‘Lift ban on direct recruitment of household workers’

MANILA, Philippines — The recruitment sector has urged the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency (POEA) to lift the ban on foreign principals or their agents directly interviewing prospective Filipino household helpers.

Alfredo Palmiery, president of the Federation of Manpower Exporters Inc. and head of the Hong Kong association deploying domestic helpers to the former crown colony, said the POEA circular is a virtual ban on deployment of household helpers.

Palmiery urged POEA administrator Bernardo Olalia to lift the ban, saying the circular is a curtailment of the recruitment activities of licensed agencies. The circular, issued when the Philippines banned worker deployment to Kuwait, was meant to prevent abuses of domestic helpers in the Middle East.

Olalia said the main purpose of foreign principals in coming to Manila is to personally select applicants to match the needs of their clients.

This is to prevent any mismatch of applicants to work, which may result in disadvantages to the workers themselves, Olalia said.
Sometimes this may end up in termination or repatriation, he added.

Palmiery, however, said the circular should not apply to Hong Kong or in countries where reports of abuses of Filipino domestic helpers are not rampant.

He added that the letter of authority issued by the POEA was requested by agencies to replace the special working permits issued by the Bureau of Immigration (BI).

The industry negotiated with the BI that a letter of authority from the POEA would suffice for foreign principals to interview workers instead of the permit that has been the practice since 2001.
Numerous cases of arrests and extortion were reported against foreign principals before 2001, especially Japanese principals who were interviewing applicants for the entertainment industry.
Palmiery added that if the objective of the circular is to reduce the number of workers applying for work abroad, this will not happen.
“The government cannot stop Filipinos from working abroad to earn for their families,” he said.

The introduction of the HSW Reform package in 2006 aims to reduce the number of outbound Filipinos working as domestic helpers.

But the higher salary of $400 appeared to have attracted more applicants. HSW deployment has gone up since then, from 41,000 in 2007 to 205,000 in 2016.
Palmiery said licensed agencies are partners of the government in combating illegal recruiters and human traffickers.

Imposing a ban on interviews and deployment will only aggravate the trafficking of Filipino domestic helpers, he said.