“Just what kind of image does our government really like to project to the outside world about who we are as a people?”
Once again, the government has an OFW problem in its hands.
The standoff between the country and Kuwait with regard to our domestic helpers is, however, frozen with both countries unwilling to budge from their respective positions.
Kuwait considers our domestic workers who run away from their violent employers to seek help from our embassy and be housed in shelters a violation of Kuwaiti laws.
The Philippines, on the other hand, considers it a dereliction of duty if it cannot provide assistance to its citizens in distress – and rightly so.
As a consequence, Kuwait has canceled the issuance of any kind of new visa to any Filipino who wishes to travel to Kuwait with the exception of those who have existing valid work contracts in that country.
We have chosen not to respond by matching what the Kuwaiti government did perhaps, due to the statement of PBBM a few weeks ago that he does not like to burn his bridges on this issue because doing so would close all avenues for a future rapprochement.
He said this during an interview when some hotheads in the government wanted to react in kind like issuing a total OFW deployment ban to Kuwait.
About two weeks ago, however, Kuwait announced it has started negotiations to hire Ethiopian domestic workers ostensibly to replace Filipinos.
Whether this was a show of force on Kuwait’s part we do not know.
The government has chosen to remain quiet except to say we are ready to sit down to settle whatever issues the Kuwaiti government is alleging.
This was followed by the DFA saying we will not apologize for taking actions to protect our citizens which is like saying we are not backing down.
If we look at this recurring problem, it is evident this needs careful study to come out with a long-term solution to this perennial issue of foreign employers treating our domestic workers brutally.
The number of OFWs being repatriated or have been repatriated from Kuwait should already tell us the extent and gravity of the problem.
Yet, we still seem to project the desire to settle the row with Kuwait so that we can continue sending domestic workers to that country because the salary of domestic workers there is reputedly the highest in the Middle East.
I hope I am reading this thing wrong but if that is the intention of the government, it is the wrong move.
Considering the repeated problems being encountered by our women who work basically as indentured servants in foreign lands, we still want to preserve this deplorable program.
At this stage of our economic development wherein the government has been working hard to be able to graduate to a high middle income economy in a year or two, we should have started a program of gradually lessening the number of domestic workers we send abroad.
But this is clearly not the case.
It begs the question why we want to keep on doing this to ourselves.
Just what kind of image does our government really like to project to the outside world about who we are as a people?
And speaking about country brand, our country is not even within the top 60 in the world, according to one study I read, that has a country brand while some of our neighbors are already on the list.
This means the world does not know what to make of us Filipinos.
How can we really expect other countries to take us seriously or have a positive image of our country and people if we ourselves do not believe that national pride is important?
For instance, achieving a high middle income status for the country means having arrived at a certain level of development that requires us to act in a manner befitting that level.
Continuously sending domestic helpers abroad is not the way to do it.
We should now be focusing our attention on sending skilled and professional workers so that we will not be known as the number one source of domestic helpers.
As far as I know, there is no other country that has a program of exporting women labor the way we do.
Some people might say we cannot eat pride when people need work.
After all, there is nothing to be ashamed about hard work as long as it is honest. True enough, but in the real world, what is happening to many of our women is painful and gut wrenching.
Remember that worker who fell to her death cleaning a window in a high rise building and the other murder victims being brought home in coffins?
These should spur the government to find a way to end this appalling program.
In the final analysis, this is a failure on the part of many administrations because they failed to institute workable programs to train these women with a trade so they can earn money here instead of going abroad to work in a difficult to monitor environment.
Yes, they send foreign currency to fill the coffers of the government that is always on deficit spending but at a huge social cost to Filipino family life.
The only long term solution to this problem is to start a process of gradually reducing the deployment of domestic workers until we reach zero deployment. The question is, will the government have the political will to bite the bullet and do it?