Tuesday, September 02, 2008 Editorial: Springs forth another suprise for the bagong bayani
SAUDI Arabia adopts new hiring regulation starting today, an online news read. The today here was yesterday, September 1.
Starting September 1, the news said, "all Filipino workers applying for visas must seek the assistance of the Saudi National Recruitment Committee (SANARCOM), a private group of recruitment agencies in Saudi."
In effect, this empowers Sanarcom to act as a middleman, a broker for contracts and visas for migrant workers. Under the existing policy, Philippine placement agencies deal directly with Saudi employers.
What's surprising is the seeming lack of information about this, even as Saudi Arabia is the work place of thousands of Filipinos, which just means any change in the hiring policy that will be detrimental to the overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) can be regarded as an act that further punishes these OFWs and their families left in the Philippines.
It's tantamount to further enslaving the OFWs, this time to a monopoly of recruitment agencies out there after they have already left the Philippines.
By this time, with millions of Filipinos out there working hard for a living to feed their hungry families here in the Philippines, government should have already honed up its sensitivities to instinctively sense what can put the OFWs at a risk much greater than they already are in now.
But then, that's asking too much of a government that's full of rhetorics but lacks the heart for what it repeatedly calls as the country's 'bagong bayani'. In fact, the term 'bagong bayani' is now overused, it has taken on the image of a concrete statue on a city plaza, praised and prayed for every year, but hardly remembered in the daily course of life.
And so, the new policy took effect yesterday, just five days since Valenzuela City Rep. Rex Gatchalian filed a resolution in the House of Representative seeking an investigation into how the new hiring rule will affect the OFWs.
Had government been truly looking out for the welfare of the OFWs who bring in the dollars and dinars and yens and the euros and the riyal to prop up the country's economy and fill the lootbag for corrupt officials on the sides, then it should have long initiated an inquiry and an investigation. Had government been truly looking out for the welfare of teh OFWs, it should have by now already known how this new policy will be advantageous or disadvantageous to those in Saudi Arabia.
Indeed, Gatchalian's resolution is on the right track when it raised the need to "thoroughly review all the other provisions included in the new hiring policy, in order that we shall be appraised of the whole context of this unified scheme to formulate the basis for our legislative proposal, policy or guideline or its ultimate rejection".
But since the policy is now in force, the review should be done fast, and right away.
