Libya wants OFWs to return; PHL says ‘not yet’
The Libyan government is appealing to Filipino workers, who escaped from the March uprisings there, to come back to their jobs now that the situation has become ‘peaceful and calm.’
But the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs was not about to lift the OFW deployment ban to Libya, maintaining that the agency remains at “alert level four" to force Filipinos to keep on evacuating Libya.
On Monday, Libyan Foreign Ministry Immigration Undersecretary Abdulhadi Al-Huwaid called on Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario to tell him that Libya is now safe for redeployment of Filipino workers.
More than 9,000 overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), most of whom are engineers and highly skilled workers employed by oil companies, returned to Philippines as of April this year in the wake of the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.
At least 1,700 Filipino workers, mostly in the medical sector, remained in Libya, Al-Huwaid said in a press conference late Monday at the Makati Shangri-la.
“We are taking care of them (Filipinos in Libya)," he said. “We are calling on those who left to return to Libya. The situation is very peaceful, the situation is calm in Tripoli apart from the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organizations (NATO) aggressions."
Al-Huwaid said Libya is eager to hire more Filipinos, especially those in the medical services.
But the Philippine Department of Labor and Employment had pointed out earlier that Filipino workers displaced in Libya have huge job offers in other countries in the Middle East, such as Qatar, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
source: GMA News