Filipino Workers on the Frontlines During COVID19 Globally and in Canada

Warlito Valdez. Amor Padilla Gatinao. Daisy Dorinilla. Debbie Accad. Leilani Medel. Christine Mandegarian. 

These are just a few of the names of Filipino nurses, personal support workers, and caregivers in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, who have died after providing frontline support to clients and patients with COVID-19 in hospitals, long-term care facilities, and private residences. The need to fill in job vacancies for health care personnel in migrant-receiving countries like Canada, and the existence of a labour brokerage policy that make the ‘export’ of labour and transfer of payment to home countries a vital part of migrant-sending countries’ [like the Philippines] economic growth strategy, compel thousands of Filipinos to seek jobs as migrant workers. Because many Filipino migrant workers go abroad to become care workers, the Philippines has effectively created what author and historian Catherine Ceniza Choy describes as an “Empire of Care”.

An idea has been developing. Perhaps three of the biggest threats to our societies – environmental destruction, public austerity and economic inequality – stem from a single problem: a rapacious economic model that assumes everything, including people, is a resource to be consumed. Until there’s no more.

The announced General Motors closures have shown us that we need to explore a new industrial strategy, where public investments gives equity in companies, and where public control can help us preserve manufacturing, and direct it toward just social and environmental outcomes. Above all, we have to realize that it is the people, and not the corporations, who should make the economic decisions which affect them in their daily lives.   

The Broadbent Institute's new project, Change the Game, takes a critical look at the history of social democracy in Canada, with the intention of learning from the successes and challenges of the past in order to build the best possible path forward. We invite you to join us in rethinking and renewing social democracy by reading other entries in this series.

For large parts of the 20th century, social democracy was the natural habitat for many in the labour movement, and vice versa. Social democrats built the political space where union aspirations for better living conditions and social solidarity found a sympathetic hearing. For their part, social democrats have always relied on strong unions as a major force for economic equality, full employment and the economic democracy that are the necessary pillars of a progressive welfare state¹. Social democratic parties also benefited from close union ties in the electoral arena through union political support, both in terms of resources and expertise, as well as a connection to their natural voting constituency.

On May 23, Statistics Canada released an interesting and widely reported study by Yuri Ostrovsky, with the title “Doing as Well as One's Parents?” It showed that some two thirds of Canadian children born between 1970 and 1984 (broadly speaking, the children of baby-boomers) had, at age 30,  family incomes at least as high as their parents at the same age and that this proportion has been stable.

It is now three months into the Presidency of Donald Trump, and policy makers around the world are still unsure how to respond to the new administration's challenge to the liberal global order and the looming threat of “America First” trade  policies. 

The election of President Trump and the potential imposition of border taxes and other protectionist measures is clearly of great concern to Canadian exporters, the workers they employ and the communities they support. This underlines just how much NAFTA and the wider liberalization of trade with rising economic powers such as China have shaped our economy and made us highly vulnerable to forces outside our control.

Every year, women around the world celebrate (angrily) the day their average full-time, full-year earnings have caught up to men’s average full-time full-year earnings from the year before.

In the October 2013 Speech for the Throne, the Canadian government announced it would introduce balanced-budget legislation. At the time this vague proposal attracted little interest from anyone, although a year later the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) did produce a substantial document analyzing the benefits and costs of such a proposal. 

The recent election was full of varying promises to increase growth rates and employment levels. Few of these promises, however, addressed a critical weakness in our ability to compete in global markets: significant literacy and numeracy skill shortages. 

This is a critical area where the federal government has a vital role to play.