It seems like a silly question given the decades-long Filipino obsession with crewing. But precisely for that reason, it needs to be asked – especially after the roundtable discussion held yesterday at the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) Policy Center in Makati, the country’s posh financial district. The forum, organised by the Center and the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry, had as its leitmotif ‘The Global Demand for Labor: How Do We Assure the Philippines’  Economic Growth.’

That’s a mouthful. The assumption is that the export of labour, seafarers included, is of strategic value to the Philippines. This was a given for the event organizers as it was, obviously, for the MBA team from the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business which presented the findings of a study on the region’s ‘labor market challenges’ commissioned by the APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC). A similar presentation had been made before ABAC members in November in Singapore but apparently Doris Magsaysay Ho, the ABAC Philippine representative and chieftain of the Magsaysay Group of Companies, felt that Filipinos needed to hear first-hand what the American academics had to say.

No one can deny the importance of migrant labour to the national economy. In 2008 overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) sent home a total of US$16.43 billion, which accounted for nearly 10% of that year’s estimated GNP of US$166.9 billion. Of this, US$3.03 billion or 18.5% came from sea-based workers – which makes seafarers a very significant economic force although they are far outnumbered by their land-based counterparts.

Some economists believe that the Philippine economy would have collapsed a long time ago were it not for the OFW remittances. Maybe so. This would make manpower export a strategic industry in the negative sense. What is clear is that money from migrant workers is helping send sons and daughters to college, build new houses, buy automobiles and household appliances and otherwise raise the living standards of OFW families. In the case of crewing, it is not only seafarers and their families who benefit. A whole class of entrepreneurs – from manning agents and training centre operators to maritime lawyers and union bigwigs – continues to enrich itself and live off the sweat and tears of those who toil at sea.

On the downside, labour exporting has created a certain mind-set amongst many Filipinos that assumes that working abroad  is the only way to improve one’s lot, with the concomitant view that local employment is inferior. Worse, it has a created a culture of consumption. This explains why the Philippine economy, as government figures will show, remains driven by consumer spending and not by investments. Much of the spending is fuelled by OFW remittances – the same factor that’s behind the proliferation in every major Philippine city of shopping malls, the quintessential symbols of 21st-century consumerism.

As for crewing, Filipinos have paid a steep price for being No. 1 in the game – little though they realise it. The country used to boast one of the largest ocean-going fleets in Asia, which included a couple of supertankers operated by the Philippine National Oil Co; a home-grown shipbuilding industry (Bataan Shipyard & Enginering Co and its sister firm, Philippine Dockyard Corp); and even an incipient marine manufacturing sector (the now-defunct Ace Containers). All that came to an end with the fall of the Marcos regime. In a real sense, the end was brought on and certainly hastened by the excessive preoccupation with ship manning and its mutant form, the government’s bareboat chartering programme.

Filipinos actually need not be told by some academicians from California how – to borrow a phrase from the late Blas Ople, Ferdinand Marcos’ labour minister – to export warm bodies. They have been doing it with flair since 1974, when the dictator officially launched the country’s labour export campaign. Mr Marcos is long gone but his legacy lives on. What Filipinos have to be reminded of is that too heavy a reliance on manpower export is unlikely to lead to meaningful and lasting economic growth; it may, in fact, prevent it. Clearly, that kind of message couldn’t be expected to come from the lady who runs one of the country’s largest manning operations or from the American scholars she brought to town. ~Barista Uno