SARS is more dangerous
than the secretary of labor



THE SAD NEWS this week that Labor Secretary Patricia Santo Tomas had rejected the recommendation of a fact-finding committee to not accept the Unified Contract that some Philippine recruitment agencies were having domestic helpers sign to be deployed to Saudi Arabia, was surprising but not completely unexpected.

Santo Tomas maintains that the whole Unified Contract controversy is the byproduct of a fight between two competing recruitment groupings: the Philippine Association of Service Exporters, Inc. (PASEI) and Overseas Placement Agencies of the Philippines (OPAP).

Earlier this year, some members of OPAP began requiring that domestic helpers going to Saudi Arabia sign this new Unified Contract, adopted under pressure from the Saudi National Recruitment Committee (Sanarcom), which among other things allows contract substitution once the maid lands in the Kingdom, and forbids maids from running away from abusive employers.

The contract substitution part means that the decent level of compensation agreed upon in Manila can automatically be substituted with a much lower salary once the maids arrive in Saudi Arabia. The no-running-away clause also means that financial liability of absconding maids will probably be placed upon the Philippine recruitment agency, and not the employer, no matter how horrible he or she may be.

Controversy surrounded the Unified Contract from day one, and not even all OPAP members agreed with implementing it, as was made clear in a hearing of the House of Representatives labor committee a few months ago. The outcry by labor groups forced the Saudi embassy in Manila to suspend the implementation of the Unified Contract, and a Philippine fact-finding committee headed by National Labor Relations Commission chief Roy Señeres was tasked to look into it.

Refusing to accept the recommendation of the Señeres committee, for fear of seeming to be on the take, Santo Tomas cheekily said Señeres himself should protest her inaction.

Santo Tomas' inaction is shocking, galling and incomprehensible. Her actions speak louder than her words: It seems she is on the side of the labor-importing countries, rather than on the side of the Filipino worker. Making the deployment of Filipino workers abroad as easy and as cheap as possible seems to be her main goal as secretary of labor, which is a shame, really.

At a time when even Indonesia, traditionally the largest supplier of maids to Saudi Arabia, has suspended the deployment of maids in a bid to protect them and also to increase the caliber of the labor they deploy, the Philippines, through Santo Tomas, is trying to be the labor supplier with the lowest salary levels and least protections! It's truly amazing and shameful.

I think President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo should intervene and declare, through an executive order, that the Unified Contract is null and void for blatantly contravening Philippine law (by allowing contract substitution) and for being against the best interests of the country. The president of the Philippines has broad constitutional powers to do so, especially when it involves foreign contracts that affect the welfare of Filipinos.

Ironically, with the current outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), the welfare of OFWs is now more at risk from this deadly coronavirus than from the Unified Contract.

Rumors were flying in Saudi Arabia this past week that many Saudi employers were canceling the vacations of their Filipino staff, for fear that they would contract SARS while at home or perhaps bring it back with them to the Kingdom. Whether this is true or not (the cancellations I mean) remains to be seen and cannot be easily verified. For sure, many OFWs have voluntarily postponed their vacations home, waiting for the SARS outbreak to peak.

The fact that someone infected with the SARS virus can be symptom-free for several days, but still contagious, is in my opinion part of what has fueled many people's irrational and excessive fear of SARS.

An e-mail I recently received from Singapore Airlines only helped to make me feel more creeped out! In describing how the airline was coping with the SARS outbreak, in view of the fact that Singapore was one of the epicenters of the outbreak, the e-mail said the airline would remove and destroy the cushions of the seat and the carpeting surrounding the seat of any passenger found to be SARS infected while in-flight! Call that overkill or what!

In any event, Singapore Airlines has cut its flights to Jeddah from three times a week to a single flight, because of the steep drop in passengers flying through Singapore since the SARS outbreak. The airline is even temporarily suspending its Jeddah flight from May 15.

The Philippines should exert all efforts to contain the SARS outbreak in the country through strict quarantine measures. This is the only way to stop the disease from spreading and threatening not only the lives of all Filipinos, but also the welfare of potential OFWs who might not be able to find jobs abroad if, God-forbid, a major SARS outbreak occurs in the Philippines.