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Asia's migrant workers face uncertainty By John Aglionby in Jakarta Published: February 5 2009 17:46 | Last updated: February 5 2009 17:46 Within seconds of a visitor entering the classroom at MIP Resindo Jaya, the 60 trainee carers studying quietly ahead of their departure to Taiwan jump to their feet and chant happily in newly learnt Mandarin: "Good morning. How are you? It's a pleasure to meet you." Outside, half a dozen men preparing to work on Taiwanese fishing vessels are equally cheerful. "What economic crisis are you talking about?" says Burhanuddin, 23. "I've got a good job to go to so I'm happy." Satia Sila, the owner of this migrant worker agency in south Jakarta, remains cautiously optimistic about 2009. "This is going to be a difficult year and we're going to have to be more professional to succeed," he says. "But so far the impact of the global recession has not hit us." Across Asia there are already plenty of signs that the global economic slowdown is having an impact on workers. Beijing this week said 20m migrant workers who had gone elsewhere within China in search of work had lost their jobs because of the crisis. But looming over much of the region is the question of what will happen to the millions of migrant workers who cross borders in search of jobs overseas and whose remittances home have become a big source of income for countries such as the Philippines. So far, Mr Sila's optimism is echoed around the Asian migrant worker industry, in spite of expectations that hundreds of thousands of the region's estimated 45m workers who cross borders for work - up to 80m including undocumented workers - have been losing their jobs. Manolo Abella, a regional migrant worker expert at the International Labour Organisation, says remittances have tended to survive in previous crises and one recent World Bank study predicted global remittance flows, which were an estimated $283bn (?221bn, £193bn) last year, would shrink by only 1 per cent this year. Mr Abella says the volume of remittances from migrant workers to their home countries was still rising, which indicates that most have kept their jobs, so far. In Taiwan, a significant employer of overseas workers, official data show that the number of migrants employed was up by 2 per cent at the end of 2008 compared with a year earlier. The Philippines, one of the biggest suppliers of migrant workers, with 9m citizens working overseas, says it expects remittances to continue to grow through 2009 - although officials say growth is likely to be between 6 and 9 per cent compared with a 15 per cent surge to $15bn in the first 11 months of 2008. There are growing fears, however, that the speed of the slowdown in Asia will shortly catch up with migrant workers, whose lack of advanced skills and often tenuous employment status make them vulnerable to dismissal in a serious economic downturn. South Asian countries could be among those worst hit. Nepal derives 17 per cent of its gross domestic product from overseas remittances from more than 2.5m workers, while Indian authorities fear that hundreds of thousands of migrants will be sent home from the Middle East this year. Harry Juliandy, a manager at Lansina, another Jakarta agency, says the receiving country that has been hit the worst is Dubai. "Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are not reporting any major problems but Dubai is bad, particularly in construction. Things were OK until October. Then in November salaries were paid 10 days late and in December hundreds [of my workers] were sent home," he says. Indonesian officials estimate that overseas worker remittances may fall by up to 10 per cent this year from $8.2bn last year, although they say optimistically that the decline could be as low as 5 per cent. This is because migrants working in the informal sectors of overseas economies are expected to fare better than those in factories or construction. "Our current analysis is that firings will continue in the formal sector as factories shut down, but the informal sector labour force will continue to grow," says William Gios, regional co-ordinator of the Migrant Forum in Asia, a regional network of organisations working on behalf of migrant workers. "They might have to negotiate for lower wages or move to other jobs like drivers or cleaners, but they should cope," he says. Mr Gios also cautions that the absence of a surge in returning workers does not mean they are all still in full-time employment. "It might be easier for them to wait and hope things improve than to go home. Or they might be earning a fraction of what they were a few months ago," he says. Mr Abella said part of the reason why the situation had not been worse for migrant workers was that most of the job losses in the countries that employed large numbers had been in sectors primarily employing locally recruited workers. Additional reporting by Roel Landigin in Manila, Robin Kwong in Taiwan and Prateek Pradhan in Kathmandu [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
