Think of Filipinos abroad, and images immediately come to mind of nurses in American hospitals, musicians in Hong Kong bars, drivers in Iraq, mechanics serving Saudi oil companies, or domestic helps in faraway homes. And we read of billions of dollars they send back home every year in what’s decidedly one of their country’s biggest sources of foreign exchange.
Last year, they sent home a whopping $17.3 billion, making the Philippines the fourth-largest recipient of worker remittances in the world, after India, China and Mexico. This year, the inflow is expected to reach $18.1 billion.
But it’s hardly remembered that Filipinos, in hundreds of thousands, are also at work abroad as seamen on foreign ships and claim a large share of the remittance pie. In fact, of all the world’s ship workers afloat at any given time — some 1.6 million — 25 per cent are Filipinos, which makes the Philippines the largest single source of ship hands for the world’s merchant fleet. In 2009, seafarers alone produced an inflow of $3.4 billion, 12 per cent more than a year before.
It’s said that the first Filipino ever to hit the international seas was a man named Enrique, whom Ferdinand Magellan, a 15th century Spanish explorer, had bought as a slave and taken with him to circumnavigate the world. But not before another Ferdinand, President Marcos, turned a dictator in 1972 and drove the country towards economic ruin did Filipinos start taking up seafaring, among others, as a serious profession. Today, Filipino seafarers are a coveted lot, preferred by foreign ship-owners for their loyalty, language ability and skills. They are paid well — as much as $8,000 a month for an officer — and are trained to international standards by the country’s many well-recognised maritime schools.
The demand keeps growing, and the schools, turning out some 25,000 graduates every year, are busy upgrading their facilities and courses. Maritime circles expect a worldwide shortage of some 90,000 officers by 2015 and the authorities in Manila are anxious that the Philippines must do everything to ensure it doesn’t drop out of the International Maritime Organisation’s White List. It has been on that list for many years now, an acknowledgment of the quality of maritime education provided in the country.
It can be said that the Philippines is well protected in the international job market. It occupies a large spectrum. If Filipinos have been a fixture on the world’s flags-of-convenience ships, Filipino singers, musicians, and dancers have been no less in cities from Hong Kong to Seoul to Tokyo to Dubai to Rio.
They started going out as early as the late 1950s, since the famous Bayanihan Dance Company made a successful debut at the Brussels Universal Expo in 1958 and appeared on New York’s Broadway the following year. A decade later, the equally famous Philippine Madrigal singers broke into the international scene with aplomb at the first Choruses of the World festival at the Lincoln Centre in New York.
For the Philippines, these were epochal events and threw the door open to a wider world. There was something exotic about those performances, carrying the flavours of native music and dances to audiences largely unused to them. This, plus the Filipinos’ natural performing talent and a special way of connecting with the audiences, readily endeared them to bar managers and show organisers across the world.
There was something else — a wonderfully open and outgoing disposition that the Filipinos inherited from their former Spanish colonial rulers, and an incredible passion for western performing arts that they imbibed from the Americans, who came to occupy the country afterwards. No other group of people in Asia at that time could claim to combine those two traits — along with a high degree of literacy and knowledge of English — so well in their character as the Filipinos did. In fact, the Filipinos were Asia’s first westerners and its first international citizens in the field of performing arts.
So far, this has worked very well for the Filipinos, minimising the impact of poverty in an economy damaged by the long years of Marcos’ predatory dictatorship. But, as the economy gets bigger at home, throwing open newer occupations and opportunities, and as competition from others becomes stiffer, it might not work as well for long. Both by volumes and rates of annual increase, inward remittances might fall over the next decade. That’s the general assumption.
Still, nobody is panicking for three simple reasons. First, overseas Filipinos cannot be easily dislodged from the specific niches that they occupy, like seafaring and entertainment. Remember, we aren’t talking of truck drivers, security guards, or machine operators. Second, a bigger home market will still be too small to absorb all the talent that’s on offer. And third, literacy, language skills, and an ingrained cheerfulness of manner will always mark Filipinos apart as desirable buys in the international labour market.
