THE Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) is now crafting the Governing Board (GB) resolution officially lifting the temporary deployment ban for health care workers (HCW).
This after President Duterte finally approved the proposal of the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), which was endorsed by the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Disease (IATF).
“This will immediately take effect upon the approval of a GB reso of the POEA,” POEA Administrator Bernard Olalia said on Sunday.
POEA imposed in April the temporary deployment ban, covering workers from 14 medical categories, to ensure a reliable pool of HCW in the country, to help efforts to fight the Covid-19 pandemic.
Government competition
The looming removal of the ban was welcomed by the recruitment industry, but it expressed concern over the plan of POEA to cap at just 5,000 the number of HCWs to be deployed per year while pandemic persists.
Olalia said the cap will apply for HCWs deployed by Philippine Recruitment Agencies (PRA) and POEA through government-to-government agreement.
Recruitment consultant Emmanuel Geslani said they wanted the cap to apply exclusively for HCWs of PRAs.
“If the POEA’s deployment of nurses is allowed to participate in the 5,000, the private sector will have only one-half of the 5,000 cap,” Geslani explained.
And yet, he noted, the 5,000 “is just one fourth of the yearly deployment to the Middle East before the pandemic.”
Geslani said that as it is, the POEA already deploys more than 2,000 nurses yearly to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and another 1,000 nurses to Germany under their “Triple Win” arrangement.
“Even markets developed by the private sector like Korea and Israel have been taken over by the POEA to the detriment of the recruitment agencies who developed those markets with their own resources and marketing efforts,” he added.
The PRA have been complaining about the slow processing by POEA, which had claimed that due to the pandemic they are operating under a skeleton force where personnel only work one or twice a week.
“Accreditation and processing of job orders have slowed down the recruitment activities of the existing labor markets like Taiwan where we had 140,000 overseas Filipino workers (OFW),” Geslani said.
He claimed the number of OFW being recruited to Taiwan is now down to 100,000 “because the rest have been transferred to Vietnam and Indonesia by Taiwan principals due to the very slow approval operations of the POEA.”
POEA’s continued “competition” with PRAs in the deployment negates the Migrant Workers Act of 1995, which as a policy prohibits the state from actively promoting overseas employment, Geslani claimed.
Alternative options
An official of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) also rejected the cap since it will prevent some HCWs from seeking work abroad.
“We have always appealed before that [those who] already [have] existing contracts, should not have their deployment suspended,” said CBCP – Episcopal Commission on Migrants and Itinerant People (ECMI) Vice Chairman Bishop Ruperto Santos.
If the government really wants to maintain a pool of HCWs for its Covid-19 response, he said it should consider implementing policies to improve the conditions and benefits so these workers will voluntarily choose to stay in the country.
He also said the government may also opt to make it mandatory for fresh graduates of medical-related courses to render one year of work in the country before they can seek employment abroad.
Villanueva weighs in
The chairman of the Senate Labor committee welcomed the lifting of the deployment ban but viewed the matter “as a reminder for our government to continue raising the standards of compensation” for the HCWs.
“As we have said before when we called for the lifting of the ban early on, the most effective way to make our healthcare workers stay and work in our country is to offer better employment terms including competitive salary and benefits, and its timely payout,” Senator Joel Villanueva said on Sunday.
He added that despite the anxiety of separation from families and the risk of getting infected overseas, “the world respects and looks up to Filipino healthcare workers as one of the best, and compensates them well for raising the standards of care. Our government should do the same to our own kababayan.”