How the Philippines became the nurse factory of the West

Two years ago in Manila, employment agencies started offering trips to a new destination: Poland. Filipino Dolfa Ravena, who works in a factory in Warsaw, recalls: “It’s difficult to get to the US, Canada or Germany. I chose your country [Poland] because it is the easiest destination in Europe,” he admits to a journalist from Gazeta Wyborcza. “I asked my uncle, who had emigrated before, and he told me ‘Poland is fine’”. 

Currently, Filipinos receive the third most work permits in Poland, after Indians (45,000) and Nepalis (35,000). While there were only 733 in 2017, 29,000 Filipinos received a work permit in Poland in 2023.

The main difference with other nationalities is gender and age, explains Olga Wanicka, a researcher on Filipino migration at the University of Warsaw. They are generally older (between 35 and 45 years old) and there are more women. For example, 90 per cent of Indian migrants in Poland are men, while half of the Filipinos migrating to Poland are women. This is partly following the trend that Filipino women have been migrating as live-in domestic workers or nannies to the Middle East or Hong Kong for decades.

Polish work agencies advertise Filipino migrants to employers as “the smiling, English-speaking worker” – it is one of the two official languages of the Philippines – as well as the shared large Catholic populations of both countries.

One can find such a story in Austria too. No tears, no drama. One day in August, 25-year-old Maria Dio said goodbye to her mother, her cousins and her two-year-old daughter, just like any other weekday, but instead of taking the bus, she boarded a plane in the capital, Manila. After a nineteen-hour flight and a four-hour train ride, she stepped off the platform in the Austrian town of Westendorf the next day to work in a nursing home.

From tourism to the care sector: almost no industry is exempt from staff shortages in Austria, which currently registers 174,000 vacancies. Add to this the thousands of baby-boomers who will soon be retiring and leaving the labour market. In light of this, the Austrian government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) a year ago with the Philippines to establish guidelines on 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 alleviate shortages in its hospitals. Now it has gone a step further.

There are 1.96 million Filipino workers abroad in 2022. Those workers sent 197.47 billion pesos (about €3.18 billion) back to the Philippines between April and September 2022

Jann Siefken, director of Recareity, an Austrian care recruitment agency in Graz, specifies that, unlike recruiting in European countries, where there were problems of reliability – “if they don’t like something, they get in the car and go home”, he says – Filipinos are “very friendly in nature, as well as helpful and committed”, he stresses in an interview with Der Standard. In the past 18 months, Siefken has brought around 100 professionals from the Philippines to Austria. The Austrian government plans to bring in around 400 Filipinos a year until 2027.

Paradoxically, these recruitments are taking place at the same time as the Austrian government is assessing the possibility of deporting Syrian refugees back to Syria and several Austrian parties are calling for tougher asylum laws, an issue on the table in Austria’s debate in last elections. 

This is “cherry-picking” writ large. Faced with an increasingly ageing population and a shrinking labour market, some European states have begun to “cherry-pick” those entering their countries based on their needs. In the care sector, Europe is following in the footsteps of the United States, where 10-15% of nurses are foreign-born and 4% are from the Philippines.

Export of workers, a state doctrine

Under the long rule of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos (1965-1986), the Philippines made the export of workers a state doctrine, pending the inflow of foreign exchange.

Unlike the so-called “Asian Tigers” (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan), where successful economic development was attributed to education, in the Philippines, which had failed to integrate its highly educated workforce into the national economy, the government focused its efforts on facilitating overseas employment, explain MIT researchers. As a result, there are currently 1.96 million Filipino workers abroad, according to data from the Philippine Statistics Authority in 2022. Those workers sent 197.47 billion pesos (about €3.18 billion) back to the Philippines between April and September 2022.

“The best Filipino staff for you. We are the first agency in Spain specialising in Filipino domestic services for luxury clients,” reads a recruitment agency with offices in several European cities. “Do you need a Filipino maid? We can help you find the right person. Write to us. Based in Madrid,” reads another. “It’s on demand. We have 16,000 girls on our database”, someone from a Madrid agency explained by telephone to El Confidencial.

In 2005, The Merriam-Webster global dictionary published two meanings of the word “Filipina”. One was “Woman or girl from the Philippines”, the second: “Domestic worker”. Sociologist Julien Debonneville expands on this in his book The Globalised Domestic Work Industry in the Philippines, in which he argues that “this set of social representations, which associate Filipino women with docility and devotion to others, is more broadly part of a matrix of discourses steeped in colonialism and revolving around what we now call ‘women of the global South’”.

“I have always been prepared to be a live-in domestic worker,” reasons Emerita Aguila, a Filipina live-in domestic worker, currently working in Spain. “It’s not hard because I was always prepared for it”, she says. The hard part, she continues, is leaving your family, because “we even left our children in the Philippines” – she cries. “The work, I can handle it”: Emerita arrived in Spain with the help of a relative. Her first job was in a villa, looking after children. She says the family was very nice. “They treated me like I was part of the family, I ate with them at the table, they treated me well. Others work through agencies.”

With the proliferation of new workers, abuses have also increased. In the first six months of 2024, the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre documented 15 cases of abuse involving Filipino workers in Poland, most of them related to excessive recruitment fees (nine), breach of contract (eight) and lack of information (six).

“The employment agencies in the Philippines look for an employer who is willing to sponsor them and charge a fee of between €3,500 and €5,000,” Jocelyn Pontanares, of the Community of Filipinos in Alicante, told El Confidencial. She says that some have a partner agency in the Philippines or other places such as Hong Kong, as is the case with those going to Poland. Before coming to Poland, many Filipino workers have been elsewhere. Sometimes Poland is not their last stop either.

Belinda Piquic, 47, who until recently worked as a live-in domestic worker in Spain, made her first trip abroad when she was 20 years old. First to Israel, taking care of children, then back to the Philippines, then to Cyprus, where she spent eight years working for a household, and in 2023, she started working in Spain. To do this, she first travelled to Poland, “it was the quickest way to get to Spain”, she explains. It was in a house in Madrid, she says, where she had to do everything: cooking, cleaning, ironing and looking after the baby. “It’s been very hard, because it’s a big house”. In a vicious circle, Belinda is thinking of returning to Poland.

👉 Original article in El Confidencial

🤝 This article is part of the PULSE project, a European initiative to promote cross-border journalistic cooperation. It has been jointly produced by El Confidencial, Der Standard and Gazeta Wborcza.