‘Deployment lag due to suspension of recruitment agencies’

MANILA, Philippines — A large number of licensed recruitment agencies whose documentary processing privilege has been suspended for the past few months by the newly created Department of Migrant Workers is a contributory factor to the slowdown of land-based deployment, according to recruitment consultant and migration expert Emmanuel Geslani.

Geslani said the suspended recruitment agencies numbering 40 or more have not been able to process their job orders due to the suspension of their processing privileges.

He added that the agencies could only deploy workers’ orders that have been previously processed and given Overseas Employment Certificates, but their job orders are frozen from the time the documentary processing orders were received by the agencies.

The suspended agencies are large agencies mainly deploying household service workers (HSWs) to countries like Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Singapore, Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia.

There is, however, a temporary deployment ban of HSWs to Saudi Arabia since November last year.

The suspension covers all their accredited job orders to all countries and cannot be lifted until the agencies comply with the order.

Mostly, suspensions arise from the agencies’ failure to repatriate workers who have filed complaints with labor attaches on site and have requested repatriation to the country, according to Geslani.

He said suspensions only cover documentary processing, and agencies are free to conduct business as usual.

The effects of the suspension, however, are felt financially with their failure to collect from their principals since they cannot deploy workers selected by employers.

Meanwhile, Indonesia and Thailand have re-entered the domestic workers market in Saudi Arabia to offset the scarcity of Filipino domestic workers due to the deployment ban of the Philippines.

The country is still under negative deployment with the land-based sector unable to reach pre-pandemic levels with the closure of the Saudi labor market, which has a potential 200,000 overseas Filipino workers annually while other markets in the Middle East remain below their annual deployment figures.

Other markets for the Philippines’ land-based sector, like the United Kingdom, Canada, United States and parts of Europe, have only small deployments unlike Middle East markets.