CEOs advocate better conditions for migrant workers
abs-cbnnews.com | 06/05/2008 10:57 AM
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By PURPLE S. ROMERO
abs-cbnNEWS.com/Newsbreak
Business executives are taking up migration issues as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) program following the first Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) held in Belgium last year. The Philippines is slated to host the second GFMD this October.
The GFMD focused on the capacity of migration to be a tool for sustainable growth, in line with the Millennium Development Goals and explored avenues for strengthening the linkage between migration and development. These included the regulation of remittance facilities, transparency in financial and labor markets, and protection of migrant workers.
Doris Magsaysay Ho, chairperson and CEO of the Magsaysay Maritime Corp. said in a meeting yesterday that labor issues are the "unfinished business" as free movement of goods, capital and information placed higher on the priority list.
She added that migration should be given more attention as it is an issue that involves "not the movement of goods nor capital, but people."
There are around 192 million migrants in the world. Makati Business Club chairman Ramon del Rosario, who was at the meeting of corporate executives, cited 2006 data which showed that 8.2 million of migrants are Filipinos. Ho said that this number is not expected to go down as both low and high-skilled workers remain in demand across different parts of the globe.
However, the continued demand for migrant workers poses potential problems of cultural clashes, dubious salary promises, unsafe working conditions and human trafficking.
Ho added that other social costs of migration include discrimination, imprisonment of migrant workers due to ignorance of host country’s laws and workers themselves turning into ‘social misfits.’
Wrong perception
Some workers are caught in the trap of debt-bonded labor, where money earned for extremely long hours of work automatically goes to the pockets of the employment brokers.
The international social auditing organization Verite showed, in its studies, how debt-bonded labor sucked foreign contract workers dry in Taiwan, Malaysia and Jordan in 2005, making them more vulnerable to exploitation.
Compounding this problem, according to Ho, is the misleading perception among Filipino families that migrant workers rake money easily, leading to the wastage of remittances on consumer spending. Recipients of remittances also have the tendency to depend solely on their loved ones who work abroad for survival.
"The money earned by overseas workers goes to nothing because of lazy relatives," she said.
Overseas workers are therefore encouraged to invest on microfinance and other entrepreneurial activities.
On a global level, the International Organization for Migration recently launched a P55- million project to improve research and inter-regional information exchange on remittance corridors in Southeast Asia and Europe.
The project will map remittance corridors for the Philippines from Italy, Indonesia from Netherlands, and informal remittance flows from Malaysia to the Philippines and Indonesia to determine the proper channels of money transfer and prevent the loss of remittances.
