Labour market cold to financial insecurities of migrant workers, The Nation

How do you solve a problem like Maria? The case for stronger migration governance…

From nanny-cum-cook-cum-laundry-woman in an Asian city, Maria promptly plunged into work in an export garments factory eight years after her return home. Wages were better, work conditions allowed her one day off a week and there was handsome overtime pay. Her life as a migrant worker was over.

Then one mysterious day she fell ill. What started as a suspicion that she inhaled too much cotton dust from cutting fabric ended with a much deeper malaise, diagnosed six months after a cough that wouldn’t go away. She had contracted the HIV/Aids virus.

Promptly, she was thrown out of her home that she had sustained through eight years of monthly remittances. She was put in a government hospital that has since become her home. Along with other patients, usually migrant returnees, they are hidden from view.

Maria’s story mirrors the vulnerabilities that somehow disappear in the reckoning of advantages to both labour-sending and labour-receiving countries. Remittances remain at the top of a list of economic justifications for why governments adopt, however unofficially, the export of labour as government policy.

Yet it is also a central feature of the global labour market that the majority of foreign workers constitute young able-bodied women, hardly equipped with the socio-cultural-psychological wherewithal to navigate the complexities of the global marketplace.

Some countries, however, have stepped up to the plate.

Sri Lanka has negotiated bilateral agreements with a Jordanian insurance company to provide

cover for all domestic workers.

Just recently, Thailand entered into bilateral agreements with Cambodia, Laos and Burma to provide better monitoring and surveillance of cross-border migration.

Singapore openly admits that its continuing viability as a city-state hinges on constant labour importation. Training for skills upgrading is an option to domestic helpers who can acquire a nursing diploma.

Most labour-sending countries like Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Philippines have institutionalised an overseas welfare fund to provide insurance benefits to workers and their families in cases of death, repatriation and disablement.

Maria’s predicament, however, remains unresolved.

Current social insurance schemes miss out on various other contingencies that afflict migrant workers the world over. The majority of complaints centre on issues of non-payment of salaries, breach of contracts, onerous conditions of work and cultural adjustment problems.

Workers arrive in these countries stranded. Agencies fail to show up at the designated pick-up points. Others are asked to double up work at a family-owned restaurant or a mother-in-law’s house. The very worst cases forcibly end up in their master’s bed for sexual favours. Like Maria, their brutal predicament is known only much later.

For those fortunate ones with an all-round trouble-free experience, their return home is a tale of sudden insecurity. They have provided for everyone but themselves and accumulated no savings, despite long careers spent overseas. A long line of children, nephews and nieces would have grown up and been educated on remittance money, the family home refurbished, the land title fully secured and paid for. But the migrant returnee only has a suitcase of clothes and a television set purchased from Dubai Airport.

To date, there is no pension fund or forced savings scheme for migrants. For while countries with ageing populations worry about the availability of social security funds, there is almost no thought given to migrant workers’ financial insecurities. Perhaps it is time to factor in these additional costs in the global labour market equation. Or, more pointedly, put more teeth in migration governance.

nTess del Rosario is a senior research fellow at Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore. She can be contacted at: tdelrosario@nus.edu.sg

By Tess del Rosario
Special to The Nation
Published on July 7, 2008