It's true, RP is a nation of servants, groups say

MANILA, Philippines - There are almost nine million Filipinos abroad – half of whom are overseas Filipino workers (OFW), yet we deny that we are a “nation of servants."

It was Hong Kong writer Chip Tsao who wrote in his March 27 column that the Philippines is “a nation of servants" who shouldn’t “flex your muscles at your master, from whom you earn most of your bread and butter."

Many migrant groups, including the Center for Migrant Advocacy (CMA), Kanlungan Center Foundation, and Migrante International, have bashed Tsao for spouting this "racial slur." Nevertheless, the groups admit that the Philippines has indeed become a country of overseas domestics because of the government's labor export policy that should have never been a policy at all.

Kanlungan resource and advocacy assistant Alladin Diega did say, however, that the Philippines being called such is not a new thing.

“Tsao is not the first and will not be the last. [The] Philippines being a nation of servants is not a new thing," he told GMANews.TV on Thursday.

He said Merriam-Webster has even previously defined a Filipina as domestic help.

But both CMA and Kanlungan questioned why Filipinos are so keen on denying the fact that we do have large a number of Filipinos doing domestic work abroad.

“We react because we have too many domestic workers abroad? But we do," CMA executive director Ellene Sana told GMANews.TV in an e-mail.

This, Diega said, is what we get by letting the government deploy thousands of Filipinos everyday to other countries instead of focusing on creating jobs locally.

Institutionalization of migration

The phenomenon of migration in the Philippines can be traced back to the 1970s when there was a surge in the number of Filipinos leaving for abroad.

Dante Ang, chairman of the Commission on Filipinos Overseas, said this was because then Labor Secretary Blas Ople thought of deploying Filipino workers to the Middle East to take advantage of the oil-boom and at the same time, temporarily solve the growing unemployment rate in the country.

“To the credit of the government, the policy of sending Filipino workers abroad helped defuse what could have been a social volcano," said Ang.

However, more than 30 years after migration was pegged to be a temporary stop-gap measure against unemployment, the deployment of Filipino workers still hasn’t slowed down.

In an article titled “Understanding International Labor Migration in the East," published in the May-June 2007 Newsletter of the Philippine Institute for Development, Maruja Asis, director for Research and Publications of the Scalabrini Migration Center, identified the factors why Filipino migration has continued for almost four decades.

One of the reasons for this, she said, is the “institutionalization of migration."

The Philippine government has always been very upfront with its desire to deploy more Filipinos overseas – allowing them to lessen the number of unemployed workers while increasing the amount of dollar remittances that the country would be able to rake in.

And while it is clearly stipulated in Republic Act 8042 or the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act of 1995 that the government “does not promote overseas employment as a means to sustain economic growth and achieve national development," it is doing just that.

As proof, government agencies like the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), Overseas Workers Welfare Administration and the Office of the Undersecretary for Migrant Workers Affairs of the Department of Foreign Affairs have been set up to help OFWs with their concerns.

This, Asis said, might have developed a culture of migration.

“Working abroad has become an accepted fate to most Filipinos," she said.

In fact, she said it is now unusual for a Filipino to not to aspire for a job abroad despite being faced with proof that overseas is not really a haven for the unemployed.