PHILIPPINES
The Manila Times
13 Feb 2018
The signing of the total ban on the deployment of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) to Kuwait does not end the national conversation about the overseas workers program, or quiet down the high anxiety of the OFWs and their families today.
This development should rather lead the nation to a wider inquiry and a more intensive discussion of a more effective program for managing the massive OFW challenge.
We say this because Kuwait is only one OFW-destination country and the tragic and sad plight of many OFWS there is only one issue that needs to be addressed in the total picture.
Likewise, our attention must not only be drawn to the situation and welfare of the Filipino domestic workers abroad. We must attend to their special concerns even as we value the contribution that they are making.
The point was vividly brought home to us by this: as we close the book on one OFW who was found killed and placed in a freezer in Kuwait, we also learned of another OFW case, wherein a Filipino OFW was awaiting execution for her killing of a child of her employer.
These sad stories remind us how wrenching often are the problems facing our OFWs in foreign lands.
The OFW community, even just counting those in the Middle East, is massive. We are talking here of nearly 10 million workers or more. And they include both Filipino documented and registered workers, and undocumented workers, those who went to their work destinations without the normal papers required under our own overseas employment laws and regulations.
Apart from the size of the OFW community, there is also the enormous size of the annual remittances that our OFWS remit to their families and to the country. At this point, the remittances already top $26 billion a year. The amount has been consistently growing over the years, and it has now reached nearly stratospheric heights that the nation and the economy could ill afford to let it be snuffed or radically changed.
We believe the government, led by all executive departments and agencies whose functions relate to the OFW community, should seize the opportunity to undertake together a comprehensive and collective study of the OFW program, in order to review the broad plan and refine its many components, update the various policies covering each area of concern, and upgrade the specific measures to carry them out.
The government – both Congress and the Executive branch – has striven to come up with legislative measures and regulations designed to resolve problems in particular areas of concern.
But now, it appears that servicing the overseas workers program and ministering to the needs of OFWs and their communities abroad have spawned a vast bureaucracy of thousands of employees. And we haven’t even counted yet the addition of a special bank for OFWs, which is the latest service that the government has added to the list of services for our overseas workers.
Attending to all the tasks, problems, concerns and the special problems requiring focus and attention will demand a high degree of generalship and managerial competence.
The task should be approached as a massive management challenge. The work cannot be taken in one bound. It must be undertaken one piece at a time; problems must be resolved one at a time. And then at the end of the day, if the plan is sound, everything must cohere into an effective plan for the total revitalization of the OFW program.
We will only add this word to this speculative vision of how the overseas program can be redesigned and refined. It must also contain special programs and solutions to special problems and cases, such as the growing problems of criminality that have arisen from the sheer size of our overseas workforce, and the far-flung OFW communities.
We won’t go so far as to suggest that we need a full-fledged department now for overseas Filipino workers. That would be too far out…
Throwing bureaucracy at the problem is like throwing money at the problem. You discover as a consequence that it is not worth all the cost.
(First published in The Manila Times – http://www.manilatimes.net/propitious-time-refine-ofw-program/379898/)
