipino migrants at 125,226. Compare this to Pangasinan, home province of former President Fidel V. Ramos, which had 111,029 of its citizens migrating in the eight-year period ending 2005. Still the province posted a poverty incidence level of 18.6 percent, more than double neighboring Pampanga’s.

With the exception of Batanes, 14 provinces have poverty incidence levels above the national average of 25.7 percent.

“The high poverty levels of these provinces can perhaps explain why citizens from these areas cannot easily migrate overseas," the Imdi scoping study on migrant philanthropy released last August said.

Impacts

Even the World Bank report admits it is difficult to establish migration’s direct impact on rural poverty reduction levels.

“Migration can be a climb up the income ladder for well-prepared, skilled workers, or it can be a simple displacement of poverty to the urban environment for others," the report noted.

The report also cited that while remittances from migrants back to the farm household “can relax capital and risk constraints, the relationship between migration and agricultural productivity," for one, is “complex."

“The (temporary) absence of household members reduces the agricultural labor supply. Agricultural productivity can therefore fall in the short run but rise in the long run as households with migrants shift to less labor intensive, but possibly equally profitable, crops or livestock," the report said.

Remittances, the report noted, “often drastically change the composition of the rural population" and “can pose (their) own challenges for rural development, because migration is selective."

“Those who leave are generally younger, better educated, and more skilled. Migration thus can diminish entrepreneurship and education level among the remaining population," the report said.

Likewise, the report cited there are evidence suggesting migration “is most accessible for the wealthiest and best educated of the rural population, as moving requires means to pay for transportation and education to find a good job."

“Moreover, better-educated migrants are the most likely to have a successful migration outcome," the report added.

It particularly cited the Philippines as having more female migrants to urban areas faring better than the less-educated males.

The report estimated some 575 million people migrated from rural to urban areas in developing countries over the past 25 years.

Of these, it said, “400 million lived in transforming countries, where migration flows increased to almost 20 million a year between 2000 and 2005."

Migration flows as a share of the rural population have been traditionally highest in urbanized economies, but they have fallen over 2000–05 to an annual rate of 1.25 percent. In transforming and agriculture-based economies, the annual flow of out-migration steadily increased to 0.8 percent and 0.7 percent of the rural population, respectively.

The report also noted that international migration out of rural areas is male-dominated in Ecuador and Mexico, but female-dominated in the Dominican Republic, Panama, and the Philippines. - OFW Journalism Consortium

Note: To download the complete World Development Report 2008, go to this link: http://siteresoruces.worldbank.org/INTWDR2008/Resources/2795087-1192111580172/WDROver2008-ENG.pdf

RP is 4th largest recipient of overseas remittances in Asia - UN

2007-10-22T22:11:00.000+08:00

10/22/2007 | 03:52 PM

The Philippines ranked as fourth top recipient of overseas remittances in Asia, receiving $14.65 billion in 2006, a United Nations report showed.

The report, released in time for the Oct 19 opening of the International Forum on Remittances in Washington DC, said the $14.65 billion remittances sent to the Philippines was based on "a conservative estimate."

The amount includes the $12.8 billion remittances coursed through the banks, as reported by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, plus OFW earnings sent through informal channels such as door-to-door delivery.

The report titled, "Sending money home: Worldwide remittances to developing countries" by the United Nations' International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) listed India on top of the list, receiving $24.5 billion, followed by Mexico with $24.2 billion and China with $21 billion.

Russia, with $13.7 billion, ranked next to the Philippines.

Lower remittance charges

The report prompted Sen. Loren Legarda, chairman of the Senate committee on economic affairs, urged the government to “quickly draw up and execute a roadmap toward purposely driving down excessive remittances charges."

"We have to consciously bring down burdensome remittance fees. This is the single most efficient way for us to truly make full economic use of remittance inflows," Legarda said.

The senator lamented that migrant workers spend a staggering total of up to $1.72 billion every year to pay for remittance fees, or 13.5 percent of the $12.8 billion that they sent home through banks in 2006.

Legarda said her estimate was based on a study by the International Monetary Fund, which pegged at 13.5 percent the average transaction cost of remittances to the Philippines, with OFWs paying anywhere from $15 to $26 in transfer fees for a typical $200-remittance.

"If we reduce by half the amount spent by OFWs to pay for remittance charges, this would easily translate into an additional $860-million worth of inflows every year. This is a lot of extra money coursed through the pockets of their families here and the economy," she said.

Remittances, the bulk of which go to poor families in the rural areas, could contribute to prosperity in the countryside, according to the IFAD report.

The IFAD is a special UN international financial institution dedicated to fighting poverty and hunger in rural areas of developing countries. - GMANews.TV

Asia's labor force to grow by 200 million, says ILO

2007-08-13T10:05:00.000+08:00

Agence France-Presse
Last updated 08:20am (Mla time) 08/13/2007

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/world/view_article.php?article_id=82183

GENEVA -- Asia's economies face the challenge of finding jobs for an extra 200 million workers between now and 2015, according to a new International Labour Organization (ILO) report out Monday.

It said the region will have its work cut out to improve the quality of jobs on offer and ensure the benefits of Asia's future economic growth are distributed more evenly as the labor force, currently 1.8 billion, increases.

"One thing is clear: doing business as usual is not sustainable over the long term," said ILO Director-General Juan Somavia. "Asia is experiencing unprecedented growth and development.

"At the same time, vulnerabilities arising from environmental pressures, economic insecurity, shortcomings in governance and unequal income distribution pose a threat to the region's future development."

"Visions for Asia's Decent Work Decade: Sustainable Growth and Jobs to 2015", has been presented to an ILO Asian Employment Forum in Beijing running from Monday to Wednesday.

Government representatives, trade unionists and employers from some 20 countries in Asia and the Pacific will attend.

The report said the service economy would be the main source of new jobs and by 2015 would have become the biggest single sector employer, representing about 40.7 percent of the region's jobs.

It also predicted the share of industrial jobs would rise from 23.1 percent of the total jobs market in 2006 to 29.4 percent in 2015.

By contrast, agricultural jobs would by 2015 have declined to 29.4 percent of the market from 42.6 percent, said the report.

And that trend from rural to urban jobs would create greater wage inequalities between the classes of workers, part of a broader wage gulf between the extremely poor and other workers.

In fact the report identified the problem of the working poor -- those living on less than two US dollars (1.5 euros) a day -- as one of the major challenges facing the region.

More than one billion -- 61.9 percent of the workforce -- still worked in the informal "black" economy with little or no social protection.

While this was down from 67.2 of the workforce a decade earlier, it was still a cause for concern, said the report, especially since it was not expected to fall much further by 2015.

The report identified a number of other challenges facing the region including:
-- an ageing labor force, which in some countries meant that as many as one in four people would be over 65 by 2015;
-- increasing migration that would see millions of workers quitting Asia in search of jobs;
-- the inability of wage growth to keep pace with labour productivity in some countries;
-- long working hours becoming the norm in many parts of Asia.

"Meeting the challenges facing the region will require far-sighted thinking and careful planning," said Somavia.

"We all need to work together to make globalization and economic growth more inclusive."

Filipino workers in Iraq deceived, abused - report

2007-07-31T21:48:00.000+08:00

Filipino workers in Iraq deceived, abused - report
07/27/2007 | 05:58 PM

Filipino workers promised jobs in Dubai hotels were deceptively recruited and trafficked to Iraq for a massive US Embassy construction project in Baghdad, two former American civilian contractors of a Kuwaiti company testified at the US Congress on Thursday.

The foreign workers, including Filipinos, experienced physical abuse and substandard working conditions, said John Owens, an American citizen who worked for First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting Co. as a construction foreman for six months.

The Kuwaiti firm was awarded the $592-million contract for the construction of the US Embassy in the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad. This was said to be the largest US diplomatic mission in the world.

“Conditions there were deplorable, beyond what even a working man should tolerate," Owens said in his testimony before the House committee on oversight and government reform on allegations of waste, fraud and abuse in the construction project.

“Foreign workers were packed in trailers tight. There was insufficient equipment and basic needs – stuff like shoes and gloves. If a construction worker needed a new pair of shoes, he was told, ‘No, do with what you have’ by First Kuwaiti managers," Owens said based on a transcript of the congressional proceedings.

“The contract for these workers said they had to work 12 hours a day 7 days a week, with some time off on Friday for prayers," he said.

Rory J. Malberry, also an American who worked as emergency medical technician at the embassy site under a subcontract, said First Kuwaiti managers asked him to escort 51 Filipinos through the Kuwait airport and onto a flight to Baghdad.

“I was given my flight information to Baghdad. At this time, First Kuwaiti managers asked me to escort 51 Filipino nationals to the Kuwaiti airport and make sure they got on the same flight that I was taking to Baghdad. Many of these Filipinos did not speak any English," he told US congressmen.

"I wanted to help them make sure they got on their flight OK, just as my managers had asked. We were all employees of the same company after all. But when we got to the Kuwait airport, I noticed that all of our tickets said we were going to Dubai. I asked why? The Kuwaiti manager told me that because Filipino passports do not allow Filipinos to fly to Iraq, they must be marked as going to Dubai," Malberry said.

Washington Post reported on Friday that US State Department officials disputed the testimonies of Owens and Malberry.

It quoted Howard J. Krongard, the State Department’s inspector general in charge of investigating the project, saying that he conducted a “limited review" on the conditions of foreign laborers at the construction site in Baghdad and did not find reasons to substantiate the claims.

The inspector general of the US-led military force in Iraq also conducted inquiries, he said.

“Nothing came to our attention that caused us to believe that trafficking-in-persons violations or other serious abuses occurred at the construction workers’ camp at the new embassy compound," Krongard told the committee.

The Filipinos worked at the embassy construction site with laborers from India, Pakistan and Sierra Leone.

Malberry said he had read Krongard’s report. “It's not worth the paper it's printed on. This is a cover-up. I'm glad that I have this opportunity to set the record straight," he told the committee.

Malberry said the workers were told they would be working in hotels in Dubai, not in Baghdad.
According to him, the First Kuwaiti managers even instructed him specifically not to tell the Filipinos they were being taken to Baghdad.

“As I found out later, these men thought they had signed up to work in Dubai hotels. One fellow I met told me in broken English that he was excited to start his new job as a telephone repair man. They had no idea they were being sent to do construction work on the US embassy," Malberry said.

"Mr. Chairman, when the airplane took off and the captain announced that we were headed for Baghdad, all you-know-what broke lose on that airplane. People started shouting. It wasn't until a security guy working for First Kuwaiti waved an MP-5 in the air that people settled down," he said, addressing Rep. Henry A. Waxman, chairman of the oversight committee.

"They realized they had no other choice but to go to Baghdad," he said. “Let me spell it out clearly. I believe these men were kidnapped by First Kuwaiti to work on the US Embassy," Malberry said.

According to the Washington Post report, the US Department of Justice is also investigating First Kuwaiti’s labor practices, particularly the allegations that foreign workers were brought into Iraq under false pretenses and were unable to leave because the company had confiscated their passports.

The Kuwaiti firm was awarded the contract because no US company met the terms for the construction project, the committee was told. Company officials declined the congressional panel’s invitation to testify.

The report also said foreign workers came from countries in South Asia and the Philippines because of the difficulty of hiring Iraqis to work inside the heavily fortified Green Zone.

In the transcript of Thursday’s proceedings, Malberry testified that he “witnessed" the trafficking of the Filipinos.

“When flying from Kuwait to Baghdad, I saw a bunch of workers with tickets to Dubai. Mine was the only one that’s for Baghdad. When I asked the First Kuwaiti manager, he said, ‘Shhh, don’t say anything. If the Kuwaiti customs knows they’re going to Iraq, they won’t let them on the plane’," Malberry said.

When the plane landed on Baghdad, the workers were then taken away in buses to the construction site.

Malberry said First Kuwaiti assigned him as “security liaison, among other tasks" at the construction site although he claimed to have “more experience with building
embassies than anybody else on that site."

“I think the American people might understand what was going through my head over there as I watched this abusive and unprofessional practice taking place. I kept thinking it would get better. I kept telling myself that it would get better, and after more time had passed and things didn't get any better, I felt so bad all the time and I realized it was time to resign and speak up for those who do not have a voice," he said.

Waxman, a Democrat congressman from California, remarked: "It does not help matters that there are only three career State Department officials on site to oversee this massive project. Everyone else is a private contractor." - GMANews.TV

Gulf states threaten to ban Filipino workers

2007-06-06T17:09:00.000+08:00

05/31/2007 | 10:08 PM

The Gulf states -- Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman – may no longer accept Filipino workers unless the Philippine government take steps to clarify its policy imposing $13 daily penalty on foreign employers who would not pay their workers on time and at a minimum of $400 a month.

The Committee for Importing Foreign Workers of the Gulf Cooperation Council(GCC) unanimously agreed in a meeting on Thursday to stop importing Filipinos until Philippine labor laws are clarified, Dylan Bowman of Kuwait New Agency reported.

GCC, also known as the Cooperation Council of the Arab States in the Gulf, is a trade bloc involving six Arab Gulf states with many economic and social objectives, including the formulation of similar regulations in various fields such as economy, finance, trade, customs, tourism, legislation, and administration.

The report acknowledged that the Philippine government raised the minimum salary of its workers overseas was intended to improve the standard of living of its citizens.

“Participants agreed to submit this recommendation [to stop importing Filipinos] to the decision-makers in the GCC and expressed hope that this recommendation would be implemented as soon as possible," Abdel-Aziz Al-Ali, head of Kuwait's domestic labor offices, told the Kuwait News Agency.

“We understand the important international implications of this issue and we are dealing with it accordingly," Al-Ali said.

Based on POEA data, the six GCC member-states employ 435, 190 Filipinos as of December-2006, and this is broken down into: Saudi Arabia – 223, 459; UAE – 99, 212; Kuwait – 47, 917; Qatar – 45, 795; Bahrain – 11, 736; and Oman – 7, 071.
Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar are among the top 10 popular destinations of OFWs.

The new regulations issued by the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) partially took effect on December 15, 2006, was fully implemented beginning March 1, 2007 pegged the minimum salary for Filipino domestic workers, including stay-in care givers, at $400, up from $200.

Foreign employers are also required to sign a declaration stipulating they would pay a fine of around $13 a day if they do not pay their Filipino workers on time, and at the prescribed rate spelled out in the labor contract.

The minimum salary regulations are not binding on any of the GCC’s six member states, but if employers do not agree to them then the Filipino government will not process their staff’s contracts, Kuwait News Agency said.

Asaad Derbas, head of the Kuwaiti delegation to the meeting of the GCC Committee, said the decision to stop importing Filipinos was taken because the Philippine government “used the issue as a political tool in its recent general election."

He said the issue had a negative impact on the countries importing Filipino workers. - GMANews.TV

UAE gives illegal workers 90 days to regularize stay or leave

2007-06-06T17:08:00.000+08:00

06/05/2007 | 04:08 PM

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After Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates has also tightened its rules on illegal workers by declaring a three-month amnesty beginning June 4 to allow them to regularize their status or leave the country without paying heavy penalties or being jailed.

Philippine Ambassador to the UAE Libran Cabactulan said the embassy was encouraging the illegal Filipinos working in the Gulf state to come out and benefit from the amnesty. The offer, he said, is “with good intentions."

Consul General Antonio Curameng in Dubai said he is convening a meeting with consulate officials, the Philippine Overseas Labor Office (POLO) and the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) to discuss arrangements, draft necessary guidelines and facilitate the repatriation of the illegal workers.

Curameng said the consulate is just awaiting official communication from UAE authorities before disseminating the information to the Filipino community.

Undocumented foreign workers in the UAE, including Filipinos, are expected to flock to their embassies and consulates following the decision of the UAE Cabinet to adopt the amnesty program.

Saudi Arabia has implemented a two-month amnesty for illegal workers that ended May 31. Kuwait has also followed suit.

Corollary to the amnesty program, the UAE Ministry of Justice was also reported to be preparing strict rules that would impose heavy fines on people who shelter illegal immigrants or hire absconding workers.

After the UAE government’s announcement of three-month amnesty for illegal residents, airlines are gearing up to meet the possible rush on outbound flights from Dubai.

During the last general amnesty in UAE from January 1 to June 30, 2003, nearly 100,000 illegal residents had benefited, according to a report in Khaleej Times.

UAE ranks second to Saudi Arabia

Laborers to Be Informed of Their Rights Through HRC Pamphlets

2007-06-06T17:05:00.000+08:00

Raid Qusti, Arab News

RIYADH, 6 June 2007 — The government-funded Human Rights Commission (HRC) announced here yesterday that it was working with the Labor Ministry to publish pamphlets that would inform laborers of their rights under Saudi law.

The aim of the pamphlet is to address concerns that laborers are unaware of the legal mechanisms that are afforded to them in the Kingdom. The pamphlet also aims to spread awareness among employers, informing them of penalties for breaking labor laws and violating workers’ rights.

“We are working hard on the issue with the Labor Ministry,” said Muhammad Al-Khunaizan, HRC board member.

The official did not mention when the pamphlets would be released, but stated that they were being processed.

The Saudi labor sector has seen numerous violations of guest-worker rights, including non-payment of salaries for months or failure of sponsors to provide room and board as agreed upon.

A report published by the National Society for Human Rights, another rights body in the Kingdom, suggested that the sponsorship law in the Kingdom be eradicated altogether and the government should step in to fill the role currently held by individual Saudi sponsors.

In another development, HRC officials requested the US State Department to publish a booklet or pamphlet printed in Arabic to be given to all Saudi travelers, including students, to the United States.

According to HRC officials, the aim of the proposed pamphlet is to “specify the rights of Saudi travelers that would avoid harassment.”

The request was made to Erica Barks-Ruggles, deputy assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor. The US official and her accompanying delegation met Turki Al-Sudairi, president of HRC, and several members of the board. This is her fourth visit to the Kingdom and her second this year.

Board members also brought to the attention of the visiting official the matter of a Saudi student, Mishaal Al-Rabeah, whose visa was canceled by US immigration authorities on arrival in the US recently.

“This is just one of the problems Saudi students face when arriving in the United States. The visa, issued by the US Embassy in Riyadh, was canceled. The error was not on his part,” a board member told the US official.

The US official said she was not aware of the incident but would investigate.
HRC also announced that Saudi women would be appointed for the first time in its next board reshuffle after three years.

“God willing, the next board will have Saudi women,” said Al-Sudairi. “We are currently studying it. And there is a big possibility that it will take place.”
He said that as with all new board members, the appointment would come from Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah.

The current board consists of 24 members — 18 full-time members and six part-time members. The president is appointed by the king and has a rank of minister.

Al-Sudairi also said that a Saudi woman, a former civil service employee, was hired by HRC to deal with issues related to women in Riyadh.

He said part of HRC’s support of Saudi women has recently included the establishment of two women’s sections in HRC offices in the Eastern Province.

Among the issues discussed at the meeting between the HRC and the US officials were ways to identify areas of cooperation in the judicial system and commercial sector.
The US delegation evinced keen interest in the progress of HRC regarding its human rights awareness campaigns targeted at the people living in the Kingdom. HRC officials, on their part, said that they were doing so “gradually” in the Kingdom, bearing in mind the conservative nature of its people and trying carefully not to make moves that would backfire.

The US officials said they were seeking to specify common areas of cooperation in the judicial system.

They specified their interest in the development of commercial law in Saudi Arabia, especially after the Kingdom joined the World Trade Organization. They also proposed that a curriculum be established in Saudi universities that would educate students on commercial law.

HRC officials and the US delegation also discussed the subject of human trafficking

Sri Lanka Places Restrictions on Recruitment of Maids

2007-04-28T16:46:00.000+08:00

Mohammed Rasooldeen, Arab News

URL:http://www.arabnews.com/page=1§ion=0&article=95452&d=26&m=4&y=2007&pix=kingdom.jpg&category=Kingdom

Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama addressing reporters in Riyadh.

RIYADH, 26 April 2007 Sri Lanka has imposed restrictions on the recruitment of housemaids, which includes a total ban on hiring women who have children less than five years of age.

Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama, who wrapped up a three-day visit to the Kingdom, told reporters yesterday that female domestic workers who have children below five would not be sent abroad as housemaids. his is not only because of their discontented life here but it also creates social problems back home,?he said.
Homesickness has been identified as one of the primary causes of labor problems among housemaids working in the Kingdom.  housemaid who came here leaving a five-month-old baby ran away from her workplace because she desperately wanted to see her child,he added.

The Sri Lankan government has initiated programs to look after the families of housemaids, by providing scholarships for their children in government schools, but infants still need to be with their mothers, the minister said, stressing that in future only women who are above 25 years of age would be granted permission for overseas deployment.

Speaking about the problems of runaway housemaids, Bogollagama said this is only a fraction of the housemaid population in the Kingdom. he problems are mainly due to misunderstandings between the employer and their employee, non-payment of wages and ignorance about the cultural environment in the host country,he said.

While stressing on his government stance to blacklist job agents in Colombo that send unskilled women as domestic aides, Bogollagama requested the Saudi National Recruiting Committee to check on local recruiting agents who are behind such nefarious activities.

Saudi Ambassador in Colombo Muhammad Mahmud Al-Ali and Sri Lankan Ambassador A.M.J. Sadiq were present at the press briefing held at the Royal Conference Palace.
Bogollagama said a second Sri Lankan airline would start services to the Kingdom. esides SriLankan Airlines, the government is keen on introducing Mihin Air to the Kingdom to serve the Sri Lankan expatriates here,the minister said, pointing out that the new airline, which began operations early this year, is a government-owned budget airline. e are negotiating to modify our bilateral aviation agreement with the Kingdom to accommodate this new airline,he said.

Mihin Air, which is fully funded by the state treasury, will cater not only to migrant workers but also to the tourism industry as a low cost carrier. his will be a great boon to low-income migrant workers who would like to save money on their travel. It would also provide customers with an opportunity to travel at prices 50 percent cheaper,he said.

The minister described his talks with Saudi officials as successful and said that his government is interested in strengthening political, economic and cultural relations with the Kingdom.

Bogollagama said they had agreed to negotiate and finalize bilateral agreements on avoidance of double taxation, combating terrorism, extradition, prisoner exchange and investment protection. Earlier at a meeting at the Riyadh Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the minister said the country offers an attractive package to foreign investors.

Sri Lanka, an investment hub in Asia, has attracted a large clientele of investors from all parts of the world since the country has abundant natural resources and cost-effective labor for viable projects,he stressed.

He pointed out that the Free Trade Agreement with India would give free access to a larger market in the sub-continent to products manufactured in the island.

Ministry Acts to Stop Problem of Runaway Maids

2007-04-28T16:41:00.000+08:00

P.K. Abdul Ghafour, Arab News

URL: http://www.arabnews.com/?page=1§ion=0&article=95448&d=26&m=4&y=2007&pix=kingdom.jpg&category=Kingdom

JEDDAH, 26 April 2007

The Labor Ministry has taken tough actions to prevent maids from running away from their Saudi sponsors in search of better salaries and facilities. Saudis employing these runaway maids will be fined SR20,000 and banned from recruitment, said Muhammed Al-Dowaish, a legal consultant at the ministry.

He said recruitment offices involved in sheltering the illegal maids and hiring them out to Saudi families would be closed down and their licenses withdrawn.

The maids will be deported and will not be allowed to come back to the Kingdom, Dowaish said, spelling out the new measures taken by the ministry. Runaway maids have become a difficult problem facing Saudi families. Many maids run away from their sponsors as a result of torture, nonpayment of salaries and difficult working conditions.

Employment offered by some recruitment offices and Saudi families will encourage maids to run away from their legal sponsors,?Dowaish said, adding that the new measures would put an end to this negative phenomenon.

f they have any problem with sponsors, maids should approach the police or the labor office or the governorate for a solution,?the official said. hey would not run away if they didn expect somebody to shelter them or provide them jobs,?he added. Last year the ministry announced new regulations for recruiting household workers. Ahmad Al-Zamil, deputy minister for labor affairs, stressed that the ministry would deny the right to employ domestic servants to any household that mistreats its workers in any way and would force employers to pay their dues.

Not all maids who disappear, however, are runaways. A number are regularly kidnapped and forced into prostitution by gangs. The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice recently raided two apartments in Dammam where two Asian maids had been imprisoned and forced to work as prostitutes.

One of the maids said she was living with her Saudi sponsor and had popped out to get something from a nearby shop when she was kidnapped by a taxi driver who raped her and then sold her to another expatriate for SR7,000,?said a commission member in Dammam.

A Bangladeshi taxi driver was arrested in Riyadh recently in connection with the kidnapping of several maids. Police said the driver had been kidnapping maids and then forcing them into prostitution for a long time. He would tell maids that he could get them better jobs and would ask them to run away from their sponsors. Then he would imprison them in an apartment and charge people SR300 to sleep with them,?said a police officer in Riyadh.

An Indonesian Embassy source said they received about 10 complaints from maids every day. Most of them involve abuse and include severe beatings, suicide, kidnapping, rape, withholding of salary for months and years, sexual harassment and impregnation.

Unfortunately, people here are very cruel to maids. They treat them with suspicion and abuse them in many ways,?he said. The rate of domestic servants fleeing their sponsors in the Kingdom is as high as 70 percent, one report said. When they flee, to find jobs with higher salaries, their sponsors lose large amounts of money which were spent in recruiting them and paying for their visas. People who hire maids illegally say that the recruiting system is too complicated and has too much unnecessary red tape.

Illegal migrants' right to work wins support of public in poll

2007-04-25T23:53:00.000+08:00

Illegal migrants' right to work wins support of public in poll
By Colin Brown
Published: 25 April 2007

A campaign for an estimated 500,000 illegal workers in Britain to be given the official right to earn a living would have popular support, according to findings in an opinion poll.

The plight of illegal immigrants who are denied any right to work has been called "modern-day slavery". It is said to be flourishing in Britain while we avert our eyes to the scandal under our noses.

Liam Byrne, the Immigration minister, said mass migration had enriched Britain but left UK society so "unsettled" that the issue could cost Labour the next general election. But an opinion poll commissioned by Strangers into Citizens - a campaign to give employment rights to illegal immigrants -shows that 66 per cent of people in the would accept refused asylum-seekers and those who had overstayed their visas if they worked and paid taxes. The poll was conducted last weekend by ORB with a sample of 1,004 adults across the

"This poll makes clear that just talking tough will not be enough to fob off the UK public on immigration, " said Habib Rahman, chief executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants. "They want the political parties to get real and respond in a way that is workable and fair to migrants who are living as members of our society."

"Strangers into Citizens" is calling for the Government to allow a pathway for long-term illegal workers in this country to earn a living legally. They will hold a rally at Trafalgar Square on Monday 7 May to call for all immigrants who have been in this country for four years to be allowed a work permit for two years. It would become a route to "leave to remain" indefinitely while they work and pay taxes.

The campaign challenges the Home Office policy of stepping up the removal of illegal immigrants, who have either overstayed their visas or been refused asylum.

Mr Byrne is introducing a points-based managed migration system, with tighter border controls and a crackdown on employers who recruit illegal immigrants. Austin Ivereigh, the co-ordinator of the campaign, said: "We are not calling for a general 'amnesty' but a six-year pathway to citizenship for long-term migrants. It is certainly not issuing a 'green light for unprecedented migration'." He said one-off naturalisation programmes had been introduced in Spain, Germany and the US as part of a wider strategy of border enforcement. "It may not stop illegal immigration - that is a matter for border controls - but they do bring thousands out of limbo, recognise realities, clear asylum logjams, bring huge benefits to the state and shrink the underground economy on which people-trafficking and exploitative employers thrive," said Mr Ivereigh.

Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, said: "Migrants contribute hugely to the economic, civic and cultural life of London. To have a substantial number of them living here without regular status - because of deep-rooted failings in the immigration system - is deeply damaging to London as well as to them."

The Labour deputy leadership candidate Jon Cruddas said: "We must deal with those who no one wants to talk about - the 500,000 or so who have no status. Regularisation is about providing a solution to the problem everyone knows exist but which everyone runs from."

Jack Dromey, the deputy general secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union, said the economic and moral case for an "earned amnesty" for migrants was overwhelming. "

'Denis', 32, doctor: 'I would have gone home a long time ago if it was safe'

He is secretive and deeply troubled by the threat of being returned to his native Zimbabwe
Denis - not his real name - will not show his face and insists on anonymity. But the 32-year-old is a qualified doctor. "It is very difficult and it is humiliating, " he said. "I am a professional person, but I am living on handouts from my friends."

He speaks good English and was trained as a doctor before he fled Zimbabwe in 2002 after threats to his life. Since settling in this country he has got a girlfriend, also a Zimbabwean illegal immigrant, and they have a daughter, aged 18 months.

"I am crashing down at a flat," he said. "I am not supposed to be here. We are staying with a friend who has a council flat, but she is not supposed to have us here. She is afraid she will be evicted if they find us." Denis is adamant he will not work illegally. "I want to be a professional doctor. I am afraid of taking any other work that will undermine my career. I am so scared for my life. I would have gone home a long time ago if I felt it was safe. I came to Britain because I just wanted somewhere safe and better to work. I cannot go anywhere else because my documents are with the Home Office."

'Lucas', shop assistant: 'I always try to stay away from trouble'

A young Venezuelan with a big smile and a gentle manner, "Lucas" has been living in the UK for 10 years, first studying English and working part time, and then working full time.

He has done a variety of jobs - as a cleaner, working in a hotel and teaching Spanish on a freelance basis. For the past two years he has worked in a shop, and is well-liked by his colleagues and customers. His employers are not aware of his immigration status. He has a national insurance number and has paid taxes and national insurance contributions in all of his jobs.

He has survived as an undocumented worker by working hard and keeping a low profile. "I am very careful, and always try to stay away from trouble," he says. He avoids the authorities as much as possible - he would be very wary of reporting a crime to the police, and does not have a GP. If he were to fall ill he would go to A&E, where he could be treated anonymously.

He arrived in London in 1998. "I came to the UK on a tourist visa and then enrolled as an English student for two-and-a-half years," he says. When he tried to renew his visa a third time, however, he was told that he had been in the country for too long.

Skilled Filipino Immigrants Stonewalled

2007-04-22T19:01:00.000+08:00

Leah Diana
Special to the Sun
Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Re: B.C is busy helping skilled immigrants find right jobs, Feb. 12

Contrary to Minister of Economic Development Colin Hansen's claim about inaccuracies in reporting of his government's programs, it is the minister himself who is making inaccurate statements.

While Hansen claims his government is doing a lot to help skilled immigrants find jobs, many Filipino immigrants (despite being highly educated and skilled) continue to be marginalized and economically segregated into low-paying jobs. Many find the costly and long processes required by professional regulatory bodies as impossible barriers to their recognition and accreditation.

For example, hundreds of Filipino nurses in British Columbia are trapped working under the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP), because nursing is not given any occupational points under the Canadian immigration system. They are forced to work as private nurses and caregivers for the elderly and sick for minimum wage or below for two years despite a dire nursing shortage in the province.

We met with the minister in 2000 to bring up this issue, but our recommendations have not been implemented.

While we agree that professional regulatory bodies have the responsibility to ensure the public's health and safety, we question the minister's rigid view on English language skills and equivalency standards. Philippine educational institutions are at par with many other countries and Filipino immigrants to Canada are already required to be competent in one of two official languages before they are admitted into Canada.

Hansen should put the money where his mouth is. While he touts increasing budgets for so-called solutions to the problem of professional accreditation, we haven't seen any of that money flowing to community-based organizations such as ours that are helping facilitate the recognition and accreditation of Filipino and other foreign-trained nurses. To date, the Filipino Nurses Support Group has conducted review classes and assisted more than 300 nurses working under the LCP to obtain accreditation devoid of any help from the provincial government.

Without the political will to recognize foreign-trained professionals, the promises of Hansen and other politicians remain empty.

Leah Diana is vice-chair of the Philippine Women Centre of B.C.

Indonesia, Malaysia: Overhaul Labor Agreement on Domestic Workers

2007-04-22T18:57:00.000+08:00

Indonesia, Malaysia: Overhaul Labor Agreement on Domestic Workers
Proposed Malaysian Migrants Bill Would Violate Basic Freedoms

(New York, February 21, 2007) – At their meeting this week, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyuno should commit to stronger protections for Indonesian migrants working in Malaysia, Human Rights Watch said today. Abdullah is in Jakarta to receive an Indonesian award for heads of state, the Bintang Republik Indonesia Adipradana.

Approximately 2.5 million migrants work in Malaysia, and the majority are Indonesians working in plantations, construction and domestic service. Gaps in labor laws and punitive immigration policies have left many migrants at risk of abuse and labor exploitation by employers and recruitment agencies.

Malaysia recently announced plans to introduce new legislation that would restrict migrants to their workplace or living quarters. Such measures violate workers’ right to freedom of movement. The resulting isolation would also put them at risk of other abuses, as demonstrated in the case of the approximately 300,000 migrant domestic workers in Malaysia. Many domestic workers already confront restrictions on their movement and communication.

“Instead of improving the situation, Malaysia’s proposed foreign worker bill will make it dramatically worse,” said Nisha Varia, senior researcher on women’s rights in Asia for Human Rights Watch. “It’s shocking that Malaysia is even considering a proposal that would give employers freedom to lock up workers.”

As Human Rights Watch reported in “Help Wanted: Abuses against Female Migrant Domestic Workers in Indonesia and Malaysia,” Indonesian domestic workers in Malaysia often work grueling 16 to 18 hour days, seven days a week, and earn less than 25 US cents per hour. Some suffer physical or sexual abuse. These workers are excluded from key protections in Malaysia’s main labor laws, and nongovernmental organizations and the Indonesian mission in Malaysia have received thousands of complaints from domestic workers in recent years.

In Indonesia, labor agents often subject prospective workers to extortion, discriminatory hiring processes, and months-long confinement in overcrowded training centers. In Malaysia, some labor agents turn a deaf ear to women’s complaints about abusive treatment and pleas to return home.

The two countries signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in May 2006 to regulate migration of domestic workers. Positive measures included the introduction of a standard contract and protections against cutting workers’ salaries to repay fees borne by the employer. However, it allows employers to keep workers’ passports, prohibits workers from marrying, and fails to introduce clear standards on a minimum wage, a weekly day off, or monitoring mechanisms for labor agencies.

“While creating the MOU was a step in the right direction, both Indonesia and Malaysia continue to drag their feet in guaranteeing the most important protections for these women,” said Varia. “Domestic workers have to rely on the whim of employers rather than the rule of law for decent working conditions.”

Human Rights Watch said that Indonesia and Malaysia should reform the MOU to, at a minimum, include:

· A commitment to pursue legislative changes to extend equal protection under Malaysia’s labor laws to domestic workers, specifically Section XII of the Employment Act of 1955 and the Workmen’s Compensation Act of 1952.
· The right of workers to hold their own passports. When employers or agents hold workers’ passports, this form of control makes it difficult for workers to escape abusive conditions or to negotiate better working conditions and full payment of their wages.
· A standard contract that ensures minimum labor protections, including: a 24-hour rest period per week; a fair minimum wage; a limitation on working hours per week; benefits; and safe working conditions.

· The creation of clear mechanisms to provide timely remedies for migrant domestic workers in cases of abuse, and to outline sanctions for employers and labor agents who commit these abuses. Migrant domestic workers with pending criminal cases or labor complaints should be allowed to work while waiting for their cases to be concluded.

· Stronger regulations governing recruitment agencies, with clear mechanisms to monitor and enforce these standards. Issues such as agency fees, standard contracts, provision of accurate information, and conditions of training centers should be addressed.
· Protection of workers’ ability to form associations and unions.
“Migration benefits both countries tremendously – by providing important services to Malaysia and needed income to Indonesian workers,” said Varia. “But, despite a long history of large migration flows, Malaysia and Indonesia have lagged behind other countries in ensuring basic protections for migrant workers.”

To view the July 2004 Human Rights Watch report “Help Wanted: Abuses against Female Migrant Domestic Workers in Indonesia and Malaysia” in English, please visit:
http://hrw.org/reports/2004/indonesia0704/
To view the report in Indonesian, please visit:
http://hrw.org/indonesian/reports/2004/indonesia0704/
To listen to broadcast-quality audio commentary by Nisha Varia, senior researcher on women’s rights in Asia for Human Rights Watch, on abuse against domestic workers, please visit:
http://hrw.org/audio/2007/wr2k7/english/essays/migrants.mp3

For more information, please contact:
In New York, Nisha Varia: +1-917-617-1041
In London, Brad Adams: +44-20-7713-2767

The STRIVE ACT is Corporate Designed Immigration Reform

2007-04-09T22:43:00.000+08:00

By Javier Rodriguez April 4, 2007

The debate in the nation on immigration reform is definitely on and the cards are once again stacked. The Gutierrez-Flake STRIVE ACT of 2007 is a corporate monster most of the way. It doesn't come close to meeting the human rights standards set forth by the international community for the more than 200 million migrants in the planet who, by designs of corporate globalization and its rising capitalist transnational class, have been forced to leave their home countries in search of a new life.

On the contrary the new STRIVE ACT, like last year�s failed Sensenbrenner-HR4437 and Hegel-Martinez S2611, will criminalize immigrants, allow enforcement of immigration law by police agencies, calls for more extreme border enforcement, calls for building 20 more detention centers for immigrants, will erode human rights for future deportees and future immigrants, it will impose an employer verification program, it will delay legalization for the 13 million immigrants already here for many years and not surprisingly it does not set realistic standards to resolve the immigration issue period.

Overall, if approved, it will further set back the struggle for immigrant empowerment, make present and future immigrant workers more vulnerable to exploitation and drive them further underground.

The international criteria for immigrants set in 1987?, says migrants, within three years of living in the host country, have earned their right to legalize their status. By then, they have established roots in their adopted communities, creating family, children, culture, education, business and religion.

This is a sounder humane approach to a real earned right to legalization, to be united with their families and to the stabilization of their lives.

In 1986, through the IRCA Immigration Reform Act, several million urban and farm workers, undocumented immigrants, regularized their status through a radically different set of standards. A one year wait for their permanent residency and five more for citizenship and the right to vote without having to leave the country.

The farm worker clause was even more humane with a requirement of only three months of farm work in the previous two years to qualify. It set forth a fee of only $150.00 per applicant. That�s it. It was a family oriented law though far from perfect.

NOW COMPARE. By Cong. Luis Gutierrez own words, under the STRIVE ACT, the legalization part will not be implemented for two years until Congress confirms that the security border enforcement measures of the new law are in place, and then, only then will the legalization process begins.

Then after, the first of two three year permits for non immigrant status will be issued with the right to a social security, a drivers license and leave and return to the country. After the sixth year the immigrant will have the right to solicit permanent residency.

But instead of an automatic �Green Card� into the hands of the 13 million immigrants, all applicants will be placed in the back of the line for another 5 to 10 years wait, until the applications of 3 million plus potential immigrants now in process, which the STRIVE Bill does not address, are resolved.

It does not stop there. An added five year wait to qualify for citizenship and the right to vote, which means, approximately a total 18 to 21 years to exert full earned constitutional rights which all Americans now enjoy under the constitution.

Is this a corporate panacea or not?The proposed house bill also establishes a quota for 450,000 yearly Conditional Workers, a euphemism for the old Guest Workers Program. Conditional Workers will have the right to: two three year working permits with the right to change jobs, to organize, bring their families and children with the right to school, to a drivers license, a social security and lastly, with an existing good moral conduct and no criminal background, the right to legalize. Seductive isn�t it.

But like their 13 million immigrant counterparts already in the US, which hypothetically speaking, will be waiting in line for years for the �coveted Green Card� this sector will be highly vulnerable to small and large corporate business misconduct. Admittedly though, on par, the future undocumented sector will be several notches more exploitable.

According to leaks emanating from the Capital in the last two weeks, the Kennedy-McCain Senate proposal will use the same framework of S2611 which died last year. If so, for certain the conciliation process between the House and Senate will be a water down process for the Fable-Gutierrez Bill.

For the immigrant rights movement and allies the central question is �What is to be Done�? Already at the gate in tacit support of this concept is a powerful conglomerate of the most active wing of labor, big business, the Latino establishment, Democrats and Republicans, the church hierarchy, the Mexican and Central American governments and the moderate wing of the immigrant rights movement. And it is well financed with a war chest of $4 million dollars.

The accomplishments of the 2006 mass immigrant struggle are historic. Most notable was energizing the electorate and along with the antiwar sentiment changing the correlation of forces in Congress against the extreme right.

Without a doubt President George W. Bush and the Republicans are in a weaker position although his shock troops have launched a near fascist campaign against the country�s undocumented creating havoc and terror.

At this point, the correlation of forces is absolutely not favorable except that the country�s progressive forces and allies move from traditional lobbying towards mass mobilization in an attempt to gain the upper hand and influence the national debate for a more inclusive pro worker immigration reform.

The activists response to the governments ICE raids and deportations campaign has been toe to toe and it appears, has set the conditions for another round of mega mass mobilizations. We shall see if the people respond accordingly again on May 1st International Workers Day in defense of their dignity and humanity. The challenge is as historic as in 2006.

Javier Rodriguez is the media and political strategist for the March 25 Coalition and a co-founder of the May 1st National Movement. Jrodhdztf@hotmail.com 323-702-6397

Into the breach again: US looks to Filipinos

2006-11-17T15:19:00.000+08:00

Asia Times Online, 17 Nov 2006

Into the breach again: US looks to Filipinos
By Cher S Jimenez
MANILA

When the United States moves to downsize its military facilities in Okinawa, Japan, and begin construction on new military bases designed to house 8,000 marines and their families on the Pacific island of Guam, Filipino construction workers will likely do most of the heavy lifting.

In September, Philippine labor officials accepted an invitation from Guam - a US territory - to discuss hiring 15,000 Filipino construction workers to work on the new military facilities, including barracks, administration buildings, schools, training target sites, runways and entertainment establishments. On-land construction activities on Guam are set to begin early next year and the estimated US$10 billion project is scheduled for completion in 2014.

The US Congress' Overseas Basing Commission had earlier estimated that the cost of relocation and building the new base in Guam, including facilities for a new command post and housing for the marines' family members, at about $2.9 billion.

For undisclosed reasons, the US military now says the total cost will be closer to $10 billion, of which Japan has agreed to shoulder 59% of the bill. Cheap Filipino labor, it is believed, will help bring down those spiraling costs. If the deal is done, it will mark the latest big hire of Filipino workers by the US military and its affiliated business interests.

The US has employed more than 7,000 Filipino workers - nearly half of them undocumented - in its four main military camps in Iraq, according to Philippine labor officials. Neither the Philippine nor US governments has publicly owned up to how thousands of Filipino workers have slipped into Iraq and found work on US military facilities. US federal policy prohibits the employment of non-Americans inside US military facilities, but the Bush administration's heavy use of private contractors has blurred the lines between public and private functions.

After a Filipino truck driver killed in Iraq caused a domestic uproar against the Philippines' participation in the United States' war effort, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in July 2004 banned any new deployments of Filipino workers to Iraq. Philippine-based non-governmental organizations tracking Arroyo's support to the United States' global counter-terrorism campaign contend that both Washington and Manila have quietly decided to ignore the official ban to maintain the steady supply of cheap, English-speaking Filipino workers in Iraq. Washington clearly seems to favor Filipinos over other English-speaking nationalities for its most crucial and sensitive military-related construction projects.

In March 2002, Washington and Manila secretly processed the papers of 250 Filipino construction workers to help build new or overhaul old detention facilities now in use at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the US controversially holds hundreds of suspects as part of its "global war on terror" campaign, according to Philippine officials. For their efforts, Filipino workers received a $1,000 monthly salary - far below what it would have cost the US military to employ US citizens.

Contractual gratitude Local labor recruiters have been told by government officials that the Guam assignment is a US reward for the Arroyo administration's strong support for its "war on terror". There is also an element of trust: US soldiers frequently train with their Philippine counterparts and US advisers are currently training and providing logistical support to Arroyo's campaign against Muslim separatists in the southern Philippines.

Philippine officials estimate that if and when Filipino workers are deployed to work in Guam, they will earn wages similar to those paid for the Guantanamo operation. From the United States' perspective, hiring cheap Filipinos makes good economic sense at a time when the US military budget has spiraled out of control with the mounting expense of operations in Iraq and to a lesser degree Afghanistan. It also appears to be part of a quiet outsourcing process: the US Department of Defense's 2005 base realignment and closures recommendations aimed to pare "unnecessary management personnel" at Guam's existing facilities, including "military, personnel and contractor personnel", to the tune of 174 lost jobs over the period spanning 2006-11. Cheaper Filipinos are expected to fill some of the lost contractor positions, Philippine labor sources say.

And they will be charged with building facilities alongside some of the most advanced and important assets the US military maintains outside the continental US. This includes Andersen Air Force Base, which can handle aircraft ranging from unmanned aerial vehicles to long-range strategic bombers, and Apra Harbor, which services everything from nuclear submarines to aircraft carriers. Andersen's special hangar facilities are designed specifically to protect the special radar-evading skin of B-2 bombers.

Sources from the Philippine recruitment industry say that, apart from their low cost, Filipino construction workers are "highly favored" by the US because of their English-language skills. According to industry sources, Middle Eastern companies that have recently hired large numbers of Filipino construction workers there are often subsidiaries of or somehow affiliated with big US reconstruction firms, including Halliburton, Bechtel and Flour Daniel.

"Americans favor Filipino workers because we can understand them and they speak English," said Loreto Soriano, president and chairman of the board of LBSeBusiness, a Manila-based recruitment firm. "Construction manuals and plans are written in English, so we can follow easily, and that's what they like." Their overall skill sets, including their ability to work with modern construction technology, however, are very much in question. The Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) recently said that from 2001 to 2005 it was only able to meet 56% of global orders for 103,167 construction workers because of their low skills, including their inability to operate modern construction technology.

Much of that demand has come from the Middle East, where booming oil prices have led to a flurry of new construction and infrastructure projects. Soriano said the Philippines generally could not meet the surging demand for highly qualified construction workers, including welders, flame cutters, plumbers, pipe fitters and carpenters.

For the past few months, job advertisements for construction workers and engineers rose by almost 29%; there were new requests for 4,000 overseas placements in September, according to official statistics. As of 2005, the Professional Regulation Commission registered 312,478 construction-sector professionals, where nearly one-third was listed as qualified civil engineers.

However, the POEA, the government agency that oversees labor deployment abroad, had registered only 737 professionals over the period spanning 2002-04. Now, local employers are complaining about the growing number of construction workers who leave their jobs without notice after they have been placed overseas. Some in Manila fear that if the government paves the way for 15,000 workers to take jobs in Guam, the already labor-strapped local Philippine construction could come to a total grinding halt. However, that could also happen to the planned new military facilities in Guam if Filipino workers lack the skills to implement US building designs effectively and efficiently.

Cher S Jimenez is a Manila-based journalist with the BusinessMirror newspaper.
She recently received a grant from the Ateneo de Manila University to conduct investigative journalism on illegal workers in the United Arab Emirates.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing .)

DoLE suspends OFW deployment to Kazakhstan

2006-10-25T15:51:00.000+08:00

By Veronica Uy
INQ7.net
Last updated 02:42pm (Mla time) 10/25/2006
http://globalnation.inq7.net/news/breakingnews/view_article.php?article_id=28647

THE Department of Labor and Employment (DoLE) on Wednesday suspended the processing and deployment of Filipino workers to Kazakhstan five days after clashes broke out between Turkish and Kazakh workers.

Acting Labor Secretary Danilo Cruz told INQ7.net the order is “effective today until further
notice.”

He issued the order shortly after a multi-department meeting attended by Foreign Affairs undersecretary Esteban Conejos Jr., acting administrator Viveca Catalig of the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, administrator Marianito Roque of the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, and a representative of local recruitment agency International Security Development (ISD).

Cruz also said a composite team composed of the Philippine ambassador and consul general to Pakistan, the Philippine labor attaché to Riyadh, and a representative of ISD will be sent to Tengiz, Kazakhstan “to assess the situation and conduct dialogue with the Filipinos there.”
He said they are expected to arrive in Kazakhstan on Friday.

From their meeting, the acting labor chief said it was learned that although there is “continuing provocation from Kazakh workers,” the Filipino workers there are not in so much danger.

"Aside from reinforced security from private security guards and the Kazakhstan government, the Filipinos have been moved to quarters separate from other nationalities,” he said.

However, he said, the Philippine government has asked Bechtel, the Filipinos' employer, to have a separate mess hall for Filipinos as all nationalities eat at the same mess hall.

Asked if the Filipinos have returned to work, Cruz said they have not yet done so.

Earlier, the Department of Foreign Affairs said the Filipino workers will be asked to return to work Wednesday or Thursday.

Cruz belied reports that 40 were killed in the riot last October 20. He said no one was killed, but 300 were injured, two of them seriously.

A U.S. Fortress Rises in Baghdad: Asian Workers Trafficked to Build Worlds Largest Embassy

2006-10-23T15:19:00.000+08:00

A U.S. Fortress Rises in Baghdad: Asian Workers Trafficked to Build World's Largest Embassy
by David Phinney, Special to CorpWatch
October 17th, 2006
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14173

Things began looking more sketchier than ever to John Owen as he boarded a nondescript white jet on his way back to Iraq in March 2005 following some R&R in Kuwait city. Employed by First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting, the lead builder for the new $592-million US embassy in Baghdad, Owen remembers being surrounded at the airport by about 50 company laborers freshly hired from the Philippines and India. Everyone was holding boarding passes to Dubai -- not to Baghdad.

"I thought there was some sort of mix up and I was getting on the wrong plane," says the 48-year-old Floridian who was working as a general construction foreman on the embassy project.

He buttonholed a First Kuwaiti manager standing near by and asked what was going on. The manager waved his hand, looked around the terminal and whispered to keep quiet.

"'If anyone hears we are going to Baghdad, they won't let us on the plane,'" Owen recalls the manager saying.

'Not Valid for Iraq'

The secrecy struck Owen as a little odd, but he grabbed his luggage and moved on. Everyone filed out to the private jet and flew directly to Baghdad. "I figured that they had visas for Kuwait and not Iraq," Owen offers.
The deception had all the appearances of smuggling workers into Iraq, but Owen didn't know at the time that the Philippines, India, and other countries had banned or restricted their citizens from working in Iraq because of safety concerns and growing opposition to the war. After 2004, many passports were stamped

"Not valid for Iraq."

Nor did Owen know that both the US State Department and the Pentagon were quietly investigating contractors such as First Kuwaiti for labor trafficking and worker abuse. In fact, the international news media had accused First Kuwaiti repeatedly of coercing workers to take jobs in battle-torn Iraq once they had been lured to Kuwait with safer offers.

The Kuwait-headquartered, Lebanese-run company has billed several billion dollars on US contracts since the war began in March 2003. Much of its work is performed by cheap labor largely hired from South Asia and the company has an estimated 7,500 foreign laborers in the theater of war.

Now, with a highly secretive contract awarded by the US State Department, First Kuwaiti is in the midst of building the most expensive and heavily fortified US embassy in the world. Scheduled to open in 2007, the sprawling complex near the Tigris River will equal Vatican City in size.

But Owen says that working on the project proved to be one of the worst jobs he has ever had in his 27 years of construction work.

Not one of the five different US embassy sites Owen had worked on around the world previously compared to the mess he describes. Armenia, Bulgaria, Angola, Cameroon and Cambodia all had their share of dictators, violence and economic disruption, but the companies building the embassies were always fair and professional, he says. First Kuwaiti is the exception. Brutal and inhumane, he says "I've never seen a project more fucked up. Every US labor law was broken."

Seven months after signing on with First Kuwaiti in November 2005, he quit.
In the resignation letter last June, Owen told First Kuwaiti and US State Department officials that his managers physically assaulted and beat the construction workers, demonstrated little regard for worker safety, and routinely breached security.

And it was all happening smack in the middle of the US-controlled Green Zone -- right under the nose of the State Department that had quietly awarded the controversial embassy contract in July 2005.

He also complained of poor sanitation, squalid living conditions and medical malpractice in the labor camps where several thousand low-paid migrant workers lived. Those workers, recruited on the global labor market from the Philippines, India, Pakistan and other poor south Asian countries, earned as little as $10 to $30 a day. As with many US-funded contractors, First Kuwaiti prefers importing labor because it views Iraqi workers as a security headache not worth the trouble.

Despite numerous emails and phone calls about such allegations, neither First Kuwaiti general manager Wadih Al Absi nor his lawyer Angela Styles, the former top White House contract policy advisor, have responded. After a year of requests, State Department officials involved with the project also have ignored or rejected opportunities for comment.

Your Passports Please

That same March Owen returned to work in Baghdad, Rory Mayberry would witness similar events after he flew to Kuwait from his home in Myrtle Creek, Oregon.

The gravely voiced, easy-going Army veteran had previously worked in Iraq for Halliburton and the private security company, Danubia. Missing the action and the big paychecks US contractors draw Iraq, he snagged a $10,000 a month job with MSDS consulting Company.

MSDS is a two-person minority-owned consulting company that assists US State Department managers in Washington with procurement programming. Never before had the firm offered medical services or worked in Iraq, but First Kuwaiti hired MSDS on the recommendation of Jim Golden, the State Department contract official overseeing the embassy project. Within days, an agreement worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for medical care was signed.

The 45-year-old Mayberry, a former emergency medical technician in the Army who worked as a funeral director in Oregon, responded to a help wanted ad placed by MSDS. The plan was that he would work as a medic attending to the construction crews on the work site in Baghdad.

Mayberry sensed things weren't right when he boarded a First Kuwaiti flight on March 15 to Baghdad -- a different flight from Owen's.

At the airport in Kuwait City, Mayberry said, he saw a person behind a counter hand First Kuwaiti managers a passenger manifest, an envelope of money and a stack of boarding passes to Dubai. The managers then handed out the boarding passes to Mayberry and 50 or so new First Kuwaiti laborers, mostly Filipinos.

"Everyone was told to tell customs and security that they were flying to Dubai," Mayberry explains. Once the group passed the guards, they went upstairs and waited by the McDonald's for First Kuwaiti staff to unlock a door -- Gate 26 -- that led to an unmarked, white 52-seat jet. It was "an antique piece of shit" Mayberry offers in a casual, blunt manner.

"All the workers had their passports taken away by First Kuwaiti," Mayberry claims, and while he knew the plane was bound for Baghdad, he's not so sure the others were aware of their destination. The Asian laborers began asking questions about why they were flying north and the jet wasn't flying east over the ocean, he says. "I think they thought they were going to work in Dubai."

One former First Kuwaiti supervisor acknowledges that the company holds passports of many workers in Iraq -- a violation of US contracting.

"All of the passports are kept in the offices," said one company insider who requested anonymity in fear of financial and personal retribution. As for distributing Dubai boarding passes for Baghdad flights, "It's because of the travel bans," he explained.

Mayberry believes that migrant workers from the Philippines, India and Nepal are especially vulnerable to employers like First Kuwaiti because their countries have little or no diplomatic presence in Iraq.
"If you don't have your passport or an embassy to go to, what you do to get out of a bad situation?" he asks.

"How can they go to the US State Department for help if First Kuwaiti is building their embassy?"

Deadly 'Candy Store' Medicine

Owen had already been working at the embassy site since late November when Mayberry arrived. The two never crossed paths, but both share similar complaints about management of the project and brutal treatment of the laborers that, at times, numbered as many as 2,500. Most are from the Philippines, India, and Pakistan. Others are from Egypt and Turkey.

The number of workers with injuries and ailments stunned Mayberry. He went to work immediately after and stayed busy around the clock for days.

Four days later, First Kuwaiti pulled him off the job after he requested an investigation of two patients who had died before he arrived from what he suspected was medical malpractice. Mayberry also recommended that the health clinics be shut down because of unsanitary conditions and mismanagement.

"There hadn't been any follow up on medical care. People were walking around intoxicated on pain relievers with unwrapped wounds and there were a lot of infections," he recalls. "The idea that there was any hygiene seemed ridiculous. I'm not sure they were even bathing."

In reports made available to the US State Department, the US Army and First Kuwaiti, Mayberry listed dozens of concerns about the clinics, which he found lacking in hot water, disinfectant, hand washing stations, properly supplied ambulances, and communication equipment. Mayberry also complained that workers' medical records were in total disarray or nonexistent, the beds were dirty, and the support staff hired by First Kuwaiti was poorly trained.

The handling of prescription drugs especially bothered him. Many of the drugs that originated from Iraq and Kuwait were unsecured, disorganized and unintelligibly labeled, he said in one memo. He found that the medical staff frequently misdiagnosed patients. Prescription pain killers were being handed out "like a candy store ... and then people were sent back to work."

Mayberry warned that the practice could cause addiction and safety hazards. "Some were on the construction site climbing scaffolding 30 feet off the ground. I told First Kuwaiti that you don't give painkillers to people who are running machinery and working on heavy construction and they said 'that's how we do it.'"

The sloppy handling of drugs may have led to the two deaths, Mayberry speculates. One worker, age 25, died in his room. The second, in his mid-30s, died at the clinic because of heart failure. Both deaths may be "medical homicide," Mayberry says -- because the patients may have been negligently prescribed improper drug treatment.If the State Department investigated, Mayberry knows nothing of the outcome. Two State Department officials with project oversight responsibilities did not return phone calls or emails inquiring about Mayberry's allegations. The reports may have been ignored, not because of his complaints, but because Mayberry is a terrible speller, a problem compounded by an Arabic translation program loaded on his computer, he says.

Accidents Happen

Owen's account of his seven months on the job paints a similar picture to Mayberry's. Health and safety measures were essentially non-existent, he says. Not once did he witness a safety meeting. Once an Egyptian worker fell and broke his back and was sent home. No one ever heard from him again. "The accident might not have happened if there was a safety program and he had known how to use a safety harness."

Owen also says that managers regularly beat workers and that laborers were issued only one work uniform, making it difficult to go to the laundry. "You could never have it washed. Clothing got really bad -- full of sweat and dirt."

And while he often smuggled water to the work crews, medical care was a different issue. When he urged laborers to get medical treatment for rashes and sores, First Kuwaiti managers accused him of spoiling the laborers and allowing them simply to avoid work, he says.

State Department officials supervising the project are aware of many such events, but apparently do nothing, he said. Once when 17 workers climbed the wall of the construction site to escape, a State Department official helped round them up and put them in "virtual lockdown," Owen said.

Just before he resigned, hundreds of Pakistani workers went on strike in June and beat up a Lebanese manager who they accused of harassing them. Owen estimates that 375 laborers were then sent home.

'Treated Like Animals'

Recent First Kuwaiti employees agree that the accounts shared by Owen and Mayberry are accurate. One longtime supervisor claims that 50 to 60 percent of the laborers regularly protest that First Kuwaiti "treats them like animals," and routinely reduces their promised pay with confusing and unexplained deductions.
Another former First Kuwaiti manager, who declines to be named because of possible adverse consequences, says that Owen's and Mayberry's complaints only begin "to scratch the surface."

But scratching the surface is the only view yet available of what may be the most lasting monument to the US liberation and occupation of Iraq. As of now only a handful of authorized State Department managers and contractors, along with First Kuwaiti workers and contractors, are officially allowed inside the project's walls.

No journalist has ever been allowed access to the sprawling 104-acre site with towering construction cranes raising their necks along the skyline.

Even this tight security is a charade, says on former high-level First Kuwaiti manager. First Kuwaiti managers living at the construction site regularly smuggle prostitutes in from the streets of Baghdad outside the Green Zone, he says.

Prostitutes, he explains are viewed as possible spies. "They are a big security risk."
But the exposure that the US occupation forces and First Kuwaiti may fear most could begin with the contractor itself and the conditions workers are forced to endure at this most obvious symbol of the American democracy project in Iraq.

David Phinney is a journalist and broadcaster based in Washington, DC, whose work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, New York Times and on ABC and PBS. He can be contacted at: phinneydavid@yahoo.com.

ON THE JAPAN-RP ECONOMIC PACT

2006-09-09T18:31:00.000+08:00

ON THE JAPAN-RP ECONOMIC PACT
IBON Foundation
September 9, 2006

The upcoming Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA) will bring dubious gain to the local economy while severely limiting government’s policy options to develop domestic industries.

The agreement, which is reportedly set to be signed at the Asia-Europe Meeting in Helsinki, Finland on Sep. 10-11, 2006, has been under negotiation away from public scrutiny for the last four years. Officials provide few details but it is reported that the agreement will cut import tariffs on industrial goods by 90% within 10 years and provide concessions for Japanese direct investment in the domestic automobile and electronics industries.

The Philippines will abolish tariffs on at least 60% of its steel imports from Japan. Tariffs on Japan-made cars will also be fully eliminated in 2010. In exchange, Japan will lower tariffs on Philippine bananas and pineapples, while the Philippines removes tariffs on Japanese grapes and pears. Japan will also allow a year-on-year quota of some 200 Filipino nurses and caregivers. It had also been reported that the JPEPA would remove mutual restrictions on Japanese and Philippine investors, as well as prohibit performance requirements.

Both governments have already said that the agreement will be positive for both the Philippines and Japan in terms of trade and investment. However the JPEPA is actually an unequal agreement between unequal parties that, moreover, is biased for the more powerful Japanese economic interests. The biggest gainers are Japanese investors who will keep setting up export enclaves in the Philippines that are unintegrated with the domestic economy. They will continue to import most of their inputs and components, exploit fiscal incentives, stifle workers’ rights to organize, and hire labor as cheap as they can get. The Philippines will also be foregoing millions in dollars in tariff revenues from Japanese imports.

Japan and the Philippines are such grossly unequal economies that nominally equal terms can never mean a “level playing field”. The Japanese economy (US$4.4 trillion GNI in 2004) is 50 times larger than the Philippines’ and its GDP per capita is 35 times larger. Japan accounts for some one-third of foreign investments (with a cumulative US$3.5 billion in Japanese investments 2003) in the Philippines and one-fifth of its external trade (with US$14.2 billion in total Japan-Philippines trade in 2004). And yet, for instance, the country’s domestic industrial base has continued to deteriorate despite the majority of Japanese investments being in the manufacturing sector.

The Philippine government is surrendering policy tools under the JPEPA that, ironically, Japan itself used heavily. The Japanese government greatly protected its domestic industries from the late 19th century until the early 1980s. Japan’s industrial might in cars, trucks, shipbuilding, computers and consumer electronics was built up in through almost a century of sustained intervention and protection, especially in their early stages. Average weighted industrial tariffs reached as high as 30-40 percent. The Japanese government required technology transfers from US, French and UK investors, or brazenly pirated technology through so-called “reverse engineering”. Government agencies were obliged to procure goods and services strictly from Japanese firms. Japanese technological and productive capacity would not have developed if not for these many decades of active state support.

The far-reaching JPEPA is also the dangerous first step towards complete government renunciation of developing the Philippine economy. What little public information there is about JPEPA indicates about a dozen areas for liberalization that collectively go far beyond anything proposed even in the currently dormant World Trade Organization (WTO). These include: the elimination or reduction of tariffs on industrial products and agriculture, forestry and fishery products; liberalization of services sectors such as construction, outsourcing, air transport, health related and social services, tourism and travel-related services, maritime transport services, telecommunications and banking; national treatment, MFN Treatment and performance requirement prohibitions; and supposedly easier entry of qualified Filipino nurses and certified caregivers.

The JPEPA also includes various provisions on: Government Procurement, Competition Policy, Intellectual Property, Dispute Avoidance and Settlement, Improvement of the Business Environment, Mutual Recognition and Bilateral Cooperation.

As the country’s first full-fledged bilateral free trade agreement (FTA), the benchmark it sets for liberalization will determine the shape of all FTAs to come. If the Philippine government sets high trade and investment liberalization standards in JPEPA then it will be obliged to also give these to partners in subsequent FTAs lest it be accused of discrimination. The country’s negotiating position in all subsequent trade and investment agreements will be gravely undermined. The end result of the JPEPA and other such agreements will be to shut the door to real domestic industrial growth and economic progress.

The government is also treating our health professionals and caregivers as mere commodities when it touts the “quotas” supposedly being given by Japan for these jobs as a good thing. The reality is that these mostly women health workers and caregivers will bear the burden of overcoming formidable language, certification and even racist and patriarchal barriers. Because of its desperation for quick sources of foreign exchange, the Philippine government is placing the burden on the cheap export of skilled Filipinos. It should instead focus on creating the strong domestic economy that will create opportunities for Filipinos at home.

The Philippine government affirms its commitment to the destructive policies of neoliberal globalization. Instead of using the collapse of the WTO Doha Round talks as an opportunity to rethink its commitment to neoliberal globalization, it is giving up its sovereignty piecemeal on a country-by-country basis through bilateral and regional economic agreements.

Japan, on the other hand, makes further headway in consolidating Southeast Asia as a source of cheap agricultural, mineral and other raw materials for Japan as well as a captive market for Japanese industrial goods. Aside from the Philippines, Japan has already signed or is negotiating FTAs with Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei and Vietnam. #

Medical workers may be losers in FTA

2006-09-09T14:50:00.000+08:00

Japan Times
Medical workers may be losers in FTA
By Glenn Omanio
9 September 2006

MANILA (Kyodo) Philippine officials may be upbeat about finalizing the bilateral free-trade agreement with Japan this weekend, but there is some concern that the country’s medical workers will be the losers in the deal.

The FTA will mean freer movement of people between the two countries, something the Philippines welcomes. Professionals, including doctors and nurses, are eager to get high-paying jobs in wealthy countries.

Japan is keen to follow other rich countries by having foreign nurses fill the shortage at home and has opened its labor market to Filipino nurses and caregivers.

But Filipinos may be in for a big disappointment as Japan has put in the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement that it will only accept caregivers who are college graduates, and nurses who are fluent in Japanese and can pass its nursing license examination — in Japanese.

Analysts say Japan’s position of only giving visas to health workers who can speak Japanese could backfire as the rising demand for health workers in wealthy nations, also facing rapidly aging populations and falling fertility rates, will mean stiff competition to get workers from poorer countries.

The agreement does not specify the number of nurses Japan will accept, but media reports said that Tokyo will set an initial cap of 500 nurses per year and will increase the number depending on the need.

"Japan seemingly wants to preserve the homogeneity of its people. In a very global world, it is an exception. Japan should learn from other countries on their openness in accepting other people," said Federico Macaranas, head of the Manila-based Asian Institute of Management Policy Center.

Macaranas said that while fluency in the local language is important for nurses to perform their duties, Japan could relax this requirement to allowing non-Japanese speakers to serve English-speaking Japanese people.

He said many English speakers in Japan are wealthy and can afford to hire private nurses and caregivers.
Marilyn Yap, president of the Philippine Nurses Association, said the language requirement is harsh and decreases the chances of Filipino nurses passing the national exam.

"In order for you to take the Japanese board exam, you have to master the language. It takes time. That’s our concern," Yap said.

An indication of just how hard a Japanese exam would be for Filipino nurses is the the pass rate for information technology workers, who also must take a certification exam. A average of 5 percent of Filipino applicants have passed the exam since it was offered in 2002.

In an test program in the mid-1990s, only one of 13 Filipino nurses finished the two-year Japanese language program and passed the national nursing exam.

Yap said Japan will have to compete with other countries in attracting Filipino nurses and caregivers, adding Japan should offer higher salaries and better nonmonetary packages to compensate for the language requirements.

Given the same salary and work benefits, Filipino nurses, most who speak English fluently, would rather choose English-speaking countries such as the United States or Britain over Japan because of the language barrier.

"It remains to be seen if Filipino nurses will be accepting offers to work in Japan. I am reluctant," Yap of the nurses association said. "If there are any other options easier, I’d take that."

Every year, as many as 8,000 Filipino nurses leave for Saudi Arabia, continental Europe and the United States, according to Philippine labor statistics.

The United States remains the favorite destination. Nurses can bring their families and they earn as much as
$4,000 a month compared to the $ 200 they get at home, studies show.

The World Health Organization estimates that by 2008, Britain will need 25,000 doctors and 250,000 nurses while the United States will need around 1 million nurses in the next decade to meet the projected shortfall.

Migrant Women Are Big Money Senders To Home Country : UN

2006-09-07T17:13:00.000+08:00

http://www.antara.co.id/en/seenws/?id=19532

New York (ANTARA News) - Women constitute half of the estimated 190million international migrants worldwide and are responsible for the largest amount of remittances, the UN Population Fund said Wednesday. Women migrants sent home a total of 232 billion dollars in 2005, of which 167 billion dollars went to developing countries.

Remittances and foreign direct investments are the main sources of economic development in many developing countries.

In an annual report, A Passage to Hope: Women and International Migration, the UN population agency said that remittances could be even higher than reported because migrants often use informal channels. The report focused on the roles of migrant women and their economic impacts on their home countries.

It said that the international community only recently has begun to grasp how much migrant women contribute to the world economy and the social well-being of the population in their home countries.

"Women are migrating and will continue to do so," the report said as reported by DPA."Although women and youth have always made up a considerable proportion of international migrants, their contributions have largely gone unnoticed. Their voices must be heard.

"The report noted that migrants' total remittances were larger than the official development assistance provided by governments, which have been urged to set aside 7 per cent of their gross national products (GNPs) to help poor countries. Only the Nordic countries have met that target.

Of the 1 billion dollars Sri Lanka received in remittances in 1999, more than 62 per cent came from women migrants, the report said. The Philippines annually receives 6 billion dollars in remittances, one-third from women migrants.

Bangladeshi women working in Middle Eastern countries sent home 72 per cent of total remittances in their country, of which 52 per cent were earmarked for families' daily needs, health care and education. Brain drain But international migration has resulted in a brain drain for many countries.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said that the migration of women includes many nurses and physicians, depriving home countries of badly needed medical personnel.

Developed countries, where the ageing population requires more medical personnel, benefit from this migration. WHO set a minimum ratio of 100 nurses per 100,000 residents in all countries. Some poor countries have only 10 nurses per 100,000 inhabitants. By contrast, Finland and Norway each have 2,000 nurses per 100,000 inhabitants.

While developing countries have tried to stop the flow of skilled woman migrants, the demands for nurses and doctors has continued to grow in wealthy countries. WHO said that by 2008 Britain would need 25,000 more doctors and 250,000 more nurses than in 1997.

The US has projected the need for an additional 1 million nurses by 2020 because of the ageing population. Canada and Australia projected deficits of 78,000 nurses and 40,000 nurses, respectively, in the next four to five years. "This is partially owing to demographic ageing brought on by lower fertility rates and longer life expectancies in industrialized countries," the report said. (*)

Immigrants to Britain should meet wage target: think tank

2006-08-29T11:00:00.000+08:00

Agence France-Presse
Last updated 09:35am (Mla time) 08/29/2006
http://business.inq7.net/money/breakingnews/view_article.php?article_id=17781

LONDON -- Britain should set an income target for immigrants and those who do not meet it should not be allowed to settle in the country, a think tank was set to propose Tuesday.

The Daily Telegraph reported that Migrationwatch would propose that migrants with an income of less than 27,000 pounds (51,200 dollars, 40,000 euros) a year not be allowed to permanently settle in Britain.

That income figure, which only one in five migrants reach, is the level at which a person begins making positive contributions whether measured by taxes paid or by contribution to gross domestic product, the think tank argues. Individuals with lower incomes put pressure on existing infrastructure.

The average wage in Britain last year was 28,210 pounds according to government statistics.

While low-income workers should still be allowed into Britain to work, Migrationwatch says they should not be allowed to settle permanently.

Immigration has returned to the forefront of public debate in Britain in recent weeks after the government released figures showing more than 427,000 people from the eight new eastern European EU member states have come to work in Britain since the bloc's enlargement in May 2004.

Those figures exclude self-employed workers, a category believed to cover many eastern Europeans in the building trade. Once those are also included, the overall number is closer to 600,000 by some accounts.

OWWA Fund Juggling Confirmed by COA

2006-08-09T15:41:00.000+08:00

Funds transferred to Smokey Mountain and PhilHealth, records show
OWWA fund juggling confirmed by CoA
By Angie M. Rosales
08/08/2006
http://www.tribune.net.ph/headlines/20060808hed1.html

Charges of alleged juggling of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) funds held in trust by Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) dating back to the Ramos administration, was established yesterday by Senate investigators with two sectors, the Commission on Audit (CoA) and a non-government organization claiming the same findings, based on documents culled by the two agencies.

At least half a billion pesos was shown to have been illegally used when OWWA was made to engage in the Smokey Mountain housing development project while another P500 million or exactly P530 million of its funds was transferred to PhilHealth amid objections by some board members representing land- and sea-based migrant workers.

This piece of information corroborates an earlier expose made by Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago during a privilege speech a few years ago concerning a project undertaken by R-II Builders Inc. of businessman Reghis Romero.

Worth of the said project, to date, has already ballooned to at least P1 billion and the government, “technically” is yet to recoup both investments and interest earnings although the principal amount had been “reimbursed” to OWWA by another government agency, the Home Insurance Guarantee Corp. (HIGC).
The HIGC stood as the “guarantor” to the amount OWWA “loaned” to enable R-2 Builders to undertake the Smokey Mountain Development and Reclamation Project, in joint joint venture with the National Housing Authority as the land owner.

Alongside this development, Senate probers learned there is “available” P7.1 billion OWWA funds currently deposited in Land Bank of the Philippines (Landbank), P3.2 billion, in Development Bank of the Philippines (DBP) billion and P703 million in various banks.

Senators sitting as members in the panel chaired by Sen. Jinggoy Estrada, upon hearing the testimonies given by Connie Regalado of Migrante International, and attested by OWWA resident auditor Gemiliano Maloles, were at a loss on why there is a squabble over the availability of funds needed for the repatriation of OFWS stranded in Lebanon.

“This investigation occurred because during the height of the Lebanon crisis , the (Philippine) embassy (in Beirut) complained that there are no funds available…the rumors again on this issue that there’s no money came about recently and then here it shows that there is over P7 billion in funds. So OWWA has funds. Then why is it (it is) so parsimonious in giving funds?” asked Sen. Joker Arroyo.

Senators were told by Maloles that government actually can dip its fingers into these funds, if need be, but it would get a lesser amount because the account will be rendered pre-terminated.

“If they have such funds, why is Malacanang asking for a supplementary budget (for workers’ evacuation)?” Estrada commented before reporters during a briefing that proceeded after the hearing.

Senators were also told that the reported P530 million transferred to Philhealth, alleged to have been made without any consultation with migrant workers as provided by OWWA charter and existing laws, are yet to be “replenished” by the government, according to Rosemarie Trajano of Kanlungan Center, an NGO working for OFWs’ welfare.

Based on the presentation by Maloles, OWWA’s annual revenues, the latest of which was for the year 2005, totaled P1.3 billion coming from fees and taxes received from OFWs alone, excluding those from so-called investments and interests income while expenses incurred included benefits paid to migrant workers and overhead operations amounted to P673 million last year.

More or less, OWWA had P650 million net collections based on fees and returned interest income of P462 million last year.

Regalado claimed before senators that based on records they collated, a total of P8 billion to include that with Philhealth and the Smokey Mountain project were poured by the government to other agencies over the years.

It was Regalado who told senators the transfer of funds to Philhealth was not approved by OFWs’ representatives sitting in the OWWA board of trustees.

“In the P530 million OWWA medicare funds transferred to Philhealth, the first move was done in Feb. 2, 2004, OWWA board resolution 005 approving the transfer of said amount and based on the statement of OWWA, the transfer was made in 2005.

She then said that after President Arroyo signed EO 182 for the transfer of the fund, in Feb. 2, 2004, the OWWA board of trustees approved resolution No. 005 for the transfer of the P530 million.

She said after the amendment was sone, stated that the actual transfer wasmade in March 2005….they have the report, the OWWA. It was submitted to the House committee on overseas workers’ affairs during a hearing last March 29.

“It was, the OWWA Medicare funds, collected from each OFW of P900 per year…actually it accumulated up to P4 billion and P530 was transferred to Philhealth..the Medicare program of OFWs is now handled by Philhealth.

She said this was an illegal transfer because the money of OWWA is a trust fund and it is owned by the migrant workers and the transfer was done without proper consultations from the migrant workers themselves.
“We were raising the issue that before any transfer of funds or before the OWWA board of trustees should decide where the money should be spent, especially in matters like the Medicare funds, there should be a consultation with migrant workers but it was not really done.”

She saud she was in HongKong in 2003 when the former president of Philhealth Francisco Duque appeared in an OFWs’ forum in the Philippine consulate. He said it was a consultation but in reality it was not because he was already selling Philhealth (cards) to OFWs and during that time Mrs. Arroyo signed EO 182 on the transfer of funds. She charged rgar Duque was actually marketing it, explaining the benefits from income. It was not a consultation. It was in July 2003. I was still the chairperson of United Filipinos in Hong Kong….

“The proposed transfer of OWWA funds was actually in relation to the plan of President Arroyo to run in 2004 presidential elections,” she said.

As to the Smokey Mountain project, an initial investment was made in Feb. 6, 1995 of P93.1 million with a
face value of P100 million on the same month, she said citing documents from OWWA.

“On Feb. 9, 1995, the OWWA secretariat headed by then OWWA chief, followed by administrator Wilhelm Soriano who assumed office in may 23, 1005, facilitated the investment of P459.4 million worth of Smokey Mountain project participation certificates with a face value of P500 million.

“From October 1996 to the maturity value of the initial investment as of Oct. 2000 was P905.9 million or a 92 percent increase in five years.

“But based on CoA annual audit report on the OWWA for the year ending Dec. 2005, it was found out that the OWWA’s investment in the Smokey Mountain project participation certificate now has a face value of P664 million was made in violation of DoF circular 194-8 are not within the maturity date.

“And I have here a copy of the summary of the investment portfolio, it’s not only P664 million, in 2000 it says that from the OWWA main fund that comes from membership fee collection, there is a total of P664 million investment and from the Medicare fund of P171 million or a total of P835 million,” she said.

Regalado further testified that such undertaking was illegal, “because a private firm cannot own or acquire a land for public domain”, citing the ruling rendered by the CoA.

The matter, when pursued by Sen. Sergio Osmena III, yielded similar claims from Maloles who explained before senators that the P500 million investment or principal amount, technically speaking, has yet to be recovered by the government since another government office, the HGIC “refunded” the amount to OWWA.

The P500 million income from 8.5 percent annual interests has not yet been given, Maloles said.

“That’s another scam because the Filipino people paid who for it. the HIGC is another government corporation…we know they’re the guarantor but obviously there’s a scam there because it’s operating a port and yet they did not pay the interest so they used the money of the workers,” said Osmena.
Not even the principal has been returned, Maloles said.

“So OWWA invested and it’s in the nature of a loan…(with 8.5% interest)…and so R-2 Builders neither paid principal nor interest on that P500M,” Osmena said.

OWWA invested P500 million, of this, it is supposed to have earned another P500 million in interests over the years, roughly about P1 billion. Of the P1 billion, P500 million was paid back to OWWA by HIGC…representing the principal,” said Maloles.

“So R-2 still owes P500 million in accumulated interests,” the senator said.

“Technically sir it is already the HIGC that is assuming…this was paid in tranches, it’s not a one-time payment,” Maloles clarified.

Asked by Osmena to there were any earnings OWWA got from the said project, Soriano who is currently commissioner of the Human Rights Commission (CHR), explained that there was none because they merely assumed the role of being a participant in the project.

OFW remittances crucial, but ‘tend to spoil the government’

2006-08-09T11:40:00.000+08:00

E-balita
2 August 2006

Remittances of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) help strengthen the Philippine economy, but they also have the potential to hurt the country’s poorer families, an economist said.

OFW remittances have made the government lax in working for the improvement of the domestic economy and will eventually make the economy sink with the decline in exports, resulting in loss of jobs, he added.

Dr. Ernesto Pernia of the School of Economics of the University of the Philippines Diliman raised these points in his talk on the “Diaspora, Remittances and Poverty in RP’s Regions.”

The Department of Economics and the Carolinian Economics Society of the University of San Carlos in Cebu City organized the talks last Friday night.

“Remittances tend to spoil the government,” he said, adding that the deployment of OFWs should only be temporary. Economic policies must be formulated to generate more local employment.

“The phenomenon should be transitory to allow the government to do its homework in making the economy stronger,” Pernia said.

The government’s complacency is one of the “moral hazard effects” of the increase in OFWs, aside from raising the number of broken Filipino families.

Although remittances have contributed to the decline in poverty incidence and improved the economy through higher gross domestic product (GDP), consumer spending and employment opportunities, they also have created an imbalance in the regions.

In a study on OFW contributions from 1995 to 2004, Pernia revealed that Southern Tagalog, the National Capital Region and Central Luzon, where about half of OFWs come from, also got 50 percent of the OFW remittances during the period.

Since working abroad and migration require money, poor regions have fewer workers leaving for jobs abroad.
However, the trend is now changing. Pernia noted that in 2004, the Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao, one of the poorest in the country, got 1.4 percent more in OFW remittances than the rest of the country.

This may indicate that OFWs from poorer regions had a “higher altruism” toward their more deprived families, Pernia noted. This could also mean they are simply remitting more.

Central Visayas, which ranked first in 1995 with a 1.6 percent higher annual average remittance, is now third.
However, he believes other factors, such as the increase in the deployment of highly skilled workers who earn more, could have contributed to this.

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas expects OFW remittances to rise 10 percent this year, from a record $10.7 billion in 2005.

From January to May this year, remittances coursed through banks reached $4.85 billion, up 14.8 percent from the same months last year.

The bulk of remittances continues to come from the US, Saudi Arabia, Italy, United Kingdom, Japan, Hong Kong and United Arab Emirates.

There are over eight million Filipinos working abroad.

In a comparative study on the 15 regions in 1994, 1997, 2000 and 2003, Pernia noted that while the increase in remittances meant higher spending for 20 percent of the country’s poorest families, it also meant a higher purchasing power of the higher income groups.

“The richer households are benefiting more than the poorer households. There is an increasing income inequality. In time, it will worsen,” Pernia said.

However, while the migration of more OFWs is ongoing, Pernia recommended that the government should protect OFWs from unscrupulous recruiters, assist them in signing “fair and decent” employment contracts and lower the cost of remitting their income.

He also urged USC’s faculty to educate good leaders.

“I think what’s going to help us are good leaders,” he told them.

“The Filipinos have been letdown so many times from President Ferdinand Marcos to President Arroyo,” he added. By Charmaine Y. Rodriguez

IOM to evacuate 450 filipinos from Beirut

2006-08-09T11:36:00.000+08:00

International Office of Migration (IOM) is to airlift some 450 Filipino workers from war-torn Beirut, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) said Wednesday.

The Filipinos are to be taken by bus across the Syrian border to Damascus, where they will board an aircraft for Manila, the DFA said.

The Filipinos are expected to arrive in Damascus in two batches on Saturday and Sunday. They will board the chartered flight for their journey back home next Monday.

The 450 Filipinos are currently huddled in a crowded evacuation center run by the Catholic church amid fierce Israeli raids targeting the militant group Hezbollah.

"All associated costs will be covered by the IOM. Individuals will also be provided with temporary accommodation at the IOM shelter in Syria," the DFA quoted Vincent Houver of IOM Beirut as saying.

Contingency plans are also being prepared for Filipinos in northern Israel, parts of which have been targeted by Hezbollah missile fire. Some 30,000 Filipinos work in Lebanon, with roughly the same number working in Israel.

President Arroyo had earlier issued an appeal to the international community for help with the repatriation of Filipinos in the conflict zone.

The IOM, an inter-governmental organization, seeks to provide humanitarian assistance to migrants in need.
Some 37 Filipino evacuees from Beirut arrived in Manila from Damascus Wednesday.

DFA spokesman Gilbert Asuque and Angelo Jimenez, Overseas Workers' Welfare Administration Deputy Administrator, met the evacuees at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport Terminal 1 before noon.

Asuque said another batch of 119 evacuees will arrive Wednesday night at NAIA Terminal 2 from Hong Kong.

Gov't urged to allow more foreign workers

2006-07-03T14:39:00.000+08:00

2006/7/2The China Post staff
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/detail.asp?ID=85144&GRP=B&onNews=

The government should ease restrictions on the import of foreign unskilled laborers and high-level managerial personnel to ease the shortage of both types of labor in Taiwan, a local business leaders urged yesterday.

Gary Wang, chairman of the General Chamber of Commerce of the Republic of China, issued the call during a panel meeting of the national economic conference on sustainable growth held by the Executive Yuan.
Wang suggested that the government amend its policies and regulations to facilitate entry of more unskilled workers and white-collar management professionals from abroad to meet domestic demand.

Wang said that basic monthly wage for foreign unskilled laborers should be de-pegged from those granted to local laborers and that the government should provide more attractive incentives to lure talented foreign students to study and work in Taiwan. In addition, the government should also ease current rules on immigrants with investment projects, he proposed.

According to estimates made by the Cabinet-level Council of Labor Affairs (CLA), Taiwan will need an extra 300,000 blue-collar workers and some 50,000 high-ranking managers by 2015.

CLA officials said that the government would thoroughly review its foreign labor policies, and would adjust its job training directions and offer tax incentives to encourage local enterprises to boost their on-the-job training programs, in addition to introducing suitable foreign labor.

On the same occasion, Education Minister Tu Cheng-sheng also noted that his ministry is gearing up the cooperation between high-level education schools and local industries to cultivate more professional personnel needed by the industries.

At another panel meeting, scholars were divided in their opinions concerning whether the proposed eight naphtha cracking plant and big steel plant should be built or not.

Some said Taiwan is no longer suitable for developing high-energy consumption industries, such as steel refining and petrochemical manufacturing, but some opined that the government should apply high-tech methods to solve the environmental protection issues concerning the two major projects, valued at around NT$538 billion.

In response, Economics Minister Huang Ying-san said that the two projects will be up for further discussion at the national economic conference on sustainable growth.

Pace of worldwide migration slowing -- UN report

2006-04-05T15:52:00.000+08:00

First posted 06:45am (Mla time)
April 05, 2006 Agence France-Presse
http://news.inq7.net/breaking/index.php?index=3&col=&story_id=71725

UNITED NATIONS -- The number of migrants worldwide rose by only 36 million to 191 million during the 1990-2005 period, a much slower pace than in the previous 15 years, according to a UN report released Tuesday.

The increase compares with a rise of 41 million, from a lower population base, to 175 million during the 1975-1990 period, according to the Report on World Population Monitoring, the first comprehensive global count in five years.

But the report said that migration had become increasingly important to population growth in developed countries.

The developed world, led by the United States, still takes in the larger share of the world's migrants, up to 61 percent last year, compared with 53 percent in 1990, the study showed.

The report noted that because of low fertility, net migration today accounted for 75 percent of the population growth in the developed world.

"If current trends continue, between 2010 and 2030 net migration will likely be responsible
for all the population growth in those regions," it said.

Last year 64 million migrants lived in Europe, 44.5 million in North America, 4.7 million in Australia and New Zealand and two million in Japan.

The migrant population of the developing world meanwhile has risen a mere three million since 1990, totaling 75 million last year, including 51 million in Asia, 17 million in Africa and seven million in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The report, discussed here this week at a session of the UN Commission on Population and Development, concluded that family reunification accounted for a major share of the migration flow to North America and Europe, although the share of labor migration and skilled migration also rose.

It described the net economic impact of international migration as generally positive for host countries.
"Although the presence of international migrants may have a small adverse effect on the wages of non-migrants or may raise unemployment when wages are rigid, such effects are small at the national level," it noted.

"Over the medium and long term, migration can generate employment and produce net fiscal gains," it added.
The report said that in 2004, official migrant remittances totaled 226 billion dollars, including 160 billion which went to developing countries.

Such remittances benefited the low- and middle-income families that receive them and enabled migrant households to invest in income-generating activities. They also served to ease foreign exchange constraints and cut the cost of borrowing for countries of origin.

The report warned that while the departure of large numbers of skilled personnel was hurting small developing countries, "skilled migrants who maintain ties with their countries of origin may stimulate the transfer of technology and capital."

"Countries of origin have become more proactive in encouraging the return of citizens living abroad and in maintaining ties with expatriate communities so as to harness the positive effects that migration can have on development," it said.

While the report emphasized the huge role of international migration in a developed country’s population growth, it warned that this cannot reverse general population aging and forestall overall population decline unless its volume rises substantially.

"Net migration to Europe, for instance, would have to increase fourfold to maintain constant the size of the working-age population," it said.

RP AMONG TOP 5, Migrant workers sent home $167B last year, says UN

2006-04-01T14:25:00.000+08:00

First posted 01:09am (Mla time) April 01, 2006
Agence France-Presse
Editor's Note: Published on page A1 of the April 1, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
http://news.inq7.net/nation/index.php?index=1&story_id=71252

SINGAPORE—Migrant workers in high-income countries remitted a record of more than $167 billion to their families last year, a UN agency said as it called for measures to ensure the money is used for long-term development.

In countries including Bangladesh and the Philippines, annual remittances exceed official development aid and foreign direct investments, the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (Unescap) said in its latest report released here Thursday.

If remittances sent through informal channels are counted, the figures could rise by as much as 50 percent, the UN's economic and social arm said.

As of 2004, three of the top five remittance-receiving countries in the world were located in Asia-India which received $21.3 billion, China with $21.7 billion and the Philippines with $11.6 billion, the report said.
Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka are also among the major recipients of remittances, while Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Nepal, Thailand and the Pacific island of Samoa benefit to a lesser extent.

The agency urged governments in recipient countries to cut the costs of sending money home and help the workers' families channel the funds into more productive endeavors.

Countries exporting migrant workers should also take steps to improve their skills and tighten policies to ensure they do not fall prey to unscrupulous recruitment agencies, Unescap said.

"Policy-makers need to recognize that remittances are private flows of money that need to be treated as such. Therefore, these flows should not be taxed," it said.

The money has already been taxed in the country of origin and imposing taxes will discourage workers from sending funds through the banking system, it added.

'Very high' fees

It noted that levies charged by remittance service providers "are very high," with fees for small transfers reaching as high as 10-15 percent.

"There is no doubt that more can be done to increase the volume of home remittances and to enable the recipients to use them more effectively," Unescap said.

"Additional measures should be taken to increase the access of poor migrant workers and their families to formal financial institutions."

Unescap urged banks in the workers' home countries to establish branches in host nations and allow micro-credit institutions and credit unions to transfer funds to rural households.

The agency also said governments should give the right information about job opportunities to prevent situations in which families borrow huge sums to send a worker abroad, only to discover that the earnings are not enough to recover the cost.

Major sources

In the Asia Pacific region, Australia, Hong Kong, China, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Singapore are major sources of remittances for developing countries.

For Laos and Burma, neighboring Thailand is a key sources of workers' remittances, Unescap said.
Outside the region, Canada, the United States, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are the main source of foreign workers' remittances.

An increasing number of remittance-senders are women, it noted. Agence France-Presse

More than a hundred Filipinos work illegally in South Korea

2006-03-25T00:36:00.000+08:00

First posted 07:37pm (Mla time)
Mar 24, 2006 By Veronica Uy
INQ7.net

AS MUCH as 70 percent of the 200 or so Filipino overseas performing artists who left for the booming entertainment industry in South Korea are undocumented, a labor official who requested anonymity said Friday.

They flew to Busan and Seoul via the so-called escort service illegally provided by some employees at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport in exchange for 300 dollars, the official said.

He said singers, musicians, and dancers who leave the country this way sidestep the Labor Assistance Centers of the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration at the Manila airport terminals.

A foreign affairs official confirmed the increase in the incidence of illegal recruitment since the one-year mandate of former police captain Reynaldo Jaylo's task force on illegal recruitment ended in June last year.The labor official warned Filipino workers against going to Korea without proper travel documents. He said they would be vulnerable to abuse by unscrupulous nightclub
operators, citing cases where even the passports of OFWs were confiscated.

For the past three years, OFW deployment to South Korea has been increasing steadily at an average rate of 20 percent: 7,136 in 2003, 8,392 in 2004, and 9,970 in 2005.

There are about 40,000 documented and undocumented Filipinos in South Korea.

Filipinos warned about working in Dubai on ‘visit visas’

2006-03-19T17:54:00.000+08:00

First posted 09:45am (Mla time)
Mar 19, 2006
By Jerome AningInquirer

Editor's Note: Published on page A8 of the March 19, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
http://news.inq7.net/nation/index.php?index=1&story_id=69916

DUBAI, the most progressive city in the Middle East, has been hosting an increasing number of Filipino “tourist workers,” many of whom often find themselves without jobs, or working under miserable conditions and reduced to begging, according to a top Filipino job recruiter.

The recruiter, who visited Dubai in the United Arab Emirates last week to check on the workers that his own agency had deployed to the emirate, said Filipinos who entered Dubai using “visit visas” widely advertised by travel agencies in Manila were having a difficult time finding good jobs.

To survive, many accept work for low salaries and under unfair labor conditions, said the recruiter who asked not to be named.

His findings were confirmed by Emmanuel Geslani, a consultant to several Manila-based recruitment agencies.

Geslani said the recruiter had written about the problem months ago to the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration but nothing came of it.

Considered undocumented because they did not go through the hiring process of the POEA, these workers-disguised-as-tourists are allowed to stay in Dubai for only 57 days.

Documented workers like secretaries receive 3,000 UAE dirhams (about P42,000) with free accommodations while workers with only “visit visas” are given only about 1,500 dirhams, or P21,000 pesos, without accommodations.

Those unable to find jobs within the 57-day period have to leave Dubai and fly to the tourist island of Kis in Iran to renew their visit visas or wait for a worker visa to be issued by their employer, the recruiter said.
He said many of the OFWs waiting it out in Kis had spent almost all their cash. Some had even resorted to begging from new Filipino arrivals for bed and board.

The plight of stranded OFWs in Kis was investigated by the Department of Foreign Affairs a few years ago. But the DFA has yet to make public the report of the team it sent to Iran and UAE to check on the matter.
Deployment to the UAE has been rising dramatically for the past seven years, from a low of 35,485 in 1998 to 49,164 in 2003, 68,386 in 2004 and 81,707 in 2005, because of a boom in the construction of hotels, office buildings and residences.

About 100 new hotels are expected to be constructed in Dubai by 2010, according to the source. But though this would be a boon to OFW recruitment, he said the POEA should start cracking down on those travel agencies selling “visit visas” at prices ranging from P40,000 to P100,00.

“Thousands of Filipinos have been lured by these travel agencies with their ads and many more are convinced by their friends now working there to fly to Dubai and take their chances in finding jobs,” the recruiter said.
Geslani said there were two to three local travel agencies responsible for sending out these “tourist workers.”

He earlier accused Bureau of Immigration agents based in the country’s airports of colluding with these travel agencies in allowing the tourist workers to leave.

Provision of Antiterror Law Delays Entry of Refugees

2006-03-13T20:52:00.000+08:00

By RACHEL L. SWARNS
Published: March 8, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/08/politics/08immig.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

WASHINGTON, March 7 — About 9,500 Burmese refugees scheduled to be resettled in the United States from
Thailand this year are in limbo because their indirect support for armed rebels opposed to their repressive
government has put them in technical violation of American antiterrorism law, government officials say.

The Burmese are the largest of several groups, including refugees from Cuba, Vietnam, Liberia and
Somalia, whose admission to the United States has been jeopardized by a provision in the USA Patriot Act that denies entry to anyone who has provided material support to a terrorist or armed rebel group.

The provision applies even if that support was coerced or the aims of the group in question match those of
American foreign policy.

The law broadens the definition of terrorist groups to include organizations that do not appear on the State
Department's list of designated terrorist groups, effectively barring refugees loosely linked to armed
groups that have resisted authoritarian governments like those in Cuba and Myanmar, formerly Burma.

Some of the refugees paid taxes to rebel groups that controlled their communities. Others offered food or
small sums to relatives or acquaintances in groups with ties to rebels or were forced to provide such
support, refugee resettlement officials said.

Officials in the Homeland Security and State Departments have been working for several months to
define guidelines for a waiver to the statute that would allow the resettlement of the refugees, who are
fleeing religious, ethnic and political persecution, and refugee officials said they hope for a resolution
soon.

But with thousands of families stranded in refugee camps overseas, officials from the United Nations and
Republicans and Democrats in Congress have begun warning in recent weeks that the law is leaving
refugees increasingly at risk.

The law has already delayed the resettlement of 146 Cubans who offered support to armed opponents of Fidel
Castro in the 1960's; 200 Burmese refugees housed in Malaysia; 30 Hmong refugees in Thailand; 11 Vietnamese Montagnard refugees in Cambodia; and a small number of Liberians and Somalis, United Nations statistics show.

The United Nations is still awaiting a formal decision on the 9,500 Burmese refugees in Thailand.
United Nations officials and members of Congress said the refugees posed no known security risks to the
United States. By tagging them as having links to terrorists, the United Nations says, the Bush administration will make it difficult to find other countries willing to accept them.

It may also lead countries providing the refugees with temporary shelter to reconsider their welcome.
The delay in issuing a waiver to the statute has led the United Nations to suspend the American
resettlement of hundreds of Colombian refugees, many of whom were forced to make payments to rebel forces, and of 1,300 Burmese refugees housed in Malaysia, who made donations to ethnic groups linked to armed opponents of the Burmese government.

It has also prevented some 500 asylum seekers in the United States from being granted permanent refuge
here. Many of those cases are being appealed.

"Until this issue is resolved, many deserving refugees and applicants for asylum fleeing religious, ethnic or
other forms of persecution will be unfairly denied or postponed from achieving safe haven," Representatives
Christopher H. Smith, Republican of New Jersey, and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Republican of Florida, said last
week in a letter to the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff.

The antiterrorism law, which was passed in 2001 and which Congress reauthorized on Tuesday, has been
increasingly applied to refugees in the past two years. So has the Real ID Act, which further broadened
the definition of terrorist groups when it was enacted last year.

"That procedure should ensure that terrorists do not abuse refugee status or the asylum laws of the United
States," Mr. Smith and Ms. Ros-Lehtinen wrote.

"However, the procedure should also properly weigh situations in which individuals are acting under
duress or are legitimately resisting illegitimate and tyrannical regimes."

Senators Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, both Democrats, wrote a similar letter last week.

Bill Strassberger, a spokesman for the Homeland Security Department, said his agency was working with
the Departments of State and Justice to resolve the problem.

"Part of the consternation over this issue is that this process is taking some time," Mr. Strassberger
said. "The process is made difficult because of the need to balance national security with our deep
commitment to assisting refugees and providing a safe refuge."

Those affected by the law include a Colombian woman forced by rebels to hand over livestock. The rebels
killed her husband and raped her before she escaped the country. Because her forced support for the rebels
would bar her from admission to the United States, the United Nations settled her in another country.
Researchers from the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, who traveled to Thailand and Malaysia,
interviewed scores of additional refugees. Two of them — one who gave a hat to a cousin who belonged to an
opposition group and another who was taxed a basket of rice annually by the group — are among the Burmese who still hope to find refuge in the United States.

Lawyers at the Homeland Security Department have also argued that the laws now bar the United States from
admitting Afghan refugees who supported the Northern Alliance in its battle against the Taliban or South
Africans who supported the African National Congress when it was deemed a terrorist group.

The lawyers made that case in January as they tried to persuade a panel of judges to deny asylum to a Burmese woman who had donated money to an opposition group.

The woman, a Christian who has been detained in Texas since she entered this country in 2004, said she had
been persecuted in Myanmar for her religious beliefs and her ethnicity.

The woman, who is being represented by Edward Neufville and who will not allow her name to be used
because her case is pending, remains in detention, awaiting the judges' decision.

"I am still hoping," she said in a telephone interview on Friday.

Singapore rejects calls to grant maids mandatory rest days

2006-03-13T20:33:00.000+08:00

First posted 09:24pm (Mla time) Mar 09, 2006
Associated Press, Agence France-Presse

(UPDATE) SINGAPORE -- Singapore's manpower ministry rejected calls to make rest days for maids mandatory, arguing it would inconvenience families with special needs, The Straits Times newspaper reported Thursday.

"Some households have elderly or infirm members with special needs who require constant attention and may find it difficult to release the domestic worker for a prescribed period every week," said Hawazi Daipi, senior parliamentary secretary for manpower, in Parliament on Wednesday.

Instead, Hawazi said, the government wanted consumer watchdog bodies and maid employment agencies to carry out standard employment contracts that stipulate monthly or weekly rest days.

The ministry's refusal to legislate days off for maids came as a disappointment to activists who have been calling for domestic workers to be protected under the city-state's Employment Act, which states how many days rest an employee is entitled to each week, the newspaper said.

US-based Human Rights Watch said in a report in December that many foreign maids in Singapore endure harsh working conditions such as physical and verbal aggression, threats, restrictions on movement, long work-hours and lack of rest days as well as severe abuse such as physical and sexual violence, abuse by agents, exorbitant debt payments, and aren't protected adequately by labor laws.

Singapore said the report was grossly exaggerated. The government said foreign domestic workers receive "full protection" under the law, and employers who abuse or exploit maids can face fines of up to five thousand Singapore dollars (3,066 US dollars) and jail terms of up to six months.

Daipi said the Ministry of Manpower agrees that all workers should receive adequate rest, and employers who do not provide it can be punished.

The Manpower Ministry also said employers are required to provide meals, ensure work safety, proper housing and prompt salary payment. It stressed the government does not tolerate any abuse or exploitation, and said the domestics choose to work in Singapore because conditions are better than in their homelands.
"As part of the work permit conditions, employers are held responsible for the well-being of their foreign domestic workers, including the provision of adequate rest," he said.

One Filipina maid, who asked to be identified only as Chona, told Agence France-Presse earlier this year that the contract she signed with an employment agency in Manila promised a salary of 350 Singapore dollars (215 US dollars) and at least two days off every month.

But on arrival in Singapore, the agency here told her the salary would be 320 dollars with no days off -- for two years.

About 150,000 maids, mostly from Indonesia and the Philippines, are employed in Singapore, a wealthy Southeast Asian city-state.

Their counterparts in Hong Kong, where an even larger number of maids work, are granted one day off every week and a day off on public holidays.

Filipinos in the USA and Around the World: Whence and Whither?

2006-03-12T21:39:00.000+08:00

FILIPINOS IN THE U.S.A. AND AROUND THE WORLD: WHENCE AND WHITHER?
by E. San Juan, Jr. Sunday, Mar. 05, 2006 at 7:46 PM

About ten million Filipinos are now scattered in the U.S. and around the world, chiefly as exploited migrant labor. Meanwhile, 85 million Filipinos--with the exception of a tiny privileged minority--are sufffering and resisting the current repressive regime in a rapidly deteriorating neocolonized social order.

The Philippines has one of the most durable and vibrant revolutionary traditions in the whole world--the first Asian people to revolt against Western colonialism. 4.1 million Filipinos died opposing U.S. domination in the Filipino-American War at the turn of the last century.

Today Filipinos are engaged in a popular democratic revolutionary process against U.S. imperialism and its local agents. Can overseas Filipinos contribute to the radical transformation of a world afflicted by the atrocities and terrors of global capitalism?

OVERSEAS FILIPINOS DISPLACED, CROSSING OVER, MOVING ON: RETURNING FROM THE DIASPORA, REDISCOVERING THE HOMELAND *

…my adored land, region of the sun caressed, Pearl of the Orient Sea, our Eden lost…
--JOSE RIZAL, “Mi Ultimo Adios”

--by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

I am delighted to join the alumni of the Philippine Studies Program at this time when so many events here and in the Philippines—disasters, crises, emergencies--are forcing us to think what we should do to advance social justice and equality, to make another world possible, a better world if possible. Our diverse responses will decide the direction of our lives and perhaps the future of our community.

It confirms my belief that experience and social practice, not mere ideas, can precipitate change. But of course, without thought and critical reflection, we will surely leave ourselves open to the encroachment of the corporate media—FOX, DisneyWorld, MTV, the infinite glamour of images, shopping malls, commodity fetishism all around—until we have become robotized consumers of the globalized transnational market.

In the spirit of collaborative exchange, I offer the following comments to provoke thought and critical reflection. What’s the end in view? To make a better world if possible.

I. In October 1997, I was invited to speak at the FIND (Filipino InterCollegiate Networking Dialogue) at SUNY Binghamton; the theme of the two-days conference was: “Re-examining the Filipino Diaspora.” Many students I met in passing were seriously disturbed by the image of Filipinos around the world shown as “domestics” and “servants,” if not mail-order brides, prostitutes, etc. But, on the whole, the more than a thousand delegates were more seriously engaged in exploring how to achieve “success,” or “agency” in the trendy postmodernist lexicon. They were saturated with readings about the excess or “spectral presences” of Overseas Filipinos and the “shamelessness” of the balikbayans.

No wonder, the FIND Conference could not “find” a feasible direction for common action, with the Fil-Ams generally conditioned still by the decades-long neoconservative indoctrination of the Reagan and Bush regimes. This generation of Fil-Ams, all born after the end of the Vietnam War, differ from the generation I was acquainted with. They were politicized in the mid-sixties and seventies, learning mass politics in the activities of the anti-martial law organizations, the Union of Democratic Filipinos (KDP), and other inter-ethnic coalitions.

They supported the Manongs (such as Philip Vera Cruz) at the forefront of the farm workers’ union struggles in California and the ILWU struggles in Seattle, Hawaii, and elsewhere. While teaching in California and Connecticut, I was politicized by the Civil Rights struggles in the late Sixties and early Seventies, as well as the national-democratic struggle in the Philippines, together with these young Fil-Ams who discovered Bulosan and Bonifacio, who visited the Philippines on their own or in small groups to affiliate with the Kabataang Makabayan and other progressive sectors during the First Quarter Storm, before the declaration of martial law and after.

During the long night of the U.S.-Marcos dictatorship, a generation of Filipino Americans matured, found or lost themselves after the 1986 February Revolution. The resurgence of neoconservatism beginning with the Reagan administration in 1980, the decline of national-liberation struggles in Latin and Central America, up to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, however, produced a demoralizing effect which exacerbated the internal divisions in the organizations of Filipino-Americans and resulted in their dismantling. We no longer have the “Manongs” as examples for young Fil-Ams to learn from. In fact, few young Fil-Ams now read Bulosan’s writings, much less the biography of Ka Philip Vera Cruz. We have “model minority” Filipinos like General Taguba, the White House cook, Lea Salonga, celebrities in TV and other media casinos, etc. What else is new? You belong to a new generation in which the ideal of becoming the model “multicultural American,” while a ruse for suppressing critical impulses, seems to have become obligatory. It has effectively sublimated any claim for collective recognition of qualities other than the acquisitive or possessive. “Identity politics” in the sense of ethnic pride, etc. has been easily coopted by Establishment charity. But given the economic difficulties faced by the post-1965 immigrants, and the refurbished ethos of “white supremacy,” Filipinos cannot so easily follow the path of the Japanese, Korean, Indian or Taiwanese technocrats, for one simple reason: the Philippines, our country of origin, remains a subordinated, dependent, neocolonized society, technologically backward (in comparison with Japan, Taiwan, China, Singapore, Malaysia or Thailand), even culturally incoherent and certainly politically disintegrated. It is worse now because the Marcos period severely retarded the country’s development, set us back many decades from the time when we were the leading industrializing country in Asia next to Japan. Today the Philippines has one of the lowest per capita income in the region, over 75% of Filipinos are desperately impoverished. Now the largest Asian exporter of cheap labor, the Philippines relies on the remittance of more than 9 million Overseas Contract Workers, precariously dependent on the international labor market so vulnerable to crises, wars, currency fluctuations, and other unpredictable contingencies. The entire Filipino people and its territorial home have become collectively hostaged to an inherently unstable global capitalist economy driven to profit accumulation, heedless of their dignity, health, or survival. What distinguishes your generation and the one before you is, I think, the fact of the disappearance of a radical socialist alternative now being addressed by the anti-globalization movement. The welfare state is no more. The end-of-the-century milieu was characterized by the reign of cynical neoconservatism (with strong Anglo fundamentalist contempt of other cultures) which has recently been challenged by the anti-globalization movement and jolted by the post-9/11 attack from Islamic fundamentalist extremists. One might ask: How do you situate yourself as young Filipino-Americans (or, if you prefer, Filipinos based in the U.S.) in this current conjuncture? For those fired up by your visit and eager to contribute to transforming the social order in the Philippines by trying to change traditional practices and institutions, the urgent question is: Where are you coming from? What is your competence and capability? Understandably you feel compelled to intervene, tell folks what to do, how to do it, thereby enacting the role of the superior civilized taskmaster, a latter-day “Thomasite,” who once accompanied U.S. troops in the pacification campaigns. But there’s already an entire corps of U.S.-educated cadres of teachers and technocrats already doing that back home, reproducing their ilk everyday. To be sure, the condition of chronic poverty, corruption, daily practices of social injustice and inequality should properly be grasped as systemic effects. They are symptoms of the decay of political and economic structures accumulated in the long history of colonialism and neocolonialism, something that cannot be done away with overnight. And since these are also processes—the process of the comprador elite doing everything to maintain the iniquitous order (with U.S. support), and the masses struggling against everyday situations of exploitation and oppression—groups, not individuals, are the actors and protagonists involved, fighting for what are long-range stakes in the fierce class war. We need to take our bearings by trying to achieve a total, in-depth picture of these complex processes, the contradictions we need to take into account, the realities and possibilities for change, in the light of local and international political alignments. But in this task, we will not find any constructive help from the academic experts. Let me give you an example why. In Prof. Yen Le Espiritu’s recent book, Home Bound, we find this Vietnamese scholar inspired by three Fil-Am women who recently joined the Integrate-Exposure Program of the League of Filipino Students in Los Angeles. Upon their return, one felt “proud to be a Pinay.” They all rediscovered their “motherland” and their ethnic identity. They felt privileged in having participated in transnationalist border-crossing, which Espiritu claims to be “transgressive” in itself. It is as though frequent travels, remittances, and visits to the Philippines, accompanied with conspicuous balikbayan boxes now conceived as “symbolic” capital—the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is called in to lend theoretical finesse to simple acts of coping and routine survival tactics—already served as “acts of resistance” that successfully trounced he disciplinary normative regime of U.S. capital. In effect, balikbayan packages undermined the localizing regime of the U.S. Homeland Security State. Amazing! Fantastic! Now, please don’t mistake me as indulging in personality bashing. I am interested primarily in ideological mystification and knowledge-production, or error-production. I am not the only one to suspect how this academic metaphysics of imagining resistance to racial and gendered subjugation, influenced by fashionable cult-figures such as Foucault, Derrida, Negri, and a whole slew off scholastic libertarians and anarchists in Europe and North America, has produced all kinds of wrong-headed wish-fulfillment. It has led to the temporary marginalization of the more radical critique provided by historical materialism, by critical Marxism. Lesson One: Study Marxism and apply it to the study of U.S. history, its evolution as a class society, as a political system based on the division of its inhabitants into social classes. Up to now, Cold War propaganda continues to caricature Marxist critical analysis as economic determinist, sexist, Eurocentric, not sensitive to personal needs, etc. Consequently, in the last three decades, the question of identity has been separated from its socio-economic and historical contexts, becoming more a question of individual psychology, sexual- affective relations, a New-Age concern with the body or matter as such. This has led to the point where any account of Philippine-American relations becomes an instance of negotiation, a power-game where colonizer and colonized are positioned on a level playing field, veritably equal combatants. Hence Stanley Karnow (author of the best-selling In Our Image) and other American experts on Filipino tutelage can diagnose Filipino backwardness as caused by the natives’ own folly, recalcitrance, ineptitude, and so on. For her part, Espiritu believes that by postulating an alleged “multiple subject position”of the immigrant, she has thereby disrupted the U.S. state’s strategy of differential inclusion. By presuming that Filipino subjectivity acquires self-making power or agency through travel, border crossing, consumption habits, re-inventing traditional customs, etc., it has already overcome white nativistic racism, class subordination, and homogenizing imperialism. One may ask: Isn’t this belief precisely what the whole system of neoliberal pluralism has programmed everyone into believing—namely, that we are free to do whatever we want so long as it does not subvert consumerist individualism, or white supremacist standards? You cannot talk about agency, or meaningful subjectivity, of a racialized group (such as Filipinos, who—I might emphasize--are not just an ethnic group like Italian Americans, Swedish Americans, etc.) in a system pervaded by class inequality, alienation in workplace and neighborhoods, and historic exclusions. It is silly to denounce white supremacy and at the same time ascribe to Filipinos such wonderful virtues as disruptive border-crossers, especially now when we have witnessed hundreds of Filipinos summarily deported after 9/11 in humiliating conditions. We have seen thousands of Filipino airport workers laid off, Filipino WWII veterans still neglected and Filipinos racially profiled owing to the stigmatization of the Philippines as home to terrorist groups like the Abu Sayyaf, the New People’s Army, and so on. Ironically, this is how Filipinos are “recognized” today, despite the publicity in Filipinas magazine and other self-serving media. “Living their lives across borders”—to quote Espiritu--does not automatically render the Filipino a transgressor, a transnationalist rebel against the white-supremacist order, despite inventing her own ethnic traditions of difference. We will, as usually, only be celebrated as charming icons or spectacles, exotic curiosities for global circulation and consumption. But what’s crucially misguided is a fundamental premise informing Espiritu’s and other studies, and this is what I want to underscore here. They assume that the Filipino nation or nation-state is truly sovereign, that Filipinos have sufficiently acquired a sense of critical wisdom and autonomy enough to understand and outgrow the crippling legacies of colonialism and white supremacy, so that we are fully responsible for our actions. The whole society is still profoundly neocolonized, the large majority still trammeled by subaltern attitudes and dispositions. (Recent opinion polls show that of all nationalities that one can choose from, Filipinos prefer to be American—what else? ) To return to Espiritu’s disabling mistake. The wrong premise of Filipino national sovereignty distorts all talk of a boundary-breaking transnationalism, together with the postmodernist babble that accuses the essentializing nationalism of Rizal, Aguinaldo, and so on, as the force that has repressed the hybrid, fragmented, vernacularizing “Filipino” identity. Wait a moment: was Aguinaldo victorious over the Americans? Did the people enjoy a sovereign truly independent nation-state after the devastation of the Filipino-American War? Who won the war, in the first place? Who indeed can capture the essence of “Filipino-ness,” if there is one? Speaking a native language or vernacular by itself won’t do it; maybe, eating balut, bagoong and other native delicacies might help. Depending on what social class is articulating it, the term “Filipino” can be “the name of a sovereign nation” that is fictitious, or it can designate the group of Overseas Contract Workers with Philippine passports dependent on the employing state. The reason why elite Filipinos feel embarrassed when mistaken for OCWs in Singapore or Italy is the fact that they claim to represent the nation or nation-state, whereas the thousands of Filipina domestics we met in the railroad stations of Rome and Taipeh, who may be modern heroes, do not really represent what is distinctive about the “Filipino,” notwithstanding that stupid remark that we have been blessed by “intelligent design” to be super nannies. Remember those Internet-circulated lists of mannerisms and habits that supposedly identifies the Filipino? Before we can take action, we need to grasp concrete historical reality and its contingencies. And the first thing to comprehend is the profoundly neocolonized situation of Filipino society and polity, the continuing dominance of the neoliberal ideology (with feudal encrustations) over the system, the effective hegemony of U.S. world-outlook over civil society and state. Contrary to Stuart Hall (1997) and others, it is not just culture that constitutes the terrain for producing diasporic, subaltern identity; it is the political and economic order—the class system-- that determines the cultural or ideological domain of representation, subjectivity, values, attitudes, and so on, which in turn reciprocally reinforces the sociopolitical hierarchy and reproduces its mechanisms and actors. Throughout Espiritu’s book, as well as in dozens of recent studies of the “damaged” Filipino society and culture, you will encounter criticisms of racism, gender, intersections of this and that, even the evils of global capitalism. But you will not find a serious critical analysis of social class, the extraction of surplus value from labor-power (I need to stress here that Filipina domestics as “modern slaves” not only sell labor-power but also their personhood), which is the key to grasping the complex phenomena of racial colonial subordination of the Philippines to the United States and the neoliberal global market. Given our neocolonial status, it goes without saying that the subordinate position of the Philippines in the international division of labor, our share in the distribution of accumulated capital (surplus value), determines our image, our identity, and our notion of our future, to a larger degree than any ethnic particularism we can boast of. The lesson here is: We need to undergo real “brainwashing,” that is, getting rid of these poisonous beliefs and assumptions that will make us naïve if well-meaning lackeys of capitalist modernization, equipped with the program of “Benevolent Assimilation” (McKinley) and imperial philanthropic arrogance. We need to acquire a Marxist orientation. This means that if you want to help liberate the Philippines from U.S. neocolonial stranglehold, or express your solidarity with the mass struggles going on, you will want to fight the class enemy right here, in Washington and in the corporate headquarters. You will want to help destroy a parasitic class system that requires for its nourishment militarist imperialist interventions in the Philippines, Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, and throughout the world. Our struggle here is neither primary nor secondary to the struggle for national democracy and independence in the Philippines; it is an integral part of the internationalist struggle against global capitalism. But because of our limitations as individual agents, or as members of collectivities, we need to concentrate our energies on what we can do best in our specific time and place. You decide where, which collective project, you think you can contribute your energies and skills to good effect. This resolves those perennial squabbles among Filipino American activists about which task is primary—supporting the struggle back home, or building a revolutionary vanguard party here, debates that drained their energies while their party-building dreams collapsed with that of the Soviet Union and the restoration of bourgeois rule in China. ------------ Lesson Two: Study Philippine history from a progressive point of view, in particular the period of U.S. colonization and neocolonization of the country up to today. The first thing I would emphasize in any historical overview of ourselves is the contemporary political conjuncture: the ascendancy of an extremely militarist and racist ruling section in the U.S. This rightist power-bloc has continued to exploit the 9/11 attack in a global war on terrorism, utilizing all its weapons of violence and coercion to produce “regime change” and impose a retooled hegemony, a “new American Century,” on the backs of millions of people of color in the South, in the underdeveloped societies that were former colonies or dependent formations. This is happening at a time when the “socialist alternative” has disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union, even while the growth of anti-imperialist forces in Latin America in general is intensifying. In short, global contradictions are sharpening to the point of regional wars, wholesale extermination of peoples, relentless destruction of the environment, and so on. There is one hopeful sign counterpointing that doomsday scenario: the birth of the anti-globalization movement which is now beginning to mobilize more forces while national liberation movements in Venezuela, Mexico, Nepal, the Philippines and elsewhere continue to gain ground in the face of U.S. state terrorism. We who live in “the belly of the beast” need to take account of the USA Patriot Act and its elaborate regulations, a repressive legal machinery sanctioning surveillance of citizens and extra-judical torture for dissenters judged as “enemy combatants.” We are today living in a regime worse than the Cold War and the McCarthy persecutions of the fifties experienced by Bulosan, Chris Mensalvas and other Filipino union activists. The Abu Ghraibs, Guanatanamos and others are completely new decadent symptoms of the crisis of U.S. global hegemony. We need to use whatever civil liberties still exist to mobilize the broadest united front to defend and advance participatory democracy beyond formal citizenship rights. We need to defeat fundamentalist religious reactionaries fomenting a “clash of civilizations” to entrench the supremacy of global capital. As Filipinos in the Homeland Security State, how do we enact or put into play our solidarity with our compatriots in the Philippines and in the world-wide diaspora? II. Unfailingly, as in the past, the Philippines grabs the headlines when disasters, natural and/or man-made, inflict untold devastation, misery, and death on our brothers, sisters, parents, and friends back home. Just on the tail of the 71 persons killed and 500 injured at the Wowowee ABS-CBN event on Feb. 4, we soon confront the tragedy of 1,800 people killed in Guinsaugon, Leyte, with over 376 homes destroyed by a mud-slide. These repeated flooding incidents may be traced back to decades of wanton deforestation allowed, even abetted, by the local politicians and the central government. Of course, news analysis will never help us understand the historical context, much less the political and social causality, of these catastrophes. The beleaguered president Arroyo appeared in TV mainly to urge everyone to send prayers to the survivors in Leyte, while US warships and thousands of marines converged on the island as though in a repeat of General Douglas MacArthur’s 1944 landing on that island to signal the fulfillment of his vow, “I Shall Return.” Indeed, the return of U.S. troops was marked by the approval of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) during Fidel Ramos’ presidency, after the 1992 scrapping of Clark Field and Subic Naval Bases by a coalition of nationalist-democratic forces. But from Feb. 20 to March 5, the largest gathering of U.S. troops (5,500 soldiers) have landed for the 22nd RP-US Balikatan Exercise, purportedly to train 2,800 Filipino soldiers to hunt “terrorists,” mainly the Abu Sayyaf, but also of course the guerillas of the New People’s Army (which has been classified by the U.S. State Department as a “terrorist” organization). The presence of U.S. troops flagrantly mocks the putative sovereignty of the Philippines—indeed, even after formal independence in 1946, as everyone knows, the Philippines was saddled with so many treaties, obligations, contracts that made it a genuine neocolony up to today. So forget all this pretentious postcolonial babble—the Philippines is still an appendage of Washington, despite all symptoms to the contrary. With Secretary Colin Powell’s decision to stigmatize as “terrorist” the major insurgent groups that have been fighting for forty years for popular democracy and independence—the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army, the introduction of thousands of U.S. troops, weapons, logistics, and supporting personnel has become legitimate. More is involved than simply converting the archipelago to instant military bases and facilities for the U.S. military—a bargain exchange for the strategic outposts Clark Air Base and Subic Naval Base that were scrapped by a resurgent Filipino nationalism a decade ago. With the military officials practically managing the executive branch of government, the Philippine nation-state will prove to be more an appendage of the Pentagon than a humdrum neocolony administered by oligarchic compradors, which it has been since nominal independence in 1946. On the whole, Powell’s stigmatizing act is part of the New American Century Project to reaffirm a new pax Americana after the Cold War. The telling evidence surfaced recently when a 22-year old Filipina was gang-raped by six U.S. soldiers on leave from the aircraft carrier USS Essex last November 1, 2005. The U.S. Embassy refused to surrender to the local court four of the accused on the grounds of the VFA Agreement. This would be a national scandal in Korea or Japan; but in the Philippines, it seems routine for the U.S. to lord it over their “subalterns.” After all, this follows the hallowed pattern of Filipinos beaten, raped and killed—some were suspected as “wild boards”—in or around the U.S. military bases. There is, of course, a long history of Filipino victimage, dating back to the “water cure” and other forms of torture during the Filipino-American War of 1899 lasting up to the second decade of the last century. III. Allow me to encapsulate the theme of the struggle for national democracy and independence in the Philippines. When U.S. occupation troops in Iraq continued to suffer casualties every day after the war officially ended, academics and journalists began to supply capsule histories comparing their situation with those of troops in the Philippines during the Filipino-American War (1899-1902). A New York Times essay summed up the lesson in its title, “In 1901 Philippines, Peace Cost More Lives Than Were Lost in War” (2 July 2003, B1)), while an article in the Los Angeles Times contrasted the simplicity of McKinley’s “easy” goal of annexation (though at the cost of 4,234 U.S. soldiers killed and 3,000 wounded) with George W. Bush’s ambition to “create a new working democracy as soon as possible” (20 July 2003, M2). What is the real connection between the Philippines and the current U.S. war against terrorism? What is behind the return of the former colonizer to what was once called its “insular territory” administered then by the Bureau of Indian Affairs? Immediately after the proclaimed defeat of the Taliban and the rout of Osama bin Laden’s forces in Afghanistan, the Philippines became the second front in the U.S.-led war on terrorism. Raymond Bonner, author of Waltzing with Dictators (1987), argues that the reason for this second front is “the desire for a quick victory over terrorism,… the wish to reassert American power in Southeast Asia….” (New York Times, 10 June 2002). As in the past, during the Huk rebellion in the Philippines in the Cold War years, the U.S. acted as “the world’s policemen,” aiding the local military in “civic action” projects to win “hearts and minds,” a rehearsal for Vietnam. Washington is evidently using the Abu Sayyaf as a cover for establishing a “forward logistics and operation base” in Mindanao and Sulu in order to be able to conduct swift pre-emptive strikes against enemies in Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, China, and elsewhere. Overall, however, the intervention of U.S. Special Forces in solving a local problem has inflamed Filipino sensibilities, its collective memory still recovering from the nightmare of the U.S.-supported brutal Marcos dictatorship. (One should note that the Abu Sayyaf phenomenon, a kidnapping-for-ransom band, is a synthetic product of recent developments involving the Philippine military, local politicians, and corrupt businessmen.)What disturbed everyone was the Cold-War practice of “Joint Combined Exchange Training” exercises. In South America and Africa, such U.S. foreign policy initiatives merged with counter-insurgency operations that chanelled military logistics and equipment to favored regimes notorious for flagrant human rights violations. During the Huk uprising in the Philippines, Col. Edward Lansdale, who later masterminded the Phoenix atrocities in Vietnam, rehearsed similar counter-insurgency techniques combined with other anticommunist tricks of the trade. Now U.S. soldiers in active combat side by side with the pupped regime will pursue the Bush-defined “terrorists”—guerillas of the New People’s Army, Moro resistance fighters, and other progressive sectors of Filipino society. Are we seeing American troops in the boondocks (bundok, in the original Tagalog, means “mountain”) again? Are we experiencing a traumatic attack of déjà vu? A moment of reflection returns us to what Bernard Fall called “the first Vietnam.” As everyone now knows, US pacification slaughtered 1.4 million Filipinos, not counting the thousands of Moros who died in the infamous genocidal pacification campaign. The campaign to conquer the Philippines was designed in accordance with President McKinley’s policy of “Benevolent Assimilation” of the uncivilized and unchristian natives, a “civilizing mission” that Mark Twain considered worthy of the Puritan settlers and the pioneers in the proverbial “virgin land.” Pressured by the sugar-beet lobby and persistent rural insurrections, the Philippine Commonwealth of 1935 was established, constituted with a compromise mix of laws and regulations then being tried in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Hawaii. Eventually the islands became a model of a pacified neocolony complete with brown-skinned legislators, judges, policemen, tax collectors, teachers, and so on. Except for the preliminary studies of Renato Constantino, Virgilio Enriquez and others, nothing much about the revealing effects of that process of subjugation of Filipinos have registered in the Philippine Studies or American Studies archive. This is usually explained by the theory that the U.S. did not follow the old path of European colonialism, and its war against Spain was pursued to liberate the natives from Spanish tyranny. If so, that war now rescued from the dustbin of history signaled the advent of a globalizing U.S. interventionism whose latest manifestation, in a different historical register, is Bush’s “National Security Strategy” of “exercising self-defense [of the Homeland] by acting preemptively,” assuming that might is right when spreading “democracy” by military occupation and bombs. IV. The revolutionary upsurge in the Philippines against the Marcos dictatorship stirred up dogmatic Cold War complacency. In the course of “the culture wars,” the historical reality of U.S. imperialism (the genocide of Native Americans is replayed in the subjugation of the inhabitants of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Cuba) is finally being excavated and re-appraised. But this is, of course, a phenomenon brought about by a confluence of multifarious events, among them: the demise of the Soviet Union as a challenger to U.S. hegemony; the sublation of the Sixties in both Fukuyama’s “end of history” and Rorty’s neopragmatism; the Palestininan intifadas; the Zapatista revolt against NAFTA; the heralding of current anti-terrorism by the Gulf War and its sequels; and the fabled “clash of civilizations.” Despite these changes, the old frames of intelligibility have not been modified or reconfigured to understand how nationalist revolutions in the colonized territories cannot be confused with the nationalist patriotism of the dominant or hegemonic metropoles, or how the mode of U.S. imperial rule in the twentieth century differs in form and content from those of the British or French in the nineteenth century. The received consensus of a technological modernizing influence from the advanced industrial powers remains deeply entrenched. Consider, for example, the observation by Paul Wong and Tania Azores that one reason why Filipino nurses emigrate to the U.S. is found in “the belief in the right of personal choice that is deeply embedded in the political ideology inherited from the United States” (1994, 174). How does this explain the poor working conditions and the lack of jobs with decent pay for nurses in the Philippines? The demise of the independent nation-state purportedly caused by globalization has caused some demoralization among middle elements. Even postcolonial and postmodernist thinkers commit the mistake of censuring the decolonizing projects of the subjudgated peoples because these projects (in the superior gaze of these thinkers) have been damaged, or are bound to become perverted into despotic postcolonial regimes, like those in Ghana, Algeria, Vietnam, the Philippines, and elsewhere. The only alternative, it seems, is to give assent to the process of globalization under the aegis of the World Bank/IMF/WTO, and hope for a kind of “benevolent assimilation.” Without a truly independent nation-state representing the masses, not an oligarchic elite, what is the defense against predatory transnational corporations? What remains to be carefully considered, above all, is the historical specificity or singularity of each of these projects of national liberation, their class composition, historical roots, programs, ideological tendencies, and political agendas within the context of colonial/imperial domination. It is not possible to pronounce summary judgments on the character and fate of nationalist movements in the peripheral formations without focusing on the complex manifold relations between colonizer and colonized, the dialectical interaction between their forces as well as others caught in the conflict. Otherwise, the result would be a disingenuous ethical utopianism such as that found in U.S. cosmopolitanist and postcolonialist discourse which, in the final analysis, function as an apology for the ascendancy of the corporate powers embedded in the nation-states of the North, and for the hegemonic rule of the only remaining superpower claiming to act in the name of freedom and democracy. The case of the national-democratic struggle in the Philippines may be taken as an example of one historic singularity. Because of the historical specificity of the Philippines’ emergence as a dependent nation-state controlled by the United States in the twentieth century, nationalism as a mass movement has always been defined by events of anti-imperialist rebellion. U.S. conquest entailed long and sustained violent suppression of the Filipino revolutionary forces for decades. The central founding “event” (as the philosopher Alain Badiou would define the term) is the 1896 revolution against Spain and its sequel, the Filipino-American war of 1899-1902, and the Moro resistance (up to 1914) against U.S. colonization. Another political sequence of events is the Sakdal uprising in the thirties during the Commonwealth period followed by the Huk uprising in the forties and fifties—a sequence that is renewed in the First Quarter Storm of 1970 against the neocolonial state. While the feudal oligarchy and the comprador class under U.S. patronage utilized elements of the nationalist tradition formed in 1896-1898 as their ideological weapon for establishing moral-intellectual leadership, their attempts have never been successful. Propped by the Pentagon-supported military, the Arroyo administration today, for example, uses the U.S. slogan of democracy against terrorism and the fantasies of the neoliberal free market to legitimize its continued exploitation of workers, peasants, women and ethnic minorities. Following a long and tested tradition of grassroots mobilization, Filipino nationalism has always remained centered on the peasantry’s demand for land closely tied to the popular-democratic demand for equality and genuine sovereignty. For over a century now, U.S.-backed modernization and neoliberal programs have utterly failed in the Philippines. The resistance against globalized capital and its neoliberal extortions is spearheaded today by a national-democratic mass movement of various ideological persuasions. We have a durable Marxist-led insurgency that seeks to articulate the “unfinished revolution” of 1896 in its demand for national self-determination against U.S. control and social justice for the majority of citizens (86 million) ten percent of whom are now migrant workers abroad. In the wake of past defeats of peasant revolts, the Filipino culture of nationalism constantly renews its anti-imperialist vocation by mobilizing new forces (women and church people in the sixties, and the indigenous communities in the seventies and eighties). It is organically embedded in emancipatory social and political movements whose origin evokes in part the Enlightenment narrative of sovereignty as mediated by third-world nationalist movements, but whose sites of actualization are the local events of mass insurgency against continued U.S. hegemony. The Philippines as an “imagined” and actually experienced ensemble of communities, or multiplicities in motion, remains in the process of being constructed primarily through modes of political and social resistance against corporate globalization and its technologically mediated ideologies, fashioning thereby the appropriate cultural forms of dissent, resistance, and subversion worthy of its people’s history and its collective vision. V. Uneven, unequal development may also illuminate the new reconfiguring of the Philippines as an Asian/Pacific formation occupying the borderline between the Orientalist imaginary and the Western racializing gaze. But its geopolitical inscription in the South makes Filipinos more akin to the inhabitants of the “Fourth World,” the aboriginal and indigenous peoples of the Americas, the Hawaiians, Maoris, and so on. The reconfiguring of the Philippines as a terrain of contestation finds its historic validity in the transitional plight of Filipinos migrating to the United States in the years before the establishment of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935: they were neither aliens nor citizens but “nationals,” denizens of the twilight zone, the borderland between the core and the periphery. We live in a racial polity, a political order with a deep and long history of racist practice, of which the “model minority” myth is just one revealing symptom. Whether you were born here or recently arrived, you are perceived by the dominant society as someone “alien,” not quite “American, somehow a strange “other.” This is the inherent racial politics of the territory we happen to inhabit. Contrary to what postmodernists label “transmigrants,” Filipinos in the United States are now beginning to grasp the fact that it is the invasion of the Philippines by the United States in 1898, the destruction of the revolutionary Philippine Republic, the annexation of the islands and the colonial subjugation of its people, that explains why we Filipinos are somehow tangibly present in this continent. Whether we like it or not—and here I address the emergent community of “Filipinos” in the U.S.-- Filipinos surfaced in the American public’s consciousness not as museum curiosities (indeed, the “indigenous types” exhibited at the St. Louis exposition of 1904 contributed to the fixation of a Filipino primitive stereotype, specifically“dogeaters,” in popular lore) but as a nation of resisters to U.S. colonial aggression. We cannot go back without masochistic self-denial to the fugitives of the Spanish galleons who settled in Louisiana to reawaken us from the American dream of success. (Those interested in the antiquarian topics of the Louisiana “Manillamen” or the Indios who supposedly stumbled in California, will surely not belabor the sordid genocide of their countrymen in the Filipino-American War of 1899-1902—a nice escape for these would-be historians.) Surely if our project is the vindication of a people’s dignity and democratic empowerment, not just ethnic competition with Native Americans for precedence, we need to recover the history of resistance, of insurrection, that can resolve the problem of identity—identity is not a matter of antique relics or quaint folkways, it is a matter of the political project you are engaged with, the collective project of community vindication that you have committed to pursue. It goes without saying, though often forgotten, that the chief distinction of Filipinos from other Asians residing in the United States is that their country of origin was the object of violent colonization and unrelenting subjugation by U.S. monopoly capital. It is this foundational process, not the settling of Filipino fugitives in Louisiana or anywhere else, that establishes the limit and potential of the Filipino lifeworld here. Without understanding the complex process of colonial subjugation and the internalization of dependency, Filipinos will not be able to define their own specific historical trajectory here as a dual or bifurcated formation—one based on the continuing struggle of Filipinos for national liberation and popular democracy in the Philippines, and the other based on the exploitation and resistance of immigrants here (from the “Manongs” in Hawaii and the West Coast to the post-1965 “brain drain” and the present diaspora worldwide). These two distinct histories, while geographically separate, flow into each other and converge into a single multilayered and mutually determining narrative that needs to be articulated around the principles of national sovereignty, social justice, and equality. So far this has not been done because, among other reasons, the mainstream textbook approaches distort both histories across the realms of lived experience characterized by class, gender, race, nationality, and so on. In the wake of the poststructuralist trend among intellectuals, a theory of Filipinos as transnational migrants or transmigrants has been introduced to befog the atmosphere already mired by the insistence on contingency, aporia, ambivalence, indeterminacy, disjunction, liminality, and so on. To avoid the “nihilism of despair or Utopia of progress,” we are told to be transnational or transcultural, or else. But the notion of Filipinos as transnational subjects assumes that all nation-states are equal in power, status, and so on. Like assimilationism, this theory of transmigrants and transnationals obfuscates imperial domination and the imperative of rebellion. It reinforces the marginalization and dependency of “Third World” peoples. It erases what David Harvey calls historical “permanences” and aggravates the Othering of people of color into racialized minorities—cheap labor (like OFWs) for global corporations and autocratic households. It rejects their history of resistance and their agency for emancipating themselves from the laws of the market and its operational ideology of white supremacy. Let me conclude by repeating what I submit is the central argument, the controlling vision, of my discourses on Philippines-American relations : Filipinos in the United States possess their own historical trajectory, one with its own singular profile but always linked in a thousand ways to what is going on in the Philippines. To capture the contours of this trajectory, we need to avoid two pitfalls: first, the nostalgic essentializing nativism that surfaces in the fetishism of folk festivals and other commodified cultural products that accompany tourist spectacles, college Filipino Nights, and official rituals. To avoid this error, we need to connect folklore and such cultural practices to the conflicted lives of the Igorots, Moros, and masses of peasants and workers. Second, more dangerous perhaps, we should guard against minstrelsy, self-denial by mimicry, the anxiety of not becoming truly “Americanized,” that is, defined by white-supremacist norms. My view is that we don’t want to be schizoid or ambidextrous performers forever, in the fashion of Bienvenido Santos’ “you lovely people.” This drive to assume a hybrid “postcolonial” identity, with all its self-ingratiating exoticism and aura of originality, only reinforces the pluralist/liberal consensus of “rational choice theory” (the utilitarian model of means and ends that promotes alienation and atomistic individualism) and fosters institutional racism. On the other hand, the submerging of one’s history into a panethnic Asian American movement or any other ethnic absolutism violates the integrity of the Filipino people’s tradition of revolutionary struggle for autonomy, our outstanding contribution to humankind’s narrative of the struggle for freedom from all modes of oppression and exploitation. Becoming Filipino then is a process of dialectical struggle, not a matter of wish-fulfillment or mental conjuring. As I said earlier, it is ultimately a collective political project. For Filipinos to grasp who they are, more importantly what they can become—for humans, as Antonio Gramsci once said, can only be defined in terms of what they can become, in terms of possibilities that can be actualized—we need to examine again the historical circumstances that joined the trajectory of the Philippines and the United States, of Americans and Filipinos, constituting in the process the dialectical configuration we know as Filipino American in its collective or group dimension. The Filipino in the United States is thus a concrete historical phenomenon understandable neither as Filipino alone nor American alone but as an articulation of the political, social, economic and cultural forces of the two societies with their distinct but intersecting histories. We need to grasp the dialectics of imperial conquest and anticolonial revolution, the dynamics and totality of that interaction, as the key to how, and for what ends, the Philippines and its diasporic citizenry—nearly 10 million strong, sending $10.7 billion dollars last year which made Gloria Arroyo ecstatic at the success of her neoliberalizing scheme--is being reconfigured for the next millennium.

__________ REFERENCES Hall, Stuart. 1997. “Making Diasporic Identities.” In The House that Race Built, ed. Wahneema Lubiano. New York: Pantheon. Le Espiritu, Yen. 2003.
Home Bound. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. San Juan, E. 2004.
Working Through the Contradictions. Lewisburg,PA:Bucknell U. Press. Wong, Paul and Tania Azores. 1994. “The Migration and Incorporation of Filipino Nurses.” In The New Asian Immigratin in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring, ed. Paul Ong, Edna Bonacich, and Lucie Cheng. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

________ *This is the text of the lecture delivered at the Second Annual Conference of Sandiwa on Feb. 25, 2006, at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA.

** Dr. E. San Juan, Jr. was recently Fulbright professor of American Studies at Leuven University, Belgium, and visiting professor of literature at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. He directs the Philippine Cultural Studies Center in Connecticut and serves as co-director of the Board of Directors, Philippine Forum, New York. Among his recent books are BEYOND POSTCOLONIAL THEORY (Palgrave), RACISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES (Duke University Press), and WORKING THROUGH THE CONTRADICTIONS (Bucknell U Press).He will be a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellow this Fall 2006.

Malaysia's Mystery Migrant Deaths

2006-02-23T22:23:00.000+08:00

By Jonathan Kent
BBC News, Kuala Lumpur
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4720386.stm

Walk along the streets of Selayang, a suburb of the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur, and the phone shops
tell you everything you need to know about the population.

The shops sell discount international phone cards, posting the rates to Bangladesh, Indonesia and
Vietnam.

Selayang is an area where the capital's migrant workers live, legally and illegally. For years Malaysia has been trying to contain a burgeoning number of illegal migrant workers. In late 2004 it declared an amnesty allowing hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants - mostly from Indonesia and the Philippines - to leave before launching a major operation to deport the rest in March last year.

But illegal immigrants still make up a large population - hundreds of thousands of people, according to estimates - and the economy depends heavily on foreign workers. And they live largely anonymously, so anonymously that when five bodies were dragged out of a small lake in Selayang this week it did not merit a single mention in the media.

Exactly how the five died is unclear. There are conflicting accounts from migrants living in the area and from the authorities. But what is known is that in the early hours of last Saturday, 11 February, an immigration raid took place.

The officers jumped from their trucks and made for Selayang's large open market, where many of the migrants work. Mohammad Shaiku, a Burmese with a work permit, was working that night. "I was inside the market," he said. "The police arrived after two that night and rounded up people. And after that some people ran off to the lake and after that I think the police beat them."

I asked him whether it was the regular police, polis biasa, who carried out the raid, or Rela, Malaysia's controversial baton-wielding volunteer reserve, which was mobilised last March to tackle the immigration
issue.

"Rela," he said. "Rela, Rela."

The use of Rela has been criticised by Western human rights groups who say its members are not properly
trained or supervised.

'Screams'

Hamzan Ali Abdullah was another Burmese Muslim working at the market. I asked him whether he had seen the authorities arrive.

"Yes we did see them and we had to run and hide very, very quickly," he said. He ran out the back of the market, through a nearby street and across the road to a lake - a flooded open cast mining pit - about five minutes away at a jog.

There he says he hid in the undergrowth and te dark. And through the blackness he heard screams. "We heard they were crying in their own languages, and some in Burmese crying 'help help'."

Funeral of 29-year-old Thant Zaw Oo, a Burmese Muslim Relatives who buried Thant Zaw Oo say his body seemed beaten He could not see the Rela officers in the darkness so I asked whether he had heard them speaking Malay.

"Yes, there were, there were," he said. "The police were shouting: 'Come out come out, if you run away we
will kill you'. "Those caught in their hands were beaten by two or three policemen. They treated them like cattle. Their voices were very haughty and arrogant. Their voices were like soldiers and policemen." The first of the bodies was found later that day.

Malaysia's Interior Ministry has said that police have confirmed the discovery of two bodies. But according to several local witnesses, five bodies were dragged from the lake over the days that followed.

One was that of 29-year-old Thant Zaw Oo, the uncle of Mohammad Shaiku's wife. Mr Mohammad said the body showed signs of having been beaten. "It was half in the water and I saw his teeth, his two front teeth were missing". Black blood [was visible] in his mouth and on wounds on his head and neck, Mr Mohammad said.

Government denial

Other workers at the market also said Rela volunteers appeared angry and had chased migrants towards the
lake. They produced pictures of Zaw Oo's funeral and of another dead man, who they said was a Sikh, being
pulled from the water. Nothing serious happened and the operation went smoothly Malaysian government on the Rela crackdown Kuala Lumpur Hospital confirmed that four bodies had been taken there from the lake in Selayang. Zaw Oo's body was not taken to hospital, being buried quicklyinstead.

While they showed no signs of stab or slash wounds, a doctor said the bodies were too badly decomposed to be able to tell whether they had been beaten with batons, such as those carried by Rela volunteers. Malaysia's Interior Ministry firmly disputes suggestions anybody died during the raid. It issued a statement rejecting the migrants' account of events.

"At 2am on 11 February Rela carried out an operation to check documents of foreign workers in the open market at Selayang," it said. "Nothing serious happened and the operation went smoothly. However many illegal immigrants were seen running away."

The ministry statement referred to two bodies on which post mortems had been carried out and which it said
exonerated the Rela team. "Based on the post mortem report made on 13 February
2006 the deaths occurred about three to five days previously, meaning on 10 February at the latest,
proving that these deaths have nothing to do with the Rela operation on 11 February," the statement said.

Human rights groups say the controversy about the incident shows that the government should not be using
semi-trained Rela volunteers for such tasks. "Malaysia should withdraw this authorisation and reserve immigration enforcement for trained government authorities," Human Rights Watch said in a statement
issued from New York.

One of the bodies being pulled from the lake Five bodies were dragged from a local lake Amnesty International [AI] in London wanted to see tighter controls. "AI continues to have grave concerns about the
training, command and control supervision, and accountability of Rela "volunteers" and Immigration
Department officers," it said.

Malaysia's civil liberties groups have taken a similar line. Off the record, government sources said that Selayang was an area notorious for both organised crime and for gang warfare between rival foreign gangs.
The same sources have suggested that the five may have been victims of such clashes - which does not seem to square with the Interior Ministry's statement that post mortem results showed no sign of any violence.
None of which leaves anyone any clearer about why five bodies turned up in a short space of time in a small
lake on the fringes of the capital.

Still, Malaysians are certainly worried about crime and blame much of it on foreign workers. The economy
may rely on them but there is limited tolerance for immigrants, illegal or even legal. And five foreigners can turn up dead in one small area and it does not merit a single mention anywhere in the Malaysian press. Nor did reports widely circulated last year that two migrants died after being struck by a Rela truck, also in Selayang.

From time to time there the deaths of migrants workers does make the news, but it is written small, on the
inside pages.

Overseas workers' remittances hit all-time high of $10.7B

2006-02-19T16:45:00.000+08:00

By: Doris C. Dumlao
Inquirer
16 February 2006

MONEY remittances of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) coursed through commercial banks continued to post double-digit growth in December, bringing total remittances for 2005 to $10.7 billion, up 25 percent from 2004, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP, the central bank) reported Wednesday.

It was the first time that OFW inflows breached the $10-billion mark, equivalent to about half of the central bank's international reserves.

In 2004, OFW remittances sent through the banking system amounted to $8.6 billion, up from $7.6 billion in 2003 and $6.9 billion in 2002.

In December-- a peak period for OFW remittances, given needs for Christmas spending -- cash transfers amounted to $967 million, up 10.7 percent from a year earlier, the BSP reported.

Including inflows coursed through non-bank channels -- including OFWs' friends and other travelers -- OFW remittances last year were estimated at $12.3 billion.

Preliminary data from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) showed newly hired and rehired OFWs last year numbered 981,677, up 5.2 percent from 2004.

Land-based OFWs increased 4.2 percent to 733,970 and sea-based workers increased 8.2 percent to 247,707. the data showed.

The government, in cooperation with the private sector, conducts marketing missions to promote OFW deployment and identify employment opportunities for Filipino workers. It has programs that include pre-departure training, computer literacy, seafarers' training in strict compliance with international maritime standards.

Deployment of highly skilled and therefore higher-paid Filipino workers, including engineers, teachers, and nurses and other medical workers, also contributed to the high level of OFW money remittances in 2005.

Banks have opened more remittance centers and established tie-ups abroad. They have introduced enhanced means of cash transfers to reach out to a wider range of Filipinos working overseas.

The bulk of OFW money remittances come from the United States, Saudi Arabia, Italy, Japan, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates and Singapore.

Families of OFWs use the money for education, health, and small businesses. With INQ7.net

Heart Center feels effects of brain drain

2006-02-09T15:47:00.000+08:00

Ebalita / www.ebalita.net

With three nurses resigning every day to seek better employment opportunities abroad, a number of patients at the Philippine Heart Center (PHC) are being denied much-needed open-heart surgery, a hospital official said yesterday.

PHC director Dr. Ludgerio Torres noted the hospital is now lacking in nurses who could assist surgeons during operations because most of their nurses qualified to assist with the life-saving operation have already left for jobs in foreign hospitals.

"We are losing three nurses every day. We should average six open-heart (surgeries) simultaneously but we can only do four at the same time. So we have two rooms that are vacant. We are limited to four because we don’t have nurses," he said after a health forum yesterday.

The situation reflects an ongoing exodus of medical professionals and how this is directly affecting the country’s health care system. Since 2002, it is estimated that some 3,000 trained Filipino doctors have gone abroad to work as nurses.

Torres claimed the PHC has around 6,000 nurses on its roster. But before they could be assigned to operating rooms, they have to undergo at least six to eight weeks of training on critical-care management.

"We have supplements, we can replace (those who leave), but we still have to train them… and training takes at least six to eight weeks. We can’t entrust our critical-care unit to those that have not been properly trained," he added.

In every open-heart operation, two specialty nurses are needed. While one is tasked to help in reading the electrocardiogram (ECG) and other results, the other one "moves around" to assist doctors.

New nurses are usually assigned to the ward but in their second year, they get promoted to critical unit.

Torres said the PHC continually provides training for replacement nurses under the condition that they serve at the hospital for two years when their training is done. But many go "absent without official leave" after completing the training.

Specialty nurses earn some P15,000 to P18,000 every month. But abroad, they can earn this amount in a week.

Torres also revealed that since January last year, the PHC has lost five doctor-specialists three anesthesiologists, one cardiologist and one pediatric cardiologist who are now working as nurses in foreign hospitals.

He, however, does not find this alarming because the PHC still has around 500 specialists: "It’s just a drop in the bucket."

According to Torres, the five doctors were 40 years old and above and had almost started their medical careers with the PHC. They were already earning around P500,000 a month when they left.
Most of them have been employed by hospitals in California.

"They have been with us for the last 20 years. They had their residency (training) at PHC. They are not consultants and they are earning. And yet they left," he added.

But money, Torres said, was not the primary reason for the doctors’ migration. "It’s more for their children.

It’s not really the financial. They just want their children to settle there."
He added the doctors have committed to return to the PHC in five to 10 years after their families have been properly settled abroad.

"When they left, they expressed that they would like to come back. This is their country. No one can stop them from coming back and practicing again. They have immigrant visas so after five years they can return. And there is dual citizenship here," he noted. By Sheila Crisostomo

Using Asia's Poor to Build U.S. Bases in Iraq

2005-11-02T18:32:00.000+08:00

By David Phinney, CorpWatch.
Posted October 15, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/26660/

Companies like Halliburton are importing 'third country nationals' -- and putting them to work in horrible conditions -- to fulfill their U.S. government contracts. Jing Soliman left his family in the Philippines for what sounded like a sure thing -- a job as a warehouse worker at Camp Anaconda in Iraq.

His new employer, Prime Projects International (PPI) of Dubai, is a major, but low-profile, subcontractor to Halliburton's multi-billion-dollar deal with the Pentagon to provide support services to U.S. forces.

But Soliman wouldn't be making anything near the salaries -- starting $80,000 a year and often topping $100,000 -- that Halliburton's engineering and construction unit, Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) pays to the truck drivers, construction workers, office workers, and other laborers it recruits from the United States.

Instead, the 35-year-old father of two anticipated $615 a month -- including overtime. For a 40-hour work week, that would be just over $3 an hour. But for the 12-hour day, seven-day week that Soliman says was standard for him and many contractor employees in Iraq, he actually earned $1.56 an hour.Soliman planned to send most of his $7,380 annual pay home to his family in the Philippines, where the combined unemployment and underemployment rate tops 28 percent.

The average annual income in Manila is $4,384, and the World Bank estimates that nearly half of the nation's 84 million people live on less than $2 a day."I am an ordinary man," said Soliman during a recent telephone interview from his home in Quezon City near Manila. "It was good money."

His ambitions, like many U.S. civilians working in Iraq, were modest: "I wanted to save up, buy a house and provide for my family," he says.That simple dream drives hordes of low-wage workers like Soliman to travel to Iraq from more than three dozen countries. They are lured by jobs with companies working on projects led by Halliburton and other major U.S.-funded contractors hired to provide support services to the military and reconstruction efforts.

Called "third country nationals" (TCN) in contractor's parlance, they hail largely from impoverished Asian countries such as the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Pakistan, as well as from Turkey and countries in the Middle East. Once in Iraq, TCNs earn monthly salaries between $200 to $1,000 as truck drivers, construction workers, carpenters, warehousemen, laundry workers, cooks, accountants, beauticians, and similar blue-collar jobs.

Invisible Army of Cheap Labor

Tens of thousands of such TNC laborers have helped set new records for the largest civilian workforce ever hired in support of a U.S. war. They are employed through complex layers of companies working in Iraq. At the top of the pyramid-shaped system is the U.S. government which assigned over $24 billion in contracts over the last two years.

Just below that layer are the prime contractors like Halliburton and Bechtel. Below them are dozens of smaller subcontracting companies -- largely based in the Middle East -- including PPI, First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting and Alargan Trading of Kuwait, Gulf Catering, Saudi Trading & Construction Company of Saudi Arabia. Such companies, which recruit and employ the bulk of the foreign workers in Iraq, have experienced explosive growth since the invasion of Iraq by providing labor and services to the more high-profile prime contractors.

This layered system not only cuts costs for the prime contractors, but also creates an untraceable trail of contracts that clouds the liability of companies and hinders comprehensive oversight by U.S. contract auditors. In April, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of the U.S. Congress concluded that it is impossible to accurately estimate the total number of U.S. or foreign nationals working in Iraq.

The GAO's investigation was prompted by concerns in Congress about insurance costs that all U.S.-funded contractors and subcontractors in are obligated by law to carry for their workers -- costs which are then passed on to the government.

"It is difficult to aggregate reliable data," said the GAO report, "due in part to the large number of contractors and the multiple levels of subcontractors performing work in Iraq."

The menial wages paid to TCNs working for the regional contractors may be the most significant factor in the Pentagon's argument that outsourcing military support is far more cost-efficient for the U.S. taxpayer than using its own troops to maintain camps and feed its ranks.

But there is also a human cost to this savings. Numerous former American contractors returning home say they were shocked at conditions faced by this mostly invisible, but indispensable army of low-paid workers.

TCNs frequently sleep in crowded trailers and wait outside in line in 100-degree-plus heat to eat "slop." Many are said to lack adequate medical care and put in hard labor seven days a week, 10 hours or more a day, for little or no overtime pay. Few receive proper workplace safety equipment or adequate protection from incoming mortars and rockets. When frequent gunfire, rockets and mortar shell from the ongoing conflict hits the sprawling military camps, American contractors slip on helmets and bulletproof vests, but TCNs are frequently shielded only by the shirts on their backs and the flimsy trailers they sleep in.

Adding to these dangers and hardships, some TCNs complain publicly about not being paid the wages they expected. Others say their employers use "bait-and-switch" tactics: recruiting them for jobs in Kuwait or other Middle Eastern countries and then pressuring them to go to Iraq. All of these problems have resulted in labor disputes, strikes and on-the-job protests.While the exact number of TCNs working in Iraq is uncertain, a rough estimate can be gleaned from Halliburton's own numbers, which indicate that TCNs make up 35,000 of KBR's 48,000 workers in Iraq employed under sweeping contract for military support.

Known as the Logistics Civilian Augmentation Program (LOGCAP), this contract -- by far the largest in Iraq -- is now approaching the $15 billion mark. Citing security concerns, however, the Houston-headquartered company and several other major contractors declined to release detailed figures on the workforce that is estimated to be 100,000 or more.

High Risks, Low Benefits

"They do all the grunt jobs," said former KBR supervisor Steve Powell, 54, from Azle, Texas. "But a lot of them are top notch."Powell returned home from at Camp Diamondback in May this year. He was disillusioned, he said, with the high staff turnover of KBR employees and the treatment of TCNs that a KBR subcontractor from Turkey had hired as mechanics.

"The Filipinos were making $600 to $1,200 a month. That's good money for them, but there was tension from time to time. They sometimes thought they were doing all the work," says Powell who drove trucks for 30 years before working as a KBR truck maintenance foreman in Iraq for a year for $6,000 to $8,000 a month. "We weren't supposed to get our hands dirty."

The TCNs not only do much of the dirty work, but, like others working for the U.S. military, risk and sometimes lose their lives. Many are killed in mortar attacks; some are shot. Others have been taken hostage before meeting their death. In particularly gruesome set of murders on August 30, 2004, the captors of 12 Nepalese cooks and cleaners working for a Jordanian construction company beheaded one worker and posted a video of the execution on the Internet with the message: "We have carried out the sentence of God against 12 Nepalese who came from their country to fight the Muslims and to serve the Jews and the Christians . . . believing in Buddha as their God."

The murders led Kathmandu to bar its citizens from working in Iraq, although companies doing business there continue to employ Nepalese workers.The Pentagon keeps no comprehensive record of TCN casualties. But the Georgia-based nonprofit, Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, estimates that TCNs make up more than 100 of the estimated 269 civilian fatalities. The number of unreported fatalities could be much higher, while unreported and life-altering injuries are legion.

Soliman was one TCN who barely escaped death on the night of May 11, 2004, when his living trailer at Camp Anaconda was blown apart by a bomb attack. Sardonically dubbed "Mortaritaville," the camp sits 42 miles north of Baghdad. Some 17,000 US soldiers and thousands of contractors have dug into the former Iraqi airbase for a long-term occupation.

Three others were injured along with Soliman that night. One roommate, 25-year-old fuel pump attendant Raymund Natividad, was killed. Soliman flew home to the Philippines in a wheelchair days later because he wanted medical treatment in his own country. But even after surgery and skin grafts, he sometimes feels nagging pain in his leg, he says. Doctors tell Soliman he will walk with a piece of shrapnel lodged in his left leg for the rest of his life."It was too deep" to remove, he explains.

The attack ignited shock waves of fear among the 1,300 Filipino workers at Camp Anaconda. Some 600 PPI employees immediately quit over safety concerns. "Filipinos don't want to work anymore in the mess halls, laundry and fuel depot," a Filipino embassy official in Baghdad said at the time. "There's a paralysis of work."

By mid-July, 2004, the Philippines would resign from the "Coalition of the Willing" and withdraw its modest military presence of 43 soldiers and eight policemen from Iraq one month earlier than scheduled. The precipitating event was a threat by Iraqi militias to behead Filipino hostage Angelo de la Cruz, a 46-year-old truck driver for the Saudi Arabian Trading and Construction Company.

One day after the withdrawal, his captors released the father of eight. He returned home to the storm of media attention hailing his safe return and offers of a free home and scholarships for the children.

Only fleeting headlines in Manila greeted Soliman's homecoming just months earlier. Now jobless, he speaks fondly of the U.S. troops to whom, he says, he was forbidden to speak to by his company supervisors at PPI."

The Army treated us like friends," he said, boasting of a certificate the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers awarded him in recognition of his service as a warehouse worker who handled and received food supplies for the camp.His memories of PPI are less congenial. His managers were foul-mouthed and verbally abusive and lunches served on the job sites were unfit to eat, Soliman said.

PPI restricted employees to two 5-minute phone calls home a month and deducted the cost from their paychecks."They were $10 more expensive than at the PX (the retail store on the military base), but if they see you making a call at another location, they would send you home," Salomon said.

A number of former KBR supervisors say they don't know why TCNs continue working in Iraq when they face much more brutal working conditions and hours than what their American and European co-workers would tolerate.

"TCNs had a lot of problems with overtime and things," recalls Sharon Reynolds of Kirbyville, Texas. "I remember one time that they didn't get paid for four months."

The former KBR administrator, who spent 11 months in Iraq until April, says she was responsible for processing time sheets for 665 TCNs employed by PPI at Camp Victory near Baghdad. The 14,000 troops and the American contractors based at this former palace for Saddam Hussein have use of an Olympic-sized swimming pool and a manmade lake preserved for special events and fishing.

But TCNs have to make do with far less. "They don't get sick pay and if PPI had insurance, they sure didn't talk about it much," Reynolds recalls. "TCNs had a lot of problems with overtime and things ... I had to go to bat for them to get shoes and proper clothing,"As for living conditions, TCNs "ate outside in 140 degree heat," she says.

American contractors and U.S. troops ate at the air-conditioned Pegasus Dining Facility featuring a short-order grill, salad, pizza, sandwich and ice cream bars under the KBR logistics contract.

"TCNs had to stand in line with plates and were served something like be curry and fish heads from big old pots," Reynolds says incredulously. "It looked like a concentration camp,"And even when it came to basic safety, the TCNs faced a double standard.

"They didn't have personal protection equipment to wear when there was an alert," Reynolds said. "Here we are walking around with helmets and vests because of an alert and they are just looking at us wondering what's going on."Contractors RespondPPI in Dubai has failed to respond to numerous phone calls about the accusations of mistreatment. "I don't think anyone will want to comment." said a representative who answered the phone and decline to provide phone numbers or e-mail addresses of company executives.

There is little public information about PPI, but other contractors say the company's leading officers boast of a close association with Halliburton and say that it was formed by staff who previously worked with local firms sponsoring Halliburton's business activities in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Several sources say PPI was active as a major Halliburton subcontractor in Bosnia and at the high-security prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

.Halliburton spokesperson Melissa Norcross denied that the company has ownership or investment ties with PPI. The Halliburton unit is proud of its employees and subcontractors "who daily face danger to support the troops serving in Iraq and the Middle East," said Norcross, adding that Halliburton requires all subcontractors to provide acceptable living and working conditions for its workers."

KBR operates under a rigorous code of ethics that describes not only its standards of integrity, but its commitment to treat all of its employees and subcontractors with dignity and respect," Norcross wrote in an e-mail. The company "is aware of past disagreements between subcontractors and their employees, and KBR has interjected itself into the situation as appropriate and worked with the subcontractors to address these concerns."

Norcross did not offer details of past problems involving working conditions for TCNs, nor did KBR's project manager for Iraq and Kuwait, Remo Butler, when contacted by e-mail. But if allegations of wrongdoing or contract violations are found, Norcross said, Halliburton would address them, and "would also report any wrongdoings to the appropriate authorities, including our customer, the U.S. military."

The military, however, is apparently either unaware of the conditions or has simply chosen not acknowledge them. Margaret A. Browne, spokesperson for the U.S. Army Field Support Command which manages KBR's LOGCAP contract, confirmed that the company is expected to fulfill health, security and life support requirements for subcontractors in the LOGCAP agreement.

These are "serious issues and we are presently investigating the specific incidents you've addressed," she said referring to problems outlined by former KBR supervisors and TCN workers. "We are concerned about employment conditions for all employees," Browne said in an e-mail, adding that KBR is expected to fulfill a number of requirements outlining the health, security and life support requirements for subcontractors under the LOGCAP agreement, but that oversight for those requirements is under the purview of Halliburton and its subcontractors.

Diverted to Iraq

Challenging Halliburton and Army assurances, former KBR supervisors say they frequently witnessed subcontractors failing to meet required conditions, while some TCNs share horror stories with claims that they were falsely recruited, believing they were signing up for work in Kuwait and then having their contract changed to Iraq.

"I had no idea that I would end up in Iraq" says Ramil Autencio, who signed with MGM Worldwide Manpower and General Services in the Philippines. The 37-year-old air conditioning maintenance worker thought he would be working at Crown Plaza Hotel in Kuwait for $450 a month.

He arrived in Kuwait in December 2003, only to discover that First Kuwaiti had bought his contract. The company, which now holds U.S.-funded contracts valued in the neighborhood of $1 billion, threatened that unless he and dozens of other Filipino workers went to Iraq, the Kuwaiti police would arrested them, he says. "We had no choice but to go along with them. After all, we were in their country."

Once in Iraq, Autencio found that there were no air conditioners to install or maintain, so he spent 11 hours a day "moving boulders" to fortify the camps, first at Camp Anaconda and then at Tikrit.

Food was inadequate and workers were not getting paid, he says. "We ate when the Americans had leftovers from their meals. If not, we didn't eat at all."Working and living conditions were so bad, that in February 2004 Autencio escaped with dozens of others. A U.S. soldier born in the Philippines helped them leave the camp, and sympathetic truck drivers working for KBR offered them rides through the country.

By the time the Filipinos reached the Kuwaiti border, Autencio said the number of fleeing workers was so great that the border police let them pass through without proper papers.

First Kuwaiti general manager Wahid al Absi says Autencio is lying. His proof is a working agreement, purportedly signed in the Philippines by Autencio. Al Absi admits that unscrupulous recruitment agencies do sometimes misrepresent jobs and take money from people eager to work, but he provided Autencio's undated contract with First Kuwaiti that identified the job site as both Kuwait and "mainly" Iraq.

The agreement also lays out salary: $346 a month for 8-hour days, seven days a week, plus $104 a month for a mandatory 2 hours overtime every day.Al Absi insists that Autencio was paid in full."He sued me in court over this, and he lost," Al Absi said. "He doesn't have a case against us."

First Kuwaiti holds $600 million in Army contracts, Al Absi said. The company is also a leading competitor for $500 million contract to build the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and presently holds contracts for more than $300 million for preliminary work on the project.

Pattern of Recruiting AbusesAutencio is not the only former TCN worker with a grievance against Halliburton subcontractors and the layers of third-party recruiters.The Washington Post lays out an intricate recruiting scheme involving dining service workers from India who were lost in a maze of five recruiters and subcontractors on several continents. The Indians claimed to have been falsely recruited for jobs in Kuwait, only to end up in Iraq.

During their time at a military camp in the war zone, they lacked adequate drinking water, food, health care, and security, according to the July 1, 2004 article."I cursed my fate -- not having a feeling my life was secure, knowing I could not go back, and being treated like a kind of animal," for less than $7 a day, Dharmapalan Ajayakumar told the newspaper.Ajayakumar's case is a study in the convoluted world of Iraqi contracts: Workers were reported to have been first recruited by Subhash Vijay in India to work for Gulf Catering Company of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Gulf Catering was subcontracted to Alargan Group of Kuwait City, which was subcontracted to the Event Source of Salt Lake City, which in turn was subcontracted to KBR of Houston. And KBR, of course, is a subsidiary of Halliburton.

Nepalese worker Krishna Bahadur Khadka told a similar story of false recruitment in a September 7, 2004 news report in the Kathmandu Post. After being recruited for a job in Kuwait, he says, he arrived only to be told by First Kuwaiti Trading that if he and 121 other workers they refused work in Iraq, they would be sent back to Nepal."I was not happy at first as my contractors did not provide me a job as heavy vehicle driver as pledged. But they had offered Rs 175,000 [$2,450], and one would not be able earn half that amount in Kuwait. So I signed the papers," Khadka said, adding that he had already invested $1,680 as payment to an agent in Nepal.

First Kuwaiti's general manager claims that this allegation, too, is a lie and that Khadka misrepresented his skills. Again al Absi presented a contract identifying the work site as "mainly Iraq." It bore Khadka's signature and fingerprint."Khadka is a troublemaker who was trying to organize the workers," al Absi said, noting that thousands of TCNs working for First Kuwaiti have renewed their contracts with raises. "We treat our workers with excellent care," he said.

Labor Strike, You're OutBut cared for or not, hundreds of Filipinos in Iraq face being fired for staging labor strikes and sickouts to protest their treatment at military camps. In May 2005, 300 Filipinos went on strike at Camp Cook against PPI and KBR. The workers were soon joined by 500 others from India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal to protest working conditions and pay, according to the Manila Times. The dispute was settled with intervention from the Philippines Department of Foreign Affairs.

At the time of the strike, the Philippines offered the strikers free flights back to the Philippines, an invitation first made in April when the Philippines reiterated its ban on work in Iraq. The offer sparked concern at the U.S. embassy in Manila, according to news reports, because a loss of Filipino workers threatened military support services in Iraq.The U.S. embassy then clarified its position on April 27.

Embassy spokesperson Karen Kelley acknowledged that while Filipinos "play a crucial role in the allied effort to bring peace and democracy to a people who have been too long deprived of both," embassy officials also "recognize the government of the Philippines' concern for the welfare of its citizens."Other strikes have gone unreported, recalls former KBR employee Paul Dinsmore.

Hired as a carpenter, he later transferred to Logistics as a heavy truck driver at Camp Speicher, a sprawling 24-square-mile installation near Tikrit in northern Iraq. Dinsmore says the work crews he supervised at the former Iraqi airbase were made up of Hindis, Pakistanis, Nepalese, and Filipinos working for First Kuwaiti.

Working at Camp Speicher for seven months before returning home in May 2005, Dinsmore said he knew of three different instances of TCN construction workers who refused outright to work or showed up only to sit out most of the day. Asked what was going on, TCNs told him that First Kuwaiti had not been paid them for several months and that they didn't want to be treated that way."

I heard that several hundred Filipinos were fired in September 2004 before I got there because of labor problems," Dinsmore said. After discovering that the TCN assistants were not paid any overtime, he was careful to get them back to their compound after their 10 hour day.

Like Powell and Reynolds, Dinsmore recounted dismal working conditions. "One of the construction Filipinos told him that they were treated like human cattle by some of the Western employees there and that they did not receive enough medical treatment when they were ill.

"Many times, Dinsmore said, he would buy non-prescription drugs from the PX for his crews, especially when a very bad virus was going around during the winter of 2004-2005. If the case was bad enough, he would take the workers to the KBR clinic. His supervisor and the clinic medics told him that treating TCNs violated company policy. "We were told that First Kuwaiti was supposed to take care of them," Dinsmore said.

Dinsmore also turned to the Army for food. He says the food First Kuwaiti served was so poor, that he and other KBR employees would hand out military field rations -- known as "meals ready to eat" or MREs. "When the Army stopped that practice, many of us KBR people would pick up "to go" plates from the DFAC [dining facilities] and hand them out to the TCNs we were responsible for. If you want them to work well, you've got to feed them."

Despite these conditions, TCNs finished jobs ahead of schedule, says Dinsmore. He credits these workers for personal praise he won from KBR and the military for his own performance. "The reality was that without the TCNs, very little construction would get accomplished on time on Speicher," said Dinsmore adding that "I heard that eventually KBR took care of the pay issue."

First Kuwaiti manager Wadih Al Absi insists that his company provides the same quality of living and food that the U.S. Army provides to its soldiers and that the company has received commendations from the Army. "We have no problems with our employees; they get excellent care," he said.

Let Them Eat SandRandy McDale, who rose to be a KBR foreman for heavy construction equipment at Camp Victory and other installations near the Baghdad International Airport, confirmed many of the other contractors' and TCN's charges of miserable conditions and inadequate safety."Everyday was like T-bone steaks for us, but I would starve to death before eating what they had," he said of the workers with PPI. "Guys would just go and get lunch for them and bring it to the work site. The TCNs couldn't get it fast enough."

McDale, a KBR foreman for heavy construction equipment at Camp Victory and other installations near the Baghdad International Airport, spent 15 months in Iraq before returning home in April to an eight-year-old trailer house on 35-acres of land in cattle ranch country outside of Bogata, Texas, "halfway between Paris and Texarkana."Earning about $7,500 to $8,000 a month before his promotion, McDale said many American workers saw a clear line between themselves and the TCNs. "

There's a prejudice among some Americans that they are not equal and just labor force," he said. "Americans are supposed to be the experts."The division was made all the more clear to McDale by TCNs' lack of protective armor for threat alerts and boots and hard hats for construction work. "Some were wearing sandals walking in the mud when it was winter and 40 degrees," he said of the Indians, Sri Lankans and Filipinos he worked with. "One guy didn't even have a coat."

KBR gave McDale grief after he requested 20 hard hats for his workers, he said. "I don't know why KBR wasn't giving PPI a hard time for not getting the right equipment. That's the way it works in the States. If a subcontractor isn't ready, you fire them."Willing to ReturnAlthough Filipino passports now explicitly ban entry into Iraq, the ranks of Filipinos sneaking over the border from neighboring countries has as swelled from an estimated 4,000 before the 2003 ban to 6,000 today.

Filipinos "believe it is better to work in Iraq with their lives in danger rather than face the danger of not having breakfast, lunch, or dinner in the Philippines," said Maita Santiago, secretary-general for Migrante International, an organization that defends the rights of more than a million overseas Filipino workers.

Despite complaints about First Kuwaiti, Autencio said he would return to Iraq if he had guarantees for proper food and pay. "I would take my chances abroad if I couldn't find a decent job here," he said during an interview at his home in Pasig City, an urban area in metropolitan Manila. "But I'd take any job here that pays enough to buy me a second hand car and start my own business."Soliman, now finds his problems with PPI and injuries in Iraq pale in comparison to life back in the Philippines.

Jobless, he sees his life teetering on the edge. He may be splitting up with his wife, and plans for providing a new home to his family are on hold. He says he doubts that PPI will be sending money for his final medical checkup or even the several months salary he says he is still owed But those things don't matter so much.What really matters now is finding another job. "If you hear of anything, let me know," Soliman said at the end of the interview. "I would even go back to Iraq."

( David Phinney is a journalist and broadcaster based in Washington D.C., whose work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, New York Times and on ABC and PBS. Lucille Quiambao and Howie Severino reported from the Philippines for this article. Additional research by Pratap Chatterjee.)

Remittance standards urged to protect OFWs

2005-11-02T18:28:00.000+08:00

Wednesday, November 02, 2005 / 4:09:31 PM
http://www.journal.com.ph/news.asp?pid=2&sid=1&nid=13599&month=11&day=2&year=2005

TO protect overseas Filipino workers and their families from abuses, a lawmaker has urged the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas and the Departments of Trade and Industry and Labor and Employment to work out and establish minimum standards for banks, money transfer agents, door-to-door dispatchers and other entities engaged in the remittance business.

"Owing to the remittance boom, just about everyone wants to be in on the trade. In fact, no less than the DTI has warned the public about the emergence of a number of fly-by-night remittance agents. Regulators must now step in and make sure that all remittance handlers operate according to a minimum set of standards,"

Rep. Eduardo Gullas said. "The agencies concerned are duty-bound to protect our OFWs and their families, not just from outrageous transfer fees, but also from foreign exchange conversion short-changing as well as sloppy delivery services," he said.

To prove his point, Gullas cited the complaint of a Filipino nurse working in California, who recently sent $600 to her family in Cebu City. The money was coursed through a leading Manila-based door-to-door parcel courier that has since ventured into the remittance trade.

Gullas said the courier's California office guaranteed that the peso equivalent of $600 would be delivered to the consignee within two days. However, the money arrived after seven days. He also said the courier converted the $600 at the exchange rate of 1:55.15 (P33,090). Yet, on the day the remittance was taken, the Philippine Dealing System's average exchange rate was 1:55.65.

"In effect, besides paying the $12 (P661.80) transfer fee, the nurse or her beneficiary incurred a hidden loss of $5.44 (P300) upon conversion of her dollars into pesos. And the loss of 50 centavos for every dollar became the courier's P300 (foreign exchange) gain," Gullas said. The nurse thus spent $17.44 (P961.81), or about three percent for the $600 remittance. And yet the money was delivered five days late, Gullas said.

"Government has to set minimum standards, to possibly include reasonable and transparent limits to foreign exchange gains that may be realized by handlers at the expense of our OFWs," he stressed.

Handlers that repeatedly fail to deliver remittances within the promised period, including banks that delay the crediting of cash to a beneficiary's account in the case of direct deposit transfers, should also be penalized, Gullas added.

The BSP expects remittances to hit $10.3 billion this year, up 22 percent from the $8.5 billion posted in 2004.

The $10.3 billion does not include some $3 billion in transfers coursed through informal, non-banking channels, such as those hand-carried by returning laborers on behalf of co-workers. #

Indonesian and Philippine centers to produce 'custom-trained maids'

2005-11-01T20:45:00.000+08:00

The Jakarta Post
http://www.thejakartapost.com/detaillatestnews.asp?fileid=20051101120918&irec=2

SINGAPORE (DPA): A Singapore company promising "custom-trained maids" is setting up schools in Indonesia and the Philippines, its director said Tuesday. "We want maids with the right attitude and aptitude," The Straits Times quoted Alvin Kor, director of the company Homemaker, as saying.

"If they don't meet these requirements, we will send them back home." Kor said the center in Jakarta, Indonesia, would open next month. The center in the Philippines is due to open in January 2006. The maids will spend two months at the 280-square-metre center in Jakarta learning housekeeping techniques and ways to take care of infants and the elderly.

They will also learn safety tips and how to handle chemicals. Indonesia and the Philippines are the primary sources of the 160,000 domestic helpers in Singapore.

Others come from Thailand, Sri Lanka and India. Abuse of Indonesian maids from rural areas by Chinese employers has become rampant in Singapore. After several maids fell to their deaths while washing windows in high rise housing blocks, Singapore's Manpower Ministry has been trying to crack down on the abusive employers by issuingguidelines on what employers can and cannot expect.

Homemaker currently provides housekeeping services for expatriates living in Indonesia's capital. A training facility for maids was launched on the Indonesian island of Batam last year, but an instructor told The Straits Times that half of the maids received little or no training.

The approximately 50 maids who pass through the center daily use it mainly as a transit point to register with the center's officials, check their documents and attend a three-hour briefing on work safety and Singapore law.

Kor said his company, for an additional fee, will conduct home visits to help employers supervise the maids and to draw up their schedule.

Regardless of their nationality, the salaries of the trained maids will range between S$300 and S$350 (US$178 and US@208). "There is value in paying higher for better maids," Kor said.

Maids' pay-rise hopes dashed

2005-11-01T20:36:00.000+08:00

By EUNICE del ROSARIO
Vol XXVIII NO. 203
Sunday
9 October 2005
http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/Story.asp?Article=123967&Sn=BNEW&IssueID=28203

A NEW minimum wage for Filipina housemaids, stipulated by their own government, is not worth the paper it's written on, say recruiters in Bahrain.

Recruiters may sign the minimum-wage contract required by law to get maids out of the Philippines, but families here will simply ignore it, say agents.

They say Filipina housemaids receive high salaries compared to domestic helpers from other countries working in Bahrain.

More Bahraini families are also choosing Indians, because they are "easier to get along with, learn to adapt easily, experience less culture shock once in Bahrain and are more loyal".On average, Filipina housemaids are said to earn about BD50 a month, while those from Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India and Indonesia reportedly earn around BD40.

The Philippines' government has set a new minimum wage for Filipina housemaids in Bahrain at $200 (about BD75), which it says recruiters will have to meet.But manpower agencies dismissed this as a "formality".

They said the $200 minimum salary would be stated in contracts, but Bahraini families would most likely continue to pay Filipina housemaids BD50.

"I am happy to follow the $200 minimum wage, but the problem here is that the majority of Bahraini families would not be paying this salary. They are not in position to pay," Al Shoala Public Relations managing director and Bahrain Recruiters Society president Ali Al Shoala told the GDN yesterday.

Al Shoala Public Relations, a leading manpower supply company in Bahrain, brings on average about 40 housemaids from various countries to the kingdom.Mr Al Shoala said that he personally would like to see the BD75 minimum wage materialise, but doubted that anyone would pay it.

"It is very rare in Bahrain that families would pay even BD65 for a housemaid. Even rich families won't do that," he said.Three Bahraini families the GDN spoke to yesterday said that they paid their Filipina housemaids BD50 each a month.One family head said he would consider raising his housemaid's salary to BD60, even BD75, after a few years' service.

"It also depends on her skills. If she speaks good English and learns quickly, then why not raise her salary?" he said."Unfortunately, the growing problem with Filipina housemaids is that they generally think they can just leave and run away to their embassy at the slightest hint of a problem.

"Years ago, I had one Filipina housemaid who run away after two months because she said she was homesick."Another Bahraini family said that they would pay BD75 for a Filipina housemaid if she had a college education, other than that - they would only pay BD50."Why should we settle for someone who is not educated?" reasoned one member of the household.

Al Shoala's public relations manager Makki Abdulla said Goan housemaids were in high demand in Bahrain."Most Bahraini families want Indian housemaids now, this is what we have found out," he said."Indians make very good housemaids and they tend to adapt to Bahrain more easily than Filipinas.

They also stay for a long time in each household."All housemaids brought to Bahrain by Al Shoala are also trained prior to working with families here.If they are unpaid, abused or maltreated, they are urged to contact the agency and complain, said Mr Abdulla."If the employer is bad then we immediately put his name in our blacklist.

"A spokeswoman from Shaker Management Consultation Services said that it welcomed the minimum salary, set by the Philippines' Department of Labour and Employment (DOLE)."The Philippine Embassy in Bahrain pushed for a $300 (BD113.4) minimum salary, which we thought was a lot compared to other GCC countries - where it is $200," she said.

"This is in favour of Filipina housemaids definitely, especially if this means we will be able to hire more qualified candidates."Unfortunately, I doubt if anyone would pay BD75 a month. There is a trend in Bahrain that Filipino housemaids get BD50 a month.

"She said that Filipina housemaids got more in other countries like Hong Kong, Singapore, the UAE and Kuwait."Their salary in Bahrain is really minimal, whereas in Abu Dhabi Filipinas earn about BD75," said the spokeswoman.

"But within Bahrain, Filipinas earn more than Ethiophians, Sri Lankans and Bangladeshi housemaids."Lower salaries could mean lower quality of work, said a Zainal Manpower spokeswoman."The $200 minimum wage is just a formality in contracts, because anything less than that, the housemaid may not be able to leave the Philippines. But in reality, they get paid BD50 here," she said.

"But as an agency, our main concern is that the housemaids we bring are paid on time, they are treated properly and not abused."

Meeting

The Philippine Embassy hopes to hold another meeting with the Bahrain Recruiters Society.

Their last meeting was held at the embassy in Zinj in July, to find ways to ensure that employers stick to the standard contract for domestic staff.

The embassy also stressed to the BRS the fact that the Bahrain labour law of 1976 did not cover domestic helpers. This means that they have no benefits, such as medical insurance.

The society said that problems faced by housemaids in Bahrain were 'solvable'.

The society has a total of 61 manpower agency members. #

$3B in OFW remittances eludes banks

2005-10-27T14:26:00.000+08:00

Posted: 2:16 AM Oct. 27, 2005
Inquirer News Service
http://money.inq7.net/topstories/view_topstories.php?yyyy=2005&mon=10&dd=27&file=1

AS MUCH as $3 billion in cash sent home by overseas Filipino workers is still coursed through non-bank channels such as couriers, Governor Amando Tetangco of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP, the central bank) said Wednesday, citing findings of a government study.

Banks are expected to capture $10.3 billion in OFW remittances this year and will likely capture a bigger proportion as the money inflows continue expanding in the years ahead, Tetangco said. "As we are able to improve remittance systems and able to use technology, we'll see more and more portions of these remittances into the banking channel," he told a forum of foreign correspondents.

The OFW money that elude banks still benefits the economy as a whole, Tetangco noted. "It still goes into the country, still goes to consumption and other uses in the economy."

"That's why in the BoP [balance of payments], we try to capture some of that by assuming there's another 20 percent that is being coursed through non-banks," he said."

That's a conservative estimate, because the survey shows it's somewhere between 25 and 30 percent." The Department of Labor and Employment did the study on OFW remittances, together with consular offices abroad. To encourage use of banks in sending OFW incomes home, the BSP is asking banks "to come up with products that OFWs can use, for those who don't have the time or inclination to go into business," Tetangco said.

He said the central bank was also studying ways to link OFW inflows with microfinance. "The $10 billion is a big account and we have a lot of people in the countryside that are potential entrepreneurs," he noted.

"Looking forward, we see that there's still potential for further expansion in the industry, for a number of reasons," Tetangco said. "One, there is increasing demand especially from countries whose populations are aging," Tetangco said. With INQ7.net

Almost 5,000 Filipino workers in jail overseas

2005-10-27T14:22:00.000+08:00

First posted 07:53pm (Mla time) Oct 25, 2005
Agence France-Presse
http://news.inq7.net/breaking/index.php?index=1&story_id=54487
Inq7.net

NEARLY 5,000 Filipino workers have been jailed overseas for various crimes but the government is doing its best to help them, Labor Secretary Patricia Sto. Tomas said Tuesday.

Most are detained in Middle Eastern countries although there are others who have been jailed in Japan, Hong Kong, Brunei and Singapore, she told reporters. Up to eight million Filipinos live abroad, many on short-term employment contracts.

"Legal assistance to [overseas Filipino workers] who have committed offenses in their host countries are provided jointly by the Philippine Embassies in the host countries and by the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration," she said.

Social workers are also providing humanitarian aid, she added. The lure of higher-paying jobs overseas has seen almost eight million Filipinos go abroad with nearly a million finding work overseas every year. #

Study: Worker remittances to reach $225B in '05

2005-10-27T14:11:00.000+08:00

http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/storypage.aspx?StoryID=20064

WASHINGTON - Migrant workers are expected to send home a whopping $225 billion this year, the World Bank said Monday, as a new study showed remittances playing a key role in slashing poverty rates in developing economies.

Worker remittances also increase spending in home countries on education, health and investment, the bank said. "Close to 200 million people are living in countries other than the ones in which they were born, and remittances are estimated to reach about 225 billion dollars in 2005," the Washington-based bank said, quoting from its forthcoming publication, Global Economic Prospects 2006.

"This makes remittances the biggest source of foreign exchange in many countries and has major implications for strategies to reduce poverty in developing nations," it said.

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) earlier said it expects remittances from Filipinos working overseas to hit $10.3 billion this year, up 21 percent from 2004.

BSP Governor Amando Tetangco told reporters remittances could rise further to at least $11.3 billion next year. BSP officials have said total remittances could be around 20 percent higher if informal transfers, such as money sent home through visiting relatives and friends, are accounted for.

Remittances help fuel consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of Philippine gross domestic product.

The World Bank report, to be released in November, examines policy options to increase the poverty-reducing impact of international migration and remittances. The World Bank presented the findings in conjunction with the release on Monday of a new study, "International Migration, Remittances and the Brain Drain," produced by its research department.

It includes a detailed analysis of household survey data in Mexico, Guatemala and the Philippines -- all countries that produce millions of migrants -- which concludes that families whose members include migrants living abroad have higher incomes than those with no migrants. "The studies show that remittances reduce poverty and increase spending on education, health and investment," said World Bank economist Maurice Schiff, who co-edited the book with Caglar Ozden, also an economist at the bank.

He said the findings were consistent in all three country studies.

Further research is underway to see if they apply in other countries, he added. "The household survey evidence presented in the book demonstrates a direct link between migration and poverty reduction in the countries studied," said Francois Bourguignon, the World Bank's chief economist.

"It is groundbreaking work that is essential to sound policymaking in this area," he said. While remittances highlighted migration's positive impact on development, a more complex picture -- the so-called "brain drain" -- emerges when the study's focus shifted to the educated migrants from developing countries.

One chapter in the book unveiled "the most comprehensive database" to date, based on census and survey data from OECD countries, tracing a massive exodus of professionals from some of the world's most vulnerable low-income countries.

Eight out of 10 Haitians and Jamaicans who have college degrees live outside their country. In Sierra Leone and Ghana, the same ratio is five out of 10. Many countries in Central America and Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as some island nations in the Caribbean and the Pacific, show rates of migration among professionals over 50 percent.

This was in sharp contrast to much bigger countries such as China and India, from which only three to five percent of graduates are abroad, as well as Brazil, Indonesia, and the former Soviet Union, which also have low migration rates among the educated.

On a larger scale, the study showed that migration dramatically increased global economic output by enabling workers to move to locations where they were more productive, and as a result, earn much higher wages than they would have in their developing home countries.

A large portion of these economic gains accrues to the migrants and to their families back at home through the remittances they send, it said. (AFP)

WB study: OFW money lifting families out of poverty

2005-10-25T14:31:00.000+08:00

Posted: 2:09 AM Oct. 25, 2005
Inquirer News Service
http://money.inq7.net/topstories/view_topstories.php?yyyy=2005&mon=10&dd=25&file=4

MONEY remitted by overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) is lifting many Philippine households out of poverty by boosting funds for education, health and entrepreneurship, a new World Bank study has noted. The study, titled "International Migration, Remittances, and the Brain Drain," includes a detailed analysis of household survey data in the Philippines, Mexico and Guatemala.

The chapter on the Philippines says households with OFWs tended to be wealthier than others in terms of per capita income based on 1997-1998 data. It said that in June 1997, a month before the Asian financial crisis set in, 5.9 percent of Philippine households had one or more members working abroad.

Fifty-one percent of these households landed in the top 25 percent of the national household income per capita distribution while 28 percent were in the next-highest quartile, it said. Only nine percent of Philippine households with OFWs were noted to be still living below the poverty line.

The average per capital income of OFW households was estimated at P20,235 ($778) during the pre-Asian crisis period as opposed to ordinary households, which had a higher poverty rate of 31 percent and a lower per capita income of P11,857 ($456).

The study further noted that a currency exchange shock similar to the peso devaluation against the US dollar during the Asian crisis could lead to increases in household remittance receipts and in total household income. A 10-percent improvement in the exchange rate leads to a drop of 0.6 percentage point in the poverty rate, it noted.

Households enjoying a more favorable exchange rate were also more likely to start a business, particularly in transportation and communication services, and manufacturing, which were activities involving considerable fixed costs in vehicles and equipment that could become more affordable in the wake of positive exchange rate shocks, the study pointed out.

Those investing in transportation services were likely to venture into taxi and minibus operation while likely manufacturing activities include small activities such as mat weaving, tailoring, dressmaking and food processing, the study said.

"The fact that the exchange rate shocks stimulated such investments suggests that the shocks are likely to have persistent and positive effects on household well-being over the long term, in addition to their leading to reductions in current poverty," it said. The study also found evidence of positive spillovers to households without OFWs in terms of gift-giving.

Other key findings of the WB study were:

• 31 percent of OFW household heads have college or higher education, compared with just 20 percent of non-OFW household heads.
• 23 percent of OFW household heads work in agriculture, compared with 38 percent in all other households.
• 68 percent of OFW households live in urban areas, compared with 58 percent of non-migrant households.
• Saudi Arabia is the biggest single destination of OFWs, with 28.4 percent of the total.

Hong Kong (China) comes in second with 11.5 percent. The only other economies that account for six percent or more are Taiwan (China), Japan, Singapore, and the United States.

• OFWs have a mean age of 34.5 years; 38 percent are single and 53 percent are male. The two largest occupational categories are production and related workers, and domestic servants, each accounting for 31 percent of the total.

• 31 percent of OFWs have achieved some college education, and an additional 30 percent have a college degree.

To address rising unemployment and balance-of-payments problems, the Philippine government initiated an Overseas Employment Program in 1974 to facilitate the placement of Filipino workers abroad.

At first, the government directly managed the placement of workers with employers overseas, but soon yielded the function to private recruitment agencies and assumed a more limited oversight role.

Doris Dumlao, with INQ7.net

Reports on runaway workers in thousands

2005-10-25T14:23:00.000+08:00

The Saudi Gazette
http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/sgazette/Data/2005/10/25/Art_277047.XML

RIYADH -- The runaway workers section in Riyadh s Expatriate Department gets as many as 4,500 reports of runaway maids and workers a month, according to a report in the Arabic daily Al-Watan on Monday.

The paper said that the department s director would not give any information on the issue, saying that he had no authority to divulge such information. But the newspaper said that there is information that the department receives as many as 150 so-called missing worker reports each day.

The paper quoted visitors of the Expatriate Department in Riyadh as saying that a major contributor is the illegal employment of runaway workers by a number of citizens and expatriates for higher wages.

Fahad Al-Shammari believes that competent authorities including the Passports Department, police, and other, do not enforce harsh sanctions which would be a deterrent.

Offenders are arrested if, by coincidence, they are caught by police and sponsors are required to pay for tickets to send them home even though their legal responsibility for runaway individuals ends upon filing a running away report , he said.

Shammari adds that competent authorities are at times aware of the presence of runaway workers and when a report is filed, the Passports Department and the Police assign responsibility for arrest to each other until citizens give up and resign to the status quo.

Mahmoud Al-Haq, an expatriate, blames the running away to a number of sponsors requiring workers to pay certain amounts upon coming to Saudi Arabia in order to have the sponsor s authorization to work.

These amounts are increased each year. No longer able to bear this injustice, some workers simply run away.The head of the Expatriates Department in Riyadh declined to disclose information on the issue or on the Department s role in curbing the phenomenon on the grounds of non-competence.

However, there is information that the Section of Run-Away Labor, affiliated to the Department, receives more than 150 reports each day, which translates into more than 4,500 reports each month.

A citizen whose subordinate has run away is given a form to fill. The form contains information on the run-away worker and on his/her sponsor.

A list of workers employed by the government is then shown to a sponsor to determine whether or not a run-away worker may be working in the public sector.

On the other hand, the Department requires citizens who wish to retract a run-away report to pay fees of up to SR2,000.A sponsor who fails to report a run-away worker within three days of the running away is fined SR1,000, taking legal excuses into consideration.

Reports are received within three days of the running away incident on condition that the sponsor has not filed a lawsuit against his subordinate with any government authority.

A responsible source at the Passports Department defended the levying of a fine, explaining that some citizens make agreements with their subordinate whereby they are allowed to run away and work for other parties against a fee paid in cash to the original sponsor.

The purpose is to dodge responsibility in case a run-away worker is arrested.

In the case of maids, a sponsor is required to obtain a letter from the Maids Affairs Section indicating that the maid is no longer in his employment.

The remaining reporting procedures are subsequently finalized. The passport of a missing worker is normally handed over to the authorities within three months.

However, an exception is made in the case of maids and drivers whose passports may be handed over within two weeks in order for a sponsor to be able to apply for recruitment of a replacement.

STARTING NEXT YEAR: Maids in S'pore must be given one day off a month--report

2005-10-25T14:20:00.000+08:00

First posted 04:26pm (Mla time) Oct 25, 2005
Associated Press
http://news.inq7.net/breaking/index.php?index=1&story_id=54471
Inq7.net

SINGAPORE -- Employers of foreign maids working in Singapore must give their domestic helpers at least one rest day a month or compensate them in cash starting next year, The Straits Times newspaper reported Tuesday. Under current legislation, Singapore's employers are not obliged to give maids any free time, but the Association of Employment Agencies watchdog group said that from January, agencies must include a clause in employment contracts that stipulate one day off a month for maids.

Following the move, domestic helpers not given their monthly rest day can sue their employers for breach of contract, the report said. More than 140,000 maids, mostly from Indonesia and the Philippines, are employed in Singapore, a wealthy Southeast Asian city-state.

Singapore made it mandatory for maid agencies to be accredited in 2003 to encourage ethical and proper employment practices. The watchdog group is one of two organizations which run accreditation schemes requiring the more than 500 agencies under them to set out clear refund policies and employment terms for maids.

Maid employment agencies that do not include a clause for time off in contracts drawn up between maids and employers may not be reaccredited, the newspaper reported."Employers tell us that they are busy, that's why they can't give their maids a day off," the paper quoted David Haw, director of employment agency Newway Holdings, as saying. "It's a shame that we are from a developed country and yet we treat our maids like slaves.

"The report said a sample of the new employment agreement had been submitted by the association to the Manpower Ministry and that a standard contract would be issued shortly, implying government approval of the measure. The association can make recommendations to employers, but has no power to enforce policy.

The watchdog and the Manpower Ministry could not be immediately contacted by The Associated Press to confirm the report.

There have been periodic cases of employers abusing their maids in Singapore, and some activists want the government to do more to protect the rights of foreign domestic helpers.

Dubai imposes visit visa curbs on six countries

2005-10-24T21:01:00.000+08:00

Nation Immigration & Visas Published:
24/10/2005, 08:36 (UAE)
Gulf News.Com

By Sunita Menon and Bassma Al Jandaly, Staff Reporters Dubai:

Authorities in Dubai have stopped issuing visit visas for people from Bangladesh, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Niger, Iraq and Nigeria, a Dubai Naturalisation and Residency Department official said yesterday.

The official, who did not wish to be named, said that family visas for people from the six nations would be issued only after the approval of the director general or the deputy director of the Dubai Naturalisation and Residency Department (DNRD).

The official did not know when the visa issue would be resumed. Senior DNRD officials were not available for comment.

A senior Bangladesh official at the Bangladesh Embassy in Abu Dhabi however confirmed that issuance of visit visas for Bangladeshis has been stopped due to illegal visa trade by unscrupulous agents.

Representatives of the five other countries were not available for comment.

Officials at the Bangladeshi embassy as well as the consulate said that they had received enquiries made by Bangladeshis about the stopping of visas.

"The reason behind suspending the issuing of visit visas for Bangladeshis is due to the illegal visa trade," said Mirza Shamsuzzaman, the Bangladesh ambassador.

He said during the past year a growing number of Bangladeshis had been conned by dishonest agents into buying visit visas for a large fee.

"Many have fallen victim to the visa trade and it has caught media attention in Bangladesh. Some people have also approached me for assistance to get their money back from the agents," said Shamsuzzaman.

"The agents sell the visit visa for 200,000 taka (Dh11,182) to people who are looking for employment overseas. The victims are often illiterate Bangladeshis from villages," Shamsuzzaman added.

He said the matter had been discussed with the UAE foreign ministry, which had assured him that the temporary suspension of issuing visit visa should not be taken as discrimination against the community.
"There are about 400,000 Bangladeshis in the UAE and there is a high demand for Bangladeshi manpower," said Shamsuzzaman.

Kamrul Ahsan, the Bangladesh consul general, told Gulf News that he too had received complaints from Bangladeshis about not being able to bring their relatives to the UAE on a visit visa.

A few Bangladeshis who spoke to Gulf News said they were disappointed when informed by the enquiry desk at the DNRD that they will not be able to apply for a visa.

A Bangladeshi resident said: "Initially I called the DNRD customer service for information on the working hours. I was informed by them that visit as well as family visas for Bangladeshis have been temporarily stopped."

4,775 jailed Pinoys all over the world

2005-10-20T18:24:00.000+08:00

Aside from diplomacy, the Department of Foreign Affairs has also been busy providing legal assistance to at least 4,775 Filipinos — of which 1,103 are women — who are languishing in foreign prisons as of the end of 2004, Senator Ralph Recto said yesterday.

Citing an official report from DFA, Recto said the number of “prisoner OFWs” is about 10 percent of the number of current domestic prisoners.

“The dispersal of Filipinos worldwide has also resulted in the incarceration of a few of them in diverse places. Some of those who have joined the great Filipino diaspora have never found their own ‘Promised Land,’” Recto said.

Of the 82 Philippine diplomatic posts abroad, only 12 reported that there was no Filipino detained or awaiting trial in their area of jurisdiction, Recto said, noting that most of the Filipinos imprisoned violated immigration laws.

Recto said the DFA’s global situationer on OFWs revealed that at least 1,200 Filipinos were detained in Malaysia, mostly in Sabah, following the country’s crackdown on undocumented workers.

Next to Malaysia was Israel, where the Philippine embassy in Tel Aviv reported that 1,028 Filipinos were facing charges in court. Those not out on bail are detained in jails in Ramle, Hadera, Nazareth, Beersheva and Holon.

Others were caught trying to sneak into the country without papers, as in the case of 13 Filipinos caught in Croatia.

Recto said the other countries with Filipino prisoners were Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan.

“But many Filipinos in five continents were facing charges other than those that pertain to work or immigration concerns. Name it, they allegedly did it,” Recto said.

“One OFW issued fake checks in Vietnam. A nurse in Ireland was arrested for alleged Al Qaida links. A Filipina physical therapist in Michigan allegedly committed health fraud, and an aircraft engineer was arrested for smuggling contrabands into Nigeria,” he added.

In many Muslim countries, Filipinos were arrested and jailed for drinking alcohol, he said.
Recto also noted the rise in the number of Filipino women arrested for serving as “mules” or couriers of international drug syndicates.

There were also Filipinas in jails in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Ecuador, Hong Kong and Peru, among others, last year.

Other cases mentioned in the DFA report involved crimes of passion, including detention of a Filipino in a South American country for seducing teenagers.

In view of the rising number of Filipino prisoners abroad, Recto asked Congress to increase the DFA’s legal assistance fund in the proposed 2006 General Appropriations Act.

US to crack down harder on illegal immigrants

2005-10-19T17:39:00.000+08:00

First posted 01:12pm (Mla time)
Oct 19, 2005
Agence France-Presse
http://news.inq7.net/breaking/index.php?index=3&story_id=53837

WASHINGTON -- US President George W. Bush signed a new budget for the Homeland Security department Tuesday that sharply boosts funding to fight illegal immigration, as the department's head said they would now expel without exception all illegal immigrants.

The bill totaled 30.8 billion dollars in discretionary spending, 1.8 billion dollars higher than the current year's budget.

Of the total, 7.5 billion dollars is committed to fight the rising number of illegal immigrants in the country."We've got to strengthen security along our borders to stop people from entering illegally," Bush said.

"We're going to make this country safer for all our citizens," he said.

The government will also make stronger efforts to search out and deport illegal immigrants already in the country, Bush said."We must improve our ability to find and apprehend illegal immigrants who have made it across the border," he said.

"We've got to work to ensure that those who are caught are returned to their home countries as soon as possible," he said.

Buh's statement followed comments by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff earlier Tuesday that his department aims to expel all illegal immigrants without exception.

"Our goal at DHS (Homeland Security) is to completely eliminate the 'catch and release' enforcement problem, and return every single illegal entrant, no exceptions," Chertoff told a Senate hearing.

"It should be possible to achieve significant and measurable progress to this end in less than a year," he said.The Homeland Security budget includes 2.3 billion dollars for the US Border Patrol, and millions of dollars for increasing and improving border fences and technological surveillance.

The increased budget will enable the government hire 100 more immigration department agents and 250 investigators.

Prison space will be expanded by about 10 percent, or 2,000 beds, to accommodate the expected increase in apprehensions of illegal immigrants who are not Mexicans.

Chertoff told senators that currently a non-Mexican illegal imigrant caught trying to enter the United States across the southwest border has an 80 percent chance of being released immediately because of the shortage of holding facilities.

"We are moving to end this 'catch and release' style of border enforcement by reengineering our detention and removal process," Chertoff said.Bush meanwhile explained a separate strategy for Mexicans, who comprise by far the largest number of illegal immigrants in the country.

Rather than just forcing captured immigrants back over the order, under a new program called "Interior Repatriation," he US will fly or bus Mexican illegal immigrants all the way back to their hometowns.

"Many of these folks are coming from the interior of Mexico, and so the farther away from the border we send them, the more difficult it will be for them to turn around and cross right back into America," Bush said.

"By returning Mexicans to their homes, far away from desert crossing, we're helping to save lives," he said.

Chertoff's remarks in favor of returning "every illegal entrant, no exceptions" raised questions of an apparent conflict with the US policy toward illegal Cuban immigrants.

Though Cubans picked up at sea heading for US shores are returned to their country, those who reach US soil by any means are allowed to stay and work -- a policy Cuba says encourages dangerous attempts to get into the United States.

International shipping firms prefer Filipino seafarers, MARINA says

2005-10-18T17:43:00.000+08:00

Dumaguete City, Philippines
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
http://www.visayandailystar.com/2005/October/18/negor4.htm

Competence and skills make Filipino seafarers the most sought-after in the international shipping industry despite the low labor rates by their counterparts from China, Vietnam, India and Bangladesh, Maritime Industry Authority regional director Glenn Cabañez said at the recent Kapihan sa PIA.

This was held in line with the National Maritime Week celebration on the theme "A Globally Competitive Maritime Industry: A Key to a Strong Republic." Officer-in-charge, Evelia Durato, of the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration agreed with Cabañez that the Philippines is still the manning capital of the world in exporting qualified seafarers.

In 2002, the country deployed about 209,593 seafarers abroad and since then, the number of deployment has increased by 2.3 percent every year, Durato added. She also aired the same concern over the low salary rates particularly to Chinese seafarers.

She said that a Chinese seafarer with an ordinary seaman rank is paid only US$ 50/month compared to his Filipino counterpart with wages between US $200-300/month. Filipino seafarers rank fourth in the largest number of deployed Overseas Filipino Workers. Skilled workers, medical professionals, and domestic workers follow.

Cabañez said they will soon issue separate licensures to seafarers in the domestic and international shipping industry under different criteria and qualifications.

In order to help the domestic shipping sector hire only qualified and competent seafarers, the MARINA-7 also issues qualifying document certificates.*RG

Groups discuss adverse impact of unabated migration of nurses, docs

2005-10-15T17:30:00.000+08:00

MindaNews / 15 October 2005
http://www.mindanews.com/2005/10/15nws-nurses.htm

DAVAO CITY -- A global union of health workers is initiating this month a dialogue with key government officials and an international campaign on the adverse impact of “unabated” migration of nurses and other health professionals from poorer nations on the quality of health services worldwide.

The Public Services International (PSI) has teamed up with its domestic counterpart, Public Services Labor Independent Confederation (PSLink) for the dialogue and to raise awareness on the problems created by continuing migration of health professionals.

PSLink, in statement released today, said it will hold dialogues this month with officials of the Philippine Overseas and Employment Authority, Department of Foreign Affairs, Department of Labor and Employment, Overseas Workers Welfare Administration and Department of Health.

PSLink said it expects a delegation of health workers affiliated with PSI from Sri Lanka, Fiji, United Kingdom, Netherlands, United States of America, Canada, Japan and the Philippines to join the dialogue with labor and foreign affairs officials at the POEA headquarters in Mandaluyong City.

Jillian Roque, PSLink national secretariat member coordinating the event, said that immediately after the dialogue, the delegates will hold a three-day “partnership meeting” at the Grand Men Seng Hotel here starting October 25 to discuss ways at raising public awareness on the problems of continuing migration of nurses and health workers.

Awareness campaign plans formulated during the workshop and meetings here “will be implemented nationally, regionally and internationally,” Roque said.She said the meeting also aims to develop possible bilateral cooperation between health workers from sending and receiving country.

Roque said PSI and PSLink jointly initiated the activity in response to recent warnings from the World Health Organization and the domestic Alliance of Health Workers on the troubling trend of outward migration of nurses and other health professionals from the country.

A recent study conducted by the Institute of Health Policy and Development Studies, the National Institutes of Health Philippines, University of the Philippines Manila and the Health Science Center noted an increasing trend of deployment of nurses abroad from about 5,747 in 1992 to about 13,536 persons in 2001.The number of nurses tapered off to around 8,968 persons in 2003 but the number of nursing graduates produced yearly during these years outnumbered the projected demand for nurses.

The study noted that at present there are a total of 332,205 nurses in the country but the demand here and abroad only reaches 193,223 nurses.

The study also noted that the migrating health workers from the country are predominantly female and are between the ages of 20 to 30 with specialized training on critical care in nursing, operating room, delivery room and emergency room, and with one to ten year working experiences.

The study noted a combination of factors has driven the nurses away. Among these are low salaries, lack or inadequacy of hazard payments, low coverage of insurance, overload and stressful working condition, slow promotion, limited opportunities for employment, decreasing government budget on health care and the declining peace and order condition in the country.

The study said positive working conditions like high income, benefits and compensation packages, opportunities for skills upgrading, advance medical technlogy and better peace conditions are enticing the nurses to move abroad.

But the study also noted that as a consequence of the draining number of health workers, the country is losing senior and competent health staff. Health care in the country has also been “compromised” due to inadequate staff and poor pool of skilled health workers.

Some hospitals have also closed shop because there are not enough applicants for required residency programs.

PSLink, in its statement said the negative implications of the health workers’ migration worsen the condition of health care in the country. The country is already reeling from problems of inadequate budget and unresolved issues on the “exploitative treatment” of Filipino migrant workers. #

Saudi Arabia to allow more women workers, more benefits for them

2005-10-13T17:45:00.000+08:00

10/13
3:22:37 PM
http://www.philstar.com/philstar/NEWS_FLASH101320053786_15.htm

The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) Thursday reported that a new labor law has been passed by the Saudi Council of Ministers in line with the priority agenda of King Abdullah in addressing the problem of unemployment in the Kingdom.

Citing a report from Philippine Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Bahnarim Guinomla, Acting Labor and Employment Secretary Manuel G. Imson said that one of the salient features of the new law include allowing women to work in all fields and their entitlement to maternity leave.

Imson said the new law also imposes an obligation on employers providing jobs to 50 women or more to arrange for babysitters who will take care of their children below six years old. The new law, he added, also requires companies to have at least 75 percent of their workforce to be Saudi nationals. However, this may be subject to reduction in instances where there is a shortage of qualified hands required by the companies, Imson said.

The new law also directed the Saudi Labor Ministry to establish employment offices that will provide free services to jobseekers and employers.

It also covers certain categories of workers for the first time including mine workers and the law aims to protect the rights of workers and ensures a balanced relationship between employers and employees.

The new labor law would surely impact on our overseas Filipino workers in that part of the region as the law is the realization of the Saudization plan of the Kingdom as well as its applicability to female OFWs deployed in that country, Imson said. #

More remittances from women emphasize feminization of migration – ADB study

2005-10-08T17:33:00.000+08:00

By Jeremaiah M. Opiniano
OFW Journalism Consortium
Saturday, 08 October, 2005

http://www.cyberdyaryo.com/features/f2005_1008_02.htm

MANILA – Southeast Asian women migrant workers, of which over a half are Filipinas, sent more money than male workers to their home countries, a study by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) showed. An estimated 2.182 million contract workers and immigrants, largely women, remitted some US$3.3 billion from Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia "on monthly averages ranging from US$300 to US$500," said the ADB study Southeast Asian Workers´ Remittances.

This development surrounding remittances from Southeast Asian migrants reflects the significant trend of increasing number of female migrants from Southeast Asia, "especially those who independently decide to migrate", the study cited.

"The human movement involved in labor migration is of obvious economic importance and… (labor export) has become the largest single foreign exchange earning activity, outweighing commodity exports, in a number of Asian labor-surplus nations," added the study, presented by the ADB in a conference last September.

Women dominate migrant volumes Citing estimates on the volume of migrants in East Asia, the ADB said there are 1.423 million Asian migrant workers in Japan, 621,400 foreign workers in Singapore, 1.43 million documented and 400,000 undocumented migrants in Malaysia, and 340,000 foreigners in Hong Kong.

From those estimates by the four East Asian host countries, 240,000 female migrant workers in Hong Kong are Filipina and Indonesian domestic helpers, while some 230,000 of the 240,000 maids in Malaysia are Indonesians.

Some 180,000 migrants in Japan are Filipinas, mostly as overseas performing artists (OPAs), and 150,000 of Singapore's 621,400 foreign workers with work permits are mostly Filipina and Indonesian domestic helpers. ADB noted there were a "large number of single women working in a country other than their own, in large part to support family members through (their) remittances¨. "These women overwhelmingly work in domestic labor situations.

In addition to frequent employer pressure upon workers and would-be migrants, these women tend to face numerous challenges, some but not all of which are worse because of their sex.

Meanwhile, the sex industry is another likely arena where women migrants work," the ADB study added. Estimated remittances From the US$3.3 billion estimated remittances from those Southeast Asian women migrants (see table 1), the study said Filipino migrants remitted US$2.3 billion, Indonesians remitted about US$0.7 million, and Malaysians sent back to their country about US$0.27 million.

Of these amounts, more than half of the Asian migrant workers, especially Filipinas, were domestic workers in Hong Kong and Singapore, and as entertainers in Japan, wrote the study. The volume of remittances, ADB added, may be higher "if estimates of undocumented workers are included".

The ADB study was based on a survey of 2,500 Filipino, Indonesian, and Malaysian remitters who send money from Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia. Filipinos and Indonesians in the four East Asian states were surveyed, while Malaysians in Japan and Singapore were made part of the survey, as Malaysia was considered both a country that sends out and receives migrants – the latter including Filipinos and Indonesians.

In the respondents´ profile of the study, 58 percent of Filipino remitter-respondents in Japan, 97 percent of those in Hong Kong, 88 percent of those in Singapore, and 58 percent of those in Malaysia were women. Women comprise 65% of OFW deploymentBased on Philippine labor department data, nearly 3,000 Filipinos leave the country everyday for work or residence abroad, adding to the stock estimate of a total eight million Filipinos living and working temporarily or residing permanently in 197 countries worldwide.

Government data shows that over-65 percent of these deployed overseas workers are women. Deployment data from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) confirms that most of the Filipinas in Japan are overseas performing artists (OPAs), and those in Hong Kong and Singapore are mostly workers.

Meanwhile, a majority of the Filipinos in Malaysia are undocumented migrants in Sabah island that crossed the border from Western Mindanao.

If the estimates of this latest ADB study on the remittances of Filipinos in Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong are correct, these are higher than 2004 actual remittance figures by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas in those countries.

Multilaterals´ efforts on remittances Funded by the Japan Special Fund (JSF), these data comes from the Bank's second major study on remittances –the first being the 2004 study titled Enhancing the Efficiency of Overseas Workers' Remittances. ADB spent US$650,000 for the Philippine and Southeast Asian remittances studies.

Apart from culling estimates of remittances, the latest study analyzed migration trends in Southeast Asia; how both senders and receivers of remittances use the money; the regulatory framework on remittances; the remittance industry in these countries; and financial intermediation initiatives.

During the conference Remittances and Poverty Reduction: Learning from Regional Experiences and Perspectives that the ADB, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)-Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF), and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) co-convened on September 12 to 13 in Manila, ADB vice president Liqun Jin said the Bank sees its role "as a focal point for research and development of remittances in Asia".

While the ADB, Jin said, "stepped up its efforts in addressing remittances concerns in the past two years" through "substantial research and policy development initiatives," IDB's MIF has "convened conferences, commissioned studies and surveys, and financed projects on the volume, transaction cost and the potential development impact of remittances," its website wrote. IDB-MIF, from 2001 to August 2005, has financed remittances projects through non-refundable technical cooperation grants and loans to the tune of US$40,030,653, information in www.migrantremittances.org revealed.

Jin said that US$53 billion (or 42 percent) of the world's US$127 billion total of remittances coursed through banks in 2004 come from Asia. India, the Philippines, China and Pakistan are among the top five remittance receiving countries worldwide – the Philippines being number three.

ADB, a multilateral development finance institution with 64 member-countries, annually lends about US$6 billion to members, and provides technical assistance usually totaling about US$180 million a year. Cyberdyaryo 10/08/05

Relations of RP, Singapore not tainted over slain OFW envoy

2005-09-27T17:47:00.000+08:00

Tuesday, 09/27/2005
http://www.tribune.net.ph/nation/20050927.nat03.html

Even with the brutal slaying of Jane La Puebla, a Filipino domestic helper, the bilateral relations of the Philippines and Singapore remains intact. Philippine Ambassador to Singapore Belen Anota yesterday confirmed this, stressing the recent tragedy involving two overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) was not in any way causing damage on the bilateral relations of the two countries.

“I am not here during the Flor Contemplacion case, but I can speak for what is happening now and the things are going on very smoothly,” Anota said.

Both countries, Anota added, are “very senstive” to each other's concerns and so far there was no indication that this might create another tension between the Philippines and Singapore should the ruling of the subordinate court turned out unfavorable to us. Guen Aguilar, the suspect in the murder of La Puebla, was currently detained at the Changi Womens prison.

Philippine authorities feared this case would again cause another spark between the good relations of the two nations 10 years ago during the execution of Flor Contemplacion, the Filipino domestic helper convicted of killing her compatriots Delia Maga and a Singporean boy.

Anota said there is an ongoing backdoor channelling with the Philippines and the host government to ensure the La Puebla murder slay will not put both parties at stake.

“We are in close coordination with all the authorities so that nothing gets out of hand,” Anota explained, adding she is heading the Philippine team. But she refused to give details of the backdoor negotiations since she noted this may harm the ongoing back room channelling.

Anota added despite the recent tragic event, the Singaporean government did not impose stricter rules on the entry of the OFWs in the country, claiming our deployment has not been affected. Citing the figures of the Philippine Overseas Labor Office in Singapore, Anota said there are an estimated 90,000 OFWs in Singapore at present and the number continues to increase.

But when asked how many are considered illegal, the diplomat noted if we are using the Singapore laws, there is no “illegal” workers in the host country since all of the Filipino workers there are documented and are able to secure their work permits.

But she claimed if we will use the Philippine laws, majority of the OFWs in Singapore could be considered illegal since they entered Singapore using a tourist visa.

Meanwhile, Anota has committed to give all the support to both the Aguilar and La Puebla families until the case will be over.

Court Magistrate Carolyn Wee last Friday suspended the court hearing for the third time to give the police some more time to gather pieces of evidence and complete their investigation.

Based on reports, the next hearing of Aguilar is set on Oct. 14. Marie A. Surbano

Brain drain now a na

2005-09-21T21:35:00.000+08:00

Brain drain now a national ‘hemorrhage’ First posted 09:32am (Mla time) Sept 21, 2005 By Christian EsguerraInquirer News Service THE BRAIN drain has become a “national hemorrhage.” Some 80 percent of government doctors are now enrolled in nursing schools nationwide so they can land higher-paying jobs as nurses overseas, according to a group of concerned health professionals. The situation was troubling since one Filipino doctor tended to between 10,000 and 26,000 patients, warned the Health Alliance for Democracy (HEAD).The local ratio was a far cry from the United States and even Cuba where there was one doctor for every 225 patients.“Let’s look at the irony -- we are producing so many nurses yet our hospitals are lacking in quality nurses and the quality of health service that we’re giving to Filipinos is very poor,” Dr. Gene Nisperos, HEAD secretary general, said Tuesday in a press conference in Quezon City.HEAD, an organization of doctors, nurses and other health professionals, linked up with the Alliance of Health Workers (AHW) to pressure the government and other stakeholders to address the worsening health care problem.Last week, the AHW predicted that the local health care system would crumble in two to three years unless the exodus of doctors and nurses was arrested.In the media briefing, Nisperos said the brain drain started in the 1960s when doctors and nurses left for higher studies and training overseas.By the mid-1970s, however, the Philippines was already the top exporter of doctors and nurses in the world, second only to India in peddling local doctors abroad.The problem of health professionals leaving the country for better pay and working conditions came to a head in the late 1990s when the US and several European countries jacked up their demands for doctors and nurses.From 2000 to 2003, Nisperos said a total of 51,580 Filipino nurses left the country. In 2004, some 5,000 doctors jumped on the bandwagon to work as nurses. Around 4,000 more doctors are taking up nursing this year.The growing number of doctors settling for a nurse’s cap has been welcomed by nursing schools. At least 45 of them now offer an abbreviated nursing course for doctors lasting between 1 1/2 to 3 years, according to HEAD.Nisperos said administrations, past and present, should have taken concrete steps to keep doctors and nurses in the country.“This is mainly a government-sponsored phenomenon,” he said. “We believe strong medicine is needed to address the hemorrhage in the health sector.”The HEAD-AHW alliance proposed four steps to deal with the health sector crisis: First, the Arroyo administration should increase the budget for health care and abide by the World Health Organization prescription that countries set aside at least 5 percent of their gross national product for this purpose. At present, only 0.6 percent of the GNP was purportedly allocated to the health sector.Second, the government should work to adequately compensate doctors and nurses. In the South African country of Namibia, the alliance said a junior physician earned $1,161 monthly while a Filipino counterpart here had a salary of between $300 and $400.Third, the government should review -- or perhaps rescind -- its commitments to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Such commitments purportedly allow countries like the United Kingdom to lure local doctors and nurses to work abroad, with no regard for the fate of the local health care system.Fourth, there should be more consultations among all stakeholders in the health care crisis, particularly patients, to arrive at other concrete solutions. #(image placeholder)

Kuwait plans minimum

2005-09-21T21:29:00.000+08:00

Kuwait plans minimum wage for foreign workersTuesday, September 20, 2005 / 7:31:24 PM KUWAIT CITY, Sept 19 (AFP) - Kuwait's minister of social affairs and labour Faisal al-Hajji has proposed the introduction of a minimum wage for hundreds of thousands of expatriate workers, a newspaper reported Monday. Al-Qabas newspaper quoted Hajji as saying he has submitted recommendations to the cabinet calling for a 50-dinar (170-dollar) minimum monthly wage for foreigners hired by private companies involved in government contracts. He also proposed a 70-dinar (240-dollar) minimum wage for expatriates working as security guards for private companies. Monthly salaries of many expatriate menial workers, like cleaners, are as low as 70 dollars a month. Hajji said that after the recommendations are approved, no private company will be awarded a government contract before guaranteeing it will pay the minimum wage. More than 1.8 million foreigners live in Kuwait, which has a population of 2.8 million. About 900,000 work in the private sector, including about 60 percent from the Indian subcontinent. Kuwait also employs about 450,000 domestic workers, mostly from India, Sri Lanka and the Philippines. Asian workers have staged a series of strikes in recent months, claiming they had not been paid wages in several months. The government intervened and threatened action against employers if they did not pay. The US State Department in its annual "Trafficking in Persons Report" released in June criticised Kuwait and three other Gulf states for not doing enough to halt human trafficking and child labour. Washington has also stipulated improving labour conditions and amending the labour law as two of several conditions for starting free trade talks with Kuwait. Like other oil-rich Gulf states, foreigners working in Kuwait's private sector must have a "sponsor," a regulation which restricts their movement and puts them at the mercy of their employers. Officials have said Kuwait has been cooperating with the International Labour Organization for the past four years, and is considering ILO suggestions for changing the sponsor requirement. In June, the labour ministry prohibited employers from forcing labourers to work under the sun from noon to 4:00 pm during the summer months when the temperature reaches 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit). #

Malaysia tightens OF

2005-09-21T21:28:00.000+08:00

Malaysia tightens OFW entry rulesTuesday, September 20, 2005 / 7:04:45 PM FILIPINOS who intend to work in Malaysia will be required to attend a 10-day induction course and pass a 90-item written test on Malaysian laws and culture, including basic Malaysian language, the Department of Labor and Employment said yesterday. Labor Attaché to Kuala Lumpur Josephus Jimenez, in a report to Labor Secretary Patricia A. Sto. Tomas, said the government of Malaysia has come up with the new policy to help foreign workers avoid problems that may arise due to their ignorance of Malaysian laws, culture and language. The course aims to teach foreign workers basic Malaysian language, help them adjust to Malaysian culture, religion, and social norms, avoid violations of Malaysian laws, and raise awareness on foreign workers' rights. After the induction course, foreign workers will be required to take a written test. Those who pass will be listed on the Roster of Passers and granted a Certificate of Eligibility. Only those with CEs will be granted a work visa. Jimenez said the policy is applicable to foreign workers who will arrive in Malaysia starting November 1, this year. Those who arrived in Malaysia between Nov. 1, 2004 and October 31 this year will be required to attend an orientation course to be conducted by Malaysian employers, Jimenez said, adding employers who fail to conduct the orientation will be penalized. Sto. Tomas said the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority will submit a list of training centers for accreditation to Malaysia before October 30 this year. #

Migrant party pickets Philippine office in Taipei

2005-09-19T21:19:00.000+08:00

Industrial accident victim's rights were protected, MECO labor officials say
2005-09-18 / Taiwan News, Staff Reporter / By Marie Feliciano http://www.etaiwannews.com/Kabayan/2005/09/18/1127014440.htm

A group of Filipinos staged a picket protest inside the Manila Economic and Cultural Office in Taipei last Sunday to denounce the alleged incompetence and gross negligence of labor officials who helped negotiate a compensation package for occupational accident victim Seraflor Mabuti.

Seraflor, a native of Ilocos Norte, figured in a work-related accident in Taipei on September 10, 2004. The injuries left him paralyzed from the waist down. The Filipino returned home on November 10 last year In a dialogue with the protesters, MECO-Labor Taipei Representative Reynaldo Gopez and Welfare Officer Lydia Espinosa stressed that MECO did all that it could to secure Seraflor a just compensation package.

The occupational accident victim and his wife, Rocel, also voluntarily agreed to accept one of the two options drafted by the Taipei County Labor Bureau, the two said. "Everything was explained to Seraflor.

He was advised (by us and someone who was really looking after his interest) not to leave Taiwan (so that he could pursue his case) but he still insisted on going home. We respected (Seraflor and Rocel's decision), and we understood their situation at the time," Gopez said.

"If you (are well off), you could easily say, 'Yes, I can wait (for the compensation package from the labor insurance bureau).' Their situation however did not permit that. You can't blame them for accepting the settlement." Espinosa confirmed Gopez's assertions. "We explained to them their options.

We discussed everything with Seraflor and Rocel," she said. Seraflor's wife however insisted that MECO-Labor Taipei bungled the settlement process, and demanded that Gopez and Espinosa re-opened her husband's case. "Bakit po pinabayaan ninyo kaming pumirma (ng kontratang) mali? (Why did you let us sign an unfair contract?)" Rocel asked the two officials.

The Filipina, who attended the picket staged by the Migrante Sectoral Party, works as a caregiver at a Taipei nursing home. MECO, which assisted Seraflor during the negotiation process, allowed Seraflor to sign a document in Chinese dated November 3, 2004, Rocel said. The Philippine labor center did not even bother to translate the agreement in English or Tagalog, she continued.

By doing so, MECO failed to fully explain to them that signing the contract meant they were waiving all of Seraflor's actual labor insurance claims, Rocel continued.

Item 7 of the agreement stated that Seraflor was "forfeiting" all of his insurance claims, and that he was authorizing his former employer to collect it. The said article also stated that Seraflor must sign 10 withdrawal slips so that his former boss could withdraw the money. The final sum was also none of Seraflor's business, it added. Based on the contract that Seraflor signed, the Filipino would be receiving a total of NT$795,040 from his former boss.

The amount included the NT$150,000 in compensation package paid to him by his former employer, two months' salary amounting to NT$31,680, and NT$613,360 in estimated labor insurance benefits. The latter amount, a rough assessment of Seraflor's insurance claims, was initially shouldered by the Filipino's former employer.

The employer would later get a reimbursement when the labor insurance bureau has determined Seraflor's actual insurance benefits. The entire sum, once released, would go to Seraflor's former employer, the contract said. Negligence? Reverend Joy Tajonera, one of the individuals who provided moral support and assistance to the Mabutis, described the agreement as "lopsided."

"First, the contract that Seraflor signed - and this is a contract that MECO brokered - is in Chinese. Everyone knows that Mr. Gopez and Mrs. Espinosa neither speak nor read Chinese. If that's the case, then there's no way that those two officials could honestly say that they had fully explained its contents to Seraflor when they themselves could not even read it," said Tajonera.

MECO only produced an English translation of the contract after Rocel, Tajonera, Alice Librea of the Migrant Workers Concern Desk, and a representative from the Taiwan Association for Victims of Occupational Injuries asked Gopez to furnish them a copy during a visit on November 8, 2004, said the priest. Rocel did not have a copy of the agreement.

"If they (MECO-Labor Taipei officials) really knew what they were doing at the time, they would have drafted an agreement stating that Seraflor still had the right to collect his insurance claims. If the actual amount exceeded the NT$613,360 in substitution payment shelled out by Seraflor's former boss, the excess amount should still go to Seraflor since it's his. Baldado na nga iyong tao. (His injuries left him paralyzed)," the priest said. "What went wrong? What would MECO do to ensure that this would never happen again?" Tajonera added he was puzzled that MECO agreed to a contract requiring a migrant to sign withdrawal slips.

"No one in his right mind - especially government officials who are mandated to protect the rights and welfare of overseas Filipino workers - would agree to that. They themselves are breaking their office's own policies," he said. On the evening of November 8, MECO's Tony Wu asked Rocel to drop by the Philippine labor center and sign another waiver the following day, Tajonera said. "I told her not to sign anything," said the priest.

During the said meeting, Gopez promised Rocel, Tajonera, and representatives of the MWCC and TAVOI that he would ask MECO lawyers to go over the agreement, the Asia-Pacific Mission for Migrants said in a statement. "Mr. Gopez never got back to the three to relay to them the lawyer's opinion - if there was any," APMM said.

In a handwritten statement, Seraflor claimed that Espinosa and former MECO-Labor Taipei administrative assistant Tony Wu - Wu was one of MECO's local-hires who was "eased out" earlier this year - discouraged him from pushing for a bigger compensation package. Seraflor's statement "Since my employer's offer was quite small, my wife and I decided to ask for a larger sum (NT$1.4 million).

My employer turned down our request. MECO's (Tony Wu and Lydia Espinosa) told us that if we insisted on getting that amount, we might end up with 'Option 1' (total receivable was NT$181,680 exclusive of actual insurance claims after 180 days) or a sum that was even smaller than that. Worse, we might end up with nothing," Seraflor said in Tagalog.

"Why are they (Espinosa and Wu) like that? Instead of encouraging us to fight (for our rights), they discouraged us at tinakot na baka mas maliit o kaya'y wala pa kaming makuha (and they warned us that we might either end up with a smaller sum or nothing at all)."

Espinosa denied Seraflor's allegations. "What we told Seraflor was that the employer rejected their demand, and that the latter even said Seraflor could file a case if he wanted to. I asked him, 'What do you want to do? File a case and go to court?" she said. "We simply explained to him what his options were." The NT$613,360 in estimated insurance claims stipulated in the agreement was also a "fair assessment" of what Seraflor might eventually get from the labor insurance bureau, Espinosa continued.

"We based that on labor insurance bureau estimates. We did the best that we could even though we were pressed for time," she said. The final decision always rest with the migrant, Espinosa continued. During last Sunday's dialogue with Migrante protesters, Gopez told Seraflor's wife, "Rocel, may kasabihan sa Ingles na (there's a saying in English that says), 'You can't have your cake and eat it too."

"Pasensya na. Naiintindihan kita (I feel for you and I understand you)," he said. "I'm also thankful to Migrante because they are helping you out, and that's what we are hoping for. Let's help each other. What's wrong with that? Instead of assigning blame, let us cooperate with each other. If you think what we are doing is wrong, tell us. Now, let's talk about her husband. How is he? How can we help?"

Rocel lamented that when her husband was still confined at a Taipei hospital, MECO failed to get him a 24-hour caregiver. "He is paralyzed so he needed someone who would regularly change his diapers and empty his catheter," she said. "No one was there to care for him. It was really tough for Seraflor." Espinosa said she did request Seraflor's former broker and employer to provide the Filipino with a caregiver during his therapy sessions.

"It even reached a point where it's the broker who ended up looking after him," she said. Gopez called on overseas Filipino workers to care for their own. "It's difficult to get sick abroad since you are away from your families. We have to help each other. Mga negosyante ito eh bakit sila magsusuweldo ng taong magbabantay? Igiit man natin iyan, kulang pa rin. Iyong bibig natin ilagay natin sa trabaho.

Tayo ang magbantay (They are businessmen so why would they pay for your caregivers? Even if we were able to push that, it would still not be enough. Let's put our words into action by looking after our sick countrymen)," he said.

Rocel added that the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration did not even provide them with an ambulance when they arrived in Manila on November 10. She had to arrange for one and pay for it. Espinosa said the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration in Manila did not dispatch any ambulance to the airport since Rocel did not inform her that they were indeed flying home on the said date.

The agreement that Seraflor signed stated that his flight was tentatively set on November 10, 2004. "The night before we left, Tony Wu kept on calling me. He said he would meet us at the airport, and that he would ask us to sign a waiver concerning my husband's insurance benefits. So how could you not know that we were flying home on the said date?" Rocel asked. In a text message to the Taiwan News, Wu, who is no longer with MECO, neither confirmed nor denied Rocel's allegations.

"I was not at the airport, so how could I ask them to sign (the waiver)?" Wu said in his text message. He added that he was only employed as an administrative assistant at MECO at the time, and had no power to make tough decisions on behalf of Seraflor. "Do you think without the (officer's authorization) I would be able to solve that kind of problem?" he asked.

Accountability In a statement, the Asia-Pacific Mission for Migrants called on MECO to immediately endorse Seraflor to the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration in Manila for medical and psychological assistance. The group also called on the Philippine government to closely examine MECO-Labor Taipei's performance on the Seraflor case.

"As of this writing, Seraflor had stopped his rehabilitation program at the Mariano Marcos Memorial Hospital in Batac, Ilocos Norte because of financial constraints.

His doctor is still recommending that he continues the said program since possible complications might arise," APMM said. "Vocational training should be considered and (possible) psychological problems like depression and anxiety reactions should be seriously addressed." #

Labour ministry powerless to prevent abuse of maids

2005-09-19T21:15:00.000+08:00

By Bassma Al Jandaly, Staff Reporter
Published: 19/9/2005, 07:59 (UAE)
http://www.gulfnews.com/Articles/NationNF.asp?ArticleID=182518

Dubai: Labour ministry officials say they know that recruitment agencies are abusing foreign housemaids they bring into the country to work, but say the ministry is powerless to oversee their activities.

Asked by Gulf News about complaints from housemaids that agencies keep them in tiny attics, beat them and give them very little to eat before delivering them to their sponsor, an official from the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs said he was aware of what was happening.

“Yes, hundreds of housemaids are mistreated by the agencies, and we know that,” he said. “But we can’t inspect them and go inside to find out what is going on. Even the Interior Ministry cannot do that. The agencies are taking advantage of this.”

A Gulf News reporter visited four recruitment agencies in Dubai, Sharjah and Ajman, posing as a potential employer. In one agency about 25 housemaids of different nationalities were crowded into a small room above the office. They crouched silently on the floor.

“Take one,” the woman at the agency said. Gulf News saw a lady at one agency slap one of the housemaids who had been returned by a dissatisfied client. The maid had neither done nor said anything before she was slapped in the face.The official said the labour and interior ministries were both powerless because neither had full oversight over the issue.

The labour ministry merely issued licences for the agencies to pursue their business in the UAE. As for the Interior Ministry, he said its Immigration and Naturalisation Department issued visas for the housemaids.The official said: “Everything to do with these agencies should be placed under one ministry, and we have suggested that it should be the Interior Ministry. “We want to explain this problem to the media.

These agencies mistreat people and break the law because they are not under full control of anybody,” he said. An Indonesian housemaid named Hini, now working for a family in Sharjah, said the previous housewife who employed her in Abu Dhabi forced her to wear a veil day and night in the house because she was young and pretty.When the housewife found her sleeping without a headscarf, she said, “She kicked me and woke me up, asking me to cover my hair while sleeping.

I cried a lot and I asked them to send me back to the agency, who also mistreated me and they used to beat me until I found another sponsor who treated me well.” She said back at the agency in Dubai dozens of maids were kept in a small room.

Maria, another housemaid at another agency in Sharjah, said she and 20 other housemaids were kept in a small attic above the agency.

A woman who runs a labour recruitment agency in Sharjah told Gulf News she kept the housemaids in an attic at the agency while they were awaiting deportation or changes in their visas.

Number of domestic workers set to grow

The number of foreign housemaids in the UAE is estimated at 300,000. They represent 20 per cent of the workforce. However, this number is expected to rise to 800,000 by 2010, according to figures released by Dubai Municipality two years ago.

They come from India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, East Africa.

Overseas remittances bypass Philippines poor, says ADB

2005-09-13T22:28:00.000+08:00

Posted: 11:58 AM
Sept. 13, 2005
Agence France-Presse
Inq7.net
http://money.inq7.net/breakingnews/view_breakingnews.php?yyyy=2005&mon=09&dd=13&file=17

BILLIONS of dollars of cash transfers from the Philippines' huge overseas work force have largely bypassed the Southeast Asian nation's poor, according to the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

While the money has boosted personal consumption, the main driver of its economy, the overall impact is patchy, with more prosperous areas of the country and higher-income families receiving the lion's share, it said.

"The poorer segment of Philippine society has been largely excluded from the opportunities provided by migration, and OFWs (overseas Filipino workers) tend to come from less poor regions," the Manila-based lender said in a report.

The Philippines central bank says around eight million overseas Filipinos -- nearly a 10th of the population -- will send home 9.4 billion dollars this year via formal banking channels, up 10 percent from last year's levels.

The country is the third highest recipient of remittances, behind Mexico and India.

The ADB, however, estimates that the actual level of remittances will be about three times the official amount, with overseas workers using other, informal means of transfer.

It found that despite sustained GDP growth in the four years to 2003, real average family incomes in the Philippines have fallen 10 percent, with the total income of the poorest 10th of the population having stagnated.

About 44.1 percent of Filipinos earned no more than a dollar a day in 2003.

"While a significant proportion of families report that income from abroad is their main source of income, these families are mainly based in urban areas," the report said.

"Furthermore, families from higher income groups tend to receive larger proportions of income from abroad than lower income groups."

Provinces with the highest levels of poverty, particularly in the rebellion-torn southern island of Mindanao, have the lowest proportion of overseas workers.

"Poverty remains a significant challenge in the Philippines, and it is a challenge that continues to grow," said Shamshad Akhtar, head of the ADB's Southeast Asia department.

"The number of poor Filipinos is increasing," she said, owing to the rapid 2.36 percent population growth rate, and "rural poverty has proven to be particularly intractable".

Remittances outstrip ODA, FDI for poor countries--experts

2005-09-13T22:19:00.000+08:00

Posted: 5:00 PM
Sept. 12, 2005
Agence France-Presse with XFN-Asia
Inq7.net
http://money.inq7.net/breakingnews/view_breakingnews.php?yyyy=2005&mon=09&dd=12&file=20

OVERSEAS remittances from workers in developed countries have outstripped foreign direct investment (FDI) and official development aid (ODA) as sources of funds for developing countries, financial experts said Monday.

Total overseas workers' remittances to developing countries are conservatively estimated at 200 billion dollars a year," said Donald Terry, manager of the Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF) of the Inter-American Development Bank.

In contrast, foreign direct investment amounts to about 125 billion dollars a year and official development assistance is only some 50-60 billion dollars annually, Terry told an international conference on remittances in Manila.

He estimated the number of workers sending remittances overseas at about 125 million worldwide.

This huge transfer of funds had been hidden because financial institutions were not aware how large the total was, said Robert Bestani, director-general of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) private finance department.
It was also not widely acknowledged because it was "very controversial," he added.

"It's wonderful to talk about the free flow of goods but it's not wonderful to talk about the free flow of people," said Bastani.

He said this situation could increase as more of the poor sought work in developed countries while richer regions, like Europe and Japan, suffered a shortage of young workers.

India, Mexico and the Philippines were the three countries which got the largest amount of remittances from their nationals overseas, said Bastani at the opening of a joint conference on how such remittances could lower poverty.

The forum, sponsored by the ADB, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the MIF at the ADB headquarters in Manila, will look into ways of tracking such remittances and how they can be harnessed to help the poor.

Terry remarked that the total amount of overseas remittances to poor countries was officially placed at 126 billion dollars but that all studies showed that there were still vast amounts going through unofficial channels.
The amount officially recorded as going to Asia is about 50 billion dollars a year, said Terry, about equal to the amount going to Latin America.

But considering the large amounts still going through unofficial sources, the total for Asia would more likely hit 75 billion or even 100 billion dollars a year, said Terry.

Bestani said the overseas remittances were very effective as the money was going to the poor who need it most.

However the experts said the money could have a wider multiplier effect and could also be put to better use by the recipients if they were only aware of their financial options.

Terry cited India and Ecuador where remittances were being routed through micro-finance institutions and were being used in different financial services like home mortgages.

The challenges facing financial institutions is to find ways to lower transaction costs for remittances and learn how to channel more of the money into investment, Bestani said.

The experts also warned governments against excessive intervention like taxation or forcing people to use their remitted funds in certain ways.

Bestani said it was highly unlikely that terrorists and criminals were relying on overseas remittances to launder funds, remarking that individual amounts being sent home were too small.

24 OFWs on death row for various crimes--DFA

2005-09-12T15:55:00.000+08:00

First posted 02:28pm (Mla time)
Sept 12, 2005
By Veronica Uy
INQ7.net
http://news.inq7.net/breaking/index.php?index=1&story_id=49985

APART from a Filipina maid in Singapore who faces death by hanging if she is convicted for the murder of a compatriot, at least 24 overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) are on death row for various crimes, the Department of Foreign Affairs said Monday.

In an interview with INQ7.net, Pedro Chan, executive director of the Office of the Undersecretary for Migrant Workers Affairs, said most of the 24 death-row inmates are in Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. He said those in Saudi Arabia face capital punishment for murder, while those in Malaysia face the death penalty for drug-related cases.

Chan also said that of the seven million Filipinos overseas, his office is handling some 25,000 assistance-to-nationals cases at the moment, including those that involve crimes and capital punishment.

“These figures are relatively low if you compare for example with the crime rate in Metro Manila. Of course, [OFWs] are more behaved when they are outside the country. When you have seven million people, these incidents are bound to happen.

“[The OFWs] stand out only because the cases usually involve both Filipino victims and Filipino perpetrators, and because they happen outside the country,” he said.At the same time, DFA spokesman Gilbert Asuque said funds have already been released for the hiring of two Singapore-based lawyers, one each for suspect Guen Garlejo Aguilar and for victim Jane Parangan La Puebla.

Asuque said Philippine embassy officials have already talked to Aguilar but only about “general things” as Singapore police officials have advised them against discussing the case.

“The right to remain silent and the right against self-incrimination are really honored there as requirement of the law,” he said. #

Nurse Assaulted

2005-09-05T21:57:00.000+08:00

Monday, 05 September 2005
7 DAYS
http://www.7days.ae/local-news/nurse-assaulted.html

This man hit his receptionist in the face with a phone. He got a dhs500 fine. She got four stitches and faces a six month ban. A dental nurse who was assaulted by her boss faces being banned from the country after he reported her as an absconder.

Grace Castello was celebrating her 30th birthday when Dr Mohamed Nihad Mohammed Gouma, a dentist based in the Comprehensive Medical Centre at the Crown Plaza in Dubai, lost his temper over the time of an appointment and hit her over the head with the telephone.

“I was asking a patient to come to the clinic at 2.00pm instead of 4.00pm. I was surprised when he started shouting at me and took the phone from my hand and hit me with it.

He hit me with the telephone so hard that I had a cut on my forehead and I started bleeding,” Castello, from the Philippines, said. A surgeon in the same building gave her four stitches, she said.

The case eventually went to court, where Gouma was found guilty and ordered to pay dhs500 compensation for the attack. When Castello said she was too afraid to return to work, she was reported as an absconder, and she could now be banned from the country for six months.

“He wanted to settle the case amicably and I refused, hoping that this man learns a lesson,” she said. “But I feel he has got away with a mild punishment - even for a traffic violation we get the same fine.

“My sponsor had warned me that I was digging my own grave and now I feel he is right,” she said. When contacted by 7DAYS, Dr Gouma claimed Castello had fallen over and invented the story. He hung up when told 7DAYS had seen court documents on the case.

Siza Darwish, the patient who was on the other end of the phone when Castello was attacked, said she could hear a man screaming. “Then I heard a bang and she [Castello] was crying.

“The call was disconnected after a while,” Darwish told 7DAYS. Despite repeated requests, Dr Gouma’s sponsor refused to comment on the case.

Employers Placing Women in Night Shifts Face Fines

2005-08-30T17:15:00.000+08:00

Fahd Al-Ghaithi, Arab News/Al-Eqtisadiah
Tuesday, 30, August, 2005 (25, Rajab, 1426)
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=1§ion=0&article=69275&d=30&m=8&y=2005

RIYADH, 30 August 2005 The Ministry of Labor has warned institutions in the private sector that women should not work during the evening. An exception is made for those in the medical field where their job requires them to work at night or that they are in a continuous working shift in a hospital that requires them to stay all day.

Muhammad Al-Duwaish, the director of the legal department and labor relations at the ministry, told Arab News that the Kingdom had signed an agreement with the International Labor Organization which states that women should not work in the evening. He said that the signed agreement was for their own protection and not discriminatory as some say. Al-Duwaish said that institutions found not complying with the rule could be fined. The fine ranges from SR500 to SR1,000.

In addition, the authorities will be informed and the female section of the institution will be shut down.Commenting on the appeals made by some women in the medical field who earlier asked the minister of labor to exempt them from the ruling since their jobs required that they be in the hospital in the evening, he said that there was no need for such appeals because women in the medical field had already been exempted.

Al-Duwaish said other countries which signed the agreement would also comply with it and that the Kingdom was not the only country applying a no-evening working hours for female employees. “All countries that have signed the agreement will comply with it, including Saudi Arabia,” he said.

He noted that women should understand that the agreement was not to take away any of their rights but was instead to protect them. #

15,000 entertainers lose jobs in Japan

2005-08-30T17:12:00.000+08:00

By Mayen Jaymalin
The Philippine Star
08/30/2005
http://www.philstar.com/philstar/NEWS200508300408.htm

At least 15,000 Filipino entertainers have lost job opportunities in Japan and figures are expected to increase in the coming months as the Philippines continues to bear the brunt of Tokyo’s new hiring policy.

Data from the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency (POEA) showed a dramatic 38.46 percent drop in the deployment of overseas performing artists (OPAs) for the past seven months of the year due to Japan’s stricter visa requirements in employing foreign performers.

Based on POEA records, only 23,359 Filipino entertainers were hired from January to July or almost 15,000 fewer than the recorded 37,958 OPAs deployed in the Asian country during the same period last year. In July alone, hiring of OPAs declined by 73 percent to 1,664, a big drop from the 6,292 Filipino entertainers deployed during the same period in 2004.

Officials of the local recruitment industry said they are no longer expecting the total deployment in Japan to reach 30,000 this year.

"Most OPAs, who were deployed this year, applied for their visas before the implementation of the new hiring policy so we expect the hiring of OPAs to drop by half this year," said a recruitment official, who requested not to be named. He noted that only 291 OPAs were granted visas by the Japanese embassy since the implementation of the new hiring policy last March. "We used to have an annual deployment of over 63,000 OPAs to Japan," he added.

Labor Secretary Patricia Sto. Tomas admitted there has been a steady deployment drop, but noted local recruitment agencies are now preparing to undertake appropriate actions to enable OPAs to comply with the new hiring requirements.

Sto. Tomas also pointed out that the new policy is not singling out Filipinos, saying other foreign entertainers must abide by Tokyo’s new requirements as well. "It’s not that the new policy is biased against us (Filipinos) because it is for all entertainers (wanting to work in Japan)," Sto. Tomas said.

Earlier, local recruiters had warned of a possible drop in the deployment of OPAs as well as dollar remittances from Filipinos in Japan as soon as the Japanese government began restricting the entry of foreign workers.

The Philippine Association of Agencies Deploying Artists said OPAs annually remit some $1 billion to the country but the figure could decline dramatically due to the new hiring rules. The Japanese government is enforcing the new immigration law in an effort to curb the worsening human trafficking and prostitution problem in the country. #

10% of Filipinos left RP as of '04

2005-08-28T21:22:00.000+08:00

www.sunstar.com.ph
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
10% of Filipinos left RP as of '04
By Jimmy P. Abayon

SOME ten percent of the country's more than 80 million people or 8.08
million Filipinos have left the Philippines as of December 2004, said
the Commission of Filipinos Overseas (CFO).

Officials from the CFO were in Dumaguete City on Tuesday to conduct an
awareness campaign on issues concerning migration and intermarriages.
Of the total, 3.19 million are permanent residents abroad, said CFO
official Janet Ramos.

Some 79 percent are in the US, 14 percent in Canada, seven percent in
Australia, six percent in Japan, one percent in Germany, and 0.5
percent in the United Kingdom.

Ma. Regina Angela Gallas, another CFO official, said from 1998 to 2004
4,887 Filipinos from Negros Oriental left the country to work or live
overseas.

Almost half, roughly 2,237, were from Dumaguete City.
From 1993 to 2004, some 1,692 Filipinos married foreigners of whom 696
were from Dumaguete City.

CFO also held a similar forum at Negros Oriental State University (Norsu).
Ramos said the number of Filipinos going abroad has been increasing in
recent years and that, based on the trend, it will continue to
increase in the coming years.

Some 55,137 Filipinos left the country as immigrants in 2003 and the
number increased to 64,824 last year.

She said an average of 300 to 350 Filipinos leaving the country as
immigrants register for CFO's pre-departure and guidance counseling
sessions daily.

CFO is a government agency catering to Filipino immigrants, either
through petition or intermarriage, and holds pre-departure and
guidance counseling sessions for Filipinos ready to leave the country.

The agency conducts annual awareness campaigns in provinces with a
high number of Filipino immigrants.

(August 28, 2005 issue)
(c) Copyright 2002 - 2005 Sun.Star Publishing, Inc.

Maid released TO lawyer custody

2005-08-28T15:08:00.000+08:00

By Edgar C. Cadano
The Saudi Gazette
http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/sgazette/Data/2005/8/28/Art_256358.XML

RIYADH -- Housemaid Nour Miyati was released Saturday to the custody of a Saudi lawyer hired by the Indonesian embassy, embassy officials said here.

Nour Miyati is now under the personal custody of lawyer Nasser Dandani, said Dr. Mohammed Sugiarto. The lawyer, however, refused to give further information when contacted by the Saudi Gazette.Sugiarto said the hearing of the case slapped against Miyati by the Saudi prosecutor would proceed in the local court while she is now free.

The Indonesian embassy has been requesting the Saudi government to release their national under their custody while Miyati has been recuperating from surgery that amputated of her nine fingers and some toes as she was afflicted with gangrene that she allegedly got from a beating.

Beaten black and blue with mouth and eye injuries, Miyati was rolled to Riyadh s Shumaissy hospital in March by her employer, whom and whose wife the Indonesian initially accused of torturing her and tying her up in a bathroom for a month until she developed gangrene.

She has earlier asked her employer to pay the 18-month unpaid salary.Miyati was moved to King Faisal Specialist Hospital after her amputation as ordered by King Abdullah who was Crown Prince at that time.

While at King Faisal Specialist hospital, an investigative report said Miyati changed her previous statements about being tortured and was charged for issuing false allegations against her sponsor.

Miyati was arrested at the hospital and transferred to Al-Nisa Jail for two days and later found out to have been moved to Al-Nahda Philanthropic Society.

Sugiarto said the embassy would continue to extend legal and other assistance to Miyati while her case is being heard.The Indoneisan government has resumed deploying Indoneisan workers last month after Indonesian recruitment agency and the Saudi Arabian National Recruitment Committee of the Saudi Council of Chambers of Commerce agreed upon some protective measures.

Industry sources said the agreement provides housemaids to be given a weekly day off, a monthly salary of SR600 for newly recruited maids and SR700 for maids recruited for the second time. It also makes it mandatory for the sponsors to bear the domestic help s recruitment fees and air repatriation ticket upon the completion of the contract besides providing her with adequate accommodation and healthy food.

The agreement also allows maids to perform Haj and Umrah besides receiving incoming telephone calls and meeting with embassy s officials if need arises. Another provision states that maids should be treated kindly as per the Islamic and Shariah rules and holds the sponsor accountable for any psychological or physical damage caused to the maid by her employer or any of his dependents.

It also makes it obligatory for the employer to provide medical care for the maid and in case she falls sick and is prescribed rest by the doctor she must get paid full salary. And if she dies, the employer shall fully bear the transportation expenses of the corpse. #

Thai laborers riot in Kaohsiung

2005-08-23T18:47:00.000+08:00

2005/8/23
The China Post staff

Protesting what they called "unfair and unjust" treatment, more than 100 foreign workers, mostly Thais, staged the severest riot ever involving alien labors in Taiwan near Kaohsiung City. They burned houses, cars and facilities, and attacked police Sunday night before being subdued by riot police. No serious injuries were reported.

The incident occurred when several Thai workers returned Sunday night to their dormitory at Kangshan in Kaohsiung, the island's second largest City, with liquor and cigarettes, which are banned from the premises.

When they were prevented from entering the dormitory, the angry foreign workers who had been unhappy for a long time about the rigid and unreasonable treatment vented their anger by burning houses, breaking glasses, and throwing stones at the management staff, some of whom were beaten up, according to the police.

Riot police were called in to restore order, and the rioting workers sent delegates to negotiate with the human resources company that brought them to work in Taiwan. The negotiations went on until a little past 7:00 a.m. yesterday.

Witnesses said the workers actually turned the area into a "battlefield" with offices ransacked and extensive littering of burned garbage and beverage cans.

The management of Huapan Manpower Consultant and Management Co. estimated that the riot caused a NT$10 million loss to the company.

The government has dispatched Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) officials down to Kaohsiung and staff of the Thai representative office in Taipei also came forward to try and mediate.

By noon, peace returned to the Kangshan foreign workers' living quarters that were built to accommodate 3,000 people hired to build Kaohsiung's mass rapid transit system. At present, only 1,700 foreign workers, mostly Thais, are living there.

Thai workers were seen taking the initiative to clean up the mess they had created, while the construction work for the mass rapid transit (MRT) systems was brought to a standstill for one day.
Both police and prosecutors said they have started to gather evidence with a plan to charge those who led the rioting.

The workers presented a long list of 16 requests to improve their living and working conditions as well as payment terms.

They complained that the company, Huapan Manpower Consultant and Management, still owes them overtime pay incurred last year. They were only paid for 46 hours for every 100 hours of overtime, they said.
The workers demanded that they be allowed to use cell phones, that food quality at the cafeterias be improved, and that a satellite dish be installed so they can watch TV programs from their home country.

They also wanted the company to reshuffle managers who have allegedly been rough with the workers, including beating up some of their co-workers.

Another disgruntlement of the workers was that they could not take back food and daily necessities that were not purchased at the dormitory store. They called the restriction a form of exploitation.

Expressing his concern, Premier Frank Hsieh appealed to relevant government agencies to be lenient with foreign laborers, saying that the country should extend greater hospitality to the foreign nationals who are here doing laborious jobs that many Taiwan citizens would rather not do.

Noting that efforts should be made to regularly protect the foreign laborers' basic human rights and interests, Hsieh said that it would be a "bad thing" if the laborers' dissatisfaction or indignation with their Taiwan managers intensified to become a full-blown riot.

The premier said he has already directed the CLA to look into the latest incident.

Kuo Fang-yu, director-general of the CLA's Employment and Vocational Training Administration, said that officials from the Kaohsiung Police Department, the Kaohsiung Bureau of Labor Affairs and the Thai liaison office in Taiwan have begun investigating the incident.

Acting Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chi-mai expressed concern about the incident, urging all related parties to step forward to resolve the management-labor controversy as soon as possible.

Chen also called for the Thai workers' brokerage firm to mediate so that the laborers can resume their work to prevent the MRT project from being disrupted.

The Thai officials and Huapan executives, together with representatives from the local police precinct and the District Attorney's Office, held a meeting in the afternoon at the Cultural Bureau of Kaohsiung County, seeking to work out solutions to the problems.

The manpower management company eventually agreed to 14 of the 16 demands from the foreign laborers, who agreed to resume working today and allowed sanitation workers to enter the dormitory to clean up the debris from the riot.

Thai workers riot against `unfair' firm

2005-08-23T11:42:00.000+08:00

`INHUMAN TREATMENT': Hundreds of Thai workers in Kaohsiung took the law into their own hands to protest what they call unacceptable treatment by their employer

STAFF WRITER WITH DPA , TAIPEI
Tuesday, Aug 23, 2005, Page 1

Published on TaipeiTimes
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2005/08/23/2003268802

Furious with what they saw as inhuman personnel management, some 300 Thai workers in Kaohsiung set fire at the management center, a work dormitory, cars and other facilities Sunday night, police said.

Television stations aired footage of the workers clashing with police, attacking them with rocks and bottles in the overnight riot.

Several officers were injured by rocks shot with slings by the Thai workers, while one Thai worker was injured by broken glass in the dormitory, police said.

The riot began about 9:30pm Sunday at the five-story dormitory housing 1,700 Thai workers, who are building the Kaohsiung mass-transit system. The management company was hired by the Kaohsiung Mass Transit Bureau to manage the workers' living conditions.

"Some Thai workers clashed with management personnel, who tried to discipline the drunken workers who were shouting in the dorm. The management personnel stopped one Thai worker from using a cellphone and reportedly hit him with an electric prod," the Broadcasting Corporation of China (BCC) reported.

"The two incidents prompted the Thai workers to vent their pent-up anger at the management, so they rioted," it reported.

In addition to the bans on alcohol, cellphones and Thai television in the dormitory, the Thai workers were required to use tokens in the dorm store, but they allege they were short-changed when exchanging the script for real money, it added.

Of the 1,700 Thai workers in the five-story dorm, some 300 took part in the riot, setting fire to management offices and cars, burning clothes and hurling rocks at police who responded to the fire report.

Police, members of Thailand's representative office in Taipei, the construction company and the recruiting firms' representatives were involved in negotiations with the Thai workers to end the standoff.
Authorities yesterday agreed to the demands made by several hundred Thai workers, ending the confrontation.

But officials also decided to charge the rioters and deport them for starting the riot, which cost the employer at least NT$10 million (US$322,500) in damages.

"After three rounds of talks, the Thai workers have agreed to end their protest and return to work after the management company accepted most of their demands," said Fang Lai-chin (方來進), the director of the labor bureau of the Kaohsiung City Government.

The workers demanded that they be allowed to use cellphones, that food quality at the cafeterias be improved and that a satellite dish be installed so they can watch TV programs from their home country.
They also protested the management company's unreasonable methods of payment -- for each 100 hours of overtime, they are only paid for 46 hours.

The workers also complained that they could not take back food and daily necessities that were not purchased at the dormitory store.

The Huapan Co last afternoon agreed to most of the workers' demands.

Fang said the labor authorities will investigate the management methods of the company and will ask that the company dismiss supervisors treating the workers in inhuman ways.

Meanwhile, officials threatened the workers who took a stand against the company with deportation. Lai Chin-lin (賴勁麟), vice chairman of Cabinet's Council of Labor Affairs, said workers found guilty of starting the riot will be deported for violating law and order.

He said the council will also punish the employer, the Kaohsiung Mass Transit Bureau, for mismanagement by slashing by 800 the number of foreign workers the company is entitled to import to help it construct the transit system.

Asked for comments, Premier Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) said yesterday that local employers must try their best to protect foreign laborers' legal and human rights.

"These people [foreign workers] flew far away from their homes and came to Taiwan for jobs, and most of them are doing heavy-duty work, such as construction work. Basically, we should try to understand their feelings," the premier said.

"Employers should pay attention to these foreign workers' emotions from time to time, because it will be too late to do so when tragedy happens," he said, adding that he has already directed the Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) to look into the latest incident.

There are some 100,000 Thai workers in Taiwan.

Additional reporting by Jimmy Chuang

Workers' group urge RP government to protest alleged abuse of maids in UAE

2005-08-22T19:30:00.000+08:00

08/22 3:21:00 PM
http://www.philstar.com/philstar/NEWS_FLASH082220052955_11.htm

MANILA (AP) - A migrant workers' group on Monday urged the Philippine government to file a protest and review ties with the United Arab Emirates following reports that a rising number of Filipina maids are being abused by their employers in the Gulf country.

More than 60 Filipina maids have sought refuge at the Philippine consulate in Dubai, living in a makeshift shelter there to escape beatings and sexual harassment and seek unpaid wages.

Filipino women have been flooding into the fast-growing city to work as maids for as little as US$160 a month. But the influx has led to the number seeking shelter to double in recent weeks, with as many as five runaways a day fleeing to the consulate, labor attache Vicente Cabe said Wednesday in Dubai.

"The Philippine government should immediately lodge a diplomatic protest and review our relations with the United Arab Emirates in view of new reports of abused Filipina workers," Migrante said in a statement.

"The Philippine government must take immediate action to teach host countries ... that it is not right to condone abusive employers and leave guest workers without a livelihood, without food and without justice."

Consular officials said some runaway maids show up with bruises or allege sexual assault. Three men have been jailed in the Emirates this year for alleged rape of Filipina maids. With so many reports of abuse, Indonesia recently banned unskilled women from working in the Gulf as house maids.

Philippine Consul-General Generoso Calonge said he wanted his government to do the same.

Cabe estimated some 36,000 maids are among more than 200,000 Filipinos working in the Emirates. The maids work for local Arabs as well as expatriate European and Asian families. Nearly 2 million Filipinos live and work in the Arab countries on the Gulf, he said.

The increase in abuse cases stems from two sources: the burgeoning number of maids arriving in Dubai, one of the world's fastest growing cities, and the awareness that they can go to the consulate to report it, Calonge said.

The consulate is working with Dubai authorities to quickly return the women to the Philippines.

Dozens of runaways are stuck at the consulate-- with 25 sleeping in one room-- until Cabe or other diplomats are able to persuade employers to pay back wages and buy them tickets home. #

Mission Visa helps hiring of skilled staff

2005-08-16T15:18:00.000+08:00

By Nissar Hoath, Staff Reporter
Published: 16/8/2005, 08:11 (UAE)
GULF NEWS
http://www.gulfnews.com/Articles/NationNF.asp?ArticleID=177514

Abu Dhabi: The Ministry of Interior yesterday clarified that the recent amendment by the Cabinet of an earlier decision on the visa and fee structure pertains only to a new visa introduced to facilitate the Labour Ministry's Temporary Work Permit. Lieutenant Colonel Rashid Al Khidhar, Legal Adviser at the Directorate of Naturalisation and Residence in the ministry, told Gulf News it is a completely new type of visa introduced to facilitate Labour Ministry's Temporary Work Permit, which is issued for a maximum of 180 days.

The permit by the Labour Ministry is issued for three months for a fee of Dh1,100 per person and can be renewed for another three months with an additional fee of Dh1,100.

"The new temporary work visa, which is called Mission Visa, will be issued to those who enter the country for temporary jobs with permission of Labour Ministry, and with specialised qualification," the legal adviser clarified.The new visa is issued for three months against a fee of Dh600 and can be renewed for another three months against an additional fee of Dh1,200.

It caters mainly to companies that require highly-skilled workers, especially in the oil sector, according to Brigadier Colonel Bekheit Al Suwaidi, Deputy Director at the General Directorate of Naturalisation and Residency, at the Ministry of Interior. He said companies will have to apply for it to the Ministry of Labour which may decide to issue the visas based on the skills needed and the size of the project.Earlier, companies used to bring in temporary workers and specialists on visit visas which is illegal, Brig Colonel Al Suwaidi said.

The new Mission Visa makes it easier for them to hire temporary workers without breaking the law. Al Suwaidi urged national companies to make use of the new system.Earlier, confusion pertained due to media reports saying that under the decision the fee and stay duration structures of the current three-month visit visa have been changed. However, it has not.

A visit visa is still issued for two months against a fee of Dh100 and can be renewed for another 30 days against an additional fee of Dh500.

Al Khidhar further explained: "All the existing visa types, including the visit visa, their fees and stay duration structures remain unchanged."He also clarified that the Mission Visa is not an expansion of the current Special Mission Entry Visa, which is issued to businessmen and tourists for a non-renewable 14 days against a fee of Dh220.

About the implementation of the Mission Visa, Al Khidhar said: "All the procedures have been finalised and it will be implemented by the end of this month."The introduction of the Mission Visa comes under Cabinet decision No 16 for 2005, which amends some provisions of decision No 6 of 1994 regarding the amendment and introduction of fees levied for transactions processed by the departments of Naturalisation and Residency and Traffic. It was approved last month.

The official also clarified that the citizens of 34 countries, including Britain and the US, are issued a 30-day visa upon arrival free of charge. Earlier, the service was provided to the citizens of Britain only.It entitles the holder to stay in the country for up to 60 days as it can be renewed once for an additional period of 30 days for a fee of Dh500.

Types of visaVisit visa: It must be sponsored by an individual, such as a relative, or an establishment. The application is submitted by the sponsor with all required documents. It is issued for Dh100 for two months and is renewable for another month for a fee of Dh500.

The citizens of following countries can get a 30-day visit visa free of charge upon arrival, entitling them to stay for 60 days and the visa can be renewed once for another 30 days for an additional fee of Dh500: Britain, France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Cyprus, Finland, Malta, Spain, Monaco, Vatican, Iceland, Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong.

Tourist Visa: It is available for tourists sponsored by tour operating companies and hotels. It is issued for 30 days for a fee of Dh100 and an additional Dh10 for delivery. This is non-renewable.Special Mission Entry Visa: This is issued for a non-renewable 14 days for a fee of Dh220 and a delivery charge of Dh10. Commonly known as a transit visa, it is collected by the visitor upon arrival.

It is issued to businessmen and tourists sponsored by a company or commercial establishment or a hotel licensed to operate in the UAE.

Mission Visa: The newly added type of visa, it is issued for the purpose of temporary work in the country. It is issued for a maximum of 180 days with a combined fee of Dh1,800. It is issued for three months against a fee of Dh600 and can be renewed for another three months against a fee of Dh1,200.

It has been introduced to facilitate Labour Ministry's Temporary Work Permit. An applicant must obtain the permit from the Labour Ministry first to get the visa.

Transit Visa: It is issued to travellers transiting through UAE airports. It issued for 96 hours and must be sponsored by an airline operating in the UAE. The visitor must have a valid ticket for onward flight. There is no charge for this permit.

Multiple Entry Visa: It is an option for businessmen who are frequent visitors to the UAE and who have a relationship with a reputable company here.

This multiple visa is valid for six months from the date of issue and costs Dh1,000. However, each visit must not exceed 30 days. The visitor must enter the UAE on a visit visa and obtain the multiple entry visa while he is here.

Residence Visa: A residence visa is required for those who intend to enter the UAE to live indefinitely with a person who is already a resident. It is issued to the immediate kin of a resident for three years for a fee of Dh300.

The residence permit becomes invalid if the resident remains more than six months at a time out of the country.Parents of residents are issued residence visas after special approval with a renewable validity of one year for a fee of Dh100 for each year. A refundable deposit of Dh5,000 has to be paid for each parent.

Investor Visa: It is issued to an expatriate investor in partnership with a local. The foreign investor must hold a minimum stake of Dh70,000 in the share capital.

Like the residence visa, it is issued for three years for a fee of Dh300.

Employment Visa: Employment Visa or Permit is issued by the Immigration Department to a foreign national who wishes to work for a company in the UAE upon the approval of the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs.

It allows the holder to enter the UAE once for a period of 30 days and is valid for two months from the date of issue.

When the employee has entered the country on the basis of the employment visa, the sponsoring company will arrange to complete the formalities of stamping his residence. #

Solons slam Japanese officials for snubbing hearing on OPAs

2005-08-15T14:52:00.000+08:00

Daily TribuneMonday, 08/15/2005
http://www.tribune.net.ph/metro/20050815.met05.html

The Japanese government has incurred the ire of lawmakers, government officials and the overseas entertainment industry with its alleged deception of the Filipino artists who were earlier displaced with the adoption of its stringent immigration requirements starting last March.

The legislators, particularly members of the House special committee on overseas workers affairs, also lambasted the Japanese Embassy officials for ignoring an invitation to last Wednesday's congressional hearing looking into the plight of the Filipino artists working in Japan.

The lawmakers, through the Department of Foreign Affairs, were contemplating to declare the Japanese officials as “persona non grata” for conduct unbecoming of diplomats. The group felt slighted and greatly insulted over the foreign official “undiplomatic gesture” on a formal request from a supposed friendly nation, an ally and a co-member of the community of nations.

Eastern Samar's Rep. Marcelino Libanan, who called for the continuation of the inquiry, assailed the “lack of seriousness” on the part of Japan to tackle the current problems plaguing the industry that has adversely affected around 80,000 OPAs and hundreds of thousands of their families. It was the committee's fourth hearing.

The loss of an estimated $8 billion yearly contribution to RP economy through dollar remittance was also noted. He bared they were twice stood up by the Japanese Embassy officials. “Why do they keep on doing this to us? Thirty minutes before the meeting, these embassy people just cancelled their attendance,” a visibly irked Libanan said.

“Japanese officials are great liars. Their constant pronouncement that there is no numerical reduction in OPA deployment is another deceptive tactic. We were merely used as scapegoat to upgrade their category in the US State Department Trafficking in Person Report last year,” Maureen Advincula spokesman for the OPA Koalisyon, lamented, saying Junichiro Koizumi's government succeeded in that effort and is now up at Tier 2 or has made significant efforts to comply with the standard in the campaign against the global problem on human trafficking. “Kami lang ang sinangkalan sa isyu,” Advincula said.

A remark by embassy spokesman Shuhei Ogawa, alleging that 90 percent of Pinoy artists in Japan are involved in the flesh trade “is an affront to the Filipinas' dignity, a humiliating and demeaning tag, and the accuser has to explain for arriving at this conclusion,” Surigao Rep. Prospero Pichay said. #

Ministry Warns of Jail Term for Abuse of Maids

2005-08-15T14:43:00.000+08:00

P.K. Abdul Ghafour, Arab News
Monday, 15, August, 2005 (10, Rajab, 1426)
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=1&section=0&article=68463&d=15&m=8&y=2005&pix=kingdom.jpg&category=Kingdom

JEDDAH, 15 August 2005

The Labor Ministry yesterday warned Saudi sponsors and employers against abusing maidservants saying they would face deterrent punishments including jail sentences.

Ahmed Mansour Al-Zamil, deputy minister for labor affairs, said his ministry was following up cases of maids who have taken shelter at the refugee centers under the Social Affairs Ministry.

He said employers who fail to honor the rights of their workers or delay payment of their salaries would be banned from recruitment and their applications at the ministry would not be processed.

“These arrogant employers will be jailed if their cases are taken to the Interior Ministry,” Al-Watan daily quoted him as saying.

He referred to the ministry’s efforts to settle disputes between employers and their maids. “If a maid agrees to resume work with her sponsor, a written undertaking will be taken from the sponsor pledging he would not violate her rights again. If the sponsor repeats the offense, he/she would be punished,” he explained.

The ministry had earlier announced the formation of a special department to safeguard the rights of expatriate workers and impose sanctions on employers who abuse them.

Al-Zamil said the Department for Protection of Domestic Workers would receive complaints from maids who have been sexually harassed, mistreated or who have not been given their salaries. “If it is proven that an employer has not paid his maid, we will ban him from applying for any domestic worker for five years,” he said.

The new move by the ministry comes after reports of recurrent abuses of maids by their sponsors in various parts of the country.

In a much publicized case, Indonesian maid Nour Miyati accused her sponsor and his wife of torturing her. She alleged that her employer tied her up in a bathroom for over a month until she developed gangrene and had to have some of her fingers and toes amputated. The woman later retracted her statements about being tortured and was arrested by police for making false allegations against her sponsor.

Indonesia sends the largest number of domestic servants to Saudi Arabia. The South East Asian country recently lifted a five-month ban on recruitment to the Kingdom following talks between Saudi Arabian National Recruiting Committee Chairman Waleed Al-Suwaidan and the Indonesian deputy minister of labor. #

Expat workers seeking sponsor change before time 'must wait'

2005-08-14T14:47:00.000+08:00

By Diaa Hadid, Staff Reporter
Published: 14/8/2005, 07:59 (UAE)
GULF NEWS
http://www.gulfnews.com/Articles/NationNF.asp?ArticleID=177223

Dubai: People who want to change sponsors before completing the required time period set by the Ministry of Labour must wait until the Minister clarifies exemptions to the new sponsorship law, a senior source said. In late July, the Cabinet passed a new law conditionally allowing all people to transfer sponsorship.

In the new law, workers must stay with their current sponsor for at least one year, if they have a PhD or Masters degree, two years if the worker has a Bachelor's degree or equivalent, and three years for everybody else.

However, the new law allowed exemptions to that time period, provided that the new sponsor paid an extra Dh3,500 on top of all other official transaction fees.

Yesterday, a senior official, who declined to be named, said the Minister had still not clarified who would be eligible for exemption, and under what circumstances. "We are waiting for the Minister," he said.

This is important for many workers who want to change sponsors, but have found themselves under the new law obliged to continue working with their current sponsor until they complete the set time period.

The senior official said a part of that confusion was caused because the ministry wanted to apply all policies gradually.There are discussions within the ministry to allow desk clerks to approve the exemptions, rather than waiting for the labour undersecretary's signature.

"That's too centralised. Provided the current and future sponsor agree, and is willing to pay the extra fee, it shouldn't be a difficult operation to complete."Companies 'illegally bringing in employees'Companies are still illegally bringing in workers on visit visas for temporary tasks, instead of applying for temporary work visas through the Labour Ministry, a senior official said.

The senior official, who declined to be named, said the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs had authorised temporary work visas "about a month and a half ago", for oil companies in particular.

"These are companies who need specialised people for a specific task with a fixed time period," he said.The official said those companies had traditionally gone through the Department of Residency and Naturalisation to bring in workers on visit visas, even though the practice was technically illegal.

"This was meant to replace [that practice]," he said.But at least a month and a half on, the official said he did not know of any companies applying for workers through the new temporary work visa system.

The Labour Ministry and the UAE Cabinet recently increased fees for the temporary work visa, to Dh1,100 per person for 90 days. It can be extended to a maximum of 180 days for another Dh1,100. #