Articles in The Asian Pacific Post and The Province on the plight of Filipino nannies has triggered warnings in Manila about unlicensed schools offering caregiver courses that promise employment abroad.

Delia Albert

"It has come to my attention that a number of these caregiver-training schools, which attract enrollees by offering to arrange employment for them abroad once they finish the course, may actually be involved in a scam," Albert warned in her weekly briefing with the diplomatic press corps recently.

Albert said a report from the Philippine Consulate in Vancouver, Canada, noted that articles from The Asian Pacific Post and The Province told of sad stories of Filipino live-in caregivers and nurses in British Columbia.

He warned Filipinos to be wary about the proliferation of unlicensed schools offering caregiving courses that promise them employment abroad, ABS-CBN News reported.

The news report noted that there are now 1,000 Filipino nurses in British Columbia not registered to work in their profession, and most of them are working as nannies and homemakers.

The recruited caregivers are being required to pay fees ranging from US$3,000 to US$5,000 for a package of six-month training course, immigration and live-in caregiver program in Canada and an airline ticket.

Albert cited the report in The Asian Pacific Post which also quoted the statement of Britain's national health officials that problems on the growing illegal recruitment cases for caregiver jobs in Canada and US are similar to cases of human trafficking.

Meanwhile, recent data from the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency (POEA) shows that the terrain of the overseas labor market for Filipinos has changed, from gender to skills.

Women are increasingly dominating the sector, and the demand for professional and technical workers is growing, the agency said.

The data showed that, in 1992, newly hired females accounted for just 50 percent. By 2003, their share had gone up to 70 percent.

In the past 10 years, higher-paying jobs have overtaken labor-intensive work. Production workers, such as construction workers, factory laborers, plumbers, and welders used to account for 37 percent of the total number of deployed workers in 1992. A decade after, in 2002, their share shrunk to 24 percent.

Service workers, mainly domestic helpers, inched up from 32 to 34 percent in the same period. On the other hand, professional and technical workers, such as nurses, engineers, teachers, choreographers, and dancers improved from 28 to 35 percent. Production workers are predominantly male, while service, professional, and technical workers are mostly female.

A POEA memo said job prospects for caregivers in Canada, the most favored destination, are not as bright as before. It accounts for only 2.2 percent of the 7,782 currently approved job orders. Almost 60 percent of the job orders come from Taiwan, Israel, and the United Kingdom.

The dollar remittances from overseas Filipino workers continue to be a major driver of the local economy. In the first quarter of 2004, the amount reached US$1.92 billion, up 4.35 percent from $1.84 billion in the same period last year. Last year, remittances reached an all-time high of $7.6 billion, a 5.5 percent increase over the $7.2 billion realized in 2002. These figures represent just the funds coursed through banks and other legitimate channels.

The number of departing Filipinos for jobs overseas continues to be staggering. In 2003, 868,000 fresh or re-hired overseas foreign workers left the country. This means about 2,400 Filipinos leave daily. In 1984, deployments reached only 350,000, but over the next two decades, the number grew by an average of 30 percent every five years.

Today, Philippines has around 7.5 million of its nationals working overseas The figure does not include undocumented workers and those who have stayed on after their contracts expire. Filipino workers are scattered in some 190 countries.