LEAVE THE OFWs ALONE
DURING the lean, hard years of the despot, our OFWs provided the hard currency buffer that propped up the country’s acquisition of vital imports. The dollar sources at Binondo were partly funded by OFW remittances sent through the informal market. Plus, of course, the heroic effort of propping up whole families and entire communities.
Today, the OFWs and their re in terms of saviors and national survival. But what sector provides $30 billion a year, let us emphasize this, without government support, with hardly any investment coming from the State? The BPO, sure, is slowly gaining traction to do a repeat of the OFW story, but some items of the TRAIN law have slowed down the momentum of the offshored jobs sector.
So, the generator of hard currency – and the massive stimulator of consumer spending – that true and trusted OFW sector. Then and now, the national story remains unchanged. Modern-day heroes they are still.
What has changed? The tune the eggheads are singing on the OFWs as of late. Example: OFWs may be the dark underbelly of the country’s slow, often-frustrating march to industrialization. That the big income from the OFWs is the equivalent of a national resource that dampens the enthusiasm of the country to unleash its production potential. The human exports are there and they earn big on a sustained basis. So, why bother taking the hard, baby steps toward industrialization? So goes that tortured argument.
On the surface, it is a compelling argument with a lot of merit. Some countries in Europe and Africa went through that same stage of lethargy after the discoveries of oil or mineral resources that worked two ways. It kept those countries going. It drove those countries to de- industrialization. Resources extracted as lowhanging fruits indeed resulted in both complacency and lethargy among the citizens and leaders who ought to know better.
But are we on the same boat? Let us look at history and what the Marxists call “objective conditions.”
If we backtrack a bit, it will be all too clear to us that the erosion of the country’s industrial foundry – steel, rubber, textile and chemicals – came before the mass exodus of our workers overseas. The factories that dotted the then fringes of today’s Metro Manila, particularly the Valenzuela and the Libis-Marikina areas, began closing down because of the production efficiencies of competing manufacturers and our manufacturing sector’s failure to upgrade and innovate, with the aim of producing better and cheaper products .
That was the same critical juncture when China started cranking up its factories, the seminal production activity that ultimately led to China’s “great leap forward “in manufacturing and production. Today, it is known as the “factory to the world.”
At the same time, our government was starting the shift to assembly lines at the processing zones, which was not manufacturing and producing products in its purest form.
The old man Jacinto, the visionary who set up in Mindanao the steel plant that could have been the backbone of industrial production, was entangled in the political turmoil of the late 1960s and the early 1970s, which forced him into exile.
With disincentives to manufacturing piling up, and with no course reversal done by the State, the hopeless Filipino pounding the streets looking for jobs, any decent-paying job for that matter, started to vote with their feet and cheap luggage, the start of the global diasporas of overseas Filipino workers, the OFWs.
It was the dying manufacturing sector and the moribund real estate sector that primarily drove the Filipino workers into the Middle East and elsewhere.
Of course, the OFW sector was also institutionalized at the precise time the agriculture sector took a beating. The cheap loans dried out, the supervised food production programs of government lost its steam and momentum, the banking system’s tolerance for the cheap farm credit was over and done with. The unabated slash- andburn and bigtime logging had by this time practically eviscerated the once-thriving watershed areas, with farm irrigation as the rural catastrophe helped trigger the migration of the young from the traditional farming provinces into where jobs were – and this meant overseas.
The rural young, cautious and unadventurous to a fault, were forced by circumstances to join the migration to places that offered a better option than idle, unproductive lives in the dying countryside.
The OFW sector was never the golden parachute that killed industrialization. The reverse took place. As the country’s industrialization program was beaten to the ground by foreign factories and the government’s failure to stem the collapse of the traditionally strong production sectors and agriculture, the young moved elsewhere. And, to stress the obvious, saved the country though various stages of economic crises via their steady and sustained hard currency remittances.
The idle academics should leave the OFWs alone and take their unsubstantiated, empirically challenged prognosis elsewhere.
The OFW sector has brought about problems that impact on the country’s social fabric, true. The OFW sector is not without serious downsides, true.
But the service that the sector has rendered to the country in the past and continues to render until today – and in the unforeseeable future still – is more than enough to blunt the downsides and the negatives.
And there are no remunerative jobs for returning OFWs. That such jobs exist locally and exist aplenty is fake news.