MikeLigalig.com

Mayen Jaymalin
The Philstar

Despite the global demand for highly skilled workers, local recruitment industry leaders yesterday warned that fewer overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) are likely to get hired abroad in the coming year.

Recruitment industry leaders said the slump in hiring of Filipino workers this year may continue in the coming years due to government’s effort to take over the recruitment of workers from private sector.

This, even as there are expectations that remittances from OFWs will double to about $21.4 billion in the next three years.

Jackson Gan, Pilipino Manpower Agencies Accredited to Taiwan (PILMAT) president, said the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) does not have sufficient manpower and expertise to handle the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of Filipino workers.

“The government, particularly the POEA, does not have the capacity to handle the recruitment of the large market in the Middle East which could lead to lower deployment in the coming year,” Gan said.

The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) has recently entered into a government-to-government deployment of Filipino workers to the United Arab Emirates.

Gan noted that the POEA has already taken over the labor market of South Korea through the Employment Permit System (EPS) but could not cope with the high demand.

“Though the EPS system offers a lower recruitment costs for the workers, it has brought numerous problems as far as the welfare and protection of Filipino workers are concerned,” Gan pointed out.

He said workers deployed by the government have no grievance mechanisms in place in their jobsite since government cannot be sued. In this case, workers are misled by POEA with lower recruitment costs but workers have no means of suing POEA.

“This is now the situation happening in South Korea as hundreds of EPS workers sent by POEA have complained of poor working conditions, unfair labor practices, reduced salaries and the failure of labor attaches to attend to their cases,” Gan disclosed.

Philippine Association of Service Exporters Inc. (PASEI) president Victor Fernandez also criticized the POEA for assuming the job of the private recruitment industry.

Fernandez said the POEA embarked on marketing missions to get a bigger share of the recruitment industry’s market using taxpayers’ money.

“It recently trained several marketing officers to intensify government participation in the industry,” Fernandez added.

Labor officials, however, belied that the government is taking over the recruitment industry, saying it only enters into an agreement for a government-to-government deployment of workers upon the request of the host countries.

Also yesterday, local recruitment officials dismissed the DOLE’s claim that employers in the Middle East are again looking to hire Filipino domestic helpers.

The 12 Saudi manpower agencies that labor attaché Rustico de la Fuente reported are very much fewer than the 300 Saudi agencies that used to hire Filipino maids, industry officials pointed out.

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