Israel is poised to accept 1,000 overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in December to work in hotels and other tourism-related industries amid a continuing tourism boom in the Holy Land.
“Our population is only 9 million [and] we don’t have that many people to take care of the tourists,” Ambassador Rafael Harpaz admitted during a forum in Makati on Monday, adding that an average of 4.2 million tourists from around the world visit Tel Aviv yearly.
Harpaz added that there were two memorandum of agreements (MOA) signed by President Duterte during his visit to Israel in relation to the government-to-government hiring of Filipinos.
“The Philippine Overseas Employment Agency [POEA] would handle the hiring of Filipino workers,” Harpaz added, noting that there’s no need or requirement to speak their language, like Arabic or Hebrew, to qualify as tourist guide.
“Everybody speaks English in Israel and many of them also speak Tagalog like halo-halo, balut, he added in jest, noting there are some 20,000 OFWs in the care-giver sector.
The big advantage of the MOA is that Filipinos no longer have to pay a huge amount to third-party agencies, which regularly asked $10,000 to $12,000 placement fee, Harpaz said.
He said his government has decided to open Israel for a limited amount of workers from all over the world and they would start with 2,000 workers.
“The first country we signed an agreement with was the Philippines, and I was informed that at the end of the year, 1,000 OFWs could be recruited to work in Israel and there would be no placement fees.”
He said there is no other country in the world that has worked in their tourism industry before “and the first one is from the Philippines.”
According to Israel’s highest envoy in the Philippines, “Filipinos who applied to Israel to work as caregivers have to pay a huge amount of placement fees.
Today, OFWs who apply for work in the tourism sector “will be down to a government-to-government basis and it will be very limited,” he said.
“Why we want the Filipinos?” he asked. “[It is] because you offer the best service, we have experienced working with Filipinos before.”
According to Harpaz, the 1,000 Filipinos that would be hired this year will work mainly in hotels and restaurants of hotels.
“By Christmas I hope to see the first Filipino with visa to work in the tourism industry in Israel and it will be the first OFW that come to Israel following this decision,” the envoy said.
Harpaz mentioned that other nationalities invited to work in Israel’s tourism industry are Jordanians, “but they are our neighbors, and I’m happy we did it so fast with the Philippines [and] there’s lot of satisfaction because we enjoyed them before.”
“The contract [for Filipino tourism] works [will be valid for] five years, similar to a Filipino caregiver in Tel Aviv,” Harpaz said.
27 comments
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