Demand for Filipino HSWs remains high, says placement executive

By Joey AguilarStaff ReporterA very small percentage of recruitment and manpower agencies in Qatar fail to comply with the $400 (QR1,460) minimum monthly salary for Filipino household service workers (HSWs), it is learnt.“The ratio is 10:1 and that very small percentage of non-compliance happens rarely because the Philippine government is strictly imposing the law on HSW wages,” a senior executive of a manpower agency in Doha told Gulf Times. “Almost all our clients are complying with the wages set by the Philippine government.”Despite the cheaper rates offered by other nationalities, she stressed that the demand for Filipino HSWs in Qatar has continued to rise, especially with the announcement of the Indonesian government to stop sending housemaids to 21 Middle Eastern countries.The manpower agency gets about 100 HSWs from the Philippines every month and the number accounts for 70% of their total HSW recruitment for Qatar.The executive said they make sure that all these HSWs receive the $400 wage from their employers.However, she lamented that some HSWs fall prey to erring recruitment agencies, which are believed to make internal arrangements with their clients.“But the majority of our clients are willing to pay the amount and some well-off employers even get more than six workers from us,” she added.The Philippine Overseas Labour Office said the number of contracts they now process exceeds 75 every day.Labour attaché Leopoldo De Jesus said that during the peak months, about 90 contracts are processed daily. Deployment time for HSWs from the Philippines to Middle Eastern countries and other parts of the world was also reduced from three months to about 45 days.“At the most, it will take less than two months. Based on the arrivals we monitored recently, it is faster now,” he said.De Jesus also noted that the compliance rate among both agencies and employers is now higher compared to the previous years.On the reported non-compliance of some agencies and employers, the senior labour official said they usually ask the agency that recruited the HSW to pay the salary difference to the worker.“We had five cases in the past and asked the recruitment agencies to pay the HSWs they recruited,” he said.The Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) recently suspended Eunice International Manpower Services and Vital Wealth Manpower Resources Corporation, in the Philippines, for sending HSWs to Dubai using visas with different skills categories.One complainant said she was asked to sign a two-year contract for the position of household “domestic worker” with a monthly salary of 1,500 dirhams.But documents submitted to POEA revealed that the complainant’s position was non-household “cleaner”.She was required to work from dawn till midnight every day without adequate rest, receiving a monthly salary of 1,000 dirhams, 500 dirhams less than what was agreed in the contract.“The problem with reprocessing (of contracts) is that workers under the strict mantle of protection, such as domestic workers, are declared as some other types of workers, thereby preventing the government from applying protective measures,” POEA administrator Hans Leo Cacdac said in a statement.