GCash lane gremlins
“Gremlins” operating along “GCash lane” – these are the terms used by recruitment and migration consultant Emmanuel Geslani to describe those he says are involved in “G & C” in the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA).
“G & C” – you guessed it – stands for graft and corruption.
Geslani gave these answers when asked about the problems besetting efforts to improve regulation of labor recruitment.
The issue is in the spotlight once again following the brutal murder of household service worker Jullebee Ranara reportedly by her employer’s 17-year-old son in Kuwait. The suspect was quickly arrested and is in Kuwait police custody.
At a Senate hearing on the case last Wednesday, the lawyer of Ranara’s local recruiter Catalist International Manpower Services Company received a tonguelashing from Senators Raffy Tulfo and Joel Villanueva for failure to properly monitor her situation. Ranara’s Filipino friends in Kuwait had said she had confided to them problems with her employers.
On One News’ “The Chiefs” last Wednesday, Geslani said that even with widespread social media access that should facilitate reporting of abuse suffered by overseas Filipino workers, constant monitoring of client OFWs can still be challenging for recruiters. Other recruiters are plain negligent about this responsibility.
Geslani agreed with Migrante International, that even if a person or recruitment firm is shut down and blacklisted, it is so easy to register under a different business name and resume operations.
He says most local companies recruiting for the Middle East and North Africa are in fact majority-owned and controlled by Arabs from that region. If blacklisted, he says the foreigners simply employ Filipino dummies, or partner with struggling local recruitment firms.
Why can’t the government crack down on this? Because, he said, of the “gremlins” engaged in G & C using the “GCash lane” in the POEA.
Such activities, he told us, are common knowledge in the recruitment industry. People would get mad at him for this revelation, he said, but he maintains it’s the truth.
* * * Apart from graft, another problem Geslani cited is the inadequacy of the free skills training seminars provided to prospective domestic workers. The “NC II (National Certificate)” seminar provided by the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority, he says, is limited to skills such as “cooking beef stew.”
Overseas Workers Welfare Administration head Arnell Ignacio has said among the reforms the government is considering is to provide cultural orientation to both prospective household service workers (HSWs) and Middle Eastern employers.
Geslani notes that many HSWs come from underprivileged communities particularly in Mindanao. Their employers, meanwhile, are citizens of countries with some of the highest per capita incomes in the world, with a number of them nomadic Bedouins living in the Arabian desert. Culture shocks and misunderstandings are then inevitable, which can create an environment that invites abuse of domestic workers.
Obviously, cultural understanding was not emphasized in the agreement hammered out in 2018 by the Philippine and Kuwaiti governments to improve protection for OFWs particularly domestic workers.
The agreement was forged after the Duterte administration suspended OFW deployment to Kuwait following the discovery of the body of domestic worker Joanna Demafelis in a freezer in an apartment abandoned by her Syrian and Lebanese employers.
Unfortunately for our OFWs, the agreement did not stop the abuse and murder of our workers in Kuwait. On The Chiefs at the time, Susan “Toots” Ople, then active in her life’s advocacy of migrant workers’ welfare, told us that Kuwait passed rules that could be applied to all migrant workers and not just OFWs. This meant certain elements in the agreement with the Philippines could not be fulfilled.
* * * Last Wednesday, the government announced that deployment of first-time domestic helpers to Kuwait would be suspended until measures to improve protection for HSWs can be worked out.
Toots Ople of course has said that the best way to stop the brutal murders, abuse and humiliation of Filipino migrant workers is to put an end to the OFW phenomenon.
This means creating conditions that will generate decent employment and livelihood opportunities right here in the country, making it unnecessary for Filipinos to seek greener pastures abroad.
Ironically, massive OFW remittances have helped preserve the dysfunctional status quo and the broken systems that have made working abroad the Filipino Dream.
The billions raised from the blood, sweat and tears of over a tenth of our population working abroad fuel our consumer-driven economic growth and help stabilize the peso.
Our political and electoral systems are broken. For representative democracy to work, votes must be based on informed choices. This cannot happen when the overriding concern of the majority of voters is filling an empty stomach, while the overriding concern of the political elite is to perpetuate dynasties and family wealth.
Patronage politics thrives on poverty and undereducation.
The typical politician can’t care less if the country’s 10-year-olds are global bottom dwellers in terms of reading comprehension and basic arithmetic.
If such children carry this inadequacy into adulthood, they can always be added to our ever-growing army of heroic OFWs, including the hordes of women working as domestic helpers, ensuring rosy economic growth figures.
And if they are beaten, burned with irons, raped and brutally murdered?
No worries… considering the state of our nation, there will always be more where they come from.