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THE uproar in the Philippines by the militant workers’ group Migrante over the 117 overseas Filipino workers who recently ran away from their employers and ended up living under a bridge in the Kandara district of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, is a case of misplaced anger.
This anger comes from the frustration of the runaway workers at the slowness of the deportation process from Saudi Arabia, and from the misplaced notion in the Philippines that runaway workers can just board a plane in Saudi and end up in Manila. It’s not that easy.
All foreigners in the kingdom need a work visa to enter the country and they also need exit visas every time they leave the country. The Philippine Consulate in Jeddah does not have a magic wand which it can use to get the Saudi authorities to allow the en-masse departure of 117 runaway workers just like that.
First, the authorities have to contact the sponsors of each of the workers to ask them what went wrong and to find out if the workers are owed money or if the employer claims that the workers still have outstanding obligations. This cannot be done overnight, and sometimes takes weeks. The police also check that none of the workers are wanted for a crime. In the meantime, the consulate hands over these individuals to the Saudi authorities who place them in the deportation center in Jeddah.
I agree with Migrante that the deportation center is dirty, overcrowded and has terrible food. I know, because I’ve visited Filipinos there more than once. The Saudi National Society for Human Rights has visited the center and wrote a report to the government about the facility.
Migrante’s call for the recall of Philippine Ambassador Antonio Villamor and Consul General Ezzedin Tago for their alleged failure to get these 117 OFWs home quickly is absurd. Both the ambassador and Tago have to follow the law of the land and cannot just pressure the Saudi authorities to allow these OFWs to leave post-haste. And the call for President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to appeal directly to King Abdullah for help in getting the workers repatriated won’t work either.
It won’t work because there are one million Filipinos living and working in Saudi Arabia, the single largest concentration of OFWs except for Filipinos living in the US. On her last visit to Saudi Arabia in May 2006, President Arroyo secured the release of 138 jailed Filipinos after she appealed directly to the king during private meetings. Migrante cannot expect the President to pick up the phone and call the king every time a group of OFWs decides to seek exit from the country via the infamous “backdoor” of Jeddah.
Fixers at the Philippine Consulate have long promised to help get runaway OFWs out of the country without going through the regular immigration channels if they paid them a handsome fee. Exploiting a loophole in Saudi immigration law, the fixers would issue temporary papers to fleeing OFWs stating that they were Muslim pilgrims who had overstayed their visas and lost their original passports.
For a while this worked, although Christian OFWs who used this back door lived in fear that they would be discovered by Saudi police in deportation if they failed to know how to pray. But Saudi authorities soon caught on to this practice, and the business for fixers soon began to shrink.
The Philippine consulate has repeatedly warned OFWs in the kingdom not to believe the claims of fixers, stressing that the backdoor exit did not exist. For Migrante to now claim those fixers are not breaking Saudi law by helping runaway workers is absurd.
This is not to downplay the amount of abuse that many OFWs have to face regularly, from delayed salaries, contract substitution and sometimes the threat of assault. But as Philippine diplomats stress all the time, running away from your employer should be the very last resort. Filing complaints with the embassy and labor court should be the first step in disputes.
The Philippine government sent $36,000 to the consulate in Jeddah to help pay for the tickets of the 117 OFWs to fly them home, and the consulate said it was providing food for them on a daily basis. Some were too impatient to wait for those tickets, and ended up buying their own tickets to get home faster. They complained upon landing in Manila that they were “forced” to buy their own tickets. Somehow I doubt that. If they had waited, the Philippine government would have picked up the tab.
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