Two reports show how Pinoys cope

Two news items on Filipino employment in relation to family ties caught my attention recently. Good or bad, they say a lot about our traits, perhaps even the way we analyze our case compared to how others see us.

The first, "Filipinos are skirting the poverty trap" written by Ace Sanders, came out late February in the San Francisco Examiner. Excerpts:

As President Bush begins to saddle welfare recipients with new work requirements and vows to keep a five-year ban on benefits for legal immigrants, there is one group he won’t have to worry about–Filipinos.

In the United States, Filipinos have a household poverty rate that is so shockingly low, it begs the question, "What are they doing right?"

"Filipinos have almost negligible poverty. It’s lower than every other group, including college-educated Jews," said USC professor Dowell Myers, who created a poverty index based on the 1990 and 2000 census and the federal poverty guidelines.

What he found after compiling the data was that the Filipino poverty level was "rock bottom."

It’s not that Filipino Americans are a particularly wealthy group, but a combination of cultural, social and historical safety nets have kept a majority of them from tumbling into severe poverty, he said. About 4 percent of Filipino residents registered below the poverty line in the 1990 Census, and by 2000 that figure shriveled to about 1 percent.

A family of four qualifies as impoverished if they earn less than $17,650, according to the 2001 Health and Human Services guidelines. Of course, for a city as expensive as ours, those figures seem ludicrously low, but provide a common benchmark for all residents.

Yet regardless of where they start on the socio-economic spectrum, as the Bay Area’s 400,000 Filipino residents become more established, they tend to move away from San Francisco and Oakland into bedroom communities such as Daly City and Hayward. Large cities are gateways for many immigrants, whereas suburbs signify owning land and houses and a slice of the American pie.

Daly City Mayor Michael Guingona typifies a first-generation Filipino American boosted by his community’s built-in survival system. The San Francisco-born Guingona, grew up surrounded by his large extended family– a community of aunts, uncles and cousins that helped one another find jobs and housing upon arrival in the United States. As is common in Filipino culture, close family friends adopted the title of Tito (aunt, uncle) or Lolo (grandma, grandpa.)

As with many striving Filipinos, Guingona’s family members each hold more than one job. His mother, a single mom, worked as a travel agent and ground support staffer for a Filipino airline in the 1960s. She reflected the higher level of professional equality Filipinas have compared to other immigrant women, Myers said. And she managed to escape the chronic problem of underemployment–where highly skilled professionals toil at numerous low-skilled jobs to support their family.

Her children followed her example. Guingona’s brother is a sports-TV program producer and club promoter. Guingona works as a criminal defense attorney and is chairman of the San Mateo County Transportation Authority in addition to his duties as mayor, husband and father.

Filipino households often show a trend toward multiple breadwinners, with more than one family living under the same roof. The result is a reduction of household poverty in dollar terms. Although it often is crowded, everyone has shelter and food. And their culture dictates that no one go hungry.

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Yup, no one should go hungry. That motto etched in the Filipino psyche works for Fil-Ams–and for Pinoys back home too. It’s the story between the lines of the Bloomberg item, "Philippine jobless fell to 10.3 percent as unpaid family workers rise,"which came out Mar. 13 datelined Manila. Again, excerpts:

Philippine unemployment fell in January from a year earlier as farms and retailers hired more workers, though many of the workers who found jobs are unpaid, the National Statistics Office said.

Unemployment declined to 10.3 percent from 11.3 percent in January 2000, the agency said. The rate rose from 9.8 percent in October, without adjusting for seasonal changes. The government reports jobless figures every three months.

While domestic growth helped the economy outpace most of its neighbors last year, Philippine unemployment is still among the region’s highest. Half the 1.6 million people who found work during the year to January were unpaid family members, most of them on farms, today’s report showed.

"The jobs that are being created aren’t productive in the sense that they don’t improve purchasing power," said Bing Icamina, chief economist at EIU Philippines Inc. "Unless there is a boost elsewhere, the domestic economy may run out of fuel."

Consumer spending and farm production–which accounts for one-fifth of gross domestic product and 40 percent of the country’s workers–helped the economy expand a better-than-expected 3.4 percent last year, even as exports and manufacturing shrank.

The total number of jobless people fell to 3.4 million in January 2002 from 3.6 million a year earlier, today’s report showed. Farms added 700,000 jobs, boosting their workforce by 7.4 percent. Of those workers, 529,000 were unpaid family members, while the number of paid farm jobs fell by 113,000.

Service jobs increased by 7.2 percent, and industrial jobs fell by 1.8 percent, today’s report showed.

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Catch Linawin Natin, tonight at 11:30, on IBC-13.

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