No, absolutely not. Filipinos don’t want to be slaves or to be enslaved. They have some amount of soft social influence now but many are still working in oppressive working conditions overseas. This is bad for some Filipinos who are not so streetwise and get caught up in bad situations.
Unfortunately, there still aren’t enough economic opportunities within the Philippine economy to give jobs or small-business opportunities that are higher than a subsistence wage. To help their families survive and prosper, many poor Filipinos willingly place themselves in harsh working conditions.
That distasteful situation caused a massive disruption in the Filipino families, breaking them up or enforcing long separations. The Filipino domestic helpers were so prevalent that the British aristocrats prided themselves in having Filipino nannies and caregivers to the point that the word “Filipina” meant “housemaid” in Britain.
But are they really slaves? No. They willingly undergo long-term separation from their families but expect to either return home or bring their own family members to stay with them. They will fight or temporarily tolerate oppression but they also expect their government or other to Filipinos to fight for their rights against oppressors. Within the Philippines, horror stories against Overseas Filipino Workers forced the government and society to evolve behaviors and processes to counter the oppression. Sometimes these worked, but not always.
Lack of economic opportunities at home
Filipinos since time immemorial have already engaged in short-term destructive hunter-gathering practices such as deforestation via illegal logging, swidden (slash-and-burn) agriculture, dynamite and cyanide fishing, “muro-ami” exploitative fishing that deliberately destroys coral reefs, overfishing, and unsafe small-scale mining. When those practices were banned in the 1970s and 1980s, the only recourse left for many impoverished families was for one or both of the parents or their eldest children to work overseas in countries that would offer work opportunities to the least-protected and most vulnerable sectors of Philippine society: under-educated blue-collar workers, seamen, bar girls and prostitutes, domestic helpers, singers and musicians, teachers, caregivers, nurses, and later on, computer programmers and mid-level office managers.
The good thing was that widespread basic education, despite many deficiencies in the system of education, eventually produced a workforce that could be hired by wealthy Third-World and First-World countries that didn’t have enough local workers to support the industries they were investing on. Capital was flowing to those countries such as Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, and later on China, but entirely bypassing the Philippines because of a 1987 Constitution that was put in place by aristocratic oligarchs who would not allow foreign capital to enter the Philippine economy and displace them from their elite perch. They kept control via government controls and regulations of established industries and would not allow foreigners or local rivals to set up shop.
The Chinese immigrants managed to circumvent these restrictions by dint of hard work and thrifty savings, as well as access to capital from fellow Chinese traders. Filipinos who did not have early business training from their families remained at a disadvantage in setting up their own small businesses. The only opportunities open to most poor Filipino families was to send their best and brightest relatives away to work overseas in jobs that exposed them to still-low-but-higher wages, physical danger, and constant discrimination or bigotry from their hosts and employers.
The original cause of the Filipino diaspora
Unless, the 1987 Philippine Constitution and related laws are amended to allow unrestricted business investment by foreigners within the Philippines, like other countries do, this bad situation is unlikely to change. Foreigners remain prevented from controlling or investing 100-percent ownership of any business venture they put inside the country. They are also not allowed to own tracts of land inside Philippine territory because of an unwarranted fear that the foreigners would steal away the land and prevent local people from working on it (it’s really so absurd!). Unfortunately, there are very few Filipino businessmen (except the oligarchs) who can put up equivalent amounts of capital, especially for high-tech industries. Also, for a long time and even if they have the capital, local businessmen remain wary or distrustful of modern business practices and would rather invest on traditional exploitative natural-resource-gathering or buy-and-sell industries. They rarely invested in modern manufacturing or IT-intensive businesses unless it had first succeeded in a foreign country. This is the situation that resulted in such a lack of high-paying jobs in the Philippines that Filipinos were actually encouraged and assisted by the government to be hired for those jobs offered abroad.
Some examples of Filipino resilience and influence
Now that Filipinos have become used to working abroad, what are some results or consequences?
- Filipino seamen are the most numerous nationality afloat on all the world’s merchant fleets and even makeup around one-fourth of the US Navy’s enlisted personnel. Filipino merchant crew regularly operate the world’s cargo and passenger ships, and these fleets would have serious problems if those crewmen get the idea that they are slaves of the shipowners. By the way, American naval commissioned and noncommissioned officers are encouraged to learn Tagalog just to be able to communicate with all the Filipinos in their crew.
- Filipino nurses and caregivers supply the majority of the world’s nursing workforce. Many of the hospitals in various countries will be crippled if those Filipino nurses ever went home. Some of those nurses are actually qualified doctors who are not allowed to practice their profession in those countries. What do you think would happen if these highly trained health professionals were made to feel as if they were slaves by the hospitals and sick people who employed them?
- Filipino nannies have been taking care of the children of highborn aristocratic or royal families and wealthy tycoons in Europe and the Middle East. These children are now grown up and have forged a loving relationship with the Filipino women who raised them as if they were their own children. What do you think is the value of that cultural connection when those children who became familiar with Filipinos are already the movers and shakers in global business and diplomacy?
- Filipino musicians and entertainers are in demand all over the world to supply entertainment to the guests of hotels, resorts, casinos, theaters, and cruise ships. They may rarely be given the million-dollar contracts offered to foreign celebrities who have half their talent or skill but those establishments benefit greatly and would lose their ability to serve their guests if Filipinos were to spread awful truths (not lies) about bad treatment they received from their employers.
- It is not very well-known but when American and European security firms started hiring civilian security contractors to work in war-torn countries, they also began hiring highly trained and experienced Filipino soldiers who had opted for early retirement. The former Blackwater security firm (and others) that had hired white Caucasian (North American and European) soldiers found that Filipino soldiers had this talent for blending in with the background and befriending the locals without attracting unwanted attention from criminals and terrorists. There’s also not much point for Al-Qaeda in trying to hurt ordinary Filipinos who are friends with the locals and have enough local knowledge to hurt them back. These Filipino soldiers and security contractors can blend in as if they are ordinary OFWs and who else would know what their real job is? (Would these Filipinos make good slaves? I don’t think so.)
So given these scenarios and their penchant for (1) being the number one users of social media, (2) their ability to communicate in English, (3) their various innate talents or skills, and (4) their intimate contact with all sorts of influential leaders or elite members of foreign societies, can the overseas Filipino workers be considered slaves? Some of them might still be very vulnerable to oppressive conditions — which is somewhat inevitable for those who make bad choices — but the widespread network of Filipinos overseas and the gradual economic growth of the Philippines (no longer the once “sick man of Asia”) are now able to wield its growing global and social influence to make conditions better for their countrymen.
Watch what happened recently when a Filipina domestic helper was tortured and murdered by a rich Arab married couple who then fled to another country to escape. The globalized hullabaloo resulted in the rapid identification and capture of the fugitives and has taught foreign nationals that to hurt a Filipino is to invite a global manhunt by institutions whose leaders are friends of Filipinos.
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