THE deployment of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) to the Middle East, the Philippines’s largest labor market, is expected to further decline in 2019 due to lower crude oil prices, which, in turn, reduce the income of oil-producing countries.
However, the same industry experts who project this decline are trumpeting higher demand for Filipino workers in at least three other countries—Japan, New Zealand and China—and parts of Europe.
In Saudi Arabia, oil revenue is predicted to stay flat with lower crude oil prices. The Kingdom is the OFWs’ main destination,with Filipinos there now estimated at close to 2 million.
In 2017, the deployment of OFWs went down by 9 percent after 10 years of continuous growth; and in 2018, another 8-10 percent decline is seen by recruitment consultant Emmanuel Geslani.
Revenues from oil control the economies of Middle East countries, he said.
The year 2018 started badly with Manila imposing a ban on household service workers (HSWs) for Kuwait after the discovery of OFW Joanna Demafelis’s remains in her Lebanese employer’s freezer by Kuwait authorities.
An angry President Du-terte imposed an immediate deployment ban on all OFWs on January 22, 2018. At the time, Kuwait received an average 60,000 newly hired HSWs, second only to Saudi Arabia’s 170,000 new HSWs in 2017.
The ban lasted for almost five months and impacted deployment to Kuwait by almost 80 percent, resulting in fewer than 20,000 HSW deployed in 2018.
In 2018 Saudi Arabia, several construction and manufacturing companies suffered disastrous financial losses due to the failure of the Kingdom to pay its obligations under contracts with several
companies. As a result, more than 3,000 OFWs had to be retrenched or laid off while their recruitment companies and the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (Owwa) went on to repatriate them.
“Owwa had to shell out P100 million to bring them home, leading to large financial losses for the recruitment companies,” Geslani said.
“Huge construction projects worth billions of dollars are now being reassessed in the Kingdom and Saudization is being implemented at a faster pace with previous white-collar jobs for expatriates now being taken over by
Saudi nationals,” Geslani explained.
Other Middle East countries like Kuwait, Oman, UAE, Iraq and Iran economies stayed flat due to the lower oil prices in the middle of the year, after the spike for several months in early 2018. Only Qatar managed to avoid decline in deployment due to steadier natural gas prices.
The massive construction boom in Qatar continues as it prepares for the World Cup 2022 so that demand for construction workers is still high, Geslani said. HSW will be needed for the new hotels and restaurants being constructed for this soccer event, he added.
Other markets
Meanwhile, there is a silver lining for the OFWs in Japan, China, New Zealand and parts of Europe, Geslani said.
In April, Japan will open its door to OFWs with working visas good for five years in 14 sectors, including nursing, construction, agriculture, manufacturing and other minor fields.
New Zealand continues to attract construction and farming workers; Australia is also in need of construction workers, while China has a rising demand for HSW and English teachers.
In Europe, Germany needs nurses, while former Eastern bloc countries like Czechoslovakia , Poland and Hungary need hotel workers and staff.
The Middle East is still the largest labor market for OFWs with over 70 percent of new hires going to those countries.
However, emerging labor markets like Japan and China will attract more skilled workers in the next few years.