Filipinos welcome closure of greedy manpower agency

Overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) were pleased to learn that the Philippines Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) took action against a recruitment agency in the Philippines for tampering with work contracts.
The move was made after Filipinos workers filed complaints against the agency. They had been deployed in Saudi Arabia as nurses but ended up working as technicians. The workers said that the agency had issued them two contracts. One was used to process their exit clearance at the POEA. Their employers handed them the other contract upon their arrival in Saudi Arabia.
“We have been victims of these unscrupulous agencies in the Philippines. It turned many of us into absconders,” said Neil Grajo, who has been a runaway for three years now.
Grajo said that "despite obvious violations at these agencies, we have not seen punitive action being taken against them." Influential politicians or businessmen close to the government own many of these agencies.
“Major problems that OFWs face here and elsewhere in the world are linked directly to corrupt agencies at home,” said another OFW, Rasol Abbas.
"As community leaders, we have heard many tales of injustice from our fellow OFWs when it comes to contracts. These problems range from non-fulfillment of the agreed to enforcing jobs other than those stated in the agreement," Abbas elaborated. Yet OFWs have opted to remain silent in the absence of serious action against these agencies.
Many of them have to pay back money owed to relatives in the Philippines, Grajo added.
Philippine local newspapers reported yesterday that the POEA ordered the cancelation of a recruitment agency’s licenses for substituting the contracts of seven OFWs.
In a statement issued yesterday, POEA administrator Hans Leo Cacdac said All Skills Manpower Services Inc. switched POEA-approval employment contracts with contracts that were grossly disadvantageous to the workers who would be deployed in Saudi Arabia.
He said the Philippine Overseas Labor Office in Riyadh forwarded the complaints from the seven OFWs to the POEA.
In the original contract, the complainants were supposed to be employed either as nurses or midwives in different hospitals, but ended up working as nurses or dental technicians for a common employer, the Onaiza Dental Clinic owned by Sulaiman Hammad Al-Atiya, as indicated in the second contact. The employment contract was supposed to take effect upon the OFWs’ arrival in Saudi Arabia but new conditions stipulate that the contract becomes binding only ‘after passing the Saudi Commission for Health Specialties Exam.'
The salary, transportation allowance, food allowance and lodging stated in the first contract were also reduced or totally omitted in the new contract.
All Skills was also found to have collected excessive placement fees from the workers and had not issued receipts corresponding to the amounts paid. Cacdac said he ordered the recruitment firm to refund the placement fees collected from the complainants.