MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) will set a limit on the deployment of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW) to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia next year.
DOLE Secretary Silvestre Bello III said, “the purpose of this scaling down is to call the attention of the Saudi Government to what we consider as slow action.”
This is in connection to the unpaid claims of the 13,000 repatriated OFWs from Saudi Arabia that now reached to more than Php 4-Billion.
“Their claim is about P4.6 Billion and we got a report from our Ambassador in KSA that probably we’ll not get any compensation,” Bello said.
Bello further said hundreds of OFWs who were sent home from KSA have not received their salaries since April.
“They filed their claims, they won their claims hanggang iyon hindi nababayaran […] No less than our President sent off a letter to the KSA king pero walang action. Iyon ang pag- aaralan namin and we will probably decide to scale down on deployment,” Bello added.
The government will specifically limit the deployment of new applicants for household and skilled works.
The agency will also limit the issuance of the Overseas Employment Certificates (OEC), especially on returning workers, but this is on a case-to-case basis.
The POEA governing board will still have to sit and discuss the full coverage of the limitation of the deployment of workers in Saudi Arabia and to set a final date for its implementation.— (from the report of Aiko Miguel) /mbmf
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