GOTCHA, Published in The Philippine Star, Wednesday, December 26, 2007
It is to Arturo Brion’s credit that over a million more Filipinos landed jobs overseas this year. Given a target, the labor secretary set out to meet it. Besides, those workers would have added to the worsening unemployment and hunger had they not gone abroad. And so a total of 9 million overseas Filipino workers will remit $14 billion by end-2007. Truly manpower is the country’s bigger export than semiconductors and electronics.
It is to the government’s discredit, though, that Filipinos are finding work only by leaving their families. That 121 Filipinos leave every hour is a malady, given the demographics. Most of the men who leave are aged 29-35 years, while the women are 25-29. The government is not providing the youth with the promised bright future after college or vocational school. And as the educated youths spend abroad their most productive years, the country is also deprived of their talent.
Ironically the so-called boom in overseas placement comes under an economist President. Laymen cannot grasp what economic philosophy it is that makes Gloria Arroyo see growth in sending away the country’s best minds. Perhaps all Filipinos are dimwits and only Arroyo values which direction the country is going. All they know is that as many as three of every ten overseas worker families end up broken. Too, that children of oversees workers are likely to drop out of college because sadly unguided. And, that the officials who are supposed to assist them instead mulct them of travel money at the airports.
The government is fond of talking big — about greatness in achieving national goals through unity and all that blah. But the macro doesn’t matter to desperate families. Youths take up courses to be able to work abroad — not to be fulfilled and fruitful in chosen fields. Physical therapy, care giving and merchant marine used to be the top picks. Then, even doctors switched to nursing and women took to welding. Parents even egg supple and pretty offspring to become “cultural dancers”. Hope to get out of the poverty rut is only in dollar salaries.
It doesn’t always work out. In a growing number of cases, jobseekers abroad end up with false contracts and lower-than-agreed salaries. Or, their employers turn out to be fiends who hurt or rape and then sell them to white slavery. Or they run afoul of incomprehensible laws and land in jail. Or they simply get sick and cannot fulfill the duties they flew out to do. With 9 million Filipinos out there — a tenth of the population and a fifth of the manpower pool — thousands of them per day are bound to encounter serious trouble.
The majority of workers who survive their stint abroad fortunately are able to save enough to build homes and buy better food. Perhaps that is where the government can somehow claim credit: the economy perks up every time a worker comes home. But then again, they return uninspired to practice their trades precisely because of the very reason they left: bleak futures under bad governance. They end up going into overcrowded small businesses of tricycles.
A theory in the ’80s held that Filipinos are among several races that have missed the bus to industrialization. (Perhaps Arroyo is an adherent of that notion.) RP supposedly should no longer dream of putting up a strong steel-and-technology that manufactures machines to make other machines. It should instead focus on exporting talent as its contribution to global growth. And such talent exports should range from the highest end of scientists, engineers and surgeons, to the lowest end of a-go-go dancers, escorts and circus freaks.
If that were so, the manpower export binge would also need a steady production line. Schools have to train the workers is the spectrum of skills. But even the education system is sinking. The economist-President has not started to reverse the deterioration that everybody has been talking about for a decade.
Really, where is the economic progress there?
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It’s bad enough that government, in the name of poverty alleviation, permits mountain dwellers to hunt deer and birds at will. What worsens it is that rich members of air rifle clubs take to the forests and shoot at will, as if patay-gutom. The website of one such club in
“The poachers should be punished and the penalties to be slapped should be strong enough to stop these practices and serve as a warning to others,” says Sen. Juan Miguel Zubiri, a conservationist and executive director of the Philippine Cockatoo Conservation Program and the Philippine Deer Foundation. “This is not just about ecological balance; it’s about natural heritage and biodiversity legacy,” he adds, noting that collections of insects and agricultural pests also surged in recent years.
