Flexible, industrious, and frequently skilled, Filipinos are finding their way into unexpected niche markets. Nurses trained in the Philippines, for instance, are more likely to end up working elsewhere. Hospital recruiters from Norway and the UK travel to Manila to hire them. Likewise, American school districts having trouble attracting new teachers are discovering ample supply in the Philippines. Recruiters hop on a plane to Manila, where, in crowded hotel conference rooms, they handpick certified teachers, who are given crash courses in Georgia history or California politics before they arrive on US soil...

One Nation, Overseas
By David Diamond, Wired.com

They're known as bagong bayani, a Tagalog expression meaning "new heroes." That may sound a bit inflated, but at a succession of December celebrations in Manila, Filipinos who work on contract in foreign countries get treated something like the Series-winning Yankees coming home to New York. One day is Health Awareness Day, when thousands of overseas Filipino workers, also called OFWs, are treated to free medical care, and another is Family Day, when at malls all around the nation, the government throws a mass party. Bright welcome banners stretch from rafters. Christmas music spills from loud speakers. Returned workers, along with their spouses and kids, walk around in costume from the Auntie Anne pretzel emporium to Ace Hardware to the Gameworx bowling arcade. They also make pit stops at the booth for free dental checkups and the booth for psychological counseling. Two years is a long time away.

December's bizarre climax comes when President Gloria Arroyo travels to Manila's Ninoy Aquino Airport to personally greet returning workers, who zoom through specially designated express lines for immigration and customs. After a welcome speech, Arroyo turns a big drum filled with tickets bearing the names of returnees and picks one from the batch to win a $2,000 grand prize.

It may look like a TV game show, but the Philippines has discovered the future of work. At any given time, about 10 percent of the country's 76.5 million population is hard at work - outside the country. During 2001, more than 800,000 people headed out on a commute that makes Rye-Grand Central seem like a milk run to the corner store. They went to Italy, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Singapore, and Uzbekistan. They went to Mongolia and Equatorial Guinea. Unlike Mexicans, who flock primarily to the United States, Filipinos traveled to 162 nations in all. Unlike Indians, who fill mostly tech and medical positions, Filipinos toil as domestic helpers, engineers, nurses, bricklayers, teachers, farmers, seafarers, stenographers, hairdressers, crane operators, cooks, and entertainers.

Having discovered its prowess as an outsourcer of labor, the Philippines is now pursuing the opportunity with fervor. Whereas the US has spent decades bemoaning the export of its jobs (to Mexico, to China), the Philippine government revels in the export of its people. Using technology to stay involved in family life back home, Filipino global commuters constitute one of the biggest sources of stability for the economy of a country perennially known as the Sick Man of Asia. Remittances, the money they electronically send back to their families, account for 8.2 percent of the nation's gross national product, stabilizing its peso, improving foreign currency reserves, shoring up consumption, and making more than a dent in the unemployment rate (now 11.1 percent). Last year, overseas Filipino workers sent home $6.2 billion. Indians sent home twice the amount - with 13 times the general population.

In short, this archipelago nation has succeeded at creating the world's most distributed economy, where the sources of production are so far-flung it boggles the mind. The machinery has gears in Andorra and the Seychelles and even Diego Garcia, wherever the heck that is. (Answer: a 17-square-mile atoll of coral and sand in the middle of the Indian Ocean, mostly a joint US-UK military base that's become a temporary work location for more than 1,000 Filipinos.) With advances in transportation and telecommunications barreling ahead, it's only a matter of time before the Philippine miracle becomes a standard for the new mobile global order, with skilled and unskilled workers commuting over multiple time zones to fill in labor gaps, zapping their wages homeward through space, reentering for a new assignment. Welcome to virtual nationhood.

In fact, this thriving "trade" has already made the Philippines the envy of the developing world. Officials from such poverty-plagued countries as Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, Nepal, and Vietnam have come to Manila to find out how they too can be prime producers of labor. The market for contract migrant work, they know, is growing: According to the International Monetary Fund, worldwide remittances totaled $2 billion in 1970; by 2000, the International Labor Organization set that figure at $73 billion. After a visit to the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, Indonesia's labor minister, Jacob Nuwa Wea, said, "We learned some things we can adopt at home - like mechanisms to protect overseas workers, how to prepare candidates to meet skill requirements, and how to license private employment agencies." Pakistan has patterned its overseas workers welfare fund after the one established by the Philippine government.

Flexible, industrious, and frequently skilled, Filipinos are finding their way into unexpected niche markets. Nurses trained in the Philippines, for instance, are more likely to end up working elsewhere. Hospital recruiters from Norway and the UK travel to Manila to hire them. Likewise, American school districts having trouble attracting new teachers are discovering ample supply in the Philippines. Recruiters hop on a plane to Manila, where, in crowded hotel conference rooms, they handpick certified teachers, who are given crash courses in Georgia history or California politics before they arrive on US soil.

Signs of this future already abound. You see them mobbing Hong Kong's Statue Square any Sunday afternoon - young Philippine domestic workers who celebrate their day off together: Hong Kong is a temporary home to 200,000 Filipinos. You see signs in the Dubai airport, Filipinos napping on benches between connections to various Persian Gulf destinations: They have been a major source of labor - both white and blue collar - in the Middle East since the 1973 OPEC oil embargo. You see their mark on ships and in ports everywhere: At least 25 percent of the world's seafarers are Filipinos, and the majority of cruise waiters, too.

"It's an industry," admits Patricia Santo Tomas, the Philippine secretary of labor and employment. "It's not politically correct to say you're exporting people, but it's part of globalization, and I like to think that countries like ours, rich in human resources, have that to contribute to the rest of the world."

Fifty-three-year-old Vidasto Lantaca is wearing thick glasses, his hair a mess. He paces barefoot, holding an unlit cigarette, in his mother-in-law's tiny house in Barangalo Hulo, an overcrowded neighborhood in Manila's Mandaluyong City served by the Parish of Our Lady of the Abandoned. A college-educated mechanical engineer and the father of two sons, ages 10 and 13, Lantaca has been unemployed for three years. His wife, Percy, a nurse, worked on and off as a baby-sitter overseas until her age prevented her from getting another contract. When she came back to stay, she began work as a midwife, supporting her family on barely more than $2,100 a year. But the Lantacas' lives are about to change.

The perennial Sick Man of Asia now has a borderless business plan: "It's not politically correct to say you're exporting people, but it's part of globalization."

In nine days, Vidasto will make his way through Metro Manila to Ninoy Aquino Airport, where he'll depart for the Middle East. Having scrounged up a job placement fee - he borrowed $1,000 from a friend and took out a loan of $400 from his recruiter - he'll head for Dubai to work as a quality control manager for a construction company. His monthly paycheck of $1,400 will help cover food and schooling, and might even enable the family to save.

This isn't Vidasto's first job overseas. He's been a Philippine global temp before. He worked for six years as a construction supervisor in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, coming home for long-enough stints to meet Percy and marry her. He also did time as a mechanical engineer in Eritrea. But for the past three years, the family has been living on a mere $175 monthly while Vidasto searched out his next opportunity. That meant digging themselves into debt and giving up their TV to pay for his physical - but this job in Dubai will ultimately get the Lantacas' lives on track again.

In his new post, Vidasto will oversee the maintenance and operation of machinery, like cement mixers, for National Ready Mix, a construction company owned by the conglomerate Lootah Group. He'll be responsible for assigning jobs to about 40 equipment handlers and for ordering spare parts. When he arrives in the United Arab Emirates, he'll be met by a company representative, shown around, and settled into his own private room. Along with his salary, the firm will pay for his food and housing. He'll communicate with Percy and the kids via cell phone - perhaps the company will throw in some minutes - and within a few months, he'll deposit thousands of dollars into the family bank account.

What sets the Philippines apart from other countries whose legions also spill over their borders into wealthier lands (200,000 Malaysians commute daily to Singapore, for instance; some 200,000 Thai nationals, or about a third of a percent, leave home to work elsewhere each year) is that the federal government here is avidly encouraging the flow. In an example of socioeconomic engineering on an unprecedented scale, the Philippine leadership is embracing its role as temp agency to the world and structuring a political "business plan" accordingly. Although the ratio of remittances to GNP in nations like El Salvador and Cape Verde tops that of the Philippines, no other government maintains so sprawling a network of workers with as strict a hand.

The government official responsible for all this is labor secretary Santo Tomas, whose office is located on the seventh floor of a centuries-old building in Manila's oldest section. She is in charge of local and overseas employment; these days, for instance, her department is busily trying to fill demand for health care workers in developed nations where populations are aging. Santo Thomas also helps protect employees once they're relocated. Under her purview, the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, funded by both employer and worker contributions, maintains a network of 27 worldwide and 14 regional offices to intervene when problems arise. It was the OWWA that was responsible for moving 30,000 Filipino workers to safety during the Gulf War.

Perhaps most important, Santo Tomas and her staff regulate the hundreds of recruiters who broker close to a million job placements each year. In 1974, Ferdinand Marcos created a mechanism for managing overseas workers on a government-to-government basis, but the phenomenon grew so quickly and became so unwieldy that four years later the government handed the business over to the private sector, choosing instead to provide regulation and oversight. Today, there are 1,300 private recruiters on record at the government's labor registry. They are the link between foreign employers - who also must register with the government - and job-seekers. They populate the upper floors of two- and three-story buildings along Manila's jeepney-clogged roads, advertising "Worldwide Jobs!" and they make money by charging the hired employee a placement fee. For a licensee to recruit legitimately, Santo Tomas and her staff require $7,000 up front as a surety bond, to be kept in escrow, and a clean legal record. Thereafter, her office keeps a regular public file of a recruiter's status (Good Standing, Delisted, Forever Banned).

"When I was young," says the labor secretary, "the only people in this country who traveled were the rich. Now we've democratized travel. I have a niece in Italy, a nephew in Bern, another nephew in Brussels. I have nieces in Los Angeles and New Jersey. By becoming an exporter of labor, we have broadened our horizons."

Santo Tomas has the poise and unharried demeanor of a long-ago charm-school graduate or pleasant younger grandmother as she sits back on a sofa in her massive office. She is open enough to admit that she pays her housekeeper the typical sum of only $50 a month and is willing to write her cell phone number on her business card in the event of further questions.

Appointed to her post in 2001, she weaves a convincing case for promoting and protecting international labor. The minimum wage in Manila is $5.30 a day, compared with the average $15 a day earned abroad under contracts approved by the federal government. Working in Manila, nurses bring in $15,000 a year; in the US they earn an average of $47,000. By diligently remitting money home, Filipinos help their local banks, which not only make a profit on currency exchange but use the capital to finance trade or buy Philippine bonds. The billions of dollars in foreign currency deposits go a long way toward underwriting the country's own development.

Of course, in the grand scheme of the Philippines' future, providing temporary labor to the planet is itself supposed to be only temporary. If the governor of the nation's central bank, Rafael Buenaventura, has his way, each productive, dedicated overseas laborer will be an advertisement for doing business right there in the Philippines. Buenaventura envisions global companies choosing the Philippines for establishing new plants, corporate headquarters dotting his archipelago and a million mothers working minutes from home. The push to send workers out of the country will pay back in spades. "At this time," he says, "it is too late to be competitive in manufacturing. The biggest boon we have is trained manpower that speaks English; therefore, we could be an outsourcing center." He pauses. "But if ever we can get our act together, we'll be like Ireland, where you can bring back skilled workers. That doesn't bring in remittances, but it provides jobs and raises export earnings."

For now, though, it's hard to imagine the labor flow reversing. Many Filipinos actually find their host countries preferable to their homeland: Among the estimated 7 million overseas workers, more than 2 million have chosen to stay permanently, either getting amnesty or marrying into foreign citizenship.

I MISS YOU; DO YOUR HOMEWORK; SEND MONEY - 100 million cell phone text messages a day are why overseas Filipino workers and their families remain families.

For a complete copy of this article, go to: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/philippines_pr.html

___
[Articles featured in HFC website are original texts as originally published in their respective sources. No word has been edited in any way.]