Milking our OFW

Our overseas workers are a key resource for our economy and, as a whole, for our country. The loss of millions of able-bodied workers at the prime of their productivity and participation in society cannot be countenanced — for our country or for any country for that matter.

We should bewail our loss of development potential when we deploy our best nurses and doctors, teachers, technicians, designers and others who would otherwise prefer to be with their loved ones, contribute to our economy and provide services to our people rather than serve others in foreign lands.

“Some of us, including those in government, see our poverty rather than our country’s needs and potential and simply accept the sorry lot that there are no jobs for our countrymen. Worse, some government agencies and businesses like placement agencies even champion the export of our workers overseas.”

Recruitment agencies make millions of dollars selling our workers abroad. They receive an income from the principals abroad who place orders for workers. But not a few of them charge double — making further money from placement fees and also sorts of exaction from the workers themselves. Fees for our nurses for Europe or Canada run to six figures while fees for Hong Kong domestic workers run to five figures. Our overseas workers have to allot the first few months’ pay for usurers and loan sharks who lent them the placement fees.

The government is also on the take since OFW have to pay for mandatory membership to the Overseas Workers Welfare Agency (OWWA) — a government insurance system that should benefit the returning workers. The government is the final beneficiary from OWWA in the financial earnings from the millions stored in the OWWA coffers. It is no wonder the previous Presidents Joseph “Erap” Estrada and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo tried to skim off money from the OWWA.

As former General Almonte put it in 2001 labor export is justified as a stop-gap measure for poverty alleviation or as a political measure for the society to let off steam from severe unemployment.

The World Bank developed the Global Forum on Migration and Development pushing governments to milk the migrants of the fruits of their labor. These forums focus on the issue of capturing this income to benefit a country’s financial system. While overseas workers receive slave wages, a pittance at $400 per month compared to the $1,500 minimum wages in some countries in the Middle East, for example, this remittance income is a huge total wealth from millions of workers all over the world and it amounts to billions.

This does not include remittances that pass through informal channels or appear as private flows, investment or otherwise.

The Philippine government benefits immediately from these remittance and other financial flows from our overseas workers and immigrants such that by 2000 or thereabouts, the country no longer suffered from balance of payments (BoP) deficits because the remittance income more than made up for our trade deficits and debt payments flows.

But the Philippines shocked the Metropolis Conference in Oslo in 2002 when then Secretary of Labor Nieves Confesor unabashedly proposed in her keynote address that the destination country governments should pay the Philippine government for each migrant worker that it exports an equivalent to the costs of training and services that the government invested for each worker. How’s that for telling labor export like the slave trade that it really is!

MIGRANTE, the international alliance of migrant workers and immigrant Filipinos operating all over the world, has been naturally been at loggerheads with the government, especially the Philippine Overseas Employment Authority and the Department of Labor and Employment which vigorously promote this export but are nowhere to be found when workers end up trafficked, unpaid or worse, dead.

On the other hand, various entities have mushroomed to capture part of the hard-earned money of workers meant for their families back home. Remittance services, including banks and money transfer companies, make money from service fees while others try to capture remittances through sale of housing and investment packages.

To better capture remittances for the government financial institutions, President Rodrigo Duterte signed Executive Order 44 on 28 September last year, the Philippine Postal Savings Bank will now be acquired by the Landbank of the Philippines and will be converted into the Overseas Filipino Bank that will deliver microfinance and micro-insurance products and services for the overseas Filipino workers. What is assumed is that will also seek to capture remittances.

OFW are hard pressed to make ends meet for their families with their slave wages for the government and the private sector to skim off this income in the name of investment.