A new war against illegal recruitment

Jun 15, 2006 at 08:00 AM

from The Manila Times

THE Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, in collaboration with the National Bureau of Investigation, on Wednesday launched a renewed campaign against illegal recruitment which has reached a degree of sophistication with the uses of the Internet.

“The alarming rise in illegal recruitment has forced us to act,” said POEA Administrator Rosalinda Baldoz and NBI special action chief director Vicente de Guzman III at a roundtable Wednesday with editors and reporters of The Manila Times.

The officials reported that while the number of illegal-recruitment victims has sharply increased, the conviction rate for the perpetrators is dismally low. The reason for this is the reluctance or refusal of complainants to attend court hearings after recovering their money with or without POEA help.

The victims of spurious recruitment are usually poor workers, whose families have to sell their farm animals or mortgage their house to raise the money for their placement fees. A worker applying for a factory job in Taiwan, for example, is charged P120,000. This is in excess of the authorized fee which is the equivalent of a worker’s one-month pay, plus P5,000.

Recruitment agencies make no qualms about collecting fat fees from prospective workers. They charge a worker bound for Hong Kong from P80,000 to P90,000 for a job with a monthly pay of P24,000. The placement fee rises to P100,000 to P150,000 if a worker applies for a caregiver position in Canada or Italy.

The placement firms charge this much because they have to share the placement fee with the job brokers wherever they are. Job orders, which are the lifeblood of placement firms, are actually being sold for a price. If Filipino recruiters don’t pay the price, the job brokers make a deal with their foreign counterparts.

There is a patent violation of POEA regulations concerning the proper placement fees, but the government cannot do anything to arrest and prosecute the offenders, because the victims do not complain.

The worst form of illegal recruitment is committed by an unlicensed agency which collects exorbitant fees from prospective overseas workers for nonexistent jobs abroad. The victims usually find themselves stranded in a foreign land with no means to return to their homeland. They become the common wards in our welfare centers abroad.

The POEA and the NBI are planning to conduct anti-illegal recruitment consultations in regions of the country to raise the consciousness of the people on the gravity of the spurious recruitment problem and are distributing guides on how to avoid the predators.

Administrator Baldoz also issued a warning against illegal recruiters operating in Dubai with a tieup with Manila-based agencies. So many Filipino women have been lured to Dubai, where they are sold to prostitution rings.

We support the POEA-NBI campaign. Unless the illegal recruiters are brought to justice, more workers are in danger of being victimized.