THE Department of Labor and Employment (DoLE) will reduce deployments of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) to Saudi Arabia, citing Riyadh’s inaction in settling 9,000 unpaid claims filed by OFWs worth P4.6 billion.

Labor Secretary Silvestre H. Bello III said the government “scale down” deployment starting 2020 after Riyadh failed to act on the claims of over 300 employees this year, many of them working for a contractor of the state-run oil firm.

“I would like to inform you that we plan to scale down the deployment to Saudi Arabia starting next year. The purpose of this scaling down is to call the attention of the Saudi government to what we consider as “no action” (in the case of) more than 300 workers of which) over 200 are employed by one of the main contractors of Saudi Aramco… most of those workers have not received their salaries since April 2019 and whose monetary claims have yet to be settled,” he said at a briefing Tuesday.

DoLE said that this was not the only instance that Riyadh has not chosen to intervene on behalf of OFWs and contractors in wage disputes. In 2016, Mr. Bello flew to Saudi Arabia to repatriate more than 13,000 workers from construction firm Saudi Oger who had not been paid for as long as two years. Some 9,000 still have yet to be paid.

Processing of Overseas Employment Certificate (OEC) will be frozen for workers newly-deployed to Saudi Arabia. Returning OFWs will be issued OECs on a case-to-case basis.

The board of the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) has yet to determine the extent of the worker deployment freeze, and the industries it will halt deployments to.

Saudi Arabia is the top worker deployment destination, with over 3 million documented and undocumented OFWs employed in the country. It was the second largest source of OFW remittances after the US in the first half. — Gillian M. Cortez

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