Davao City - There would be no merry Christmas for families of Overseas Filipino Workers due to worsening working conditions abroad, said the Gabriela Women's Party-list. This despite the fact that dollar remittances are expected to go high as the Christmas season begins as many of Filipino migrant workers abroad are sending money for their families.

According to Nisa Opalla regional spokesperson of Gabriela Women’s Party-list in Southern Mindanao “for more than eight years of GMA, our Filipino migrant workers got nothing but more difficulties and worsening working conditions abroad especially in the midst of unstable economic status of countries hit by Global Financial Crisis. It is because the Arroyo administration failed to protect them of their basic rights, illegal recruitment and maltreatment from their employees”.

Banko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) noted that since 2001 until last year, the dollar remittances of the OFWs reached to 83.35 billion dollars or about 10 percent of the country's Gross Domestic Product. In just the first quarter of this year the dollar remittances pegged to 6.98B dollars or an increase of 2.8 percent compared to last year’s remittances on the same period.

“OFW remittances remain to be the saviour of our sagging economy but the government treats OFW like commodities that can be sold to global market for cheap labor. The government is not only ear-ning from the OFW remittances, it also extracts 59.2 M pesos everyday from the application fees of the 3,300 outgoing workers or an estimate of 21 B per year” said Opalla.

Opalla cited that “there are about 10 million OFWs worldwide; United States remained to be the top destination of Filipino migrant workers followed by Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. Sadly, these are the countries where most of our women OFWs are victims of rape and verbal abuse, or are framed up for trumped up cases, most of which are punishable by death or life imprisonment.”

She added that “7 out of 10 OFWs are women and who are prone to all forms of abuse and violence in their work places in foreign land.”

In Davao City, there are more than 25,000 documented OFWs , 7,000 of which are sea-based migrant workers. Many OFWs from Davao are registered in Metro Manila, of which 75 percent of them are women.

The Center for Overseas Workers in Davao City reported that most of the complaints they received come from women OFWs abandoned by their husbands or live in partners in Japan, Baharain and some other areas in Middle East.

This year, one of the highlighted cases of abuse is the story of 20 women in Saudi Arabia who have been repeatedly raped by their abusive recruiter named Abu Khalid. Aliyah, one of the survivors of this tragic and heinous incident told Gabriela and Migrante Party how they were being sold to be raped by Khalid’s friends.

Recently, the reported cases of forced drug smuggling involving OFWs in China are very alarming especially that this is happening also in some OFWs working in US, Malaysia, Brunei, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Gabriela Women’s Party is closely monitoring this case.