Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) secretary Silvestre Bello III agreed to the resolution signed by the members of the Senate that proposes to impose deployment ban to other countries where rights of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) are not protected.
Bello said on Tuesday that a Memorandum of Agreement, similar to Kuwait, should be signed between the Philippines and the countries where OFWs will be deployed to ensure that the welfare of Filipinos will be protected.
“It should be. If there is no Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) between our country and the accepting countries, then it is foolhardy to deploy our overseas workers because they will not be protected,” said Bello.
Bello’s response is in reference to a resolution signed by the Senate.
Earlier, senators adopted Senate Resolution 767 “expressing the sense of the Senate that the deployment of overseas Filipino household service workers to countries that do not afford migrants the same rights and work conditions as their nationals and allow the withholding of Philippine passports be totally banned.”
The resolution was sponsored by Senate president Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III and co-authored by all the senators present during the session.
“In these place it is often the practice that employers are permitted to withhold the passports of their foreign staff because foreign staff need to be sponsored by an employer to work in their country, these employers see their foreign staff as acquisitions, as property, functionally as slaves,” Pimentel said.
“This must end.”
The resolution was signed following Philippine government’s imposition of total deployment ban to Kuwait after the death of Joanna Demafelis whose body was found stuffed inside a freezer in an abandoned apartment in the Gulf state.
The MOU between the Philippines and Kuwait is expected to be signed in April.
