MANILA -- Reactions of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) to the latest project of the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) to honor outstanding employers in the First International Employers Awards have been mixed.

Labor Secretary Patricia Sto. Tomas announced that a screening committee with members from the DOLE's attached agencies dealing with OFWs would select about a hundred winning employers.

"It is time that we recognize and honor the employers who trust and recognize our overseas workers," she explained.

Rashid Fabricante, an OFW leader in Riyadh, told ArabNews that the intention is good because many employers for the last 30 years have indeed provided OFWs sustained income, professional growth.

But he said the DOLE should be transparent in its selection and at the same time identify the blacklisted recruitment agencies at home, especially those who continue to recruit and deploy workers even after they have been blacklisted.

"I would like to know who are these employers and what parameters were used to nominate or confer them these awards.

Why not post them in the message board and let the OFW employees judge them?" Fabricante suggested,

Abulkhair Guro, a former Jeddah-based architect who is now in Manila, said the DOLE's plan is like a duplication of the presidential awards of the Commission of Filipinos Overseas (CFO), which is held every two years.

"There is a category in these awards for employers but there is just too much cheating in these awards," Guro told Arab News in an exclusive interview.

Guro, a former chairman of the Kasapi Congress, an umbrella organization of OFW groups in Jeddah, said there have been some employers who were generously to their Filipino employees and community groups "but never get to win awards."

California-based Ren Arrieta scoffed at the idea, saying "this latest move of the government is ludicrous, thinking that foreign employers are wanting in recognition."

He pointed out that employers usually employ OFWs for profit and will not care about an award "coming from a government wracked by scandals here and there."

"Delusional patronizing attitude to be brought to foreign shores at that makes me cringe in shame," Arrieta said.

He added: "This is just an added unnecessary expense in a government whose squandering habits are the source of the budget deficit year in year out. Maybe the government should focus first on cleaning the bureaucracy from top to bottom."

Singapore-based Offie Bakker described the award as a "very positive move."

"There is no doubt that our good, sincere and caring labor secretary is trying her best to improve the welfare and plight of our long-neglected overseas workers around the globe," Bakker said.

But Bakker said that the DOLE should also recognize outstanding Filipino professionals and expatriates as this would boost morale as well as improve and enhance the image of Filipinos abroad.

"In Singapore," Bakker said, "contract domestic helpers are always given the prominence, forgetting we also have here Filipino professionals and expatriates who have contributed to the welfare of our contract workers and to the development of Singapore as well."

Labor Undersecretary Manuel Imson earlier said "the award would help catalyze and promote the best practices on human resources working to reinforce stability and growth in accordance with internationally recognized and accepted conventions and standards."

But Arrieta countered that the DOLE "should focus more on the needs and aspirations of overseas Filipino, which is the right to vote, rather than come up with shallow expensive undertaking in promoting ego boosting."

Others said they hoped the new awards program would not follow the fate of the Bagong Bayani Awards, in which some self-promoting non-heroes who knew which papers to submit and which officials to approach had been selected as awardees.

The selection of winners of questionable integrity or achievement, including some OFWs in the Middle East, has so tainted the Bagong Bayani Awards that one engineer in the Western Region who is known to be a "real hero" almost refused to go and collect his award in 1999.