Overseas Filipino workers bear debts as crisis hits labor-importing economies

MAKATI CITY, Philippines — Ramones Caytiles’s stint in Taiwan is as short as the song-length of his namesake American punk rock band: two weeks.

But nearly six months now since he and 171 fellow workers got pink slips last year from their employer Hanston Display Corp., Caytiles feels life is as long as Don Maclean’s American Pie song.

PASIG CITY, Philippines — Professor studying labor migration in Asia said countries in the region will scuttle to protect their economies but avoid edging out foreign workers as a global financial collapse seeps into real sectors.

One of them is Dr. Yap Mui Teng of the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy under the National University of Singapore.

PASIG CITY. Philippines — AS the plane nosed down to its landing in Dubai, economist Josef Yap sensed a portent of things to come for Filipino workers in the Middle East and the labor export industry.

“These are the scenes of the Asian financial crisis of 1997,” Yap recalled saying to himself and to three other Southeast Asian economists during that visit in the financial capital of the United Arab Emirates.

CHOOSING stories for the OFW Journalism Consortium is like having a sunny-side fried egg for breakfast: scoop the yellow yolk or snip the white layer first?

These are choices the diner mulls. If she has the time.