Unwanted bus drivers still stranded in UAE after one month

Author: BI-ME staff
Source: BI-ME
Published: Wed May 27, 2009 9:52 am


UAE. About a month since the issue of the stranded Filipino bus drivers came out, 76 of the original 137 trafficked Filipino bus drivers are still stranded in Ajman.

Susan Ople, President of the Blas F Ople Policy Center in the Philppines, has asked that the passport of their recruiter, Connie Paloma, be cancelled after the Senate issued a subpoena for her repeated failure to attend Senate hearings on the case.

Press reports from the Philippines said that the recruitment agent Paloma was spotted in Dubai, where she reportedly went to convince some of the bus drivers to withdraw the multiple cases they filed against her.

Irenea Maniego, wife of one of the bus drivers, was reported as saying that her husband continues to languish at an Ajman labour camp as he awaits the resolution of the issue of fines he’s supposed to pay for overstaying. The drivers had arrived on visit visas in the hope of taking up jobs in Dubai that never materialised.

She said finalisation of the police case is needed so that he could either come home or seek employment in other Dubai-based companies.

Maniego said her husband has accumulated the equivalent of US$1,000 in fines due to expired visas.

The unsettled issue of fines is understood to be what stands in the way of the 76 drivers’ eventual repatriation, or in the case of 15 drivers among them, their absorption into the workforce of the Dubai-based Emirates Catering.

At the hearing, Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) Administrator Carmelita Dimzon explained that the Philippine Overseas Labor Officer (POLO) is still negotiating with Al Toomoh Technical Services, the UAE-based partner of CYM International Services and Placement Agency which recruited the bus drivers, to pay for the penalties the drivers incurred for overstaying.

Lawyer Reynaldo Robles, who is representing the bus drivers, said his office and the Ople Policy Center have been receiving calls and texts messages from the drivers still stranded in the UAE almost daily pleading that they be brought home.

Robles described the drivers’ condition as deplorable because they stay in cramped quarters adjacent to a garbage dumpsite with no power and no running water amidst dwindling food supply, most of which was earlier donated by Filipinos in Dubai.