Do The Math
May 25, 2008
When someone tells me to “do the math”, my hard drive slows down and my brain goes on sleep mode. To “do the math”, one must decipher the language of numbers and take umbrage at the absurdity of certain ratios. To the mathematically-challenged, a fraction is a source of inner friction; a decimal point a speck in the canvass of nothingness.
What I can process, mentally and emotionally, are mathematical tragedies. A single earthquake in China kills more than 50 thousand people. In this case, the phrase “killer earthquake” is painfully, woefully apt. The size of the number of victims combined with visuals of searches in rubbles have brought home the message that calamity is too weak a word for the quake’s aftermath.
Mathematically tragic ints the twey-peso wage hike for minimum wage earners. Predictably, big employers pointed a finger at the viability of micro enterprises as moral justification for this micro salary increase. Twenty pesos more at a time when a kilo of the cheapest rice variety yields less than two pesos in change, is oppressive arithmetic to the working class. That the announcement was delivered at an employers’ conference reminds us that government sensitivity has become a lost art.
Out of desperation, many of these minimum wage earners may yet fall in the open arms of illegal recruiters. Desperation drives people to forego what is sane and proper in order to cling to promises sweet and false. The last time I checked the POEA website (Philippine Overseas Employment Administration), there was a new advisory against offers to work in Romania. Similar advisories were issued in the past regarding bogus jobs in China, Canada, Lebanon and Syria.
What is mathematically absurd, however, is that there are only 22 people in the entire POEA bureaucracy that directly works on illegal recruitment cases. With a budget of less than P30-million a year and a staff complement of 22 people, how can illegal recruiters be stopped?
Illegal recruitment cases in 2007 were higher by 8% compared to cases filed with the POEA in 2006. They could not tell me how many were convicted. How can 22 people be expected to monitor and fight illegal recruitment in a country of more than 7,000 islands?
According to POEA records, the number of arrests of suspected illegal recruiters declined from 50 suspects in 2006 to only 26 in 2007. Ever optimistic, the person I talked to in the AIR office said that they are attributing this decline to the success of the POEA’s intensified campaign against illegal recruitment. Not one to pierce a bright red balloon, I obediently wrote his comment down.
Mathematical tragedies happen for a reason. In China, it was caused by a major quake. For the recent wage hike, it was caused by lopsided negotiations. Twenty-two people in an office created to fight illegal recruitment that is both a tragedy and a folly. Consider this: for every undocumented worker that gets caught overseas, the national government is required by law to make sure that he or she gets home. Here is where I now say, please, do the math. (Visit my blog at www.susanople.com. Send comments to toots.ople[at]yahoo.com)
