30% drop in deployment of land-based OFWs

MANILA, Philippines — The deployment of newly hired land-based overseas Filipino workers fell by nearly 30 percent in 2008 compared to 2007, according to revised figures released by the Phililippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA).

The POEA data given to the media showed only 216,803 newly hired land-based workers were deployed in 2008 compared to 306,383 in 2007. The agency has yet to release its full report on OFW deployment for 2008.

Commenting on the figures, recruitment industry consultant Emmanuel Geslani said in a phone interview on Sunday that the data on the land-based new hires seemed “realistic and shows the actual situation of the industry which is suffering from reduced deployment in all markets.”

In January, the POEA, through its mother-agency, the Department of Labor and Employment said 1,376,823 million OFWs were deployed in 2008 — 27.8 percent higher compared to the 1,077,623 in 2007.

No breakdown of the figures was released by the POEA. The data on the new hires was the first details of the 2008 deployment figures to come out.

Geslani urged the POEA to come out with its complete report so that the recruitment industry could formulate marketing strategies as the country and the rest of the world suffer from the economic crisis.

The decrease in the deployment of new hires in 2008, according to the POEA figures, is reflected in regional figures for Asia (-53.3 percent), the Americas (-49.6 percent), Europe (-48.6 percent) and the Middle East (-18.6 percent).

The deployment to the Top 10 countries of 2008 that are markets for land-based newly-hired OFWs also shrank, with the exception of the United Arab Emirates, where 43,991 new OFWs were deployed, an increase of 0.5 percent.

Most of the countries were affected by the global economic crisis.

Saudi Arabia, the top destination, only had 76,148 new hires compared to 96,890 in 2007. Other markets in the Top 10 were Qatar, with 25,186 new hires (-13.3 percent); Taiwan, with 17,204 (-39.5 percent); Kuwait, with 10,107 (-38.7 percent); Hong Kong, with 8,333 (-62.6 percent), Canada, with 4,849 (-41.6 percent), Bahrain, with 2,882 (-30.9 percent), Italy with 2,288 (-56.4 percent) and Singapore with 2,276 (-38.2 percent).

Geslani said that if there were about 300,000 new hires (as stated by DOLE) and 216,000 of them were land based (as stated by the POEA) then the other 84,000 were sea-based.

“Usually we deploy a total of 250,000 land-based OFWs every year and 300,000 sea-based workers every year. And the usual ratio of rehires against new hires, is 55 percent versus 45 percent. But if the number of land-based new hires slumped, then so would the number of rehires. I think it’s impossible to have 1.3 million total deployments if the markets of new hires actually declined and no new major market opened up in 2008,” Geslani said.

He also recalled that the POEA admitted processing 19 percent less overseas employment contracts (OECs) in 2008 compared to 2007, without providing any breakdown of rehires and new hires and land-based and sea-based.

The lack of breakdown in the figures for January and February in 2009 also led Geslani to question the veracity of the POEA’s data-gathering. He said the agency had yet to explain why it had a total deployment figure of 283,348 for the first two months of the year when only 196,967 contracts for land- and sea-based workers, including rehires, were processed.

Geslani said the recruitment industry “constantly” questioned the 2008 deployment figure of 1.37 million since it was first announced by the government last January. One recruiters’ group, the Philippine Association of Service Exporters Inc., has written the POEA to obtain a comprehensive report of the 2008 deployment situation.

“There’s no basis to support such a ‘bloated’ figure as the entire world went through its worst financial crisis since the 1930s. The actual figure for new hire deployment indicates the real picture, not the rosy one that DOLE/POEA has been bragging of a 27 percent, which is now being used as an indicator of a growing economy of the country,” he added.

Geslani is a former vice president PASEI and has been with the industry for three decades both as a practitioner and consultant.

The consultant said the higher deployment numbers could have risen from the fact that immigration counters at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, where 95 percent of all out-bound OFWs pass through, only checked if workers had overseas employment contracts and not if the OECs were genuine or not.

The checking of the overseas employment contracts used to be the duty of the POEA Labor Assistance Center at NAIA but it was scrapped in April 2008, according to Geslani. Since, then he said, the POEA had no direct way of accurately validating and recording genuine POEA-processed OFW deployment.

“What agency was actually counting the workers exiting NAIA with OEC certificates? No one at the airport–the airline check-in personnel, airport terminal fee collectors or the immigration officers–can properly validate the genuineness and authenticity of POEA e-receipts (issued after for the OECs). So it is possible that documents presented to airport officials were not really processed by the POEA,” he said.

Geslani said the rising cases of off-loading by the Bureau of Immigration due to “suspicious documents” of departing OFWs bolsters the recruitment industry’s suspicion that many illegally recruited workers are leaving the country daily “by the thousands” using fake e-receipts.

“The implementation of the POEA advisory has opened the floodgates for illegal recruiters to use fake e-receipts which cannot be validated properly by airport authorities,” he said.

Geslani called on the POEA not to depend on airlines and immigration counters in counting and tallying exiting OFWs. He said those using fake receipts would become undocumented OFWs who would have no access to protection by the POEA and Overseas Workers Welfare Administration abroad. –Jerome Aning, Philippine Daily Inquirer