PHILIPPINES: Returning Workers Find Few Prospects at Home

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Marites Sison

MANILA, Oct 2 2002 (IPS) - -áEloina Reyes Rebollos can perhaps count as her greatest accomplishment in life the fact that she has sent countless nieces and nephews to school, including one who is now an engineer, another a nurse, and yet another, a social worker.

Some of her siblings have also managed to build their own homes, thanks to her generosity. Her salary as a domestic helper in the Middle East paid for it all.

Yet when Rebollos came home recently there was no one to meet her at the airport. She also didn’t have a penny in her pocket and had to be housed temporarily by activists at KAKAMMPI, an NGO fighting for migrant workers’árights. Rebollos had worked as a maid for nine years in Riyadh and Kuwait, and was among the thousands of Filipino workers who endured a long and dangerous journey by land to Amman, Jordan, to escape Iraq’s invasion in 1990.

Now 59, she is looking forward to retirement in her home in Zamboanga city in the southern Philippines. Her plan is to use her war reparations claim from the Gulf War as retirement money. How far the 200,000 pesos (4,000 U.S. dollars) she expects to get will go, however, is another matter.

Fe Necodemus, executive director of Kakammpi (ally), has warned Rebollos not to be too open-handed to relatives and friends. ”It’s time for you to think of yourself, you’re growing old. It’s not your obligation to take care of everybody,”áshe told her, hoping that her advice won’t go unheeded.

The sad reality, according to Kakammpi and other activist groups like the Hong Kong-based non-government organisation Asian Migrant Centre (AMC), is that many overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) are like Rebollos –á they come home with little or sometimes no savings even after decades of overseas employment.

Sadder still that many come home to realities that remain unchanged, including the dependence on dole-outs by their own families and relatives and a sluggish economy that doesn’t produce jobs.

”In general, OFWs spend only part of their income in the host country to cover personal needs and remit most of his/her earnings to support his/her family in the home country or set aside the surplus of his/her earnings as savings which he/she can bring home or invest in some projects,”á said a December 2001 report commissioned by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA).

There are no figures on the savings rate among Filipinos working overseas, but Labour Undersecretary Lucita Lazo says: ”My guess is that it would be low since overall savings among Filipinos is pretty low.”

Lazo, who heads the recently created Office of Reintegration of OFWs, said that migrant workers’ first three years is normally spent paying off debts incurred in paying exhorbitant fees to recruitment agencies.

Slowly, however, the savings consciousness is being instilled among these migrant workers, thanks to efforts of NGOs including Unlad Kabayan (Develop Countrymen), which is pushing for what it calls Migrant Savings Alternative Investment (MSAI).

The idea is not just to encourage migrant workers to form savings groups but also to invest these earnings into projects that not only help their families but also build or reinvigorate communities, said Mayan Villalba, executive director of Unlad Kabayan.

The programme also has a ”values formation”ácomponent that teaches dependents the importance of prudent spending and financial management.

Often, Villalba explains, Filipinos working overseas are discouraged from setting up businesses because they don’t trust their families to handle their hard-earned money properly or because they find it hard to collect payments.

”It dawned on us that nobody wants to come back because they’re not coming home to anything. There are no jobs. They also paid so much to leave; it would be a disaster for their families if they just came home,”ásaid Villalba.

This perception was bolstered by a study that the AMC conducted in 1996 among migrant workers from Thailand, India, Sri Lanka and the Philippines — all working in Hong Kong.

They were asked whether they would still work overseas if they would get the same salary back home and the response was an overwhelming ”No”. They were asked, ”Would you be ready to go home if there are options available to earn a decent income?”áand the answer was ”Yes”.

How to turn the 8 to 10 billion dollars that the 7.8 million Filipino overseas workers remit to the Philippines annually into capital for ”social investments” is therefore seen as a challenge not only by NGOs but by government, which now sees reintegration of returning workers as an inescapable reality, which, if handled well can augur well for the economy.

”If 10 per cent of the total remittances can be converted into productive investment projects, said amount will easily surpass the total foreign investments that the Philippines receives annually, some of which go into mere purchases of existing enterprises such as those being privatised or foreclosed or, as what happened in the mid-l990s, into the stock and real property markets,”áthe ILO and DFA report said.

The recent crackdown on illegal migrants by Malaysian authorities in Sabah as well as in other parts of the world, largely driven by the war against terror launched by the United States after the Sep. 11 attacks, has also been a sobering experience for the Philippines.

”The return now is more massive. In the past people came and went and the pace, volume and spacing was relatively manageable,”áLazo said. ”But now it’s not only the volume. It’s the pace like what happened in Sabah where suddenly you had a whole mass of 27,000 coming back.”

Lazo, who was appointed only last July, admitted that ”one of the big holes in the OFW programme of the government is reintegration”.á

Not that there were no programmes for returning workers in the past. But as the ILO and DFA report pointed out, their results were ”marginal due to certain weaknesses: limited knowledge of the programmes by the OFWs, complicated procedures to avail of the programme assistance, and the loanable amounts were not much”.á

For instance, the government’s Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA), which should ideally take the lead as far as migrant workers’ welfare is concerned, had a slew of programmes that were considered failures.

”In 1989 OWWA established a credit programme but it had no competence to run it,”ásaid Villalba. ”There was no strict monitoring and auditing. So it was left with collaterals like refrigerators and tricycles. It was a case of mismanagement, lack of skills and poorly crafted programme.”á

Corruption and a lack of seriousness have also tarnished government’s reputation as far as projects go. ”Our syndrome has been stop and start and probably that’s why people get cynical not just with reintegration but also with other development projects,”áLazo said. Last April OWWA conducted consultations with NGOs to see how their successful programmes can be replicated nationwide. Lazo herself has met with NGOs to pick up lessons.

Aside from reintegration into the economic mainstream, activists like Villalba have stressed the importance of ”psycho social reintegration” Often families are not aware of the harsh life that many migrant workers experience abroad, said Villalba. Lazo agreed that a ”debriefing session” of sorts is needed for returning workers, who themselves undergo an adjustment period even with their own families.

In the end, Lazo said what she would like to see is ”a federation of OFWs in every region that can become a support group to each other”. ”They can exchange information about their programmes and hopefully it will spur local economies.”

PHILIPPINES: Returning Workers Find Few Prospects at Home

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Marites Sison

MANILA, Oct 2 2002 (IPS) - áEloina Reyes Rebollos can perhaps count as her greatest accomplishment in life the fact that she has sent countless nieces and nephews to school, including one who is now an engineer, another a nurse, and yet another, a social worker.
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