Another blow
IT’S not war, not terrorism, not an earthquake, it’s cheap oil pouring out of the desert. And it’s about to turn into a crisis for those Filipinos working in the Middle East.
To pour water (or fire) on troubled oil, POEA and DOLE officials are falsely assuring our expats that a million jobs await them when they come home. “What an insult!” retorted one hero-in-the-making. Bewailed another with a smirk, “If that was true, why are there OFWs?”
I ran into Susan “Toots” Ople, the image of her father Blas, last Monday. We were both late for the post-breakfast Kapihan, so at the first chance, I grabbed her to ask what she would do if something could be done for her soon-to-be constituents, granting that she’ll make it to the Senate (she should, being the one most keenly identified with those whose careers were first mapped by her father).
Toots’ suggestion is for government to draw up an agreement with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states whereby workers terminated by plunging oil revenues will be allowed to seek employment under another employer. Under present laws, the host country does not allow foreign workers to transfer from one employer to another. “Only a government-to-government accord can relax such a provision in the Saudi law,” Toots explained.
Are DOLE and DFA up to it? An attempt to face the problem headon would be better than creating a mirage of incredible promises. (Example of a flaky solution is training balikbayan OFWs for entrepreneurship. With such a program in place, would 2,500 jobseekers leave on a jet plane every day to seek greener pastures in the desert?)
Sinking oil prices will save us $6-$7 billion a year. In exchange, we could lose a chunk of the $24B that OFWs remit annually (2015 figures were an astronomical $27B), though Bangko Sentral avers that “remittances will remain flat,” an optimistic projection, given that even nurses and others not belonging to the oil industry in Qatar have been given their walking papers.
The good news is that the BPO industry is set to overtake the OFW dollar earner in two to three years. Unless we are dealt another blow.