Doing Well Abroad
One of the prerequisites
for the achievement of economic growth is a skilled labor force -- which
the Philippines has, according to Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as
the national security adviser of US President Jimmy Carter. Observing that
Filipinos ``are doing extremely well in America,'' he speculated that our
lack of success at home could be due to our having a government that is
``bureaucratically overlaid.''
We feel that Dr. Brzezinski
is only being diplomatic when he attributes our failures to the character
of our bureaucracy. In fact, our failure to progress is due mainly to our
government. Over the past two decades or so, our government has been characterized
by so much graft and incompetence and so little vision that people with
money, whether local or foreign, have hesitated to invest in the Philippines.
This administration and
its predecessors have recognized our skilled labor force as one of our
major assets, but instead of using that labor force for our own development,
our government adopted a policy of labor exportation.
Instead of keeping our skilled
people at home and making the investments necessary to enable them to apply
their training and to contribute to our national development, our government
would rather have them work abroad and remit their earnings to their relatives
here.
Dr. Brzezinski may think
he is praising us when he observes that so many Filipinos ``are doing extremely
well in America.'' In fact, he is underlining the tragedy of the skilled
Filipino -- as long as the skilled Filipino remains in his own country,
it is extremely difficult for him to show that he is world-class.
It is only abroad that our
highly trained technical people are likely to be backed by adequate equipment,
staff assistance, laboratories, libraries and other forms of institutional
support. They also have the incentive springing from the knowledge that
good work will be rewarded with greater pay and greater responsibility.
Here at home, there was no way in which these people could be part of the
``technotronic society'' whose coming Dr. Brzezinski was proclaiming two
decades ago.
Those of our compatriots
who do not fall in the category of the best and the brightest manage to
be more successful abroad than at home because they are willing to start
in jobs for which they are overqualified -- even in jobs that are difficult,
dangerous, dirty and even demeaning. No matter how trying the working conditions
are, many of our people take the attitude that they are making far more
money than they could ever hope to make in the Philippines.
Dr. Brzezinski correctly
observes that the Philippines has a skilled labor force; unfortunately,
a major fraction of that labor force is not working in the Philippines.
As a long-time observer
of trilateralism, Dr. Brzezinski will undoubtedly note that we Filipinos
have had some participation in the economic growth of Western Europe, North
America and Japan. That participation, however, has increasingly taken
the form of being hewers of wood and carriers of water -- and of being
paid accordingly.
The larger tragedy is that
the quality of our labor force is deteriorating. We do not support our
educational institutions adequately, and so, our universities are falling
behind. The time may come when we cannot even furnish competent hewers
of wood and carriers of water.
Dr. Brzezinski predicts
turmoil in the 21st century as the world goes through a change in values
and conduct. We fear, however, that at the turn of the century, we in the
Philippines will still be grappling with the 20th-century problem of getting
enough food to eat, holding the jobs that enable us to buy that food, and
getting the training that qualifies us for those jobs.