The Great Brain Drain

People from the Philippines, most of them under the age of 35 and a considerable number older want to get out. They want to get away from the country and live somewhere else.

And they do — millions of them. The reasons are not complex. There is no real law here – if you wish to plead your case before a magistrate you had better be prepared to pay the judge more than your opponent. As an example, if you are ripped off by, say, a Travel Agent, the TA will win because  in all likelihood the TA has more money available to pay graft than a private citizen. The average working Filipino earns around $80 to $90 US per month.

 Offshore labourers can earn 20 times what they are paid by Filipino contractors. Skilled workers can earn up to 50 times as much in Western Nations. Why would they want to stay in a country where filth and litter are omnipresent; ruled by a government with no interest in the people and police are almost non-existent or if they are it is to erect a blockade to check vehicle certificates. Laws that would bring the police running in most countries are non-existent or ignored. There is no use running down a speeder on one of the country’s few Expressways because the driver cannot pay anyway.

So they head overseas in droves. There are four million Filipino workers in the United States — the bulk of them women; two million in Saudi Arabia where many are men. In the case of women they specialize in care-giving, or work as domestic helpers and maids. Men drive the oil trucks and do the dirty work on the oil rigs of the Arab Middle East. They are hard workers, they do not complain and they are dependable. There are two reasons for this, the first: for several months before leaving home they are given a course by the foreign country to which they are headed aimed at familiarizing them with their new jobs. Secondly they are given a three day stern indoctrination by the Philippine government — threatened to behave or they and their families will suffer should they fail.

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Out of a total population claim of around 100-plus million — it is hard to be exact due to the vast number of vagrants — 11 million are overseas workers. This figure climbs at the rate of at least one million per year. And as stated in the last paragraph, most are unskilled labor, or at the most, lightly trained. The Brain Drain comes from the exodus of professionals: doctors, nurses, engineers, technicians, teachers and accountants. It is little wonder the Philippines have what is, for a large country, the worst technical infrastructure in the world. The telephone companies, television suppliers, Internet service providers and electrical companies all break down regularly and there is only lip-service paid to exhaust emissions. The answer is actually three-fold. One: the staff and management are poorly trained, two: the equipment is, in almost all cases, second hand — purchased from countries wanting to get rid of faulty apparatus, vehicles do not get serviced. And thirdly, employees simply don’t care.

But the filth of the Philippines and the vast unknowledgeable work force is not seen in places like the UK, the US and Canada which along with Malaysia and the UAE are the destinations of many OFW’s (Overseas Filipino Workers) as they are called at home. These OFW’s are perhaps the best foreign workers in any country in which they reside. Hard work is part of the Filipino ethic, especially women and the knowledge that they must perform (as ordered by their government) ensures that they are clean, resourceful, friendly and are willing to work long hours with but one day off per week.

They live frugally overseas, no hardship for people who had nothing when they lived at home. Their money, most of it, is sent back to the individual’s families left behind. The OFW is usually the bread-winner in Manila or Cebu or Davao, or the myriad of small towns that dot the archipelago. In this way the money circulates in the Philippines. The host country of the offshore workers does not benefit monetarily from their presence other than that they are fed which helps out Joe, the grocer.

I used to live in Hong Kong. In Central District there is a large grassy park located in front of the award winning architectural wonder which is the Hong Kong branch of the British banking giant HSBC. Here, an amazing sight presents itself once a week. On Sundays every square centimeter of that park is taken up with Filipinas, (the feminine form of Filipino ends in ‘a’). This scene is repeated in many other parks and open spaces in the Region. Hong Kong authorities even block off vehicular traffic to accommodate an estimated 140,000 maids, care-givers, and nurses who are generally lumped together and called ahmas, which means maid in Cantonese Chinese. When the women return home after dark, they have taken every pop-bottle and its cap, every scrap of paper, every book, game, and blanket; in fact they leave the place so clean, there is no need for a cleaning crew to clear away the mess. There simply is no mess.

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Filipino women, and men, spread all around the globe, form the largest group of offshore workers in the world, save one, Asian Indians. They account for approximately 15% (some say 20%) of the Gross National Income of the Philippines. The Filipino language, Tagalog, is the fifth most spoken language in the United States. In Canada there are nearly one-half million Filipinos in a country of only 31 million people. The UK employs nearly a quarter million. In the United Arab Emirates, Filipinos, as employees, are preferred to any other race. In Saudi Arabia, the same is true. My wife is a Filipina and lived in Saudi Arabia where she was isolated from others, confined to the home and made to wear the body covering common in that land. She stood it for two years; she was a specialized nurse to an elderly woman; but the life was so limiting she would not renew her contract and was offered a job in Hong Kong which she gladly accepted.

The current economic instability in the world is having an impact on Filipinos. The extent is not yet known, nor is the government likely to make the real figure known. Here in the Philippines, the cost of living is rising, many are surviving on subsistence.  People who find themselves in financial trouble will find no help from the corrupt government in Manila – there will be no financial bail-outs in this country where greed takes preference over assistance.

 Scams with passports are a favorite of the Foreign Affairs department: illegal passports are issued on purpose in order to make the citizen pay twice. This impacts on OFW’s who will find themselves trapped in a foreign land once the International Air Transport Association (IATA) imposes new rules involving machine readable passports beginning in 2010. The current Philippine passport is unacceptable.

But a Filipino, living with poverty much of his or her life, understands little of global economics. It is the same as how they view their government. Sure it’s corrupt, but ‘what can I do about it’ so they smile, go on with their job and put hardship out of mind and think pleasant thoughts. How about that Manny Pacquaio

Tags: Economy, Overseas Workers, Philippiones