Patricia Miraflores*
With the number of recently repatriated Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) reaching the 800,000-mark, the “OFW voting bloc” is emerging into a potential key player during the upcoming Philippine elections. Although there are speculations as to how Overseas Absentee Voting would unfold during the pandemic, we have yet to see how exactly these unprecedented mass repatriations would affect local votes. Based on voting patterns in the past few decades, OFWs have been tagged as politically apathetic individuals, given their low electoral turnouts. Although this assumption was partially debunked during the last presidential elections, the pandemic introduced new obstacles that may impede OFWs’ ability and motivations to vote.
Despite these uncertainties, migrant repatriation budgets have become crucial to policy agenda-setting not only for upper tiers of governance, but also to grassroots organizations — especially those composed of migrants who are among the most vulnerable groups during the pandemic. In such matters, the migrant organizations are rather indispensable in representing the interests of OFWs across the globe. While we can only anticipate the so-called OFW voting bloc coming to fruition during the actual elections, the political role of migrant organizations became increasingly visible during the pandemic which exposed the incapacities of the Philippine state in supporting its overseas workers. This entails not only lobbying for the interests of OFWs, but also protesting against the decisions, policies, and laws enacted by the government that the organization deems counterintuitive to the migrant agenda. However, to what extent progressive migrant organizations can affect societal change remains a question, given the limitations of political dissent in many developing countries where most migrants come from.
Bridging gaps between law and governance
In November 2021, Migrante International, the largest global alliance of OFW groups, published its ten-point Overseas Filipinos Electoral Agenda for 2022 to address the weak enforcement of the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act of 1995 (RA10022). This law was enacted to improve the standards that protect and promote the welfare of distressed OFWs and their families, yet there has been a significant lack of migrant assistance even before the pandemic. The organization presented its ten demands for presidential candidates in the upcoming national elections to bridge the implementation gaps between law and practice. For instance, one point raised on the agenda concerns the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA), the agency under the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) that protects the interests of OFWs, which was not given 100% national budget allotment during the pandemic. Migrante highlighted the need to cover welfare and legal services for OFWs, especially those in need of local lawyers’ assistance in Middle Eastern countries where many were stranded due to contract termination, pending cases, and flight cancellations. However, only the operational costs of OWWA were covered by the budget and many distressed OFWs abroad did not receive urgent assistance via the special purpose fund. Illustrated below are the OWWA obligation and continuing budgets based on data published in August 2020:
Source: Commission on Audit (2020), in Philippine pesos
The organization also demanded accountability for the alleged corruption inside OWWA when the overpriced purchase of hygiene kits, napkins, thermal scanners, water and snacks totaling 1.2 million Philippine pesos raised concerns. In its official statement, the organization’s chairperson criticized the tendency of Philippine agencies’ exploitation of the pandemic to embezzle the budget that should be allocated for urgent OFW assistance. The excessive mandatory fees collected from OFWs, as listed below, were also addressed by the organization which called for the discontinuity of such revenue-making schemes:
Source: Migrante International, published by Bulatlat (26 July 2021)
As a long-time defender of OFW rights and welfare, Migrante is known for its capacity to pressure government agencies into taking action and rectifying situations concerning migrants. One recent example transpired in December 2021 when ex-OFWs from Saudi Arabia, with the support of Migrante, protested outside the OWWA office demanding their unpaid wages. The agency promised to coordinate these matters with their former employers in Saudi Arabia and directed the protesters to appropriate channels for government support.
The risks of progressive migrant action
As a progressive organization, Migrante’s demands for societal change have consequently resulted in vocal criticisms of the Philippine president Duterte’s administration. Recently, Joanna Concepcion, the chairperson of Migrante, expressed her concerns regarding the commodification of OFWs during the pandemic and the exploitation, trafficking, and recruitment of Filipino women. She criticized the administration’s use of Filipino healthcare workers as a “bargaining chip for COVID vaccines,” citing DOLE’s offer to Germany and the UK to export its Filipino nurses in exchange for 600,000 vaccines. Moreover, Migrante expressed its rejection of Senate Bill 2232 which was proposed to create the Department of Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos, an entirely new department dedicated to OFWs. The OWWA, along with other OFW-relevant agencies under DOLE, will be merged and transferred under this new department. To this, Concepcion opined that “the government will not be able to deceive [them]” that this will work in the best interests of OFWs since it does not attempt to resolve poverty as the root cause of migrant labor. As such, Migrante demands the abolition of the labor export program, calling for a large-scale shift from the national economic strategy of using migration as a solution to local unemployment.
This year, Migrante reported that they have been red-tagged by the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) along with fellow progressive migrant organizations who have openly criticized the Duterte administration. The NTF-ELCAC was founded on the premise that it will reduce the strength of the New People’s Army, the armed wing of the communist party in the Philippines. Human rights groups reported that red-tagging, or the tactic of labelling individuals or organizations as terrorists, was used by the task force to silence activists without substantial proof especially after the Anti-Terror Law in 2020 was implemented. Since the implementation of this law, the task force has reportedly escalated beyond red-tagging, with local human rights activists claiming to be in danger of being arrested or killed.
Beyond national borders, Migrante reported that nine of its global chapters — Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, Taiwan, USA, Australia, New Zealand, Toronto, and Vancouver — have already witnessed the appointment of alleged NTF-ELCAC military personnel in the Philippine consulates and embassies in countries or regions with high OFW populations. The incidents in these nine areas indicate that OFW individuals and groups who expressed their opposition towards the current administration were red-tagged, intimidated, silenced, or subjected to increased surveillance by these personnel.
Towards dispersing power from the ‘central’ government
Progressive action of alliances such as Migrante International exemplify the long-established effectiveness of rights-based migrant organizations in filling the lacunae between migration policy and practice. These organizations are especially important under crisis situations when urgent needs have to be addressed with quick responses and coordination between the sending and receiving countries. Progressive migrant organizations become catalysts for change not only by providing these needs themselves, but also by pressuring the state to expedite the process of approving and delivering government support. However, as much as the politics of migration have expanded beyond national borders, these organizations’ capacity to affect societal change is still contingent on national politics. Given the national political context of the Philippines, this could even lead to dangerous circumstances for migrants themselves. One potential way to address these dangers is through closer coordination between international organizations and grassroots migrant rights organizations to ensure national governments uphold and safeguard the rights and principles migrants are entitled to — both at home and abroad. Another potential solution is through the concerted efforts of the supranational and subnational levels of migration governance in dispersing power from the central government. These are often discussed in the context of opening national borders and regularizing migrants. The need to mitigate the political dangers of expressing national dissent, as is the case of progressive OFW organizations, provides further impetus for such multilevel governance strategies.
Patricia Miraflores* is a graduate student pursuing a joint Master’s degree in M.A. Euroculture at the University of Groningen and Uppsala University. She is a recipient of the 2020 Erasmus Mundus scholarship award from the European Commission. Email: p.e.c.miraflores@student.rug.nl