Saturday, September 25, 2010

Professionalizing Household Work



By BERNARDO VILLEGAS
September 9, 2010, 4:33pm
As can be inferred from the recent row created by pilots of Philippine Airlines accepting jobs from foreign airlines, many of our overseas workers are definitely not coming from the poorest households of the Philippines. 
In fact, a study commissioned by the Asian Development Bank about Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWS) already confirmed that it is not the poorest of the poor who actually seek jobs abroad.
 What with placement fees and other deposits that can amount to as much as P100,000, there is no way the poor can successfully land a job overseas. It is not accurate, then, to say that it is poverty that drives Filipinos to go abroad for employment. It is more accurate to say that it is wage or income differentials that motivate Filipinos to work abroad.
For this reason, we should expect that even if our poverty line should drop to below 10 percent, we will still have millions of Filipinos going abroad for two complementary reasons: there will always be large wage or income differentials between the Philippines and the more developed economies and Filipinos workers and professionals are in greater demand abroad than most other nationalities. 
This demand especially comes from the highly developed countries in North America, Europe, and Northeast Asia that are irreversibly suffering from the so-called demographic winter.
 At least for the next 50 years, whatever the family planning advocates in the Philippines may do, the Philippines will have a surplus of able-bodied workers and professionals who, by economic choice, will want to work abroad, at least for a certain period of their lives.
 These workers and professionals will be increasingly in the fields of health care, information technology, education, management, tourism, engineering, land, sea, and air transport, and other personal services.
In the next 20 years, however, as the Philippines still struggles to significantly reduce mass poverty, we will not be able to avoid sending many of our females to work abroad as household services workers (HSWs), especially to territories like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and other Middle Eastern countries. 
HSWs are among those who come from the poorer households and are driven to make sacrifices (including leaving their children) in order to help their families live more comfortable lives. As Labor Secretary Rosalinda Baldoz said during a consultative meeting with the DoLE's labor attaches recently:
 "There is a call for the DoLE to really make a serious effort to protect the most vulnerable of our OFWs--the household service workers--so it is high time for us to review the HSW reform package."
As reported by GMA News, Secretary Baldoz impressed upon the labor attache corps the need to quickly bring home all distressed OFWs, particularly the HSWs, in all Filipino Workers Resource Centers all over the world. She also reminded them to ensure they are given full and complete social and economic assistance to facilitate their re-integration into their families and home communities upon their return.
 Among other measures emphasized was to ensure that the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) would improve the quality of its skills assessment and certification system for HSWs before they leave for abroad
I would like to belabor the last point. Instead of trying to phase out the deployment of HSWs in foreign countries, which move would be clearly anti-poor as already explained above, the government should exert all efforts to work with TESDA and the numerous private technical training schools to improve the quality of our HSWs. 
In many developed countries, especially in Europe, the task of managing a home has already become as dignified an occupation as nursing, teaching and restaurant management. The figure of what we have derogatorily called a "muchacha" or "tsimay" is disappearing. 
In her place is a professional--who does not have to live in the house of the employer — who combines the talents of operating modern appliances, culinary arts, language teaching to children, and other skills that are deployed in a modern household. 
These types of home managers are already being produced by local schools like Punlaan in San Juan, Anihan in Calamba, or Banilad in Cebu. It would be worthwhile for the DoLE and the recruiting agencies to touch base with these technical schools for them to have an idea of the modern home manager so that there is no need to think that exporting HSWs is giving the Philippines a bad image. For comments, my e-mail address is bvillegas@uap.edu.ph.

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