A S I A
Uncertainty Rises for Foreign Workers in Northern Marianas
by Aldwin Fajardo
SAIPAN, Northern Mariana Islands (IPS) — For Malou and Manny, a Filipino working couple and parents of five, their future and that of their children here is a growing concern.
Malou is a human resource officer for a garment manufacturing company, while her husband Manny is a print shop employee. They have lived and worked in Saipan, capital of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a U.S. protectorate in the western Pacific, for more than 15 years.
But the couple is now making contingency plans for a possible return home to the Philippines.
Looming uncomfortably large in their lives is the phaseout in two years of quotas on the island's garment exports — which have long given the CNMI easy access to the U.S. mainland market and whose removal would mean layoffs in the industry.
The garment industry, the mainstay of the Marianas' economy, takes in the largest number of skilled overseas labour. There are more than 30,000 mainly Asian non-resident workers, from South Korea to Thailand and the Philippines, among the island's population of 64,300 people.
"There is talk that the newspaper is good only as long as the garment factories here are in operation," said Gina Pabellon, a Filipino advertising manager with a Saipan newspaper owned by the island's largest garments manufacturer, Tan Holdings Corp.
"We don't directly work in the garments sector but we're afraid that our jobs are among those that will be indirectly affected by the garment factories pulling out," she said in an interview, expressing apprehension about the viability of Saipan's garments industry given the World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules for removing export quotas.
Edwin, Gina's husband and a graphics artist, came to Saipan with his wife seven years ago. The then brisk economy attracted talent like theirs, and had also brought in Deo and Loise Manese, accountants at a local department store chain and Saipan residents for over 10 years, and Choi and Kim, Koreans who work at a local travel firm.
Now, all have children who were born in the Marianas.
They all earn in U.S. dollars, and despite the Northern Marianas' having a minimum wage lower than that on the U.S. mainland, foreign workers in Saipan do speak of earning far more on the island than they would in the same jobs in their home countries.
But the economic security these couples found away from home seems under threat now.
Deo and Loise maintain that they are "always ready to pack up", but are also monitoring the processing of their migration papers for Canada. Their situation, said Deo, "should be a cause for concern for the CNMI, U.S. and Philippine governments because there are hundreds of us non-resident parents who have American children".
While most are planning for what seems to be the inevitable, for Filipino parents the passage home will be made easier under new legislation that allows their children to regain Filipino citizenship.
"While waiting for them to reach the legal age (21) to petition us for migration to America, we can at least be together in the Philippines without worrying about having to pay exorbitant immigration fees," Malou explained.
It has been a good innings for Gina. She makes 2,000 U.S. dollars a month, gets free accommodation, and a company car with a fuel allowance. This, she said, is more than five times what she was earning at her earlier job with a Manila-based travel magazine.
Yet the same industries that give these couples their livelihoods were accused, in the 1990s, of involuntary servitude and denial of worker's rights, as the non-governmental Global Survival Network reported in 1999.
Critics of the Marianas' economic model have long been lobbying for the CNMI's labour and immigration laws to follow those of the mainland. There is tourism, which caters primarily to Asian travelers, but the garment industry — dominated by Chinese investors — has relied heavily on Saipan's access to the U.S. mainland.
How dominant the sector will continue to be is the question — from 2005 onwards, WTO members are required to dismantle the quota system which restricts garments imports from developing countries but which some, like CNMI, rely on to ensure market access for their exports.
Government officials and business experts here forecast that the islands will from 2005 shed over 2,130 jobs a year, all in the garments sector, over seven years.
In preparation for the phaseout of garment exports, some of the island's garments manufacturers set up plants in countries like Guatemala, in central America, the Philippines, China and Vietnam as early as 2000.
There, labour costs will be comparatively lower than the 3.05 dollars per hour that is the minimum wage on Saipan, a level that has attracted criticism for being well under the U.S. mainland minimum wage of over five dollars an hour.
The industry is still critical to the islands — its 'employment multiplier' is 1.52, which means that two garment jobs support another job elsewhere in the economy.
Hence, Gina's apprehension about the effects of the 2005 deadline, and Choi and Kim's hope that "the worst will never come". Malou airs the same concern, and added that she and Manny have worked abroad long enough to have saved money sufficient to start a small business when they return to the Philippines.
The couples, however, see a silver lining. They are parents to children born in the CNMI, and who thereby hold U.S. citizenship under the covenant that established the Commonwealth. Official estimates show that 16 percent of the children in the islands are born to non-U.S. citizens.
The couples see U.S. citizenship as advantageous for their children, and eventually for themselves too. More than the welfare benefits, all anticipate eventually being petitioned by their children to permanently live in the United States.
For their part, Choi and Kim, who have stayed afloat in an industry battered first by the aftermath of the Sep. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, and then by the outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, are sanguine about their future. "We'll cross the bridge when we come to it," Choi said.
