Amid a row with Kuwait, President Rodrigo Duterte urged compatriots working in the Middle Eastern country to come home since there are now, as he claims, many jobs in the Philippines.
The assertion brings us back to two things: first, crowds who leave the archipelago to find well-paid decent work elsewhere and second, our resignation to dependence on remittances from workers abroad to shore up the economy.
The former is a reaction to domestic realities like persistent unemployment that in 2017 still stood at five percent of the population. It is also a fallout to contractual work — which Duterte promised but has failed to end — by which employers keep hiring and rehiring employees instead of granting them tenure.
The latter is a convenient reference for state economists whenever they sound their hallelujah’s about the country’s strong economic fundamentals.
That is when they ironically expose the hollowness of any presidential promise to turn overseas work from being a necessity into a mere option.
Job fairs will be held across the country in celebration of Labor Day tomorrow that will offer 132,247 overseas and local jobs. At least 17,000 jobs are up for grabs in Cebu.
Stack those numbers against at least a quarter of a million Filipinos whom the President wants to come home from Kuwait, and his balikbayan call turns out to be desperate rhetoric.
Agencies like the Commission on Filipinos Overseas together with the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) seemed to hold up well amid the strain between the Philippines and Kuwait following the discovery of the remains of slain Filipina housemaid Joanna Demafelis in a freezer in the foreign country.
But Philippine officials should have proceeded with more caution in taking care of our countrymen after the President enforced a ban on going to Kuwait for work following the Demafelis tragedy.
Obviously, Kuwait was looking for an excuse to make a harsh pushback, an excuse Ambassador Renato Villa presented when he said our embassy would rescue abused Filipino workers if Kuwait failed to respond to them within a day.
That coincided with release of a video showing a Filipino embassy staffer helping a maid flee.
Kuwait’s taking offense over our diplomats’ gaffe is no smokescreen for the martyrdom of our people by the commission or omissions of Kuwaiti employers or for our people’s subjection to human rights abuses like the confiscation of their passports and phones.
Sidestepping the issue of the oppression of laborers does not befit a first-world nation like Kuwait if it wishes to be known for humanity and magnanimity rather than symbolize the cruelty of the opulent.
Kuwait’s expulsion of our ambassador and arrest or detention of other Filipinos who were only looking after their own highlights that country’s dearth of compassion for our harrowed people and justifies the ban on workers who have for so long helped hold together households there.
For President Duterte, tough as he styles himself, now is not the time to save face by making people wrongly believe that they can come home to jobs that would leave them well off.
The government should now more than ever seek ways apart from a safe exit plan to uphold the welfare of Filipinos who are still in Kuwait.
If this administration wants to leave a non-illusory legacy for Filipino workers, it should foster a climate for Pinoy research and development, entrepreneurship, job security, and living wages.
Our officials can help as soon as they abandon the mentality that ours is a vassal state to others that hold the jobs, that our workers in faraway lands are milking cows for our foreign reserves.