Kadamay criticizes Aquino’s labor-export policy, antipoverty program as behind OFW’s death

PRESS RELEASE (08 DEC 2011)
KALIPUNAN NG DAMAYANG MAHIHIRAP
REFERENCE: Gloria Arellano, Kadamay national sec-gen (09213927457)

MANILA, Philippines—An urban poor group has criticized the Aquino administration’s faulty antipoverty campaign that fails to address the deeply entrenched poverty among the Filipinos and its neo-liberal labor-export policy that forces many to leave the country to seek employment abroad. Another Filipino is expected to be executed today in China for an alleged drug-related crime.

“An estimated 3,000 families leave the country everyday to seek employment abroad. As the Aquino administration promotes its labor-export policy, it cannot ensure the security of every Filipino abroad, and the future of the family that they left in the Philippines,” Kalipunan ng Damayang Mahihirap (Kadamay) national secretary-general Gloria Arellano says.

“It even has means to cover up the tragic fate of OFWs who become victims of other countries’ brutal criminal system, and surrender in saving the lives of a score others who are to be executed soon,” Arellano adds.

Kadamay says that the Aquino administration, and those who promotes labor-export policy and other neo-liberal policies, should be made accountable for every Filipinos that have died and will die in seeking for greener pasture abroad, as the government fails to answer the massive unemployment in the country.

Arellano adds that while the chronic poverty persists to afflict some millions of Filipinos nationwide, millions of Filipinos will continue to leave the country.

“The government must stop its faulty poverty alleviation program, that acts as palliative dole-outs, and sources of corruption for the bureaucrats. It must stop trading Filipinos overseas and denying its connivance with the imperialists in dwarfing our industries that results to massive unemployment in the country,” she ends. ###