Migrant Pinoy workers
THE highly-successful national government’s overseas employment program is supposed to meet the employment needs of the burgeoning Philippine population.
Decades ago, the government came up with the program owing to the acute shortage of employment opportunities and the insultingly low pay of workers in the country.
But some quarters considered the thousands of Filipinos who worked in the vast sugarcane plantations in Hawaii between 1906 and 1946 as our first migrant workers.
Mostly Ilocanos from Northern Luzon, including Pangasinan, and Visayans, these more than 100,000 Filipinos were recruited by the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association.
Today, millions of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), many of them domestic helpers, health professionals and seafarers, are employed in various parts of the world.
And last Friday, January 20, no less than President Marcos paid a glowing tribute to these “modern-day heroes” whose dollar remittances keep the Philippine economy afloat.
People across the globe see the Philippines in a good light because of these OFWs. “This is because of the good work you are doing,” said Marcos before members of the Filipino community in Zurich, Switzerland.
Marcos specifically thanked the OFWs for their hard work and major contributions to the development of the economy.
The Ilocano President assured our OFWs that the government, through the Department of Migrant Workers (DMW), would continue to provide assistance to them.
Without doubt, meeting the mushrooming needs of our millions of migrant workers, particularly legal, financial and medical, is a move in the right direction.
