Philippine labour attaché Leopoldo De Jesus

By Joey Aguilar
Staff Reporter

The Philippines will focus on sending more professionals and skilled workers to Qatar and other GCC countries this year, labour attaché Leopoldo De Jesus told Gulf Times.
“We are expecting more ‘high-end workers’ to be deployed due to the construction boom,” the official explained, citing an instruction from Philippine labour secretary Rosalinda Baldoz.”
Before going to Kuwait for the handing over of the Abu Dhabi Dialogue chairmanship, Baldoz visited Qatar in November last year and met with senior labour officials, employers and foreign placement agencies.
The labour attache noted that the Philippines had many highly qualified professionals who wanted to work in the Gulf and in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region.
Besides thousands of fresh graduates from reputable universities, Philippines has a lot of engineers, architects, accountants, nurses and those in the medical and health sector who have years of overseas experience, he said.
He also cited the increasing number of skilled Filipino workers in the construction sector, such as plumbers, electricians, and safety officers, among others, being deployed to Qatar.
The Philippine Overseas Labour Office (POLO) in Doha recorded a rise in the number of individual job contracts it processes daily, going by statistics from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), posted on its website.
The Philippines deployed a total of 94,195 land-based Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) to Qatar (hired and re-hired) in 2013. Saudi Arabia topped the list of countries with 382,553 OFWs, while the UAE follows with 261,119. Singapore is third with 173,666 followed by Hong Kong with 130,686.
A total of 1,469,179 Filipino land-based OFWs were deployed in various parts of the world, including Kuwait, Taiwan, Italy, Malaysia and Bahrain. This excludes the 367,166 Filipino seafarers working in ships.
De Jesus also expects the Qatar-Philippines Joint Labour Committee meeting to take place in Qatar next month. Baldoz, in a letter to Qatar’s Minister of Labour, has proposed to hold the meeting on February 4 and 5 to review and finalise the bilateral labour agreement.
The specific agenda proposed by Baldoz include: 1. Update on labour market opportunities in Qatar; 2. Update on recent policies on recruitment and employment in the Philippines and Qatar; 3. Development of electronic recruitment guidelines such as e-verification and onsite accreditation; 4. Regulation of recruitment cost; 5. Development of dispute settlement guidelines; 6. Household service worker agreement, protocol and contract; and 7. Implementation of the comprehensive information and orientation program under the Abu Dhabi Dialogue.
De Jesus said part of the agenda will also include issues arising from the bilateral labour agreement signed in 2007 such as salary, deployment procedures and some irregularities in the recruitment of Filipino workers in the Philippines.
Ambassador Cresecente Relacion also expressed optimism that the committee would convene again before he was due to leave the country in March.
He earlier said that a provision in the bilateral labour agreement should be implemented to further protect OFWs from “contract substitution.”