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2 Filipino diaspora moves up value
chain By David L Llorito
MANILA - A growing global search for
English-speaking talent is greatly benefiting
Philippine workers who pursue overseas
opportunities and badly hurting the local
companies and domestic economy they are in growing
numbers leaving behind.
A recent study
conducted by Grant Thornton International and
Philippine accounting firm Punongbayan &
Araullo found that 43% of Philippine companies
rated the scarcity of skilled labor as the major
impediment to their business-expansion plans. Last year
only
15% of Philippine companies surveyed complained
about a chronic lack of skilled labor.
"Employers across industries are
experiencing ... the draining of our local talent
pool," said Greg Navarro, managing partner and
chief executive officer of Punongbayan &
Araullo. "Even in the accounting practice, we are
struggling to compete with foreign firms that see
the Philippines as a good resource for highly
trained, English-speaking [staff]."
Official statistics from the Philippine
Overseas Employment Administration corroborate
those complaints. Since 2000, the Philippines on
average has seen 79,000 professional and technical
workers, most of them college or university
graduates, take positions overseas each year.
Over the past six years, 10,000 nurses
have left the country annually for Saudi Arabia,
the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom,
Ireland, the United States and other destinations.
Close to 13,000 medical caregivers, many also with
nursing backgrounds, have likewise left each year
for jobs in destinations as far flung as Taiwan
and Israel.
Meanwhile, Japan and South
Korea are emerging as the most popular
destinations for performing artists, with each
country now receiving on average 55,000 Filipinos
per year. More worrying to national
competitiveness, the Philippines is sending a
growing number of highly trained
information-technology (IT) workers to such
countries as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Malaysia,
Singapore and the US - undermining the crucial
local electronics industry.
Official
figures may understate the actual outward movement
of IT workers to such countries as Singapore and
Malaysia, where they are often directly recruited
by employers there. Many Filipino IT workers take
advantage of the waived visa requirements for
fellow Association of Southeast Asian Nations
countries by applying directly to regional
companies while traveling on tourist visas.
Manuel Villa, a Filipino industrial
engineer who works for Fairchild Semiconductors in
Singapore, said there are many professional
Filipinos in that country. He said that apart from
IT workers, a growing number of Filipino
professionals are seeking high-paying jobs with
Singaporean and multinational companies, including
positions in upper management, engineering,
logistics and aviation. "The [official] Filipino
population here has already reached 120,000 and is
rising," he said.
Previously, the
professional exodus only affected a few sectors of
the Philippine economy, predominantly shipping,
aviation, engineering, construction and nursing.
In the past three years, however, the loss of
professionals has hit nearly every sector.
That includes Filipino journalists moving
to Singapore, Saudi Arabia and the UAE; engineers
and oil-rig workers to Nigeria, Russia, and the
Persian Gulf states; speech and physical
therapists to the US; and mining engineers and
geologists to Australia and China.
According to the Personnel Management
Association of the Philippines (PMAP),
high-value-added industries are being hit by
higher staff turnover rates, including
pharmaceuticals, banking, consumer goods, hotels,
electronics, semiconductors, telecommunications,
and IT. Anywhere between 33% and 59% of employees
who recently left their jobs in these industries
pursued new opportunities abroad, according to a
recent PMAP survey.
The lower-paying
public sector is also being adversely affected.
For instance, the state-run Weather Bureau and
Mines and Geosciences Bureau are increasingly
losing forecasters and geologists to better pay
offers from abroad. The Department of Science and
Technology recently revealed that out of almost
3,000 national scientists with PhD degrees in
various scientific disciplines, nearly 500 have
left the Philippines in recent years.
Outward march Even the Armed
Forces of the Philippines have not been spared
foreign poaching. Army sources who spoke with Asia
Times Online said Australia recently started to
recruit Filipino soldiers trained in asymmetrical
warfare and counterinsurgency operations,
sometimes luring them with the offer of
citizenship.
The Australians "know that
Filipino soldiers are well trained in the
different occupational specialties which make them
competent and efficient and they can communicate
and verbalize [in English] very well", a senior
army officer said in an interview. "The Armed
Forces of the Philippines is using American
military doctrines and it is compatible with
Australian military doctrines. For several
decades, our soldiers have been fighting the NPA
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