Two years ago, in Manila, interim agencies began offering trips to a new destination: Poland. Dolfa Ravena, a Filipino worker in a factory in Warsaw, tells us about it: “Getting to the United States, Canada or Germany is difficult. I chose your country [la Polonia] because it is the easiest destination to reach in all of Europe”, he tells Gazeta Wyborcza. “I had asked my uncle, who had already emigrated, and he told me ‘Poland is fine’”.
At the moment, Filipinos are the third nationality receiving the most work permits in Poland, after India (45 thousand) and Nepal (35 thousand). If in 2017 there were only 733, in 2023, 29 thousand Filipinos obtained a work permit in Poland.
The main differences compared to other nationalities are gender and age, explains Olga Wanicka, researcher from the University of Warsaw which studies the migration of Filipino citizens. They are mainly women and older (between 35 and 45 years old). For example, 90 percent of Indian migrants to Poland are men, while half of Philippine citizens migrating to Poland are women. This is partly due to the migration of Filipino women to the Middle East or Hong Kong, which has been happening for decades, to find work as maids, housekeepers or babysitters.
Polish agencies present Filipino workers to employers as “smiling, people who know English well” (it is one of the country’s official languages), as well as of similar culture, because they are a predominantly Catholic country.
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History repeats itself in Austria. Without tears. Without drama. One day in August, María Dio, 25, says goodbye to her mother, her cousins and her two-year-old daughter: instead of taking the bus, she gets on a plane in Manila, the capital. After 19 hours of flight and four hours of train, the following day, he gets off the platform in the Austrian town of Westendorf, to work in a retirement home.
From tourism to care services, almost no sector is free from staff shortages in Austria: the country is unable to fill 174 thousand jobs. Added to this number is that of the thousands of people who will soon retire. For this reason, last year, the Austrian government signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Philippines to establish guidelines on the transfer of qualified personnel. The relationship between the countries is not new: it began in the 1970s, when Austria “imported” Filipino nurses to ease shortages in hospitals.
Jann Siefken, director of reCAREity, an agency in Graz, Austria, which recruits staff for care services, specifies that the relationship is different than that with staff from European countries. In this case the workers were not always reliable: “If there was something they didn’t like, they got in the car and went home,” he says. Filipinos, on the other hand, are “friendly by nature, helpful and helpful,” explains a The standard. Over the past 18 months, Siefken has worked to bring around one hundred professionals to Austria from the Philippines. The Austrian government plans to deliver around 400 per year until 2027.
There are 1.96 million Filipino workers abroad: these people sent 197.47 billion pesos (about 3.180 billion euros) in remittances, between April and September 2022
Paradoxically, these hirings occur at the same time that the Austrian government is considering the possibility of deporting Syrian refugees, and several Austrian parties are calling for them to be deported. strengthen the laws on the right to asyluma central topic of discussion in Austria ahead of the elections on 29 September.
In English it is called cherry-pickingand refers to the idea that selection is made based on convenience. Faced with an increasingly older population and a shrinking job market, some European countries have begun to select who can enter the country based on their needs. In the care sector, Europe follows in the footsteps of the United States, where between 10 and 15 percent of nurses were born outside the country, and 4 percent in the Philippines.
The export of workers, a state doctrine
Under the long tenure of President Ferdinand Marcos (1965-1986), the Philippines made the export of workers a state doctrine, awaiting the influx of foreign exchange.
Unlike the “Asian Tigers” (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan), where successful economic development was attributed to education, in the Philippines, where it failed to integrate its highly educated workforce into the national economy, the government has concentrated its efforts on facilitating employment abroad, explains research from MIT. As a result, currently, there are 1.96 million overseas Filipino workers, according to data from Philippine Statistics Authority of 2022. These people sent 197.47 billion pesos (about 3.180 billion euros) in remittances between April and September 2022.
“The best Filipino staff suitable for you. We are the first agency in Spain specialized in domestic services of Filipinos and Filipinas for luxury clients,” says a recruitment agency with offices in various European cities. “Are you looking for a domestic worker of Filipino origin? We can help you find the right person. Write to us. We are in Madrid,” reads another. “It works on demand. We have a base of 16 thousand women,” explains an agency for domestic workers in Madrid to El Confidencial.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary, in its 2005 global edition, published two definitions of the word “Filipino.” One was “Woman or Girl from the Philippines”, the second “Domestic Worker”. The sociologist Julien Debonneville recalls this in his book “The global domestic work industry in the Philippines” (The Globalized Domestic Work Industry in the PhilippinesENS editions), in which he explains how “the institutional production of this globalized domesticity is closely linked to the processes of otherness that contribute to disciplining, moralizing and normalizing these women”. According to Debonneville, “this set of social representations, which associate Filipino women with docility and devotion towards others, is more broadly inscribed in a matrix of discourses steeped in coloniality, which revolve around ‘women of the Global South'”.
“It’s like you have to go somewhere and then you prepare to go there; I trained to become a housekeeper,” reports Emerita Águila, a Filipino housekeeper who works in Spain. “It’s not difficult because I prepared on purpose,” she says. “What is difficult is moving away from the family, because we also leave our children in the Philippines,” he continues crying. “I can handle the work.”
Emerita arrived in Spain with the help of a relative, while others do so through agencies. Her first job was taking care of children. He says the family was very kind. “They treated me like I was part of the family, I ate with them, they treated me well.”
With the increase in contracts, irregularities have also increased. In the first six months of 2024, the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre documented 15 cases of abuse of Filipino workers in Poland, most related to excessive recruitment costs (nine), breach of contract (eight) and lack of information (six).
“Employment agencies in the Philippines look for an employer willing to sponsor them and charge a fee that varies from 3,500 to 5,000 euros,” Jocelyn Pontanares of the Filipino community of Alicante explains to El Confidencial. Pontanares says some have an associated agency in the Philippines or in other places like Hong Kong, as is the case with migrants going to Poland. Before arriving there, many Filipino workers passed through other countries. Sometimes, Poland isn’t even their last stop.
Belinda Piquic, 47, who until recently worked as a live-in housekeeper in Spain, took her first trip abroad when she was 20. She first worked in Israel, taking care of children, and then returned to the Philippines. Then she went to Cyprus, where she worked for eight years in a family, and in 2023 she started working in Spain.
To get there, she went through Poland first, because “it was faster to get to Spain”. She says she lived in a villa in Madrid where everything had to be done: cooking, cleaning, ironing and taking care of the child. “It was very difficult, it was a big house.” Following this vicious circle, Belinda is thinking of returning to Poland.
👉 L’original article his El Confidencial
This article is part of the PULSE project and was produced thanks to a collaboration between El Confidencial, Der Standard and Gazeta Wyborcza.
