Rethinking Philippine labor migration (part one)

After the last Filipino shall have crossed the border from Libya, and after the last missing OFW shall have been duly accounted for in New Zealand, and after all the nasty finger-pointings and bickerings relative to the not-so-flawless search and rescue operations, perhaps the wise men of the government think tank should sit down and ponder deeply on how to rethink, and if called for, to reinvent Philippine labor migration in an era of global labor markets and world-wide terrorisms.

This rethinking process should also take into account the current stand-off between Taiwan and our country. This is perhaps a better subject for legislative inquiries in aid of legislation, the nineties, an military corruption. For this involves the lives and livelihoods of no less than 11 million OFWs and, assuming they each have 4 family members, about 55 million Filipinos, or more than half of our total population.

The time has come to rethink our overall labor migration policies, thrusts and programs. The Libya, New Zealand and Taiwan experiences should teach our policy-makers, legislators, and us, in general, that the strategies of the Labor Code, vintage seventies, and the Migrant Workers’ Act, of the nineties, are already immaterial, irrelevant and impertinent to the contemporary realities.

Given all our experiences, both the good ones and the bad, we should be wiser by now, in leading and managing the outward movements of our human capital. Based on the solid six years experience of this writer as labor diplomat in three difficult foreign posts, namely, Malaysia, Kuwait and Central Taiwan, perhaps, I have earned a little voice to recommend some policy reforms in the Philippine labor migration management. Whether the legislators and the policy-makers are going to listen, I leave it to their sound discretion.

At the outset, let me propose some guiding principles in policy reforms: First, we should now accept that the realities today are much incongruent to the realities of the seventies under which the Labor Code was promulgated by a Martial Law regime. The government underwent a constitutional revolution but labor migration is still being managed based on Martial rule principles. These should be discarded now. Second, we should remember that the Migrant Workers’ Act was enacted by Congress, upon the proddings of Pres. FVR, as a reaction to the infamous Flor Contemplacion Debacle in Singapore.

Third, we need to resolve three major jugular issues: 1. Should government give more stress to Employment Promotion, rather than Workers’ Protection; 2. Should we allow the private recruitment industry to dominate and dictate policies or should we allow government to take over completely the recruitment and deployment of OFWs; 3. Should the DFA continue to handle the Office for Migrant Workers Affairs or should we transfer this office to the DOLE ; 4. Should we create anew agency to integrate the functions of POEA, OWWA, the OUMWA (Office of the Undersecretary for Migrant Workers Affairs) and the DOLE overseas labor operations? We shall discuss this fully in the second part of this dissertation.

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