The OFW deployment ban: Boon or bane?

The DOLE and the POEA, exercising what you may call political will, and perhaps making a political statement, indicative of this administration’s labor policy, has announced a ban against deployment of our OFWs to 41 countries. This ban has triggered an animated debate among the leading players in the recruitment industry and the employment sector as a whole. Various reactions have been expressed by pressure groups like the associations of recruitment agencies, people who claim to speak for foreign principal employers and of course, the many associations of OFWs all over the world, from the most radical to the most reactionary.

 Being a former labor diplomat, this column conducted a quick survey of our contacts in Malaysia, in Kuwait and in Central Taiwan. The reactions are varied but they can be categorized into three main groups - the first are those who vehemently question the power of the government to interfere in the individual worker’s freedom of choice and basic right to seek gainful employment; the second are those who defend the prerogative of the state to protect its working class by laying down a clear policy of reasonable classification of labor-receiving countries, and disqualifying those that do not have adequate safety nets to assure the protection of our migrant; the third are the more philosophical, they need to evaluate the underlying rationale and the far-reaching implications of this ban.

 We shall try to analyze the arguments of the first, called the ANTIs and also the second, referred to as the PROs. It is the ANTIs firm stand that every Filipino has the fundamental freedom to decide for himself as to where and how to seek gainful employment using his God-given talents, skills and competencies. The ANTIs believe that the state has no business interfering in the exercise of that fundamental freedom. In fact, the government should instead be the people’s instrument to promote full employment. They should help open new frontiers, instead of putting barriers to the free movement of services, as made imperative by the realities of a borderless and globalized world economy. They submit that a poor third world country like ours should not show some arrogance by shutting off some countries in an era of globalization.

 On the other hand, the PROs stand on the inherent police power of the state to adopt measures to implement the Constitutional mandate of the State to afford full protection to labor, local or overseas. They believe that the ban is a reasonable restriction that gives rise to sufficient precaution against deployment to countries that have derogatory records in their treatment of foreign workers. This ban is essentially designed to avoid deployment of OFWs to countries with no legislative and administrative safety nets to protect workers’ health, safety and welfare.

 The third category of reactions is from those who are neither for nor against. They would rather gather more inputs in order to determine two basic things: the rationale, the prime purpose, the good intended to be attained and the evil sought to be avoided by this ban; and the implications, the far-reaching effects and consequences that may arise from said ban.

 The rationale behind this ban is simply WORKERS’ PROTECTION. We cannot gamble with the lives of our OFWs by deploying them to such countries as Iraq, Palestine, Libya, Lebanon, East Timor, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Nepal, Niger, Nauru, Mozambique, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu and such other unlikely destinations as Zwaziland, Erithrea and Croatia.

 The reason is simply to remove any possibility of having to repatriate our workers from such difficult and dangerous locations. They are not signatories to ILO conventions that protect migrants. They have no bilateral labor agreements with us. And they don’t have any labor standards and laws protecting foreign workers. The DOLE and the POEA should be congratulated for biting the bullet and taking a firm stand to shield our workers. This is perhaps the difference between this administration and the government of the former President, which aggressively sent our human resources to highly dangerous destinations in the name of dollar remittances and employment markets for OFWs.

Based on these and many other premises, the Labor Front can conclude that this ban is emerging to be one of the defining elements of the PNoy administration. Under this government, the safety, health and welfare of the workers come first. All of us should rally behind this courageous and precedent-setting initiative.