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Philippines worried about rising abuse of workers abroad

The Philippine government expressed concern over the rising number of the country's workers overseas who return suffering from mental or physical ailments, an official said yesterday.

Allan Ignacio, head of the repatriation team of the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA), said that for the first quarter of the year a total of 1,886 overseas workers return to the country suffering from various forms of distress.

Ignacio said many of the returnees were women workers.

OWWA records showed that from January to March 128 overseas workers had been killed at work, while 42 others returned home suffering from various mental illness.

Vivian Velez, an OWWA welfare officer, said most of the abused workers that the agency handled were from Kuwait.

"There's not a single day that passes that we don't have a case before us [from Kuwait]," she said.

"There were those who were raped, mauled, non-payment of salaries, all kinds of cases," she said.

According to the labor department, 270,356 Filipino workers found jobs abroad from Jan. 1 to April 5 despite immigration restrictions.

The deployment was up 1.5 per cent from 269,271 in the same period last year.

The increase was recorded despite a deployment ban to Iraq, stricter immigration rules in Japan, South Korea and Malaysia, and the "nationalization" of labor in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Last year, overseas Filippino workers remitted a total of US$8.5 billion, a 34-year high and up 11.8 percent from the previous year, contributing a significant portion in the country's gross national product.
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