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| Sunday, 01 August 2010 00:25 | |||||||||
ANAK is honoured to welcome guest lecturer Antonio Tujan, Jr. to Winnipeg for the Philippine Studies Summer Institute 2010 at the University of Winnipeg (August 3 to 13, 2010) Antonio Tujan Jr. is a social activist who has worked on Philippine and International issues for more than 38 years. The current International Director of IBON Foundation, he is a researcher, writer, as well as the Director of the Institute of Political Economy (IPE). The labour export policy of the Philippines was originally formulated by the Marcos dictatorship late 1970s to take advantage of the petrodollar-funded development boom in the Middle East. The Philippines had gone into a debt crisis in 1978 and needed substantial sources of foreign exchange for debt service. On the other hand, the Philippines also had high unemployment rates as it faced an economic crisis and had a large reserve of English-speaking, highly skilled labour – well suited for deployment to overseas jobs. Within 1979, the Philippines deployed tens of thousands of workers, mostly to Saudi Arabia and other oil rich countries in the Middle East. This was made possible through labour recruitment agencies organized by Marcos cronies and facilitated by the government through aggressive promotion drives in the Middle East. The Philippine Overseas Employment Authority was created from a small office under the Philippine Department of Labor and turned into a large, well-funded agency tasked to promote the business of recruitment agencies and seek out markets for Filipino labour abroad. Labour recruitment became a lucrative business as it raked in profits from service fees from foreign principals, while also earning much more from placement fees from the prospective migrant workers themselves. It was able to do this because labour recruitment not only fulfilled market demands in host countries requiring cheap, contractual migrant labour, but it also discovered a gold mine in the massive unemployment and demand not just for higher paying jobs overseas, but for employment itself. While many enterprising businessmen sought to engage in labour recruitment, the POEA kept the number of accredited labour recruitment agencies to a small fixed number. Business demands for relaxing regulations on recruitment agencies were insistent as government continued its drive against illegal recruitment agencies, many of them victimizing prospective migrant workers with non-existent jobs or through trafficking. On the other hand, official and unofficial costs for license fees became exorbitant. The Philippine migrant labour “success” story The Philippine government, while extolling the migrant worker as the new hero for saving the country from financial crisis and their families from penury, prides itself on the “success” story of becoming the main migrant worker sending nation in more than two decades of continuous expansion of labour migration. Despite the global economic crisis at the turn of the millennium and the clampdown on migration, the Philippines has sustained the increase of deployment of migrant workers and the repatriation of foreign exchange earnings. While there was a slight decline in deployment in 2003, first semester figures for 2004 showed a vigorous increase from the same period in 2003. The bulk of Philippine migrant workers are in Asia and the Middle East followed by Europe. Slight declines in 2003 were registered in all continental regions. See the PDF version of this article for charts of supporting data. Typical professions and trades continue to be the predominant jobs of newly deployed migrant workers: domestic helpers, singers and musicians, entertainers, caregivers and nurses, production workers, cleaners and the like. Except for labourers and production workers, these trades and professions are related to reproductive work. It is but expected that the overwhelming majority of workers in these professions, and of all land based migrant workers are women. If reckoned according to general skill category for newly hired workers, the highest number are the professional and technical workers, which includes the singers and musicians, choreographers and nurses. This is followed closely by service workers, into which domestic helpers are classified. Third in number is the classification of production workers, which also constitutes a substantial sum. This distribution, however, does not change the general pattern of trades and professions for migrant workers but only covers the newly hired, constituting roughly forty percent of the total deployment of land based workers for the period. On the other hand, the large numbers of domestic workers and entertainers are commonly rehired every time their contract expires. Remittances have grown consistently exceeding $7 billion in 2002… However, estimates of total remittances range from $15B to almost $20 (including remittances of immigrants) as Filipinos continue to use informal means to repatriate earnings to avoid banking and other expenses. [Editor’s note: According to a recent GMA News.TV article, overseas Filipino sent home $17.348 billion in 2009. See: “New system to slash OFW remittance fees, says BSP,” May 24, 2010.] Deregulation of Labour Recruitment While the 2002 total deployment figure represents a 200% increase since 1990, the increase in deployment has been moderate over the twelve-year period and, in fact, registered a decline in 1994. While the majority of sending countries post declines in deployment, the Philippine government has generally prided its “success” in the relatively continuous growth in deployment of Philippine migrant labour, excepting only 1994 and 2003. The need felt to continuously increase deployment strengthened the clamour for reducing bureaucratic procedures and other red tape in the processing of licenses for recruitment agencies and the processing of papers of deployed workers. This led to the enactment in 1995 of Republic Act 8042 named inaptly as the Magna Carta for Migrant workers. The main objective of this law was the removal of various regulations covering recruitment agencies and the processing of papers of migrant workers, which had been painted as to be too stringent and to be reducing opportunities for increasing the development of the market and the deployment of workers. The POEA has tried to defend the law as simply a reduction of regulations and the removal of red tape, but the full impact of deregulation had been postponed to take full effect only by 2000. The relaxation of standards for foreign employers and the operations of recruitment agencies make life and business easier for the recruiters. Regulations protecting the welfare of workers such as wages, fees and benefits were readjusted and made lax enough not to prevent deployment to countries that have weak labour standards, or to adjust to the reality that employers of migrant workers often do not want to follow regulations regarding wages and benefits. The objective of this deregulation has been to enhance the capacity of Philippine recruiters to adjust to the jobs market in the host countries, paving the way for facility and increase of deployment. Regulations that protected the worker such as the fixing of wage rates, assurance of employment standards and benefits, fixing of placement fees collected by recruitment agencies and the accreditation of these agencies were relaxed to make the Philippines more competitive and attractive to business. However, the main responsibility of the Philippine Department of Labor – of instituting these regulations to protect Filipino workers – is abandoned. Sources and References:
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