Increase for home caregivers abroad
Meanwhile, the Philippine Overseas Employment Administrations (POEA) governing board increased the minimum salary of departing Filipino home caregivers to $400. According to news reports, the POEA also raised the minimum wage requirement to 25 years old, prohibited the collection of placement fee and required a prequalification certificate.
POEA Chair Rosalinda Baldoz said that through this new policy, Filipino caregivers would upgrade their skills and eventually graduate from their grueling 24/7 work week.
Despite the Department of Labor and Employments (DoLE) projection that the new policy will result in a 40-percent drop in yearly deployment, Labor Undersecretary Danilo Cruz said that the new requirements would bring in more benefits for overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in the domestic sector.
He added that the drop could be easily compensated by new markets that need skilled and professional workers. Cruz said that new labor markets have opened in Canada, Libya, Spain and Taiwan, while Australia and New Zealand are on the pipeline.
Analyzing data on migrant labor, the new policy proves to be a good solution for the Macapagal-Arroyo administration to ensure a steady increase in OFW remittances. POEA data showed that in 2006, the number of deployed workers totaled 1.09 million of which around 300,000 were domestic helpers.
Given that the 300,000 caregivers currently earn an average of $200 monthly, they therefore earn a combined total of $60 million monthly. Even assuming a worst-case scenario that 40 percent of them would be laid off as a result of the new policy, a $400-monthly salary for the remaining 180,000 caregivers means an accumulated $72 million.
OFW remittances amounting to $14 billion in 2006 are therefore expected to further increase as more Filipinos strive to become domestic helpers abroad due to the promise of higher pay.
One can therefore expect that the male-female ratio of OFWs 59.26 percent, female; 40.74 percent, male will remain. Women, after all, would prefer to go abroad as caregivers where they can earn 56 times more than a minimum wage earner in Metro Manila.
The institutionalization of labor migration is detrimental to the local economy since economic growth becomes dependent on revenues from abroad like OFW remittances and people are wont to go abroad instead of work for domestic industries.
The Macapagal-Arroyo administrations current policies on wage hike show that it does not have the interest of the rank-and-file in government agencies in mind, but only the officials who are already getting higher salaries. While overseas Filipino caregivers can benefit from an increased salary of $400 monthly, their interests are merely incidental to the overriding concern of propping up OFW remittances in the years to come. Bulatlat
(Computation of dollar equivalents is based on a peso-dollar exchange rate of P48.95 per U.S. dollar.) Bulatlat
