THE Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) said it will review the assessment that found 41 countries not compliant to the new law that requires host countries to safeguard rights and welfare of Filipino workers.
POEA Administrator Carlos Cao Jr. said the House Committee on Foreign Relations has allowed the governing board, composed of the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) and the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), to review six months from now until April 2012 the list of compliant countries under Republic Act (RA) 10022, or the Amended RA 8042 or the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act.
The new law allows the deployment of Filipino migrant workers only to countries compliant to the requirements of the law, based on the assessment of the Philippine embassies and consulates.
“The review of the certification list will allow us to find middle ground with these host countries,” Cao said in an interview. The six-month period will allow the government to “initiate bilateral negotiations” with the noncompliant countries so they could step up measures to ensure the protection of foreign workers.
An initial list from the POEA, an attached agency of DOLE, showed that of the 203 host countries of Filipino migrant workers, 41 of them are noncompliant to the new law. Most of these countries are from the Middle East and African region that include strife-torn countries such as Libya, Iraq, Egypt, Kuwait, Yemen and Syria.
A compliant host country should have at least one of the three grounds under the law: domestic laws that provide for the protection of overseas workers in all sectors; signatory to bilateral, regional and multilateral agreements protecting the rights and welfare of Filipino migrant workers; and an existing bilateral labor agreement with the Philippines.
Cao said 120 countries have already been assessed as compliant to the new law that allows continuing deployment of Filipino workers there, including the US, Canada and many European nations.
Meanwhile, 30 countries have been assessed as “qualified compliant,” meaning, they have domestic laws providing for the protection of migrant workers in the professional and highly skilled sectors but not for household service or domestic workers.
The POEA chief said the review will also ensure that these countries would cover household-service workers in their domestic laws that seek to protect the rights and welfare of foreign workers.
Cao said it is important that the domestic laws of these host countries also cover the protection of the rights and welfare of domestic workers since the Philippines has around 160,000 of them abroad, mostly in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, a Filipino migrants’ rights group in the Middle East on Sunday warned former OFWs, especially those repatriated during the surge of the political upheavals in Libya, to be cautious about jobs offered by some unscrupulous recruitment agents amid an existing deployment ban.
Migrante-Middle East Regional Coordinator John Leonard Monterona said he has received queries from former OFWs who used to work in Libya about jobs offered by recruitment agencies.
Monterona said it is fully understandable that ex-Libya OFWs and would-be OFWs are now seeking jobs for deployment in Libya after the death of dictator Muammar Qaddafi last week.
On Friday the DFA said it will not lift the ban on OFWs deployment in Libya despite the death of Qaddafi. “We are urging the POEA to issue an advisory in this regard to guide and avoid our fellow OFWs becoming victim of illegal recruiters and human traffickers,” Monterona said.
