No Filipinos for Jordan

[Zkribbler]

Jordan 'abuse' spurs Filipino ban

By Crispin Thorold
BBC News, Amman


The Philippines has banned its citizens from going to Jordan to work amid claims of widespread abuse of domestic staff by Jordanian employers.
The move affects Filipinos who want to go to Jordan for the first time, not those already working in the country.

The ban, which came into force on Monday, is only now becoming public.

Inside the Philippine embassy in the capital, Amman, more than 150 Filipino workers, most of them women, have taken refuge from abusive employers.

The notice posted on the front door of the embassy is clear: no more workers will be allowed to come from the Philippines to Jordan until further notice.

Unpaid wages

The crimes committed against them include non-payment of wages, physical abuse and even rape.

Meetings between officials from the Philippine embassy and the Jordanian government are being held to try to solve the problem.

According to Jordanian government statistics, there are 70,000 foreign domestic workers in the country.

About 15,000 of them come from the Philippines.

Filipinos are some of the nicest people I know. Abusing them is like kicking a puppie.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

The problem isn't abuse of Filipinos, the problem is abuse of overseas workers, which is a problem that plagues all of the gulf states (as well as Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore; "maid abuse" is the #1 crime commited by Singaporean women). But those do tend to be disproportionately Filipino.

But this won't solve anything. Filipinos are also banned from working in Iraq; Phillipine passports are actually stamped "Not Valid for Travel to Iraq" in both English and Arabic.

Wanna guess how many Filipinos are working in Iraq? At least 4,000. And those are the ones visible enough to be counted.

If the Philippine government had the ability, or even inclination, to enforce its own laws, the country wouldn't be the laughing stock of Asia. But, alas, such is not the case.

[Heresson]

Philipinos are probably teh cutest of east asian nations. It's because they are catholic

[VetLegion]

There is no oil in Jordan. How come they are so well off to support an army of 70 000 domestic servants?

[LordShiva]

Why does he need Filipinos anyway? Surely with all that money from Nike endorsements he can hire Americans?

[Riesstiu IV]

Most Arab states seem to treat non-Arab groups like sh*t. Indian and Pakistani technicians and engineers are treated like second class citizens in places like Saudi Arabia or Qatar.

Yet instead of using oil profits to educate their own populations so they can do these kind of jobs and improve their standing in the world they hire underpaid foreigners to do everything, build lavish palaces and hotels, and buy sex slaves.

[Heresson]

Originally posted by VetLegion
There is no oil in Jordan. How come they are so well off to support an army of 70 000 domestic servants?

Praise Allah!

[VetLegion]

I see a business opportunity. Americans are hard to get, and obviously Arabs would pay good money to have American domestic servants. Now here is the million dollar idea - I set up a company to hire out Americans to Arabs as domestic help, but instead of Americans they payed for I send them the Poles I buy on the second hand market in London. How could the Arabs know?

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by VetLegion
There is no oil in Jordan. How come they are so well off to support an army of 70 000 domestic servants?

they probably get paid $200-300/month. It doesn't take a lot of money.

[Lancer]

Here in the Phils I pay $50 a month for Vic plus food for her and her daughter. At that price however they get to abuse me.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by Lancer
Here in the Phils I pay $50 a month for Vic plus food for her and her daughter.

And that's why they're willing to go abroad to work. (Nothing against you; I'm sure that's the going rate for the provinces. Manila had better wages, but a higher cost of living, too.)

[Lancer]

It is the going rate and they sit down to meals with us and get good food as a matter of course. Plus, they are the people the contributors here at Poly are building the Poly House II for. My boss at the casino already bought them a small property with a mango tree and contributed $500 towards a house. Here we've raised incl Dolores and my contribution over $2000. So, they're happy.

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by VetLegion
I see a business opportunity. Americans are hard to get, and obviously Arabs would pay good money to have American domestic servants. Now here is the million dollar idea - I set up a company to hire out Americans to Arabs as domestic help, but instead of Americans they payed for I send them the Poles I buy on the second hand market in London. How could the Arabs know?

Bah. You could send them illegal aliens, and the Arabs could pay them even less than Poles. They already have American i.d.s, so the Arabs will never catch on.

[DanS]

No offense to anybody here who has servants -- and I have a cleaning lady who visits from time-to-time myself -- but this servant culture sure weirds me out.

Also, I certainly don't blame folks for searching for a better circumstance for themselves, and any honest day's pay is honorable. But having all these people leave the islands for permanent work is not a good sign for the Philippines.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by DanS
No offense to anybody here who has servants -- and I have a cleaning lady who visits from time-to-time myself -- but this servant culture sure weirds me out.

Me too. In Manila, we had a cleaning lady who came in twice a week, and whom we paid extra to help out at dinner parties; in Singapore, we have someone coming in one afernoon a week. But expats love their servants. I can't tell you how often I'm at some social function and have to listen to Americans b!tch about the fact that the embassy didn't give their maid a visa -- so now, on summer vacation, they actually have to watch their own kids and pick up after themselves. Horrors!

Also, I certainly don't blame folks for searching for a better circumstance for themselves, and any honest day's pay is honorable. But having all these people leave the islands for permanent work is not a good sign for the Philippines.

It's killing the Phils, in several different ways.

First, it's screwing up nuclear families; I meet a fair number of Filipinos (men and women) who have kids they've only seen every year or two since leaving them with grandma shortly after birth; attachment between parents and children seems abstract and merely sentimental.

Second, since right now 10% of Filipinos work overseas, but that 10% generates 20% of the Phils' GNP, it means the government has a vested interest in perpetuating and expanding its reliance on Overseas Foreign Workers (OWFs), not reigning it in. This reached the height of its absurdity when I was in Manila. Responding to US pressure to curb human trafficking, japan finally tightened its restrictions on visas for entertainers, so that now they were only available to entertainers and not *ahem* "entertainers." The Phillipine government immediate issued vehement protests and a small diplomatic crisis escalated -- with the Philippine government and press taking the position, basically, that they were all for pimping out Filipinas if it kept the economy from sputtering to a complete halt.

And third, sadly, all that OFW money doesn't really help that much, in the long run. Virtually none of it gets invested in the country; it's almost entirely spend on consumer products which, while they improve the quality of lives of individual Filipinos, do nothing to stem the countries downward slide to the bottom of the Southeast Asia food chain.