Stranded

Muscat, Oman: Rarely are bankers welcomed like rock stars. This was one rare occasion.

At the Philippine Overseas Labor Office (POLO) in Dubai, the DBP team was cheered lustily. Hands were outstretched to touch us. There were embraces and songs, countless handshakes and the most heartfelt expressions of gratitude. It was part reunion and part religious frenzy. It was as if we descended from heaven to save doomed souls.

We were taken aback by the reception. It was something we did not quite expect. We were all humbled by the intense emotions of the moment.

We flew to Dubai to hand over tickets for 150 distressed workers stranded at the POLO. These workers were mostly runaways from abusive employers. All of them had horrendous stories to tell. They had no money for plane tickets, faced penalties for abandoning their contracts and subjected to suits filed by former employers.

Our labor attaché did not just have her hands full. Her office was overwhelmed. It had become a dormitory for the desperate, a sanctuary for the endangered. How she wished she had the power to multiply loaves and fishes to keep them fed in cramped quarters.

This story began the first week of May.

DBP CEO Rey David dropped by Dubai after receiving an award in Muscat for corporate social responsibility from an international association of development banks. The award recognized the DBP Endowment for Education Program (DEEP) which puts several hundred indigent but talented youths through college.

In Dubai, he paid a courtesy call to our consulate to thank them for the help they have given the bank’s remittance and investment programs for our expatriate workers. There he found the stranded and distressed workers huddled at the cramped offices of the POLO.

David was deeply shaken by the experience. He brought the matter up before the DBP Board and we all decided to put up some money to take home 50 workers. He then took up the matter with San Miguel’s Ramon Ang who readily agreed to support the repatriation of another 50 workers. BPI pitched in some money for another 10 and the OWWA scraped together funds for 40.

Labor Secretary Nitoy Roque took a quick trip to Dubai to join us. He personally brought up the matter of outstanding penalties before the authorities. Dubai’s officials were so impressed by the fact that our Labor Secretary would come over just to plead the cases of the stranded workers that they readily granted his request.

Through the combined efforts of the Labor Secretary, the DBP, San Miguel, OWWA and the BPI, 150 distressed Filipino workers were guaranteed to be home by Independence Day. This is a celebration of our nation’s freedom as meaningful to the rescued workers as it is to us.

In the few hectic hours that he was in Dubai before quickly flying home to oversee Independence Day ceremonies, the tireless Roque was also able to solve the problem of the 137 truck drivers stranded because of unscrupulous labor recruiters. He tapped his old contacts in the Emirates to get all of them duly documented and properly employed.

The truck drivers were brought over by unscrupulous recruiters who had also trapped the workers in usurious financing contracts to cover their departure from the country. We decided, in Dubai, to make it part of DBP’s advocacy to document and expose the heartless financing schemes used by illegal recruiters to dupe our countrymen.

Every financing scheme eventually leads to a bank that lends money to unscrupulous labor export financiers. In which case, it may eventually be traced to the banking sector where we can exercise some influence. We take that as part of our sphere of corporate social responsibility.

Even as we awarded the tickets to our distressed workers, we noticed even more streaming into the premises of the POLO in Dubai. All of them as distraught and with the same horrifying tales as the ones we just rescued.

We cannot keep badgering our friends in the private sector for funds to repatriate our distressed expatriate workers. Solutions to the problems of illegal recruitment and unprotected expatriate labor must be found.

Getting to the domestic financing sources for undocumented labor export is one thing that could be done. Better policing of our labor recruitment companies should be accomplished. But our diplomacy should also be made to bear on the problem of domestic service workers currently operating outside the realm of labor laws. Domestic service workers are most vulnerable and constitute the bulk of the distressed workers we repatriated.

Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh have curtailed domestic service exports until such time that the authorities in the Emirates include them in the framework of labor protection. Only Sri Lanka and the Philippines continue to supply domestic workers. Perhaps we should curtail deployment as well until legal protection is won through more effective diplomatic work.

From our successful mission in Dubai, the DBP team proceeded to Muscat to inaugurate our remittance facility here.

Oman is an emerging oil-powered super-economy. But its bureaucracy remains trapped in the 19th century. One symptom of this is that our exit papers somehow disappeared in some bureaucratic hole.

As a consequence, we found ourselves stranded in Muscat. What an irony. We had come to rescue distressed and stranded Filipino workers in the region. Now we find ourselves stranded as well — although by no means distressed.