CRUCIAL YET FORGOTTEN
What happens when the world’s largest migrant workforce disappears?
Norman Eleazar has spent the last 14 years working in high-end hotels in the glittering capitals of the Gulf states. He was in Tehran, working as corporate director for sales at the Espinas Palace Hotel, the only five-star property in Iran’s capital, when he first heard murmurs about a new virus spreading across China.
Eleazar asked former colleagues who had moved on to Beijing what they knew. By February, before Iran became home to the first major outbreak outside of China, Eleazar had already requisitioned stocks of sanitiser, masks, gloves and temperature guns for the hotel.
By early March, all of the 400-room hotel’s international bookings were cancelled. Operations were consolidated on three floors, staying open for around 30 tourists who were trapped in Iran when borders closed. Resumes flowed into Elezear’s inbox from former colleagues laid off from shuttered chain hotels across the Middle East, asking for work.
Eleazar felt lucky to keep his job but still had cause to be nervous. The hotel was deserted. “Any time, the owner can call me in and say, ‘You have one month left,’” he said. “Everything is uncertain right now. I cannot predict tomorrow.”
Eleazar is one of the 10 million Filipinos who live and work overseas. Filipinos — along with millions of international migrant workers of other nationalities — are the footsoldiers of globalisation. A 2017 study by the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that international migrants make up 3.4% of the world’s population but account for 10% of gross domestic product.
As native English speakers, thousands of Filipinos work in hotels and casinos from Las Vegas to Macau and Phnom Penh. Filipinos are nurses and doctors in Milan, Jiddah and Miami. Some 400,000 work aboard cruise ships or cargo ships, where they make up the largest share of any one nationality in the industry.
They are engineers at oil refineries and nannies in homes. At airports from Singapore to San Francisco, Filipinos handle baggage, man security and staff customer service desks. When weary travellers transit through the once-bustling airport of Dubai, there’s a good chance the person serving them coffee is Filipino.
At the same time that their labour has powered economies abroad, their money has supported households back home. Remittances make up 35% of financial flows to the Philippines — more than foreign direct investment, tourism and overseas development assistance — and 9% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).
As the coronavirus pandemic closed borders and countries shut down, the industries Filipino workers have gravitated to — tourism, airport services, shipping and cruises — were among the hardest hit. With borders shut and economies shrinking, many are now trapped in foreign countries that feel a limited sense of responsibility for their welfare.
The pandemic has highlighted how much the global economy depends on migrant labour, and how countries have treated their migrant populations as disposable resources. Migrants are struggling with indefinite furloughs and lost jobs; they are being neglected by institutions and face rising xenophobia in many countries.
Despite the contributions they have made to the countries where they work — often at great personal cost — and even though their labour will be critical to the economic recovery of their host countries, few governments have proved willing to help migrant workers through this crisis.
NATIONAL HEROES
Filipinos found their foothold in globalised labour in the 1960s and 1970s, when professionals — including teachers, doctors, nurses and scientists — were recruited to the US as permanent immigrants. As their country was a former colony of the US, Filipinos were familiar with America’s language, culture and institutions.
Many Filipinos raised in the American colonial period spoke English, were taught to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and fought in the US Army. Nearly everyone who left sent back money and gifts to the Philippines and spread the word of the opportunities available overseas.
Overseas work has since become embedded in the culture and economy of the Philippines. Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW) are referred to as bagong bayani, or the new national heroes, in deference to their personal sacrifices for the common good. Songs, television shows and news segments are dedicated to celebrating OFWs.
The reputation is frequently well-deserved. OFWs have pulled their families out of poverty, built homes for their parents and sent younger siblings to university, paving their way into better jobs in the middle class. The personal costs are often high, as lifelong overseas workers must usually leave their families behind.
By the early 1980s, there were three government agencies dedicated to managing migration: the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, the Commission on Filipinos Overseas and the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration. As global labour demand shifted from the US to places like Europe, Hong Kong, Singapore and the Middle East, and into industries like domestic work, tourism and shipping, an eager crop of strivers moved to fill the jobs, most of them migrants on temporary contracts.
Filipinos could always count on their breadwinner relatives abroad, and, by extension, so could the Philippine economy. According to a central bank survey, 80% of remittance inflows are spent, not saved — an indication of how central remittances are to consumption in the Philippines, and how closely some Filipino families are to running out of money should those remittances stop. Seventy percent of the Philippine economy is consumption-driven.
Remittances are motivated by altruism, not profit, says Nicholas Antonio Mapa, senior economist for the banking group ING in the Philippines. When there are disruptions or disasters at home, overseas workers tend to send more money.
The global distribution of OFWs means that if there is a crisis in one region, workers in less-affected regions make up the difference. This has meant that remittance flows have grown consistently for decades; 2019 was a record year, when overseas Filipinos sent back over US$30 billion.
Covid-19, however, is a different kind of crisis and has hit the global economy more broadly and more deeply than any other. The industries that traditionally attracted Filipino workers have been disproportionately affected. People who, in the past, might have been able to ride out the disruption or find employment elsewhere are forced to pack up and return home.
So far, the Department of Foreign Affairs has repatriated over 48,000 Filipino workers. Others have paid for their own passage home, and thousands more are seeking repatriation.
In May, the testing facilities at Manila’s international airport were overwhelmed by the influx of returning migrants, forcing the airport closed as they worked through the backlog. The government strung up yellow caution tape and commandeered hotels as quarantine centres. A dozen cruise ships docked in Manila Bay for weeks, the workers quarantined onboard.
Jene Bartenilla, 45, who worked as a chef on luxury yachts, has spent most of the last 10 years sailing to Monaco, Monte Carlo and ports in Italy and France. The day he arrived in Manila in March, he found out that his latest assignment — to crew a private yacht in Australia — had been cancelled. He was trapped between a lost contract and the Philippines’ strict lockdown, which prevented him from going back to his hometown on the island of Cebu.
Bartenilla endured the first month of the lockdown at a dank and crowded seamen’s dormitory in Manila, where about a hundred seafarers — some returning from months at sea, others denied deployment — scraped together what money they had for lean communal meals of canned sardines and rice.
“We’re just surviving,” Bartenilla said, after six weeks trapped in the boarding house. “It’s like we’re in jail.”
Carlos B Garcia Jr, of Magsaysay Shipping Lines Maritime Corp, the largest manning agency for commercial and cruise ship workers in the Philippines, says about 50,000 to 100,000 Filipino seafarers have lost their jobs. Ships are down to skeleton crews, with as few as 10% left onboard, mostly security and engine maintenance personnel.
The industry is not likely to recover until 2022, Garcia said, and will depend on countries like Australia and Canada lifting their restrictions on cruise ships.
Workers are returning to an economy that is already struggling. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) downgraded its growth expectations for the Philippines from a modest 2% in April to -3.8% in June.
In June, the Philippine central bank predicted that remittances would fall 5% this year, down from its previous projection of 2% growth — the first time in decades that annual overseas remittances have not grown.
The shift from high earnings overseas to hardship at home could push many families that depended on remittances out of the middle classes and into more fragile territory, warned Aiko Kikkawa Takenaka, an ADB economist. “There is a risk of them falling back to a very vulnerable situation, including possibly crossing the poverty line,” Takenaka said.
Households without much in savings are most under strain. Miriam Prado, a domestic worker in Beirut, lost her income in February when her employers left the country ahead of Lebanon’s lockdown. She used to send between $100 and $200 a month to support her two sons.
Back in the Philippines, her younger son Keanu Prado, 20, in their seaside village of Dumangas in Bohol, spent the last of the money his mother sent in March on rice, water, salt and oil. He now depends on neighbours to give him fish and meat when they can spare it.
His plans have been thrown into uncertainty. He was in his first year of college to study hospitality management, so that he could also work in hotels abroad.
“I want to give back everything that she spent on me,” Prado said of his mother, “to repay her for the exhaustion and hardship that she took on.”
DISPOSABLE RESOURCES
Returning workers have found themselves in a precarious situation, but it is often worse for those who decided to stay overseas.
Of the Philippines’ 2.2 million overseas workers on temporary contracts, more than half went to the Middle East. In many of the rich Gulf states, migrant workers — from the Philippines and other countries like India, Bangladesh and Nepal — make up a larger part of the population than locals — more than 70% in Qatar and Kuwait, and more than 80% in the United Arab Emirates.
Despite the critical role that they play in the economies of the Middle East, support for migrant workers has been uneven across a region where human rights abuses, xenophobia and limited labour rights are common and social protections are largely non-existent.
The result has been thousands of migrant workers left with limited access to cash, cordoned off into migrant neighbourhoods and quarantined in densely packed dormitories, putting some at higher risk for contracting Covid-19.
One Filipino worker in Dubai, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal — since the government is highly sensitive to criticism of its treatment of migrants — described dire quarantine conditions. In her room, six people were packed into three narrow bunk beds, with an open space in the centre no larger than one square metre, a setup typical of housing in Dubai’s migrant neighbourhoods. “We are fed up with having no distance in our small room,” she said.
She added that she has received help neither from the government of Dubai nor the Philippines. (Her country did offer $200 in aid to workers abroad, but many who applied, like herself, did not receive it.)
Her days were reduced to thinking about how to get the next meal for herself and the other migrants she lives with. “I feel low and dishonorable to stand in line to get food,” she said, but the charities handing out food are a lifeline. “It’s torture for me that I am the provider,” she said of her small group that has come to depend on her during the lockdown.
Qatar stood out from its neighbours by moving quickly to provide policy guidance on how companies could support their foreign employees during the pandemic, providing emergency loans to business owners to continue paying furloughed migrant workers and loosening restrictions on contracts that would allow workers to move between jobs if they become unemployed.
Several countries, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain, are treating sick migrants for free to try control the spread of the virus but have done little else to look after migrant workers. Reports of hunger and mistreatment are common.
Countries that have given subsidies to workers and businesses have rarely included migrant workers in their support programmes. “When they think of protecting the economy they don’t really have migrant workers in mind,” said Rima Kalush, programme director for Migrant-Rights.org. “While they’re of course necessary during normal economic times, they’re also very dispensable.”
For years, the prevailing assumption in many wealthy countries relying on migrant workers has been that there will always be a supply of willing labour. The pandemic has called that into question.
When the casual restaurant where Cams Alejandro, 26, worked in Doha, shut down in March after Covid-19 broke out in their commissary, the company offered employees two months’ pay, full end-of-term benefits — the equivalent of a pension for temporary contract workers — and a ticket back home.
The package was generous, but Alejandro turned it down. She preferred to work, and gambled that the restaurant would open again soon. She remained in Doha, living off her savings and a housing stipend from the company.
In May, the restaurant laid everyone off. Even though she stayed, in pursuit of her dream of becoming a flight attendant for Qatar Airways, Alejandro said the experience has given her a new perspective.
As she waits for a repatriation flight, she has been reflecting on whether she wants a life so far away from her home and her family. She has been taking online classes and now plans to stay in the Philippines.
“Instead of just work, work, work,” Alejandro said, “now I’m exploring different jobs.”
A 2017 study by the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that international migrants make up 3.4% of the world’s population but account for 10% of gross domestic product