It’s International Migrants Day, but we don’t need a special day to remind us that our eight million overseas workers are in trouble. The worldwide economic slowdown is prompting employers to send Filipino workers home. In Hong Kong, Filipinas working as maids are protesting a plan to cut their salary for the second time in two years. The slowdown is bad not only for the overseas Filipino workers but also for the Philippine economy, whose modest growth this year was fueled partly by remittances from OFWs.
Even without the slowdown, OFWs don’t have much cause for rejoicing on a day dedicated to international migrants. The Philippine diaspora started more than two decades ago, when Filipinos suffering from hard times found that there were better opportunities for employment abroad. Good pay has its price, however. OFWs leave relatives and friends behind, enduring loneliness in strange lands where they are often treated as second-class citizens.
Women in particular are vulnerable to abuse, including physical harm and sexual assault. How many women workers have returned from abroad, battered and bruised, their sanity gone? You don’t know if these women are luckier than other OFWs who have returned in coffins. Even before they leave for abroad, some prospective workers are victimized by recruiters who overcharge, provide fake working papers or promise non-existent jobs. Many of these workers become illegal aliens, opening them to even more discrimination and abuse. Women often end up as prostitutes and choose not to return home out of shame.
The sad plight of OFWs should give national leaders more impetus to put the country on the path to economic recovery and progress. There are those who lament that the maid has come to symbolize the Filipino in the eyes of the world, even if it’s honest work that helps keep the Philippine economy afloat. If the nation wants to change this state of affairs, it should provide enough incentive for those millions of workers to come home. No one wants to leave loved ones behind because their country can’t give them a decent wage.