Recruiters in the Philippines would rather risk losing the Saudi market than compromise on the welfare of Filipino workers sent to Saudi Arabia, the president of one of three major Filipino recruitment agencies in Manila said Thursday night. “Our workers are not commodities … we are bound to protect them,” said Jose Fernandez, president of the Philippine Association of Service Exporters Inc. (PASEI) in an interview here. He was referring to a new Saudi “unified contract” regulation that went into effect on Aug. 1, making it mandatory for recruitment agencies in the Philippines to route all visa processing work through the Saudi National Recruitment Committee (SANARCOM), a grouping of Saudi recruitment establishments. Fernandez described the unified contract as “oppressive” because it has provisions that give recruits no choice but to accept without complaint whatever job their employers give them, and that also prevent them from leaving their employers without justifiable reasons. He said such provisions were among the reasons why the manpower recruiters in Manila have agreed to reject the new regulation. News reports from Manila said the Federated Association of Manpower Exporters (FAME), Overseas Placement Association of the Philippines (OPAP) and a group with an acronym ASPRO, which sends only professionals, have also rejected the unified contract. “We object to the shape, color and contents of the unified contract,” Fernandez said, adding that if overseas manpower recruitment agencies in Manila sign the unified contract, it would be tantamount to signing a “death warrant for our workers.” He invited human rights groups in the Kingdom to look into the unified contract and determine whether or not it is “a form of slavery” of migrant workers. Fernandez said private Saudi recruitment agencies comprising the SANARCOM were basically engaged in recruiting household workers like maids and he surmised that they now wanted a piece of a larger recruitment pie, especially since deployment of domestic workers has dwindled after Manila raised their salary to at least US$ 400. “The number of maids, which used to average about 80,000 a year, has dropped to about 2,000,” he said, adding that they see SANARCOM'S move as a tit-for-tat action against Manila. __
