Coming home jobless

THE government should help the 3,000 workers coming home from Libya find employment and other sources of income. There are concerns that the political fallout from the Taiwanese deportation row would also result in more jobless OFW returnees as Taiwan threatened to become more stringent with their hiring policies of Filipinos. But I am less worried about the Taiwan scenario as I said in a previous column.

Taiwan needs Filipino workers for their economy and Filipinos are not easily replaceable. There is a compelling reason why the Taiwanese, especially their electronics industry, have always preferred the English proficient and technically skilled Filipino worker. The demands of their economy would eventually supersede this diplomatic impasse.

I am more concerned about those OFWs that would be coming home from strife-torn Libya and other troubled parts of the Middle East and North Africa. After social protests led to the downfall of autocratic leaders in Tunisia and Egypt, we’ve seen a wave of similar protests sweeping neighboring countries including Yemen, Bahrain and Libya and even Iran, and who knows how many more to follow.

There are about 600,000 OFWs in the Middle East. How many OFWs do we expect to go home from these countries remains unclear because Filipinos, just like in the case of Egypt, would rather stay put and tough it out if they can, choosing the certainty of a job in a troubled host country than the prospect of going home jobless.

President Aquino had previously instructed the Department of Labor and Employment, the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (Tesda) and other agencies to find employment for OFWs here at home. That’s really a tough task considering the only sunshine industry at present is the BPO sector, and those coming home are surely not all qualified for BPO jobs.

If I were the President, I’d throw in the services of the Department of Trade and Industry, the Department of Finance, the Bureau of Internal Revenue, and the Department of Interior and Local Government into the mix of government departments that would help returning OFWs, with the idea of encouraging the returnees to start their own businesses.

Local governments in cooperation with the BIR, DTI and Tesda should offer tax incentives, training and other services to help returning OFWs become their own bosses. Perhaps a three-year tax break for those starting their own businesses and the provision of loans for start-up capital and other incentives would be good.

Most of the workers who are coming home are very capable of starting their own businesses. They can use the skills they have already been practicing for many years with their foreign employers. For those going home to their provinces, agriculture might offer an attractive investment as most OFWs come from an agrarian background anyway. The local governments must be ready to present them with viable opportunities.

Of course, aside from offering assistance to help returning OFWs set up their own businesses, the government should also organize job recruitment fairs and training seminars/workshops for skills that meet the demand of local firms. Perhaps the government can offer an incentive to private companies that are willing to offer such training to returning OFWs.

The private sector already has its own training network consisting of accredited vocational/technical schools and computer schools all over the county. The government needs only to coordinate with companies to give some sort of priority to returning OFWs or at least accommodate them along with other aspirants.

Hopefully the political situation in the host countries would stabilize and would not further increase the pace of our OFWs’ return. But even if this were to be true we should always be prepared for retrenchment, the closing down of certain industries, economic recession, and other factors that would force host countries to suddenly change their immigration rules or hiring policies. For instance, just late last year the economic woes of Dubai have forced many of our OFWs working there to go back home. And yes, recently, we can look at what happened with Taiwan and Libya as examples, demanding the need for long term planning by the government.

Who can we trust?
Just last week alone, we saw crime reports where two taxi drivers held up their own passengers and the security guard of a bank plotted the robbery of one of its customers. The German Embassy recently complained to the government that two of its nationals were robbed here while touring, one of them by our own policemen, who asked the tourist, Daniel Ludwig, to buy them laptops worth over P200,000. The other German tourist, a 50-year-old woman was victimized by an Ativan gang and taken to Baguio where she lost almost P300,000 from her ATM and credit cards.

One crime does not make a crisis or trend, but these are a spate of crimes, and anybody can see that public safety is really a big problem nowadays, no matter if the police say crime statistics are down.

Of course, the tourists who have been victims of crime here will not only feel unsafe to return, they will also spread the word, which in these days of social networking means spreading the word to the whole world via Facebook, blogs and other online sites.

The number one problem of tourism here is not a bad logo or slogan. It’s safety. –Ernesto F. Herrera, Manila Times

ernestboyherrera@yahoo.com

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