(c) Masterlists of departing/arriving Filipinos;
(d) Statistical profile on Filipino migrant workers/overseas Filipinos/Tourists;
(e) Blacklisted foreigners/undesirable aliens;
(f) Basic data on legal systems, immigration policies, marriage laws and civil and criminal codes
in receiving countries particularly those with the large numbers of Filipinos;
(g) List of labor and other human rights instruments where receiving countries are signatories;
(h) A tracking system of past and present gender disaggregated cases involving male and female
migrant workers; and
(I) Listing of overseas posts which may render assistance to overseas Filipinos, in general, and
migrant workers, in particular.
It has been twenty one years already since the enactment of RA8042 in 1995 and this
SGISM project has not been realized yet. Hence problems and challenges on migrant data
collection and statistics persist.
The Philippines is known to provide large shares of domestic workers to foreign employers.
According to UN Women, women migrant workers from the Philippines are more likely to come
from rural areas, tend to have less access to employment and education, spend more time abroad,
and have less savings.6
Families of women migrant workers also earn a higher percentage of their income from
agriculture, making them more vulnerable to environmental shocks, corporatization of
agricultural production, and lower levels of government investment in public services.7 Living
further away from Manila-based services for migrant workers also means that women spend more
money to access services. These are gendered trends that disproportionately inflate financial
burdens on women and women-led households.
Women migrant workers are more likely to work in low wage, precarious jobs in informal
settings within the service sector. According to the POEA, the service sector employs 52 percent
of all Philippine migrant workers. The vast majority of service workers are domestic workers,
which form the largest and fastest growing occupation.8 One of the most pervasive barriers to
migrant women’s access to equality within the current global migration system is the invisibility
of women’s living and working conditions as domestic workers.
6
7
8
Encinas-Franco et al. Gender, Migration and Development in the Philippines.
Ibid.
Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA). n.d. “2010-2014 Overseas Employment
Statistics.” Accessed January 9, 2016, http://www.poea.gov.ph/stats/2014%20POEA%20Stats.pdf.