Dimwit decision haunts the Philippines
Isabel P. Ball
October 30, 2007
I’ve been bypassing arrays of local Filipino newspapers, a shamble piles of thinned out, free issues on the sidewalks begging pick up.
Frustrating, irritating, convulsing are swirling emotions that had caused me to abstain from reading reports about the Philippines. In extreme, I’m turning a bigot against my own race, and for good reasons. The fire of scorn within me is like a conflagration melting down the remaining hope I have of the country that is now engulfed into the fire of sweeping decadence known as corruption and stupidity.
Unfortunately, it is within pages of these newspapers that reported about the Philippine government tooting a record it has become the world’s number one exporter of manpower to the world. I had nothing but disgust a reaction to the news, and not the usual revelry and pride. That piece of report has since bothered me in a cynical way.
Quietly, I have been detesting enslavement the Philippines has embarked upon a solution to its massive unemployment and poverty that the culture of corruption has borne into the country by the greedy and megalomaniac leaders. Effectively disenfranchised, these pitiful and desperate Filipino contract workers had no other choice, but to follow the pathways to the sources of jobs. They work in the Middle East, Italy, Hongkong, America, Japan, Europe, Australia, they are everywhere a globetrotting slaves. Most ridiculous a sign of despondency, even in Pakistan, a country much lower in status than the Philippines, nowadays, a host to Filipino contract workers. With this phenomenon comes untold tales of abuses, of servitude, and killings suffered by the workers, as headlines flashed their tales of slavery adventures. They also battle loneliness from forced separation from families, now sociologically, the one single cause of family disintegration in the country, once a proud citadel of Christian nuclear family.
To the government, the record is a great achievement, an accomplishment that they are quick to claim and use for political aggrandizement, something to brag to the world that the Filipinos are good workers, in great demand, and skillful. The Philippine Embassies and consulates around the world were the scouring agencies actively seeking for niches for the Filipino workers. Politically, the strategy is a double whammy deal for the government. It serves as a solution to the mass unemployment plaguing the country, while it increases the transmittals. These funds, in double digit billion dollars, help prop up the economy and weather the threats of economic collapse at times of world depression.
For some time, the deployment of workers was appearing to me that the Philippine government, tactically, was going to be a job broker to the world, supplying for the manpower needs of the world, satiated and complacent, as it becomes a sinecure republic, living off its people’s labor.
Deploying of workers abroad, to me, seems an easy way for the Philippine government to renege on its role, the burden of creating employment for its own masses. A clever, yet invited insult, I thought, to an already demeaned race of Filipinos that more and more are an object of ridicule in satires from the American entertainment elites, the recent was from the Desperate Wives show guffaw.
Behind this government so-called accomplishment is a harrowing spectacle that many workers undertake in their plights to leave the country. Government job deployments are not actually government-funded recourse; they are individual efforts entailing untold costs and sacrifices to every applicants. Setting the stage, the government has established the POEA (Philippine Overseas Employment Agency), servicing as job agency and overseeing the workers plights outside of the country, and some other related services. Along came burgeoning job placement businesses that brought boom and gloom to the multitude of overseas workers.
At the beginning, the costs of travels to and fro the city and back are big expenditure for the impoverished applicants, which are mostly laborers. As unemployment remains unabated, workers now comprise the unemployed and underemployed professionals, such as Teachers, Engineers, Doctors, and Nurses working on lowly jobs just to eke out and leave the country. Once processed and applicants are accepted, start the bigger outlay; namely the agent’s fee and for the medical and other background checks requirements. By the time the applicants are processed ready for deployment, they would have collateralized or sold the property, or have obtained loans from the usurious lenders. The sacrifice is terrifying, but fortunately, it soon becomes rewarding, when the dollar transmittals begin, and the obligations are easily cleared up by the exchange rates. However, along the way, many less fortunate individuals, meanwhile, are entrapped by fraudulent agencies bilking the applicants of fees and the costs only to abscond.
Like a clairvoyant, I have the clarity to see the reason for my cynicism on massive deployment, now appearing in recent news report. The government is coming out with statistics that the healthcare service in the Philippines is gravely distressed by the immigration of the healthcare professionals, now, markedly, at 85%. Truly a disturbing ratio of only one doctor to 28,000 Filipinos is alarmingly dangerous. This comes in the heels of the Philippines winning its bid to become the NCLEX international test point for Nurses, further establishing a mindset and goal for Philippine Nurses, primarily, to immigrate to the U.S. Simply, it would mean that more and more families will be sending their children to the Nursing school, causing some disparity in the job scene equilibrium, as noted above. Also, there is a talk about restraining, if not stopping, the outflow of technical professionals, such as engineers and construction workers.
That the Philippine government had allowed it to happen speaks of dumbness and irresponsibility. Now they are in the reverse, scampering to control, if not stop the pilgrimage of its despondent citizenry. They are dimwitted to have failed to forecast that brain and manpower drain in the Philippines can have a deleterious effect, as to stall its own development because of hindsight?
If lacking in the basic intelligence to foresee the ill effects of mass deployment of workers, didn’t the government have the common sense enough to use the man-made intelligence in computer to calculate the future of foreign Filipino enslavement?
Frustrating, irritating, convulsing are swirling emotions that had caused me to abstain from reading reports about the Philippines. In extreme, I’m turning a bigot against my own race, and for good reasons. The fire of scorn within me is like a conflagration melting down the remaining hope I have of the country that is now engulfed into the fire of sweeping decadence known as corruption and stupidity.
Unfortunately, it is within pages of these newspapers that reported about the Philippine government tooting a record it has become the world’s number one exporter of manpower to the world. I had nothing but disgust a reaction to the news, and not the usual revelry and pride. That piece of report has since bothered me in a cynical way.
Quietly, I have been detesting enslavement the Philippines has embarked upon a solution to its massive unemployment and poverty that the culture of corruption has borne into the country by the greedy and megalomaniac leaders. Effectively disenfranchised, these pitiful and desperate Filipino contract workers had no other choice, but to follow the pathways to the sources of jobs. They work in the Middle East, Italy, Hongkong, America, Japan, Europe, Australia, they are everywhere a globetrotting slaves. Most ridiculous a sign of despondency, even in Pakistan, a country much lower in status than the Philippines, nowadays, a host to Filipino contract workers. With this phenomenon comes untold tales of abuses, of servitude, and killings suffered by the workers, as headlines flashed their tales of slavery adventures. They also battle loneliness from forced separation from families, now sociologically, the one single cause of family disintegration in the country, once a proud citadel of Christian nuclear family.
To the government, the record is a great achievement, an accomplishment that they are quick to claim and use for political aggrandizement, something to brag to the world that the Filipinos are good workers, in great demand, and skillful. The Philippine Embassies and consulates around the world were the scouring agencies actively seeking for niches for the Filipino workers. Politically, the strategy is a double whammy deal for the government. It serves as a solution to the mass unemployment plaguing the country, while it increases the transmittals. These funds, in double digit billion dollars, help prop up the economy and weather the threats of economic collapse at times of world depression.
For some time, the deployment of workers was appearing to me that the Philippine government, tactically, was going to be a job broker to the world, supplying for the manpower needs of the world, satiated and complacent, as it becomes a sinecure republic, living off its people’s labor.
Deploying of workers abroad, to me, seems an easy way for the Philippine government to renege on its role, the burden of creating employment for its own masses. A clever, yet invited insult, I thought, to an already demeaned race of Filipinos that more and more are an object of ridicule in satires from the American entertainment elites, the recent was from the Desperate Wives show guffaw.
Behind this government so-called accomplishment is a harrowing spectacle that many workers undertake in their plights to leave the country. Government job deployments are not actually government-funded recourse; they are individual efforts entailing untold costs and sacrifices to every applicants. Setting the stage, the government has established the POEA (Philippine Overseas Employment Agency), servicing as job agency and overseeing the workers plights outside of the country, and some other related services. Along came burgeoning job placement businesses that brought boom and gloom to the multitude of overseas workers.
At the beginning, the costs of travels to and fro the city and back are big expenditure for the impoverished applicants, which are mostly laborers. As unemployment remains unabated, workers now comprise the unemployed and underemployed professionals, such as Teachers, Engineers, Doctors, and Nurses working on lowly jobs just to eke out and leave the country. Once processed and applicants are accepted, start the bigger outlay; namely the agent’s fee and for the medical and other background checks requirements. By the time the applicants are processed ready for deployment, they would have collateralized or sold the property, or have obtained loans from the usurious lenders. The sacrifice is terrifying, but fortunately, it soon becomes rewarding, when the dollar transmittals begin, and the obligations are easily cleared up by the exchange rates. However, along the way, many less fortunate individuals, meanwhile, are entrapped by fraudulent agencies bilking the applicants of fees and the costs only to abscond.
Like a clairvoyant, I have the clarity to see the reason for my cynicism on massive deployment, now appearing in recent news report. The government is coming out with statistics that the healthcare service in the Philippines is gravely distressed by the immigration of the healthcare professionals, now, markedly, at 85%. Truly a disturbing ratio of only one doctor to 28,000 Filipinos is alarmingly dangerous. This comes in the heels of the Philippines winning its bid to become the NCLEX international test point for Nurses, further establishing a mindset and goal for Philippine Nurses, primarily, to immigrate to the U.S. Simply, it would mean that more and more families will be sending their children to the Nursing school, causing some disparity in the job scene equilibrium, as noted above. Also, there is a talk about restraining, if not stopping, the outflow of technical professionals, such as engineers and construction workers.
That the Philippine government had allowed it to happen speaks of dumbness and irresponsibility. Now they are in the reverse, scampering to control, if not stop the pilgrimage of its despondent citizenry. They are dimwitted to have failed to forecast that brain and manpower drain in the Philippines can have a deleterious effect, as to stall its own development because of hindsight?
If lacking in the basic intelligence to foresee the ill effects of mass deployment of workers, didn’t the government have the common sense enough to use the man-made intelligence in computer to calculate the future of foreign Filipino enslavement?
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