Senate calls for total deployment ban on countries that do not respect migrant workers

The Senate has called for a total deployment ban of Filipino household workers to countries that do not respect the rights of migrant workers and allow employers to withhold their passports.

The Senate adopted on Wednesday night Senate Resolution 676 expressing the sense of the chamber that the deployment of Filipino maids to countries that do not afford migrants the same rights and work conditions as their nationals and allow the withholding of Philippine passports be totally banned.

It was sponsored on the floor by Senate President Aquilino Pimentel III. Crossing party lines, all the senators present agreed to be co-authors.

Senators Manny Pacquiao and Sonny Trillanes were among the original authors of the resolution.

'The Filipino is not a slave'

In his speech, Pimentel said the resolution applies only to OFWs who work as domestic helpers because they “are more vulnerable to abuse, as their place of work is shielded from public view.

“Let us put an end to the practice of allowing our citizens to fall into the hands of cruel people who make no distinction between slaves and staff,” he said. “The Filipino is not a slave.”

Pimentel said many Filipinos are constrained to seek employment abroad in the hopes of improving their life and help their families.

He said until the government is better able to provide for all Filipinos so that no one will feel the need to leave home, officials will not be able to stop the people from seeking employment elsewhere.

“However, we can—and we should—limit the places where they seek employment in to only those countries that provide Filipino workers the same rights and protections given to nationals of that country,” Pimentel said.

Edloy, Demafelis cases

He cited the case of Irma Avila Edloy who died in a Saudi hospital in August 2016. Before Edloy fell into a coma, she reportedly pointed to her employer when a nurse asked her who has maltreated her.

This year, the country was rocked by the death of Joanna Daniela Demafelis, another household service worker in Kuwait, whose body was found in her employer’s freezer almost two years after she last spoke to her family.

The discovery of Demafelis’ death prompted President Rodrigo Duterte to order a deployment ban to Kuwait for all OFWs.

Pimentel said the cases he mentioned cannot be considered isolated because the Philippine Embassy in Kuwait receives hundreds of complaints and shelters hundreds of Filipino workers, most of them women.

“We can only imagine the full extent of the horrors that these Filipinos endured at the hands of people who imagined them as property and not as human beings,” he said. —KBK, GMA News