CEOs advocate better conditions for migrant workers

Written by Purple S. Romero

FRIDAY, 06 JUNE 2008

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.