By Jullie Y. Daza
ANOTHER meaning of OFW: Overworked Filipino Women.
I’m not speaking statistics and data, but from empirical experience. The typical Filipina is overworked, underpaid or unpaid, and underappreciated. Among other disparities, she works for less or for free (as housewife, loving daughter, daughter-in-law), and while she slaves away at two or three jobs, where is the man in her life?
By definition, the overseas Filipina working abroad leaves her own child or children to care for the children of strangers in another country, leaves her own family to enrich a stranger’s family with her sweetness, kindness, willingness to work and sacrifice whatever needs to be sacrificed in the name of service to her parents, her spouse, sons and daughters. After watching the televised return of four batches of OFWs repatriated from Kuwait, the viewer had to be struck by the conspicuous gap in the ratio between male and female returnees.
Yes, we’ve been told that close to 70 percent of overseas workers are women, but our eyes also telling us that male OFWs are happy, comfortable, safe with their employers and see no need to take advantage of the government’s offer to bring them home for free? Lucky for them.
Lucky for the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration that we have an NGO that can go in and out of certain situations involving distressed OFWs where government is shackled by the no’s and don’ts (such as the absence of an MOA or MOU, or the reality of a web of policy, rules, regulations) of conducting official government business. I never thought I’d hear it said by a government official, but say it he did, at a recent Plaridel Kapihan forum, that in such cases, OWWA steps aside to let the Blas F. Ople Policy Center and Training Institute do what government cannot. In other words, a shadow OWWA, only more effective. And overworked.
Another anomaly: The Center is a team of four and only four persons, including Susan “Toots” Ople, who had no right to lose the last senatorial election. No OFW vote? Absurd!
If a Department of OFWs is ever to be created by popular mandate, we will demand that it be headed by Toots. She knows the OFW problem like the back of her hand, as her father’s heir, gofer, and expert in chief.