Most women OFWs in Malaysia in ‘vulnerable occupations’—attaché

The photo shows female overseas Filipino workers in Malaysia. Screengrab from INQUIRER.net video

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Majority of the 66,000 overseas Filipino workers in Malaysia are women who are vulnerable to abuses by their employers, a labor attaché said.

“Most of them are women. Out of the 66,000 workers that we have in Malaysia, about 63 percent or about 40,000 plus are household service workers,” Elizabeth Marie Estrada, also head of the Philippine Overseas Labor Office, said.

Estrada made the disclosure as President Rodrigo Duterte prepared Wednesday to leave for Kuala Lumpur to meet with Malaysian officials.

Estrada, in an interview by Radio TV Malacañang, added that most of the women were in “vulnerable occupations.”

She said a number of OFWs had in fact been plucked out of their deployments in the past and were placed at the halfway house operated by the Migrant Workers and Other Filipinos Resource Center because of “problems with their employers.”

Estrada did not provide the specific number of OFWs who were rescued or what problems they had encountered with their employers.

But she said the problems had been addressed with the cooperation of Malaysian agencies.

“That’s why we are making sure that protective mechanisms were being implemented for the protection of workers in vulnerable sector,” Estrada said.

Despite the problems encountered by a number of OFWs, she said that generally, the condition of Filipino workers in Malaysia was good. CBB