KeyNote address at the Labor and Migration workshop at the Int'l Assembly of Migrants and Refugees

The Migration Phenomenon: Issues and Challenges for the Labor Movement

Keynote Address by Elmer C. Labog

National Chairperson, KMU

28 October 2008

Good afternoon, comrades and friends. This is a very important day for us as we seek to understand the global phenomenon of migration, and its impacts on the working class. I would like to congratulate the International Migrants Alliance (IMA) for spearheading this alternative gathering we are all in – the International Assembly of Migrants and Refugees (IAMR). Truly, this is an assembly that carries the voice of migrants and refugees.

This conference comes at a very opportune time when the world is being battered by a financial crisis touted to be the worst since the Great Depression. It is the working class that is most affected by two GFMDs - the “global forum on migration and development," and another of GFMD that we can call as the "global financial meltdown and destruction." For indeed, the global crisis will bring the destruction of productive forces, of natural and human resources, in order for capitalism to survive.

Now, more than ever, the workers’ movements worldwide have to reflect on the impact of labor outmigration on their ranks. The current global financial crisis has laid bare the extreme dependence of backward countries on labor-export for their economic survival, and the utter ruthlessness of monopoly capitalist institutions in manipulating global labor markets, tiding them over their periodic economic crises.

The number of unemployed people in the globe has now reached a record-high of more than 200 million. Twelve years ago, unemployment was only at 150 million. Underemployment, meanwhile, now reaches more than 1.5 billion. And the global crisis threatens to slash more livelihood from both labor-exporting and labor-importing countries.

The current financial meltdown is projected to have an adverse effect on the migrants all over the globe.  In 2005, there is already an estimated 185-192 million migrants worldwide representing 2.9 per cent of the global population. For the same year also, there were already 13 million documented refugees in the world, with 7 million coming from Asia, 3 million from Africa, and almost 3 million from developed countries.

Migrant workers suffer much while the capitalists and the governments that trade them enjoy profits. In a recent report, the UN International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) placed total OFW remittances for 2006 at $14.6 billion. The IFAD-IDB report titled “Sending money home: Worldwide remittances to developing countries” ranked the Philippines as the fourth biggest recipient of migrant remittances worldwide. India was at first place with $24.5 billion, followed by Mexico with $24.2 billion and China, $21 billion.

As governments scamper to survive the current crisis, labor export policy will be intensified resulting to an intensified movement of persons. Faced with the incapability of providing jobs in home countries, governments will be hell-bent on commodifying labor and sending workers abroad in exchange for the much-needed remittances to keep the economy afloat. 

The Philippine government for one has announced 200,000 job opportunities in Australia and Canada, in an obvious effort to exert the crisis out of the country. This would mean pushing them into more 3D jobs - dirty, difficult and dangerous, with low wages and with rights not even recognized, much more respected. 

While the GFMD and successive reports by the ADB, World Bank and the IMF have paid lip service to and cried crocodile tears over supposed deleterious side-effects of the labor-export policy, they have also laid stress on its ability to soften the impact of economic downturns on the world capitalist system at large. To quote ADB Consultant Kevyn Mellyn in his “Worker Remittance as a Development Tool Opportunity for the Philippines” (June 13, 2003):

“Global remittances by individuals were estimated at over $100 billion for 2001, with $72.3 billion going to developing countries…this is (i) more than capital market flows, (ii) more than official aid flows, and (iii) more than half of foreign direct investment flows. Moreover, remittances are more stable than any of these sources and tend to be counter cyclical, thus serving as a buffer from external economic shocks.”

The IFAD? also says in its online “Remittance forum”:

“Today, the impact of remittances is recognized in all developing regions of the world, constituting an important flow of foreign currency to most countries and directly reaching millions of households – approximately 10 per cent of the world’s population.

The driving force behind this phenomenon is an estimated 150 million migrants worldwide. They sent some US$300 billion to their families in developing countries during 2006, typically US$100, US$200 or US$300 at a time, through more than 1.5 billion separate financial transactions. These funds are used primarily to meet immediate family needs (consumption), but a significant portion are also available for savings, credit mobilization and other forms of investment.”

With the onset of the current financial crisis and impending global recession, underdeveloped and developed economies alike will most certainly make use of this available “lifeline” to save their sinking economies. What this entails for “globalized” labor in terms of further suffering, oppression and exploitation will be enormous, aggravating their legitimized and institutionalized slavery a hundredfold. And so, the unwanted and undesirable task of propping up the tottering world capitalist system will be borne substantially by migrant labor.

Statements from imperialist institutions that superficially criticize certain flaws in the LEP-led “development model” actually serve to gloss over bigger, more basic issues behind this phenomenon. These are:

1.           

Whether promoted locally or globally, labor-export policy (LEP) as a prescription for economic development has only furthered the underdevelopment of already backward economies.

On the whole, the nature of benefits derived from an LEP-led economy is consumerist, with very little trickling down as new, entrepreneurial capital. The defenders of LEP blame this on the local culture of sending countries, like the prominence of extended families and their lack of investment skills. However, the real culprit is built into economic backwardness itself: underdeveloped economies simply do not have the level playing field required to encourage more nascent forms of economic activity. Big foreign businesses, or those MNCs and TNCs, dominate the economies of migrant-exporting nations, making micro-investing in these countries risky and short-lived.

In making it a cornerstone program for alleviating the effects of economic crises, governments in Third World countries are consciously ignoring the bigger imperative of putting their economies on a sounder basis: that is, by ending land monopoly in the countryside and undertaking national industrialization, twin programs that are inimical to the interests of foreign monopoly capital.

2.           

Labor as a productive force is being destroyed on an unprecedented scale and in a more profound way than ever before.

Overseas contract work is labor flexibilization at work at the international level. This labor flex violates even those formal “core labor standards” set by corporate-funded institutions to cosmeticize modern-day slavery. The so-called “brain drain” that seemingly worries some reform-oriented defenders of LEP is in fact a mere symptom of this systematic workforce destruction. The low-end labor market demands of developed countries impose themselves on the skimpy, high-end labor markets of underdeveloped economies. Hence, the pathetic phenomenon of doctors downgrading themselves into nurses, nurses downgrading themselves into caregivers, and teachers, engineers and other professionals downgrading themselves into domestic helpers and factory workers. Data on this

And even as this is happening, monopoly capitalist-ruled governments in receiving countries are maliciously using the LEP as a “soft” method to erode their own workers’ hard-won trade union gains. Trade union busting could guarantee that developed countries will keep their doors open to increasingly cheap migrant labor despite the financial crisis. The extent of this malice may be gleaned from the ludicrous spectacle of company-friendly trade union centers in the United Kigdom acting as hiring agencies for foreign workers, and wittingly or unwittingly, against their worker-compatriots. Coupled with increasing unemployment in imperialist homegrounds due to the current economic downturn, a noxious soup of social conflicts (not the least of which is racial) is being cooked up by monopoly capital that prevents inter- and intra-class unity among marginalized sectors in both sending and receiving countries.

In the Philippines, for example, around 4,000 migrants are currently inside various jail prisons in the world, 10,000 are stranded in the Middle East, and more than 30 OFWs are waiting for death sentence for charges they were never guilty of. And these are documented cases alone.

3.           

On the basis of rampant promotion of LEP, new and distinct forms of imperialist plunder have evolved out of traditional ones.

The education funds of client-states in underdeveloped countries – already minuscule after being squeezed to pour more subsidies into military and debt-servicing – are in fact being appropriated still by developed countries through employment of public school-trained professionals and highly-skilled workers from sending countries. This is bound to intensify as labor forces in backward economies are hit fully by the effects of global recession, many of them will be pushed to go abroad. For how can they stay longer in their home countries that suffer from collapsing export-oriented industries, plummeting wages and a galloping inflation.

A whole new “industry” of silk-tied usurers have grown leech-like around the remittance system for migrant workers, extracting quick megaprofits. From electronic-transfer fees by foreign monopoly banks like Western Union to arbitrary exactions by their “own” governments, migrant workers are certainly one of the most exploited sectors of the global labor force.

From the foregoing discussion, it is fairly obvious that imperialism is at the very heart of the problem. By previously creating conditions of backwardness in the sending countries through neocolonial trade, preserving local feudalism, preventing national industrialization and fostering clientelist relationships with their governments, the stage was set long ago for labor outmigration. Exported labor force is utilized as a global reserve army of labor, which can then be ruthlessly exploited and simultaneously made to serve as a battering ram against their relatively entrenched and unionized brothers in capitalist centers.

This gives us an insight on the role of labor to end the LEP. Is it merely about attending to the needs of labor by strengthening unionism here and abroad? On the contrary, it is a role that is anti-insular and requires that the labor movement lead and reach out to other sectors pinned down by underdevelopment and labor exportation. This means that holdovers of feudalism so prevalent in Third World countries must be eliminated through genuine and thoroughgoing land reform, and that a national industry free from imperialist domination be developed in each “sending country.”

The eventual victory of these peoples’ struggles for national freedom and democracy will gradually eliminate the excuse for LEP and the reasons for forced migration. The sustained growth of a national economy free at last from the world capitalist system and its periodic and worsening crises of overproduction will generate ever increasing need for social labor and an ever-expanding workforce. Additional labor will then be derived from the countryside only on the basis of the success of genuine land reform and the subsequent modernization of agriculture – not by landlessness engendered through the intensification of feudalism, as is currently the norm.

It is extremely important for entrenched trade unions in industrialized countries that it is in their long-term interest to support the anti-imperialist and people’s democratic struggles in backward countries. The latter’s successes will deprive imperialism of a method to pit the workers of one country against the other in competing for jobs and wages, and contribute to the political education of trade unionists in the host countries regarding the nature of the real enemy of the working class.

Only a labor movement forged as a politically-conscious class and united around a consistently anti-imperialist programme and a viable alternative to capitalism as a system can be capable of such a leading role. Only a labor movement that upholds the continuing relevance of socialism as that alternative can be certain of ending the LEP by striking deep at its roots.

How are we to forge such a unity? That is not for me to say, but for this workshop to discover. Good day, and long live international solidarity!