MANILA, Philippines—The number of newly hired overseas Filipino workers leaving for South Korea through the government-to-government Employment Permit System (EPS) has gone down 40 percent from 10,575 in 2006 to 6,452 in 2007, a recruitment specialist said.Citing figures from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, which administers the system for the Philippine government, recruitment industry consultant Emmanuel Geslani said total deployment to South Korea last year, including re-hires, increased minimally from 13,984 in 2006 to 14,265 last year. He said there should be no slowdown in the hiring of OFWs in South Korea because there are so many unfilled jobs there. Geslani attributed the over-all slower hiring pace to the inherent weaknesses of the EPS. The recruitment industry's position is that the EPS encroaches in the private sector activity of recruitment. It seeks to recapture this market from the government. As POEA is again set to sign this month a new memorandum of understanding with the South Korean government on a new batch of workers to be sent in 2008-2009, Geslani said recruitment agencies are asking, "Why does the government insist on taking over the function of private recruitment agencies in the deployment of OFWs abroad?" Geslani repeated the basic weakness of the EPS: Government should not be in the business of recruitment while it is also regulating the industry. He said the EPS operations do not allow for transparency in the hiring process, the deployment cost, and the actual working conditions in South Korea. Geslani said that in EPS, the POEA violates its own policy that OFWs pay as little fee as possible; the POEA requires employers to shoulder air fare and prefers that they also shoulder fees involving mobilization, excluding personal costs like medical checkup and
passport fees. Unlike in Canada, he pointed out, the deployment cost of about P40,000 to P46,000 is shouldered mostly by OFWs. He broke down the cost to include: processing fee, P4,975; visa application, P2,500, pre-departure training, P1,994; Korean language tuition, P12,000 to P18,000; Korean language test, $30; air fare, P15,000 up depending on
the season and whether the flight is chartered; and pocket money, $150. These expenses are borne by the OFWs before they are registered under the EPS, he said. And this does not include grease money to some corrupt POEA employees to ensure their inclusion under the EPS, he added. Geslani said another cause for the low OFW turnout for South Korea jobs is the increasing number of labor cases between employers in Korea and OFWs, who are usually not made to understand what they're getting into. The POEA contract, he explained, usually indicates $700 as the minimum pay for unskilled labor in Korea. However, Korean law requires Filipinos with work permits to pay tax, insurance for medical expenses, board and lodging, effectively reducing their take-home pay to $300. "As more OFWs run away and leave their job sites for other Korean employers, the POEA decided to slow down the processing of EPS workers in the middle of 2007 and refused to register the hundreds of thousands eager applicants for EPS workers to Korea," he said. | 
