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By David Diamond
Need (hired) help? Try the
Philippines, the forerunner of tomorrow's distributed economy, supplying nurses,
teachers, techies, and sailors to the global village.
They're known as bagong bayani, a Tagalog expression meaning "new heroes." That
may sound a bit inflated, but at a succession of December celebrations in
Manila, Filipinos who work on contract in foreign countries get treated
something like the Series-winning Yankees coming home to New York. One day is
Health Awareness Day, when thousands of overseas Filipino workers, also called
OFWs, are treated to free medical care, and another is Family Day, when at malls
all around the nation, the government throws a mass party. Bright welcome
banners stretch from rafters. Christmas music spills from loud speakers.
Returned workers, along with their spouses and kids, walk around in costume from
the Auntie Anne pretzel emporium to Ace Hardware to the Gameworx bowling arcade.
They also make pit stops at the booth for free dental checkups and the booth for
psychological counseling. Two years is a
long time away.
December's bizarre climax comes when President Gloria Arroyo travels to Manila's
Ninoy Aquino Airport to personally greet returning workers, who zoom through
specially designated express lines for immigration and customs. After a
welcome speech, Arroyo turns a big drum filled with tickets bearing the names of
returnees and picks one from the batch to win a $2,000 grand prize.
It may look like a TV game show, but the Philippines has discovered the future
of work. At any given time, about 10 percent of the country's 76.5 million
population is hard at work - outside the country. During 2001, more than 800,000
people headed out on a commute that makes Rye-Grand Central seem like a milk run
to the corner store. They went to Italy, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Singapore, and
Uzbekistan. They went to Mongolia and Equatorial Guinea. Unlike Mexicans, who
flock primarily to the United States, Filipinos traveled to 162 nations in all.
Unlike Indians, who fill mostly tech and medical positions, Filipinos toil as
domestic helpers, engineers, nurses, bricklayers, teachers, farmers, seafarers,
stenographers, hairdressers, crane operators, cooks, and entertainers.
Having discovered its prowess as an outsourcer of labor, the Philippines is now
pursuing the opportunity with fervor. Whereas the US has spent decades bemoaning
the export of its jobs (to Mexico, to China), the Philippine government revels
in the export of its people. Using technology to stay involved in family life
back home, Filipino global commuters constitute one of the biggest sources of
stability for the economy of a country perennially known as the Sick Man of
Asia. Remittances, the money they electronically send back to their families,
account for 8.2 percent of the nation's gross
national product, stabilizing its peso, improving foreign currency reserves,
shoring up consumption, and making more than a dent in the unemployment rate
(now 11.1 percent). Last year, overseas Filipino workers sent home $6.2 billion.
Indians sent home twice the amount - with 13 times the general population.
In short, this archipelago nation has succeeded at creating the world's most
distributed economy, where the sources of production are so far-flung it boggles
the mind. The machinery has gears in Andorra and the Seychelles and even Diego
Garcia, wherever the heck that is. (Answer: a 17-square-mile atoll of coral and
sand in the middle of the Indian Ocean, mostly a joint US-UK military base
that's become a temporary work location for more than 1,000 Filipinos.) With
advances in transportation and telecommunications barreling ahead, it's only a
matter of time before the Philippine miracle becomes a standard for the new
mobile global order, with skilled and
unskilled workers commuting over multiple time zones to fill in labor gaps,
zapping their wages homeward through space, reentering for a new assignment.
Welcome to virtual nationhood.
In fact, this thriving "trade" has already made the Philippines the envy of
the developing world. Officials from such poverty-plagued countries as Sri
Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, Nepal, and Vietnam have come to Manila to find
out how they too can be prime producers of labor. The market for contract
migrant work, they know, is growing: According to the International Monetary
Fund, worldwide remittances totaled $2 billion in 1970; by 2000, the
International Labor Organization set that figure at $73 billion. After a
visit to the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, Indonesia's
labor minister, Jacob Nuwa Wea, said, "We learned some things we can adopt
at home - like mechanisms to protect overseas workers, how to prepare
candidates to meet skill requirements, and how to license private employment
agencies." Pakistan has patterned its overseas workers welfare fund after
the one established by the Philippine government.
Flexible, industrious, and frequently skilled, Filipinos are finding their
way into unexpected niche markets. Nurses trained in the Philippines, for
instance, are more likely to end up working elsewhere. Hospital recruiters
from Norway and the UK travel to Manila to hire them. Likewise, American
school districts having trouble attracting new teachers are discovering
ample supply in the Philippines. Recruiters hop on a plane to Manila, where,
in crowded hotel conference rooms, they handpick certified teachers, who are
given crash courses in Georgia history or California politics before they
arrive on US soil.
Signs of this future already abound. You see them mobbing Hong Kong's Statue
Square any Sunday afternoon - young Philippine domestic workers who
celebrate their day off together: Hong Kong is a temporary home to 200,000
Filipinos. You see signs in the Dubai airport, Filipinos napping on benches
between connections to various Persian Gulf destinations: They have been a
major source of labor - both white and blue collar - in the Middle East
since the 1973 OPEC oil embargo. You see their mark on ships and in ports
everywhere: At least 25 percent of the world's seafarers are Filipinos, and
the majority of cruise waiters, too.
"It's an industry," admits Patricia Santo Tomas, the Philippine secretary of
labor and employment. "It's not politically correct to say you're exporting
people, but it's part of globalization, and I like to think that countries
like ours, rich in human resources, have that to contribute to the rest of
the world."
Fifty-three-year-old Vidasto Lantaca is wearing thick glasses, his hair a
mess. He paces barefoot, holding an unlit cigarette, in his mother-in-law's
tiny house in Barangalo Hulo, an overcrowded neighborhood in Manila's
Mandaluyong City served by the Parish of Our Lady of the Abandoned. A
college-educated mechanical engineer and the father of two sons, ages 10 and
13, Lantaca has been unemployed for three years. His wife, Percy, a nurse,
worked on and off as a baby-sitter overseas until her age prevented her from
getting another contract. When she came back to stay, she began work as a
midwife, supporting her family on barely more than $2,100 a year. But the Lantacas' lives are about to change.
The perennial Sick Man of Asia now has a borderless business plan: "It's not
politically correct to say you're exporting people, but it's part of
globalization."
In nine days, Vidasto will make his way through Metro Manila to Ninoy Aquino
Airport, where he'll depart for the Middle East. Having scrounged up a job
placement fee - he borrowed $1,000 from a friend and took out a loan of $400
from his recruiter - he'll head for Dubai to work as a quality control
manager for a construction company. His monthly paycheck of $1,400 will help
cover food and schooling, and might even enable the family to save.
This isn't Vidasto's first job overseas. He's been a Philippine global temp
before. He worked for six years as a construction supervisor in Jidda, Saudi
Arabia, coming home for long-enough stints to meet Percy and marry her. He
also did time as a mechanical engineer in Eritrea. But for the past three
years, the family has been living on a mere $175 monthly while Vidasto
searched out his next opportunity. That meant digging themselves into debt
and giving up their TV to pay for his physical - but this job in Dubai will
ultimately get the Lantacas' lives on track again.
In his new post, Vidasto will oversee the maintenance and operation of
machinery, like cement mixers, for National Ready Mix, a construction
company owned by the conglomerate Lootah Group. He'll be responsible for
assigning jobs to about 40 equipment handlers and for ordering spare parts.
When he arrives in the United Arab Emirates, he'll be met by a company
representative, shown around, and settled into his own private room. Along
with his salary, the firm will pay for his food and housing. He'll
communicate with Percy and the kids via cell phone - perhaps the company
will throw in some minutes - and within a few months, he'll deposit
thousands of dollars into the family bank account.
What sets the Philippines apart from other countries whose legions also
spill over their borders into wealthier lands (200,000 Malaysians commute
daily to Singapore, for instance; some 200,000 Thai nationals, or about a
third of a percent, leave home to work elsewhere each year) is that the
federal government here is avidly encouraging the flow. In an example of
socioeconomic engineering on an unprecedented scale, the Philippine
leadership is embracing its role as temp agency to the world and structuring
a political "business plan" accordingly. Although the ratio of remittances
to GNP in nations like El Salvador and Cape Verde tops that of the
Philippines, no other government maintains so sprawling a network of workers
with as strict a hand.
The government official responsible for all this is labor secretary Santo
Tomas, whose office is located on the seventh floor of a centuries-old
building in Manila's oldest section. She is in charge of local and overseas
employment; these days, for instance, her department is busily trying to
fill demand for health care workers in developed nations where populations
are aging. Santo Thomas also helps protect employees once they're relocated.
Under her purview, the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, funded by
both employer and worker contributions, maintains a network of 27 worldwide
and 14 regional offices to intervene when problems arise. It was the OWWA
that was responsible for moving 30,000 Filipino workers to safety during the
Gulf War.
Perhaps most important, Santo Tomas and her staff regulate the hundreds of
recruiters who broker close to a million job placements each year. In 1974,
Ferdinand Marcos created a mechanism for managing overseas workers on a
government-to-government basis, but the phenomenon grew so quickly and
became so unwieldy that four years later the government handed the business
over to the private sector, choosing instead to provide regulation and
oversight. Today, there are 1,300 private recruiters on record at the
government's labor registry. They are the link between foreign employers -
who also must register with the government - and job-seekers. They populate
the upper floors of two- and three-story buildings along Manila's
jeepney-clogged roads, advertising "Worldwide Jobs!" and they make money by
charging the hired employee a placement fee. For a licensee to recruit
legitimately, Santo Tomas and her staff require $7,000 up front as a surety
bond, to be kept in escrow, and a clean legal record. Thereafter, her office
keeps a regular public file of a recruiter's status (Good Standing,
Delisted, Forever Banned).
"When I was young," says the labor secretary, "the only people in this
country who traveled were the rich. Now we've democratized travel. I have a
niece in Italy, a nephew in Bern, another nephew in Brussels. I have nieces
in Los Angeles and New Jersey. By becoming an exporter of labor, we have
broadened our horizons."
Santo Tomas has the poise and unharried demeanor of a long-ago charm-school
graduate or pleasant younger grandmother as she sits back on a sofa in her
massive office. She is open enough to admit that she pays her housekeeper
the typical sum of only $50 a month and is willing to write her cell phone
number on her business card in the event of further questions.
Appointed to her post in 2001, she weaves a convincing case for promoting
and protecting international labor. The minimum wage in Manila is $5.30 a
day, compared with the average $15 a day earned abroad under contracts
approved by the federal government. Working in Manila, nurses bring in
$15,000 a year; in the US they earn an average of $47,000. By diligently
remitting money home, Filipinos help their local banks, which not only make
a profit on currency exchange but use the capital to finance trade or buy
Philippine bonds. The billions of dollars in foreign currency deposits go a
long way toward underwriting the country's own development.
Of course, in the grand scheme of the Philippines' future, providing
temporary labor to the planet is itself supposed to be only temporary. If
the governor of the nation's central bank, Rafael Buenaventura, has his way,
each productive, dedicated overseas laborer will be an advertisement for
doing business right there in the Philippines. Buenaventura envisions global
companies choosing the Philippines for establishing new plants, corporate
headquarters dotting his archipelago and a million mothers working minutes
from home. The push to send workers out of the country will pay back in
spades. "At this time," he says, "it is too late to be competitive in
manufacturing. The biggest boon we have is trained manpower that speaks
English; therefore, we could be an outsourcing center." He pauses. "But if
ever we can get our act together, we'll be like Ireland, where you can bring
back skilled workers. That doesn't bring in remittances, but it provides
jobs and raises export earnings."
For now, though, it's hard to imagine the labor flow reversing. Many
Filipinos actually find their host countries preferable to their homeland:
Among the estimated 7 million overseas workers, more than 2 million have
chosen to stay permanently, either getting amnesty or marrying into foreign
citizenship.
I MISS YOU; DO YOUR HOMEWORK; SEND MONEY - 100 million cell phone text
messages a day are why overseas Filipino workers and their families remain
families.
The Philippines' unique three-sided history has made it an oddity within
Asia, perfectly suited to supporting this distributed economy. Until about
3,000 years ago, the islands operated almost completely in isolation. Most
people lived in small villages at the mouths of rivers, subsisting on fish
and rice. With the growth of trade, however, Chinese, Indian, Arab, and
Indonesian travelers imposed an Asian influence on the islands. In 1493,
Spain and Portugal made the bilateral decision to divide up the unexplored
portions of the globe, and by 1521, Ferdinand Magellan wound up in what is
now Cebu. He was killed by islanders two months later, but that didn't stop
the Spaniards from colonizing the 7,100-island country for more than 300
years. Then in 1898, when Spain lost out to the US in the Spanish-American
War, the Philippines fell under America's authority, where it remained until
the Japanese occupation in 1941. A major battleground in World War II, the
nation was recaptured by the Allies in 1945 and granted independence the
following year. Today, "Look Asian, think Spanish, act American" is a common
refrain.
While Filipino fruit pickers began streaming into the US as early as the end
of the 18th century, it wasn't until the 1950s that professional workers -
dentists, engineers, nurses, and scholars - followed suit. Equipped with
Christianity they'd inherited from the Spanish, as well as English they'd
learned as a second language, they slowly began arriving on other shores,
too. They became dancers and musicians in nearby Malaysia. They went to
Nigeria and New Guinea as professors and bank tellers. In the 1970s, Middle
Eastern nations in search of workers to sustain the exploding oil industry
hired construction workers, excavators, and hotel and medical help. In the
'80s and '90s, in nations like Italy, Filipinas began taking care of the
home front, enabling local women to go to work. Meanwhile, cheap airfares
and new telecommunications drove further migration.
Today, the sprawling Philippine population is held together with the newest
forms of groupware. Foreign workers rely on a variety of Web services for
not only staying in touch with their hometowns (one site, for instance, is
dedicated to Filipinos from Cagayan Valley who work in Hawaii) but also
creating communities in their new locales (say, Filipinos in Austria, and,
yes, there's a site for Filipinos in Diego Garcia). Moreover, the country's
residents send and receive more cell phone text messages than citizens of
any other nation.
Take Victor Morillo Jr., a 21-year-old volunteer organizer for a group in
Manila called Assembly of the Sons and Daughters of Filipino Workers. With
his green T-shirt, red backpack, and baggy jeans, he looks the part of a
college-age activist anywhere in the world. But Morillo's story is
quintessentially Philippine. His mother is employed as a fabric cutter on
the Persian Gulf island of Bahrain. "When I run out of food," he explains,
pulling a Nokia phone from his pocket, "I send my mother a text message
telling her I need money for bread." His mom deposits dinars in a Bahrain
bank, and a few days later Morillo ambles over to an ATM and withdraws
pesos.
Filipinos like Morillo send more than 100 million such missives daily. Each
160-character message costs 1 peso (2 US cents) within the Philippines and
10 pesos internationally, making this possibly the cheapest place on earth
to get hooked on texting. And it's only the calling party who pays. A
typical cell phone costs the equivalent of $50; most people buy prepaid
cards that, for $6, cover the cost of 300 domestic messages. I MISS YOU;
SEND MONEY; DO YOUR HOMEWORK - it's how OFWs and their families remain
families. Rosaria Reyes, the Filipina domestic helper killed by a suicide
bombing in Israel last year, transmitted a message to her son the night
before her death: MATULOG KA NA. Go to sleep already.
Then there are videophones. In the mountain-ringed town of San Pablo about
two hours south of Manila, in the coastal city of Batangas, in Pangasinan to
the north, in Rome and in Hong Kong, a nongovernmental organization called
Atikha and a domestic workers group called Balikabayani have jointly opened
centers for emailing, instant messaging, and communicating by videophone.
"On a typical Sunday, hundreds of people come through here," says Imelda
Laguindam, a Balikabayani organizer. She shows off a low-ceilinged, two-room
office down a back alley in central Hong Kong. One room houses three Samsung
computers on a single table. The other contains a JVC videophone. Laguindam
explains that domestic helpers spend HK$1 (13 US cents) per minute for the
computers and HK$7 per minute for the videophone, communicating with family
members who simultaneously congregate in one of the three counterpart
offices in the Philippines. On Sundays, when banks in Hong Kong and Rome are
closed but domestic helpers typically have their only day off, workers come
to the Balikabayani offices - which maintain reserve bank accounts for the
purpose - to wire money home.
Vidasto Lantaca has been working in Dubai for two weeks when he is called
into the head office of National Ready Mix. Already things have not gone as
planned. Instead of a private room, he's sharing one with two other men, and
he's been on call 24 hours a day. Now his employers are presenting him with
a new contract, one that reduces his monthly pay from 5,000 dirhams to 2,500
dirhams - the result, they say, of deducting the cost of his food, travel,
and housing.
Lantaca, who had been assured by his recruiter that those expenses would be
provided as part of the job, is exasperated. "It wasn't just me," he
explains later. "All the Philippine workers were called in and told they had
to sign new contracts."
"We were all called in and told we had to sign new contracts," says a worker
who refused. The deal is made clear: Sign, or be sent back to the
Philippines.
He refuses to accept the agreement. Four days later, the deal is made clear:
If he doesn't sign, he'll be sent back to the Philippines.
Lantaca phones his wife. Percy urges him to sign. "We owe too much money
now," she says, referring to the $1,400 placement fee they'd borrowed to get
Vidasto the job. He has no choice, she says softly, he must stay in Dubai
for the two years they planned.
The irony of Family Day in the Philippine malls is not just that shopping
has been elevated to a government-sponsored welcome celebration, but that
psychotherapy serves as a party favor. The great, heartbreaking cost of the
Philippines' economy is the splintering of millions of families, and no
amount of futuristic global economics can disguise this. In the best of
circumstances, those families that welcome remittances - to pay for food,
college, a television set, or tin rather than thatch for a roof - are
suffering in the absence of one or both parents. Mothers who work overseas -
63 percent of OFWs are women - usually leave their own families in the hands
of relatives or older siblings. (Stay-at-home fathers are still uncommon in
the Philippines.) Spouses are often separated for most of their married
lives. Children live with the emptiness of losing one or both parents to
distant parts of the planet. Familial affection and guidance are reduced to
a stream of 60-character memos. "The social costs of overseas work," says
Rosalinda Baldoz of the government's labor registry, "are marital breakup
and dropout children who get into drugs or crime."
It gets worse, though. Aside from separating families, the overseas
employment system is also rife with corruption. According to Baldoz, last
year the POEA received 2,000 recruitment violation cases for such
infractions as overcharging, sneaking workers out with faked visas, and
sending them to jobs that never materialized. Even licensed recruiters
perpetrate a scam known as contract substitution - whereby a
government-sanctioned agreement is later replaced by an unapproved one
detailing a lower-paying job. Often a new contract, written in a foreign
language, is forced on the employee once she's in hawk for her fees and far
away from home.
Employment brokers argue that the government's working-conditions
requirements make competing for job placements impossible. Overseas
employers, they say, can hire workers from places like Vietnam or Malaysia
for less money and less hassle. But other government critics say the
regulations are already too weak. "Licenses are issued to agencies without
much background checking," says Jean Enriquez, deputy director of the
Coalition Against Trafficking in Women's Asia Pacific office, "and when they
are revoked, the POEA reissues them to the same people under a different
name."
Straddling the divide between "competitive pricing" and humane treatment,
the government insists that it is cracking down on wrongdoers. "I just had
in here a group of people to whom I read the riot act," says labor secretary
Patricia Santo Tomas, who is imposing new rules that limit placement fees to
one month's salary and triple the amount in escrow required to become a
registered recruiter. "I want to be sure that, if anything goes wrong,
there's money I can garnish so I can repatriate the person and pay back his
salary."
Nevertheless, at the employment agency's headquarters, a semicircular,
six-story building, a sign reads BEWARE OF FIXERS. This is the most
energized spot in Metro Manila - not a disco, not a cockfight, but offices
where aspiring OFWs fill out forms. Here, tales of ill-fated experiences
abound. "She looked like a little girl," recalls Leah Carissa A. Yogyog, a
media specialist with the workers welfare office. She's referring to a
22-year-old from Cagayan de Oro who was found by immigration bureaucrats at
Ninoy Aquino Airport bruised, bleeding, and burned. She'd been a domestic
helper in Singapore for six months, for which she was paid a total of $20,
allowed to eat once a day, and beaten by her employer - who eventually got
her a ticket home. "I once saw a woman whose ear was burned," Yogyog
continues, "and one who'd been doused with hot water."
Of all the exploitation bred by the global labor trade, the most heinous is
the abuse of women trapped in prostitution. Typically, victims come from the
Philippine provinces. They are promised jobs by relatives or friends who
represent a recruiter. They're told, for instance, they will get positions
as cashiers or nightclub entertainers in Japan or Korea. Instead they might
wind up in Malaysia or Nigeria, working the streets for a fraction of the
wage they were promised.
Lantaca works for four more weeks in Dubai when he is once again called into
the head office. This time he's told he will be sent back to the
Philippines - that the company doesn't have enough work for him and that he
isn't a good enough worker anyway. Two other Filipinos are told the same
thing.
For the entire six weeks, Lantaca is paid $700. Of that, $420 goes to the
recruiting agency to cover his fees and $280 is taken by his employer in
exchange for food, transportation, and housing. Before he leaves Dubai, a
friend gives him $135 to buy gifts for his family; he thinks about buying
chocolates but figures his wife will be happier with the cash. In Manila,
she pays for his taxi from the airport.
But Lantaca's story doesn't stop there. Right away, he's planning to set off
again, to temp for a salary he can mostly send home. First, however, he
returns to his government-licensed recruiter, seeking redress for his failed
Dubai venture. After a few delays, he gets it. The recruiter will repay
Lantaca $800 of his remaining $900 in placement fees, retaining $100 for
paperwork.
So now he occupies himself around his two-story cement home, fixing some
cabinets, spending time with the kids, plotting his future: Where to?
Kuwait? Sudan? Saudi Arabia?
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