Manage our OFW business better

Manage our OFW business better
DEMAND AND SUPPLY By Boo Chanco

When the Marcos regime first resorted to the export of Filipino labor to alleviate the unemployment problem and also earn precious foreign exchange, it was supposed to be a stop gap measure. It was something we had to do while the country worked on the basics for economic growth… until our economy can provide jobs right here at home.

But it didn’t happen that way. The spectacular performance of our OFWs this year in terms of earnings remittance and the absence of real indicators that our economy is truly on the mend, means this temporary strategy will have to be around for quite a while more.

Putting aside the serious social implications of children growing up without parents or of a culture of dependency taking root among relatives left behind, the OFW strategy has at least provided the element of hope needed to keep the masses from revolting. It is also creating a new middle class that is exposed to world class ways of doing things and I am banking on this development to improve the quality of our voters in the future.

I saw a special report on ANC last week that featured pretty good looking homes of OFWs in Mabini, Batangas. The village itself is known as Italian village because the OFWs there worked as household help in Italy. It is heartwarming to see such fruits of their hard work. Those houses and the much improved lives they now live must surely make all those bitter heartaches in a foreign land worthwhile.

Now that we are resigned to sending our workers abroad in the next 10 or maybe even 20 years, we should start handling this business a lot better than we are doing now. I am not talking only of worker protection and welfare like what OWWA, POEA and DFA should be providing. I think various high level government agency heads, together with some in the private sector, should give the OFW strategy more thought to maximize the benefits we as a country can derive from it.

We often hear some official or economist lament that the billions of dollars OFWs send back home are dissipated in consumption, benefiting only the mall owners and the smugglers in Divisoria. There is a lot of truth in that view. The $10 billion or so that OFWs sent back here last year could have done more than just strengthen the peso and fatten our gross international reserves.

That’s a lot of money, to begin with. Couldn’t we capture that or some of that in terms of government securities tailor made for OFWs? Every time the National Treasury floats a bond issue, that is to say, borrow foreign exchange from banks and other investors, it is normally in a range that’s lower than $10 billion. The last one was just $2 billion. Wouldn’t it be nice if the Treasury paid interest to an OFW holding such a bond instead of to foreign banks or investors?

There was an attempt by some wise guys in Malacañang some years back to issue such an "investment instrument" that did not clearly define its use. In fact, they did not coordinate with DOF or BSP, making the caper look like a scam. But if the issue is designed by the proper financial authorities and would be used to reduce our foreign debt obligations or to build an expressway somewhere or equip PGH with world class facilities, that would be just great.

Right now, the investment choices of OFWs are limited to buying a tricycle, a jeep or a FX van… or putting up a sari sari store. Assisting the OFWs in investing their hard-earned money should be a joint government-private sector undertaking.

While I wouldn’t recommend for the uninitiated OFW to venture into the stock market the way the NEDA chief suggested, the PSE can probably come up with an index fund, a mutual fund type of instrument that tracks the Phisix. While there is still a strong element of risk here, it wouldn’t be as bad as losing all your money on one bad listed issue. It should also be more liquid. Something like the Vanguard in the US should be a good model.

Deploying our OFWs can also stand a lot of improvement. Our consul general in Guangdong province, China once told our Wednesday lunch group at Havana Greenbelt that China seems more organized in this respect. She told us that at least in Guangdong, the Chinese government negotiated directly with the British government for the supply of Chinese nurses. The package deal involves everything from English language training to professional certification and guaranteed wages. When governments talk to each other, the likelihood of abuses is reduced, if not eliminated.

This is why I think DFA should be at the forefront of efforts to negotiate and sign up treaties with various countries that would facilitate the fielding of Filipino labor. Mobility of labor is an important component of globalization and we ought to be as tough in negotiating this issue as we are in regard to the entry of manufactured goods and raw materials to developed country markets. It is a tough issue but it is also one issue we need to be proactive with. Otherwise, other countries that also send their workers abroad may get their labor agreements ahead of us.

Then there is the problem raised by the POEA of inadequate available flights out of the country to ferry our workers. Thousands of prospective workers, whose papers are already in order, lost the opportunity to work and earn money abroad because there are not enough planes to get them there. That’s a logistic problem that shouldn’t be too difficult to fix. We just need the Civil Aeronautics Board to work with POEA. The lost opportunity is an unpardonable failure of the bureaucracy.

Finally, there is the police side of it too. There was news last week that about 20 or so Pinoy "tourists" were stranded in St. Petersburg, Russia after their "guide", a Filipina, abandoned them after taking their passports and money. Apparently, the "tourists" were really bound for Western Europe to look for work and the "guide" was supposed to facilitate their Schengen visa for an atrocious fee.

Winter is a tough time to be stranded in Russia without food and shelter. And CNN says it is record cold there now. There must be some way government can monitor situations like this before these "tourists" even leave the country. Given our economic problems, people are desperate enough to take big risks for that dream job abroad. We simply have to protect our own from the more criminally inclined, also among us.

It would be nice to see more Italian Villages like the one in Mabini, Batangas. But replicating the success stories there must not be left to chance and to the desperation of our people to take unreasonable risks. We all have to put our heads together in an organized effort to maximize the benefits of this OFW phenomenon and minimize the heartaches to those who are in the thick of it.

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is bchanco@gmail.com

The Philippine Star 01/23/2006