Philippines struggles to help distressed overseas workers (Feature)

By John Grafilo May 5, 2010, 6:01 GMT

Manila - Marietta walked with a painful limp as she entered the beauty parlour where she works as a manicurist.

A decade back, the 40-year-old mother had a different gait and a different job, working as a domestic helper in Saudi Arabia. Despite the long hours and backbreaking chores, she endured the work to be able to send home money to her family.

Then one night her employer raped her.

'I endured the rape because I had no choice,' said Marietta, who asked that her real name be withheld. 'But when my boss called his friends - there were about five men there - I knew I wouldn't survive it.

'So I decided to jump out of my room from the third floor to escape. I was ready to die.'

Marietta broke both her ankles and spent a month in a Riyadh hospital. Her employer told police she had tried to run away after stealing from his home.

'I thought I would end up in jail, but my employer agreed not to press charges after Philippine embassy representatives helped me,' she said. 'But I never got paid for my work. I came home poorer than when I first left for work.'

Countless harrowing stories from overseas workers, now numbering more than 8 million from a country of 98 million people, have become a daily staple in the Philippines.

Some don't just come home with broken limbs like Marietta. A number of them return home in wooden crates.

Almost every day, distressed workers or their families seek help from the government, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and even news programmes on radio and television.

Carmelita Dimzon, administrator of the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, said that women domestic helpers were most vulnerable to ill-treatment and abuse by employers.

'You have to remember that household service workers are workers who belong to a vulnerable occupation,' she said. 'Their workplace is also their quarters. They are there to work 24 hours because sometimes even if they are already resting, they are still asked to do errands.'

Dimzon conceded that once a domestic worker was in her employers' household, the government had little control of the situation.

'That's why the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration has been very strict in approving foreign employers who want to recruit or hire Filipino household workers,' she said. 'There is a strict system of accreditation.'

But government control remains spotty because of a lack of resources, rampant corruption among personnel of regulating agencies and weak labour laws in host countries.

Aside from physical abuse, contract substitution, non-payment of salaries and unpaid overtime are among the main problems faced by Filipino overseas workers, Dimzon said.

Like many before her, Sam Rayda's heart sank when her recruiter told her on arrival at Kuwait airport in 2006 that she would only be receiving 156 dollars a month, instead of the 208 dollars agreed upon in Manila.

The second child in a family of six to farmer parents from Ampatuan town in the southern province of Maguindanao, Sam had to give her salary from the first 10 months to the recruiter as payment for processing her papers.

Determined to realize her dream of building her family a house, Sam - who was only 14 then - endured the gruelling job of being the only domestic help in a four-storey house and sleeping a mere four hours a night.

When her two-year contract lapsed in 2008, her employer refused to allow her to return to the Philippines and sold her to a new family.

'They sold me to a Lebanese couple,' Sam said. 'I was really angry and scared, so after about 20 days of living with this Lebanese couple, I went to the police, who turned me over to the Philippine embassy.'

Her Kuwaiti employers finally relented and released her passport to Philippine government representatives, but they did not return her clothes and did not pay her salary for the last three months of work.

Sam stayed for several months at a halfway house of the Philippine embassy in Kuwait along with more than 100 distressed overseas workers, until she was repatriated in July 2009 to Manila.

Despite her experience, Sam, who is now 17, attempted to return to Kuwait again for another two-year contract, but immigration authorities stopped her group at the airport because they had improper documents.

Other overseas workers suffer worse fates. While the government does not have statistics for the number of Filipinos killed while working overseas, the non-governmental organization Migrante said last year that 21 overseas workers died, five under suspicious circumstances.

Jerome Alcantara, a social worker with Visayan Forum, an NGO helping Filipino overseas workers, said widespread poverty and desperation have made many workers vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.

'Because these people do not have much education and desperately need jobs, they grab whatever offer comes before them without thinking of the consequences,' he said.

'They also have this fatalistic attitude and accept the contract even if the terms of employment are vague, even if they are using fake papers,' he said.

While Visayan Forum does not have the actual numbers, Alcantara said a large number of Filipino workers, especially household help, are abused.

'For example, in Malaysia, at least 500 Filipino migrants are repatriated every week because they do not have valid papers,' he said. 'Most of these people said they escaped from their employers. Many of them were tracked in brothels.'