What are also unnoticed are the routes where TCNs like Filipinos are hired, Quiambao said.
Another Filipino, Ramil Autencio, went on-camera to attest to this elaborate recruitment scheme.
War Film. A poster for the film by Lee Wang. (Photo by OFW Journalism Consortium)
According to Autencio, he was recruited by the MGM Worldwide Manpower & General Services, one of the Manila-based businesses that were tapped by Kuwaiti labor sub-contracting agencies that, in turn, were paid by an American company to hire TCNs.
In the film, Autencio claims that the contract he signed with MGM wrote that he would work as a technician in Kuwait.
Autencio said that six weeks after arriving in Kuwait, executives of MGMs foreign principal First Kuwaiti General & Contracting Co. ordered them to board buses going to Iraq.
A certain McKinley guy told us if we do not agree to them, we will be sent to jail and penalized with some amounts, Autencio recalled. I was being forced to go to Iraq, but my POEA contract stipulates we will be working in Kuwait.
Autencio found a way to escape from Iraq and return to Manila.
I hired taxi cab that drove all the way from our camp to the Kuwaiti border at around midnight, Autencio said in the documentary.
The driver was even scared because we are passing by snipers while we were driving.
He sued recruiter MGM Worldwide for contract substitution, which the Labor departments National Labor Relations Commission upheld.
The NLRC ordered MGM Worldwide to pay damages to Autencio.
However, MGM Worldwide officials are in hiding, Quiambao said.
Trafficked
RESEARCH Director Maruja Asis of the nonprofit Scalabrini Migration Center, which hosted a premier showing of the documentary, said since there is a government ban to deploy workers in Iraq, Filipinos there are considered undocumented migrants.
Even the case of Autencio is already considered trafficking since there was already coercion involved on the worker, Asis said.
Quiambao said Filipino workers bound for Iraq are also taken from Dubai, United Arab Emirates and they fly from there to Baghdad.
Wang estimates that Filipinos among the TCNs in American military facilities in Baghdad earning US$300 monthly, the peso equivalent of which is twice less than what a call center agent receives.
The film added that the money matters less since the lines of accountability are blurred especially when armed hostilities erupt between the armed groups operating in or near Iraqs hotspots.
Quiambao said that American soldiers are protected by vehicles with very thick armors.
Trucks driven or used by TCNs are not even protected by metal, and it makes them easy prey to missile attacks, or even IEDs (inter-explosive devices), Quiambao added.
OFWS & Migration, Pinoy Life Abroad
