Placement Fee

Every OFW may he be a 1st timer or returning OFW is trying his best to avoid the dreaded 'Placement Fee" although as I have experienced it first hand these are the following categories of placement fees:

1. No Placement Fees -

- either you are direct hired (not going through any agency) or
- your employer has agreed to shoulder the fees (most seafarers are in this category)
- Canada bound OFWs
- HSW (household service workers)
- some austrailia bound ofws

2. With Placement Fees

- Direct cash out payment of
- through salary deduction payments (fly now pay later plans)s

Placement fees are basically the sources of migrant debts and Filipino OFW workers arive in their job sites with debts and loans taken out in the Philippines to finance the cost of migrant workers with a two-year work contract. The first few months of a worker's salary often are sent home to pay back the debt and this loan can be paid back if the worker manages to keep her job for at least six months

Normally they charge you with a one month's salary for the recruitment agencies services and are collected before you can leave the country...I too had to suffer this heavy burden...of a person who presently has no job seeking employment overseas because his own country could not provide him his own needs for a decent job...where an economy controlled by mostly unscrupolous businessmen who would rather see people like you and me suffer in poverty least they loose their grip on their businessess as these low income families may earn their keep and start becoming economically empowered that these businessmen will lose poverty stricken people for cheap labor...

The OFW supply chain management has even become a big business which involves business men in the recruitment agencies, travel agencies, airlines, money lending business, medical certification gamca business with ties to doctors and hospitals and clinics, shipping, remittance banks and financial institutions which does not include the variouis underground economy funded activities just to get an OFW off to his job site...

I hope that this placement fee be eradicated from the list of so many OFW woes, social problems brought upon his life by becoming a displace worker at home, with the onslaught of the unnecessary chance of possibly being broken away from familial ties and be ominously separated from wives and children and love ones...what a burden that he must carry along with him that such crippling migrant debts that goes with working abroad is just too much tjat it will break a camels back...(This is a pun intended for those who are in the middle east)

The government should alliviate the plight of the "Bayaning OFW" and make life easier for those who had to prostitute themselves overseas just to earn a decent living. What kind of a hero will that be...we should help these workers by making their transition to migrant workers less financially disabling to the family he leaves behind...you can see them all around the airports of the world...with their baseball caps, abayas, backpacks, and the evver present ofw cry of "Kabayan"...o bayan ko ...bakit kami pinabayaang nagkakaganito...