APPROACHING "INDENTURED LABOR" CONDITIONS
"You're safe now, they can't touch you here," a domestic worker who signed up as a volunteer says to Mary Jane Garcia, 26, a newly arrived escapee who had walked out into the highway in the middle of the night and hitchhiked her way to the center.

Earlier, at the receiving area, Garcia's employers had caught up with her and — in front of everyone — accused her of stealing. They ordered her to go back home with them, but Garcia was adamant. Denying their allegations, she stood her ground and shot back at her employers angrily, managing to insert some Arabic phrases: "You make me work from six a.m. to four a.m. You also make me work at the factory. Even when I was sick, you made me work."

"Did I ever hit you?" the male employer turns to Mary Cleofe Libunga, 35, who worked with Garcia in the same household. Libunga just looks at him accusingly, but says nothing.

Enter Chona Lamberte, 26, from Bohol, crying inconsolably. She tells the volunteer at the reception that her employers forbade her to leave and they still don't know she had ran away. She's scared, she says. They might come and get her.

These scenes are typical, says Rina Velasco, 26, a volunteer in charge of filing the evacuees' travel papers that are being issued in lieu of missing passports. While there are also tearful goodbyes from those who had been lucky enough to be with kind employers, she says, "over 70 percent of Lebanese employers treat their employees badly." Another employee at the embassy, a Lebanese national, thinks the figure is closer to 99 percent.

"Rare is an OFW with a positive experience in Lebanon," says Kanlungan's Dabu. Indeed, prohibited from even saying "hello" to fellow Filipinas in public places, made to sleep on the kitchen floor, and placed on call to do their masters' bidding 24 hours a day, the conditions of these workers approach that of "indentured labor, even white slavery," says UP Professor Walden Bello, who interviewed dozens of OFWs in Beirut as part of an international delegation.

With this kind of relationships they have with their employers, the parting scenes at the evacuation center have been anything but friendly. At one point, says Velasco, the bodyguard of a general drew a gun and threatened to shoot a Filipina worker if she refused to go back with them.

PROTECTION OF RIGHTS PROVE TRICKY
At least these days the Philippine government seems ready to help the workers as much as it can. Prior to the war, it didn't look that way to some people here. According to Dabu, way before Israel began dropping bombs on Lebanon, Filipina workers had been knocking on the embassy's door for help. But instead of giving them shelter, embassy officials took the workers back to their employers, she says. Abandoned and with nowhere else to go, some of them would eventually decide to jump off buildings, recounts Dabu.

In September 2004, Kanlungan helped some abused workers file cases against the then Filipino labor attaché in Lebanon. The cases are still with the Ombudsman, while the attaché has since been transferred to Rome. Current labor attaché Manalo, who assumed her post here in June last year, maintains though that the embassy never had any abused worker returned to their employer.

In any case, most of those who ran away from their employers eventually began going to churches or to NGOs for refuge, says Dabu. The name of Sister Amelia Torres, a Filipino nun who has been with the Daughters of Charity here in Lebanon for the past 18 years, is on everybody's lips and is known to most as the person to go when the going gets tough.

Tina Naccache, a Lebanese social worker who has been working on migrant workers' issues for years, relates how their organizations once proposed enforcing a common contract that would have laid down the minimum working conditions and compensation that should be guaranteed to workers.

But the agencies opposed this and insisted instead that that they be included as a party to the contract. This would have given them more power over workers, Naccache explains. What shocked Naccache, however, was when the representative of the Philippine embassy endorsed the agencies' position.

The present labor attaché says that they see the inclusion of the agencies in the contract as a "temporary" arrangement. "While the Lebanese government is still very weak on protecting migrant workers," Manalo says, "we have to hold the agencies responsible for the workers."

Migrants' organizations are skeptical of this arrangement since agencies — having had already collected the $2,000 placement fee from the employers — simply do not have the financial incentive to be responsible. In fact, they point out, agencies have often taken the side of employers in disputes with workers. They would also be the first to force runaway workers to return to their employers; otherwise these employers would demand that the fees they paid be returned.

Fortunately, says Naccache, the proposal has been blocked by the Lebanese labor minister who happens to belong to the Hezbollah, the armed political party that is the target of Israel's ire. Unlike the other parties, she says, the Hezbollah has no ties to employment agencies and their members often don't employ domestic workers in their household. Another social worker who refused to be named says that for all of his disagreements with the Hezbollah, it is the only Islamic group he respects because of their position toward migrants.

Manalo, however, points out that the Lebanese labor ministry couldn't even compel Lebanese employers to compensate workers for unpaid services, much less make them accountable for abuses they commit. This is because Lebanese labor laws do not cover migrant workers. Saying she has been "saddened" by the plight of OFWs in Lebanon, Manalo has recommended temporarily suspending workers to the country while they "cleanse" the recruitment and placement industry of agencies found to have violated contracts or condoned abuses against workers.