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Globalization Boosts the Trafficking of Filipino OCWs

In recent years, the number of IT and other professionals migrating to foreign job destinations has increased to make the number of OCWs mow at some 10 million. Together with millions of other migrant workers from poor countries, their labor makes major capitalist countries richer. The following article, delivered as a speech by the author, currently executive editor of IBON Foundation, during last week’s first International Migrants Conference on Forced Labor, Export and Forced Migration Amidst Globalization in Manila, is being reproduced by Bulatlat.com.

BY ANTONIO TUJAN, JR.
Bulatlat.com

Migration is as old as humankind itself. People have always moved around in groups or individually in order to seek greener pastures, literally and figuratively. While this movement may have been the exercise of freedom in seeking new lands and resources, trading posts or employment for individuals or groups of people, another form of movement also emerged in trafficking of people or the slave trade of old.

The nation-state did not deter migration, but dealt with this movement of people according to its needs and situation in the context of its prevailing social system. The emergence and existence of empires from the slave empires up to modern imperialism hastened the movement of peoples as cheap labor according to the specific needs of accumulation of each moribund social system.

More crisis from imperialist globalization

Imperialist globalization represents the current effort of monopoly capital to address the problem of deepening crisis of overproduction exacerbated by technological revolution. Advances in technology bring forth more efficient production processes, better products, and faster, cheaper ways of doing business. The immediate effect may be success in business competition, but the overall effect is not more profits, but more recessionary crises due to overproduction.

Neo-liberalism or the Washington consensus has become the new paradigm of imperialist globalization in order to open new markets for trade and investment. This is the way out of the crisis as excess goods are dumped and excess capital is utilized in financial speculation in these so-called emerging markets. Monopoly corporations preach free market economics in order to further monopolize trade and investment, divest nation-states through privatization of state assets and services, and remove regulations that prevent greater monopoly integration and control and higher profits.

Globalization promises modernity and prosperity, but delivers the opposite. Financial speculation allows monopoly corporations to siphon off the lifeblood of economies, while trade and investment liberalization allows monopoly corporations to kill off local enterprises which are in no position to compete. The overall result of globalization is the destruction of the domestic economy, the massive loss of jobs and livelihood, and the domination of foreign monopoly corporations.

The world is in greater danger today of financial collapse because of the rapacity of monopoly corporations who do not want their profits reduced a single dollar, and because neo-liberal globalization allows them to destroy Third World economies in their effort to pass the burden of crisis. Such wanton destruction and carpet bagging has brought us the Asian financial crisis which is being replicated and spreading all over the world. On the other hand, globalization has not saved the US and Japan from recession and threatens the whole world today with financial collapse.

For the peoples of the world, this situation has meant worsening unemployment. According to the ILO 2001 World Employment Report, open unemployment in the year ending 2000 has reached 160M. This is 20M more than before the peak of the Asian financial crisis in 1997. This also means that one third of the world’s labor force is unemployed. Furthermore, the minimum wage has continued to fall, in some industrialized countries to below subsistence level.

Increasing migration

Economic displacement and unemployment due to overproduction in the industrialized countries and due to dumping, financial speculation and other effects of globalization provide the material conditions promoting economic migration which includes labor migration or migration for employment. Furthermore, the social and political effects of globalization result in or exacerbate existing social and political conflicts. In this way, globalization also provides the material conditions for displacement and movement of people as refugees and asylum seekers.

The ILO estimates that there are a total of 80M to 97M migrants and their dependents, excluding asylum-seekers and refugees in 1995 all over the world. From 1990 to 1997, migrants increased as a percentage of the labor force in most OECD countries.

Not only has the number of migrants increased, but the number of receiving and sending countries has doubled during 1970 to 1990. New major receiving countries include Italy, Japan, Malaysia and Venezuela, while new major sending countries include Bangladesh, Egypt and Indonesia.

Furthermore, it is commonly estimated that there are an additional 30M irregular migrants worldwide, or migrants under irregular entry, employment and residence. It is further estimated that 400,000 to 500,000 are smuggled into Europe and 300,000 cross the border into the US annually.

The Philippines has historically been a major sending country for economic migrants since the turn of the century. But the explosion in Philippine migration occurred since 1979 when annual deployments shot up to six figures and has consistently increased up to 837,929 in 1999 and 841,628 in 2000, the bulk of them going to Asian destinations. First semester 2001 deployments of 466,663 exceed 2000 figures of 459,832.

Following the global trend, highly skilled and professional workers are on the rise, from 25% in 1998 to 31% in 2000. The share of production workers among newly deployed Philippine overseas contract workers (OCWs) has been declining from 34% in 1998 to 23% in 2000. Feminization is also a global trend and is most marked in the Philippines where, not only are female migrant workers in the majority, but their share has grown from 61% in 1998 to 70% in 2000.

Total cumulative migration is now estimated at more than 10 million, the bulk of permanent migrants residing in North America. Since the 1990’s, it can be said that the Philippines is finally cashing in on its investment in labor export, as the continuously growing remittances of migrant labor earnings have ended the country’s severe BOP crises of the 1980s.

Current levels of annual remittances are more than the country’s debt service which averages $5B annually. And just as a daughter or a son working in the city significantly augments the income of the rural poor, migrant worker parents or children assure decent living for millions of Filipino families.

Temporary or permanent migration

There are many causes and influences for migration in general. It normally develops as an individual option as a result of interactions between societies and is enhanced when special relations develop between societies, whether as neighbors or as colonizer and colonized. In these situations, there exist the usual social and economic reasons or circumstances that promote permanent migration.

Social and political conflicts, especially wars, result in displacement of communities and individuals and give rise to refugees and asylum-seekers. While asylum-seekers may usually be permanent migrants due to political oppression, refugees are those who are physically and/or economically displaced as a result of socio-political conflict. They are not necessarily seeking permanent migration but in most cases only seek temporary relief and shelter until such time that they can return to their homeland.

Globalization has resulted in the increase of social and political conflicts and refugees are able to cross borders to escape war temporarily. But the greater increase in migration in recent decades is due mainly to migration for employment or labor migration. In many countries like the Philippines, for example, the jump in migration in the late seventies and the bulk of migration up to the present is due mainly to the rise in short-term project or contract-tied migration or the OCW phenomenon.

Globalization presents contradictory policies and trends for migrant labor. On one hand, globalization increases flexible hiring arrangements and individual contracts which provide favorable conditions for the hiring of low-wage migrant workers. The increase in trade and investment also creates natural channels for the increase in the flow of migration. Special rules attract migrants in professions where labor scarcity is experienced. Recently the increase in demand for certain services such as nurses and IT professionals has resulted in new regulations to attract temporary migrant workers from such countries as India, the Philippines and the North African region into Germany or the United Kingdom, for example.

On the other hand, crisis which accompanies globalization results in the singling out of migrants and the tightening of migration laws. Australia, Canada and New Zealand which continue to accept permanent mirgrants have shifted to temporary or project-tied migration which shifts the profile of temporary migrant from the previous semiskilled workers to those who are highly qualified and economically desirable. These policies may not necessarily prevent the deluge of migration but allows greater exploitation of migrant and refugee labor.

Trafficking in migrant labor

Consistent with the policies of neoliberal globalization, the processes and character of labor migration shifted since the 1970s worldwide. Unlike previously where government agencies arranged group migration for employment, private agencies took over in the recruitment and placement of migrant workers. The ILO “suggests” that as much as 80% of all foreign job placements from Asia to the Gulf States were handled by private recruitment agencies.

The sudden upsurge of Philippine labor migration and the current leading position of the Philippines as sending country can be credited to the effectiveness of private labor recruitment agencies. This phenomenon coincides with the predominance of individual contracts and labor recruitment agencies in industrialized countries.

Though recruitment and placement are now privatized, the government through its pertinent agencies promote labor migration as a means of easing domestic unemployment as well as earn revenues from various fees. Remittances of earnings provide relief for the country’s balance of payment deficits. The Philippine government is an example of an effective partner to the private agencies as its agencies like the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) operate to promote Philippine migrant labor, develop business opportunities for its labor recruiters and smooth out problems that hinder the business of exporting Philippine labor, as well as earn billions of pesos from fees, insurance and membership dues.

But unlike the traditional forms of economic migration, the current upsurge in contract labor migration through private recruitment agencies creates a new dimension of labor migration that is oftentimes no better than irregular migration. In effect it is a legalized trafficking of migrant labor.

Under globalization, labor migration is no longer just systematized but is turned into a major business that goes beyond fulfilling the demand for workers in host countries and earns through recruitment fees paid by the would-be employer in expectation of future profits to be earned from the migrant worker. More important, private placement agencies in collusion with government amplify (by attraction) and fulfill the demand for jobs in Third World countries and wring the migrant worker of an even greater share of his or her surplus value, not from the employer, but directly through government and placement fees, usury and other forms of exploitation.

The nefarious practices of even more unscrupulous recruitment agencies such as irregular entry, employment and domicile for unsuspecting migrant workers only underscore the new dimension that profiteering by recruitment agencies and governments from migrant labor has become equivalent to trafficking under globalization. Even regularly processed migrant workers face similar problems of abusive, oppressive and more exploitative working terms and conditions, as well as various forms of discrimination in the host country.

International surplus population

Migration, of course, is not simply about finding greener pastures, career fulfilment or family unification. Migration must be understood in relation to the process of accumulation in the particular stage of human and social development that it occurs. In the current era of modern imperialism, the essence behind migration is accumulation by monopoly capital and the phenomenon of international surplus population.

Surplus population is created by capitalist accumulation as more and more workers are displaced by new machines, by increasing constant capital. This vast reserve army of the unemployed is not overpopulation, but is a surplus created by the advance of technology and the alienation of the worker from production due to capitalist monopoly of the production means.

As global monopoly capital exports excess capital and goods in order to pass the burden of the crisis of overproduction to the colonies and neocolonies of the imperialist powers, monopoly capital does not create jobs in the Third World but achieves the reverse in destroying jobs in domestic industries and subsistence agriculture. Furthermore, it may achieve relief in disposing of overproduction, but in the long run, the export of capital also achieves the effect of increasing the domestic surplus population in the imperialist countries.

The vast reserve army of unemployed proletarians and semiproletarians in the Third World is a surplus population not created by capitalist accumulation but by the imperialist policy of neocolonialism and maldevelopment. This constitutes an international reserve, an international surplus population, that monopoly capital extracts superprofits through wages that are systematically depressed to far below already cheap standards and costs of living.

It is in the context of international surplus population that economic migration and the refugee issue must be apprehended. Besides assuring superprofits, this international reserve army provides the continuous flow of migrant labor that is not only normally docile, but also ensures depressed wages in imperialist and other industrialized countries.

Depressed wages

Migrant wages are depressed because employers utilize the combination of discrimination, oppressive hiring and working conditions, effect of wage differentials in the sending and host countries, and social and cultural differences. In another perspective, migrant labor also reduces the cost of services in industrialized countries. In this sense discrimination suffered by migrants at work and in the rest of society in the host countries and the social, economic and cultural differences that lie behind this discrimination are not just tolerated but are actually enhanced because it assures cheap wages.

In this way, through migrant labor, the international reserve army complements and increases the national reserve in industrialized countries and provides monopoly capitalists with flexibility to deal with crisis in industrialized countries. On the other hand, compradors and puppet governments of key sending countries utilize whatever specific advantages exist like a highly adaptable or trainable workforce like the Philippines or geographical proximity like Indonesia or Bangladesh to Malaysia and Singapore to promote employment migration. Such labor export policy enunciated in various ways is meant to reduce or mitigate unemployment and to increase foreign currency earnings in a manner not far different in impact from trafficking in slave labor.

Labor migration, as a specific means of exploiting international surplus population by imperialism to depress wages and manage falling rates of profit in their homefront, implies that migrant labor issues must be addressed in the full context of imperialism, both in the sending country and the host country. Specific migrant issues and national policies must be put in the context of fundamental relations of trafficking in systemically cheap migrant labor, in solidarity to workers and people’s issues in the colonies and semicolonies and the workers issues in the imperialist home front.

This is the reason why labor migrants, who are commonly temporary, are keenly interested in issues in their home countries and less in their host countries. They belong to their country’s reserve army which was utilized by imperialism in its home front. They are torn apart by the attraction for permanent migrant and the temporary nature of their status. Their struggle is solidarity with the peoples’ movements for national and social liberation in their home countries. Even permanent migrants share this orientation to a certain degree.

On the other hand, their day-to-day struggles for rights and welfare as workers must be within the context of the trade union movement of their host countries. Only in this way will monopoly capital be thwarted in its scheme to use migrant labor against the working class, and labor aristocrats and reactionaries to use migrants as a scapegoat to divert the workers attention to the real issues.

Of course, this solidarity between the migrant organizations and the host country trade union movement will prosper only in the context of a united struggle of the workers of the world against imperialism, not just in the issues that deal with capital’s exploitation of reserve labor, but also in shop floor issues.

Globalization and the international surplus population

The policy of neoliberal globalization and the economic process of crisis and globalization further increases international surplus population as rapidly as the forces of production are destroyed by financial speculation, trade dumping, monopoly investment and so on. Furthermore, production integration through subcontracting, albeit still limited in scale and uneven in the utilization of technology and investment in constant capital, directly internationalizes surplus population.

Globalization systematizes the utilization and exploitation of this reserve army through massive contract-labor migration in the hands of private recruitment agencies. This corresponds with flexible hiring and individual contract mechanisms that now dominates in the host countries.

Similar to flexible hiring mechanisms, contract-labor migration strips migrant workers of their right and removes the social responsibilities of the employer and government of the host country to the migrant. Further, the rights of migration, domicile, family and so on are easily skirted through contract-labor migration. This is similar to the effect of individual contracts and flexible hiring which frees the employer of social obligations of job security and benefits to the workers while at the same time effectively stripping the workers of labor and many other human rights.

This explains why contract-labor migrants suffer not only separation from their family and community, but greater discrimination and abuses at work and in the host country in general because they do not enjoy nominal rights and guarantees enjoyed by permanent migrants. In this sense, they share the lot of refugees and asylum-seekers.

Thus, it may be said that globalization has spawned modern slavery in the trafficking of migrant labor, not the freedom for migration and movement and equality for migrants that it promises. Bulatlat.com

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