09/15/2025
DMW: Tahanan ng Trafficker, huwag pondohan!
The Department of Migrant Workers under Marcos Jr. is proposing a Php 1.3-billion fund increase for its 2026 budget proposals. It has no business being granted such massive funding while making business out of the suffering of thousands of OFWs.
As the facilitator of the country’s Labor Export Program, the DMW deserves to be defunded as it has done no more than sell us wholesale to work in low-wage, exploitative jobs overseas.
The DMW is the chief broker of cheap Filipino labor to foreign governments and companies, especially those from the imperialist US and its allies. It wastes taxpayers money by spending on its marketing missions abroad to secure new labor markets. It also colludes with local employment agencies and consultancy firms for the massive and growing recruitment of OFWs.
So far this year, the agency deployed at least 1.8 million Filipino workers abroad. By setting up bilateral labor agreements and overseas work recruitment schemes, the DMW separates 8,700 Filipinos from their families every single day only to have their dignity stripped from them and their rights violated. This painful number will only grow with the DMW’s impending budget increase of 28%.
Instead of providing long-term jobs in our country, the Philippine government is expanding its nationwide machinery to carry out labor export all the way down to the local level. The proposed DMW budget includes Php 700-million in allocations for regional offices to carry out the recruitment of OFWs throughout the country.
This expansion of migrant worker recruitment by the DMW and even local government units has resulted in abuses of Filipinos from the provinces to overseas. Seasonal farm workers are still being trafficked into South Korea through LGUs in Northern Luzon. Filipino college students from the Visayas are drowning under debt and exploitation because of study-work programs in Taiwan.
The DMW cannot tout itself as the “Home of OFWs” while refusing to provide meaningful assistance to victims of trafficking and exploitation abroad. We continue to receive reports around the world of Migrant Worker Offices shooing away victims of trafficking and abuse. What assistance migrants receive from the government, as with the case of 11 trafficking victims in the Netherlands, is often too little and too late.
Meanwhile, recruitment agencies and consultancy firms that scam and traffick migrant workers continue to get away with little more than public warnings from the DMW. This department is more a haven for traffickers than a home for migrant workers.
Migrant workers are still being denied aid and assistance and are often blamed for their plight. DMW Secretary Cacdac himself recently shifted blame to OFWs desperate for work in his statement warning us against “moonlighting” or working multiple jobs, whether authorized or not. Rather than fulfill its claimed mandate to help us migrants, they somehow have the gall to claim that it is our fault that we cannot find enough stable work at home or even overseas.
The DMW is running a profitable, big business at the expense of the lives of millions of OFWs. Migrant workers are already heavily burdened with the increasing cost of living overseas and in the Philippines, and the DMW continues to implement schemes to extort money from OFWs– from verification fees, overseas employment processing fees, OWWA membership fees, and other state exactions. The Philippine government also makes kickbacks from licensing fees of exploitative recruitment agencies, language training schools, and even third-party facilitators for consular services abroad.
Like the rest of the Philippine government, there is not only profit-seeking but corruption of public funds in the DMW and its offices. Cases of corruption in the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration go back from the Marcos Sr. regime to Gloria Arroyo, who used OWWA funds for her election war chest. Recently, OWWA under Arnell Ignacio released Php 1.4-billion in a suspect land deal near NAIA. The DMW has yet to account where all these funds from the pockets of OFWs went.
Migrante International calls for the defunding of the Department of Migrant Workers. Its Php 6-billion proposed budget will otherwise be wasted to satisfy foreign governments and businesses, facilitate the sale and exploitation of migrant workers, collude with trafficker recruitment agencies, and fatten the pockets of corrupt government officials. What we migrant workers instead demand is to junk the Labor Export Program and to do away with the corrupt ruling system that facilitates it.
Labor Export Program, ibasura!
