GMA Arrested Anewfirst you remove the crooked judges, then you start arresting those at the top instead of the scapegoats.
Police Start Hunting Down 9 Co-Accused In P366-M Plunder Suit
But don't hold your breath: witnesses tend to disappear, and all the suspects have relatives working in the government.
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After much negotiating, Saudi agrees to pay their Filipina maids a little more.
the average monthly pay is $200 a month, and now they have agreed to pay $400 a month.
Many of the women working in Saudi are from very poor families who support their relatives back home. In the Philippines, there is a long tradition for older girls to work before they marry, but many of the maids are married with kids, who are cared for by the grandparents. Usually they send home pay which is used for school fees, luxuries (TV's etc) and sometimes to build a decent house or help relatives set up a small business.
Here, nursing school is about getting a job overseas. The gold standard is going to the US, but Canada and the UK and Australia are also good choices. Those who pass nursing but not the US test often go to the Middle East. Those who don't pass the nursing exam usually go as high end caregivers or nannies for "yuppies" in Hong Kong and Malaysia...there are also factory jobs in Korea advertised...and Korean language schools are available to help you get a job there.
Factoid of the day: A lot of Koreans come to the Philippines to learn English (especially in Baguio, which is up in the mountains and cooler), and many English teachers in Korea are Filippino...
We pay our maids about $200 a month (part of that is in room and food not money) which is why they come and go so quickly.
Minimum wage is 300 pesos a day (about 8 dollars) in Manila...here the pay is 200 pesos a day.
But most people help each other. The extended families help each other, and often the maids and cook take off to harvest their family fields...and people eat their own rice. The bad news is that the poorest farmers sell the rice for expenses (e.g. school fees, medicine) and so there tends to be a "hunger season" right before harvest, when they run out of the money and rice from the previous harvest. We have two harvests a year: The main one, which is being harvested now, where people carefully plant seedling, and a "winter harvest" which requires irrigation and is planted with seeds only, and is usually smaller.
Our cook gets even less, because her family has worked for Lolo's family for years and he hasn't given her a raise in five years...she is paid the old fashioned way: She skims money off the top of the food budget, she gets a lot of "gifts" and I pay the school fees for her grandkids, which means she probably ends up getting more than the maids or even the drivers.
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