MANILA—THEY are the armies of salvation; the nearly million entrants to the country’s labor force, which an economist said ensures the steady supply of skills for the economy.

“We simply have too much labor,” Doctor of Philosophy holder Alvin Ang told the OFW Journalism Consortium (OFWJC) ®.

Ang last month presented his research in public that affirms the continuing export of labor doesn’t necessarily contribute to the phenomenon called “brain drain”. Advocates against government’s structured processing of workers for foreign economies have warned the Philippines may find it difficult to reach economic progress because its highly-skilled people –doctors, engineers, scientists, teachers– are moving out.

The University of Santo Tomas professor even doubts the country will experience an economic slowdown due to this outflow. Ang said this is so because he believes the Philippines “has adjusted to the workers’ overseas migration by replenishing them”. “The government seems lucky,” Ang explains, “because abundant labor supply has given it time to ease fears of a permanent brain drain.” Ang added that even if Filipino doctors and nurses leave, “there are many more left behind here.” “Not all Filipinos want to migrate anyway,” he said.

He uses himself as an example: “If the Philippines’s brain drain problem were permanent, I myself would have not been here right now.”

Ang is going against past survey, especially by the Social Weather Stations, that points to the increasing number of Filipinos wanting to go abroad for work. Health industry leaders have warned in the past of the exodus of doctors and nurses, especially from government hospitals, seeking the high pay accorded to their colleagues in another country. The local airline industry also warned of such exodus, especially of mechanics and engineers poached by headhunters of foreign airlines.

Another economist, Edita Tan of the University of the Philippines, said in a 2006 paper has said that even the rising numbers of Filipinos migrating for overseas work and permanent settlement “has not tightened the country’s [domestic] labor market”. “(The Philippine) labor force increased faster than domestic and foreign labor employment,” Tan  wrote in her article titled “Labor Migration and the Philippine Labor Market” for the International Migration Review.  

Mapping

ANG’S belief comes at a time when the labor department announced plans to map the local workforce would know what companies abroad want their skills. The Department of Labor and Employment’s global mapping and profiling system aims to export some 800,000 skilled workers in the next three years.

“We should take advantage of the continued worldwide preference for Filipinos,” said Labor Secretary Arturo Brion in a press conference that bared the mapping plan. Brion explained that under his system, the Manila-headquartered DOLE would get information on job openings in countries that have Philippine labor attaches and offices.

Ang said such system is nothing new. The overseas work mapping scheme approach, he added, is similar to what the Labor department’s Public Employment Service Office (PESO) is doing since the mid-eighties. He added that the three-year period is within what he calls the four-year lag time before the country’s “temporary brain drain” becomes permanent. The Philippine economy has long been enduring a “temporary brain drain”, he said. He explained that despite rising numbers of skilled workers going abroad, the overflow of labor supply here are still filling up companies and public sector offices in the Philippines.

The lag period, he observes, for government’s mitigation of the brain drain problem is four years.
Even after the fourth year when many skilled workers have been deployed, the replenishment labor is waiting in the wings, Ang added.

Ang’s fear, however, is in the health sector: “Given all the issues the sector is facing due to fast-rising numbers of migrating nurses, the brain drain in that sector might become ‘permanent’ very soon.” Ang agrees with Tan that the economy is not generating jobs while the labor force is growing by the numbers. That’s the only problem, he said.

A cursory look at government data would show that while the combined number of temporary contract workers and permanent residents rises above the 900,000-level annually from 1997 to 2005, the country’s labor force never went down below 38 million workers (see Table 1).

A country’s labor force is made up of the employed, the unemployed and the underemployed. The Philippines had an average unemployment rate of 9.5 percent, looking at the same 1997 to 2005 government data (see Table 2).

So with job generation a persistent Philippine problem, Filipino workers coming from all types of occupations —including professional and technical workers— have taken overseas work as an option.  

Prodding

ROSMON Tuazon is an example of the quandary that Ang’s and Tan’s studies are trying to understand.

Tuazon’s parents and sister Russel have prodded him no end, he said, of flying out of the country and join Russel in the United States. “She keeps on egging me, although I am still okay here,” said Tuazon, who works as a public relations writer for a water utility firm.

Tuazon, a graduate of legal management in UST, said his parents also goad him to leave saying “there is no more hope here at home.”

But Tuazon said aside from a stronger reason to abandon the Philippines, he needs more information and skills. The option to try out working in another country would always be there, he said, but “available information can help me make an informed decision in the future”. For now, Tuazon said he would continue honing his skills as a writer, as evidenced by his post-graduate studies.

Tuazon’s decision, for Ang, could have been supported by government. Skills development opportunities for local workers that can cater to both overseas and domestic job opportunities are missing in the country, Ang said. “Workers do not know where to go for these.”   And assuming that the workers have been trained, and the information on the job openings (and their skills requirements) are present, Ang said not all of them will migrate overseas anyway.

“Government must train workers here. Then, in the end, he will decide whether he will stay here or try it out abroad,” Ang explained. That is where Tuazon is right now: remaining “interested” with information about overseas job opportunities.

OFW Journalism Consortium