Domestic helpers

MANILA, Philippines – There have been well-intentioned attempts of government agencies and legislators to provide measures for the protection of the most vulnerable of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), the so-called household service workers or domestic helpers. Practically all of them are women and are breadwinners for their respective families. Especially in East Asian countries like Singapore and Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, some of them can receive salaries as low as $200 monthly. There are enough sensationalized cases of physical or verbal abuse, rape, and other violent actions against them to warrant greater vigilance on the part of both government and civil society in protecting and promoting their welfare. What is important, though, is that policy makers and legislators avoid knee-jerk reactions and purely reactionary measures that can do more harm than good.

Take, for example, some of the policies announced by the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) about four years ago: Increase of minimum salary of household service workers, from US$200 to US$400; resetting the minimum deployment age limit from 18 to 25; prohibiting the collection of placement fees from domestic helpers, whether prior to departure or on-site through salary deduction; and requiring domestic helpers to acquire the Household Services National Certificate II and to attend the Language and Orientation Program of the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration. All these policies were meant to protect the welfare of Filipino domestic workers going abroad.

A team of social scientists used their respective disciplines to assess the wisdom of these well-intentioned measures. Two economists, Dr. Peter Lee U of the University of Asia and the Pacific and Dr. Alvin Ang of the University of Sto. Tomas; an anthropologist from Miriam College, Dr. Nanette Dungo; and a sociologist, Dr. Trinidad Osteria of De La Salle University analyzed the possible impact of some of these well-intentioned government intervention into the OFW industry and demonstrated how they can actually prejudice the very people they are purported to help. They all pointed out to the empirically verified truth that most OFWs do not come from the poorest of the poor. Most of the OFWs are production workers, professional and technical workers and skilled service workers (such as nurses, seafarers, caregivers) who come from lower middle-income to higher middle-income households who have to invest as much as P100,000 in deposits and other prepaid expenses which are beyond the means of really destitute families What drive most OFWs to go abroad is not abject poverty but large wage or income differentials between what they can earn abroad and what they are currently receiving.

Only a small percentage of them are actually unemployed in the Philippines.

The economists in the team cautioned that setting minimum wages, especially in receiving countries that do not have local laws setting minimum wages, could easily lead to a significant decline of demand for domestic workers from the Philippines who as a whole contribute as much as $4 billion yearly, more than 2 percent of our GDP. The same can be said of the imposition of mandatory insurance which increases the transaction cost and, therefore, the effective price that prospective employers would have to pay for Filipino domestic helpers.

Although the so-called price elasticity of the demand for Filipino domestic workers still has to be more accurately calculated, there is enough anecdotical evidence that the alternative of employing Indonesian, Vietnamese, and other Southeast Asian service workers poses a serious threat to the continued deployment of Filipinas as domestic workers in our major markets in East Asia and the Middle East. Already, Indonesian workers are replacing Filipinos in Hong Kong and Singapore. There are no minimum wages fixed by the Indonesian government. In fact, the Indonesian government is very pro-active in spending on the training of low-income Indonesian women without even a high school education to prepare them for domestic work in Hong Kong and other developed East Asian countries.

Setting minimum wages can actually hurt the most vulnerable of the OFWs, those belonging to the unskilled Filipino workers whose only opportunity of working abroad is as service workers in the household. Although it is true that some highly qualified professionals like teachers and nurses sometimes end up as domestic workers, at least for a time, the majority of OFWs who are household service workers have the least education, most of them being grade school drop-outs. These are the ones who can really redeem their respective families from abject poverty even with the $200 monthly salary they received.

Instead of setting minimum wages of $400 or more or, even worse, outright banning of domestic workers going to Middle Eastern countries where there are sensationalized cases of abuses, what the government should do is follow the example of Indonesia and invest part of the money contributed by OFWs as taxes in manpower training programs addressed to poorly educated and unskilled women from the countryside (those whose alternative employment is to be domestic helpers among rich and middle-income Filipino families in the urban centers like Metro Manila and Metro Cebu). Even $200 monthly is higher than what most domestic helpers receive in the homes of the middle class and the rich in the Philippines. These hapless “maids” should be given the freedom of choice to work abroad to take advantage of the wage differentials, just like their more skilled and educated counterparts in the OFW market. This would be a most effective poverty-eradication strategy since the families that would be benefited would be households in the rural areas where 75 percent of the Philippine poor reside.

Policy makers at the POEA and legislators should avoid knee-jerk reactions to the latest sensationalized reports about OFWs being abused. There are approximately 500,000 Filipino domestic helpers in Saudi Arabia. Even assuming the grossly exaggerated figure of 5,000 Filipinas having been victimized one way or the other in that country, it would not be rational for government intervention to throw the baby with the bath water. Even assuming that there have been illegal recruiters who have criminally sacrificed the welfare of the domestic helpers they deployed, it would be unfair to condemn the whole manpower recruiting industry that serves a very useful purpose in effectively helping the most vulnerable members of society to work abroad in order to help their families rise from dehumanizing poverty. For comments, my e-mail address is bvillegas@uap.edu.ph. –BERNARDO M. VILLEGAS, Manila Bulletin