Two years ago in Manila, employment agencies began offering trips to a new destination: Poland. Dolfa Ravena, a Filipino who works in a factory in Warsaw, recalls: “It’s difficult to get to the United States, Canada or Germany. “I chose your country (Poland) because it is the easiest destination in Europe,” he admitted to the reporter. Gazeta Wyborcza. “I asked my uncle, who had immigrated before, and he said, ‘Poland is okay.’”
Currently, Filipinos are the third largest recipient of work permits in Poland, after Indians (45,000) and Nepalese (35,000). In 2023, 29,000 Filipinos received work permits in Poland, compared to only 733 in 2017.
The main differences from other nationalities are gender and age, explains Olga Wanicka, a Filipino migration researcher at the University of Warsaw. They are generally older (35 to 45 years old) and more often female. For example, 90% of Indian immigrants in Poland are men, while half of Filipinos moving to Poland are women. This partly follows a decades-long trend of Filipino women migrating to the Middle East and Hong Kong as domestic workers and nannies.
Polish employment agencies advertise Filipino immigrants to employers as “smiling, English-speaking workers” (one of the two official languages of the Philippines) and the large Catholic populations shared by both countries.
Is this an interesting article?
Made possible by vox europe community. High-quality reporting and translation costs money. We need your support to continue producing independent journalism.
subscribe or donation
Such stories can also be found in Austria. No tears, no drama. One day in August, 25-year-old Maria Dio said goodbye to her mother, cousins and two-year-old daughter like any other weekday, but instead of taking a bus, she took a plane from the capital. Manila. After a 19-hour flight and a four-hour train journey, she left the platform in Westendorf, Austria, to work at a nursing home the next day.
From tourism to the healthcare sector, few industries are exempt from Austria’s labor shortage, with 174,000 vacancies currently available. Add to this the thousands of baby boomers who will soon be retiring and leaving the labor market. Accordingly, the Austrian government signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Philippines a year ago to establish guidelines for the transfer of qualified personnel. The relationship between the two countries is not new. It started in the 1970s when Austria imported Filipino nurses to ease staffing shortages in hospitals. Now we’ve gone one step further.
In 2022, there will be 1.96 million overseas Filipino workers. These workers sent 197.47 billion pesos (about 3.18 billion euros) to the Philippines between April and September 2022.
Jann Siefken, director of Recareity, an Austrian medical recruitment agency based in Graz, specifies that unlike recruitment in European countries where reliability has been problematic, “if you don’t like something, you get in the car and go home.” He emphasized in the following interview that Filipinos are “not only very friendly by nature, but also helpful and dedicated.” standard. Over the past 18 months, Siefken has brought about 100 experts from the Philippines to Austria. The Austrian government plans to admit about 400 Filipinos annually by 2027.
Ironically, this recruitment comes at the same time that the Austrian government is assessing the possibility of deporting Syrian refugees back to Syria and several Austrian political parties are calling for stricter asylum laws, which were a point of contention in Austria in the last election.
This is “cherry picking” writ large. Faced with increasingly aging populations and shrinking labor markets, some European countries have begun to “cherry pick” people entering their countries based on need. In the healthcare sector, Europe follows the United States, where 10 to 15 percent of nurses are foreign-born and 4 percent are from the Philippines.
Worker export, national principle
Under the long rule of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos (1965-1986), the Philippines made worker exports a national principle until foreign exchange inflows.
Unlike the so-called ‘Asian Tigers’ (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan) who attributed their successful economic development to education, the Philippines has failed to integrate a highly educated workforce into the national economy. MIT researchers explained that they focused their efforts on promoting overseas employment. As a result, there are now 1.96 million Filipino workers abroad, according to 2022 Philippine Statistics Authority data. These workers sent 197.47 billion pesos (about 3.18 billion euros) to the Philippines between April and September 2022.
“Best Filipino staff for you. We are the first agency in Spain specializing in Philippine domestic services for luxury clients,” says a recruitment agency with offices in several European cities. “Do you need a Filipino maid? We can help you find the right person. Please write to us. Based in Madrid,” another wrote. “It’s on demand. We have 16,000 girls in our database,” a Madrid agency employee explained by phone. airtight.
In 2005, the Merriam-Webster Global Dictionary published two meanings of the word “Filipino.” One was a “woman or girl from the Philippines,” and the second was a “domestic worker.” Sociologist Julien Debonneville expands on this point in his book. Globalized domestic household industry in the PhilippinesHe writes, “This set of social representations that associate Filipino women with docility and devotion to others is part of a broader discursive matrix steeped in colonialism and revolving around those we now call ‘women of the global South.’ “.
“I was always ready to become a live-in domestic worker,” says Emerita Aguila, a Filipino live-in domestic worker currently working in Spain. “It wasn’t difficult because I was always prepared,” she says. She goes on to say that the difficult part was leaving her family. “Because we even left our children behind in the Philippines,” she cried. “I can handle things”: Emerita arrived in Spain with the help of her relatives. Her first job was caring for the children at the villa. She said her family was very nice. “They treated me like family, ate at the table with me, and treated me well. Others work through agencies.”
As the number of new workers increased, so did the abuse. In the first six months of 2024, the Business and Human Rights Resource Center recorded 15 cases of abuse involving Filipino workers in Poland, mostly related to excessive recruitment costs (nine), breach of contract (eight), lack of information (six) and It’s related. ).
“Filipino employment agencies look for employers willing to sponsor and charge a fee of between €3,500 and €5,000,” said Jocelyn Pontanares of the Filipino community in Alicante. airtight. It is said that, as in the case of going to Poland, there are cases where a partner agency is located in the Philippines or Hong Kong. Before coming to Poland, many Filipino workers were elsewhere. Sometimes even Poland is not their final destination.
Belinda Picucci (47), who until recently worked as a housekeeper in Spain, went on her first overseas trip when she was 20 years old. First I went to Israel to look after the children, then to the Philippines, then to Cyprus, where I worked as a domestic worker for eight years, and in 2023 I started working in Spain. To achieve this, she first traveled to Poland. “It was the fastest way to get to Spain,” she explains. It was in a house in Madrid where she had to do everything, including cooking, cleaning, ironing and babysitting, she said. “It was really difficult because the house was so big.” Belinda, caught in a vicious cycle, is thinking of returning to Poland.
