Poor and Powerless: Community must act now

Poor and Powerless: Community must act now

(Speech delivered at the Consultation conference, “Strenghthen Our Community for Social Justice,” Oct 30,2004 at Metro Hall in Toronto.)

I have about 15 minutes to speak and I want to use that time to convey a single message. And that is, given our number in the Greater Toronto Area and our glorious revolutionary history as a people, the Filipino community can change our present marginalized economic and political conditions.

But let me first digress. Yesterday morning as I started to write this speech, I checked the Internet for some news and I was shocked to read that an estimated 100,000 civilians in Iraq had died since the American occupation in March 2003, a period of about 18 months. Much of it was caused by US air strikes in towns and cities. Many who died were children and women.This was from the report of American public health experts.

Compare the number of US soldiers killed at more than 1,000. A ratio of one hundred Iraqi civilians killed to one U.S. soldier killed.

Filipinos marginalized

Why do I say we are marginalized economically and politically?

Let’s look at some economic figures:

According to the 2001 census:

• The household median income in Toronto is $54,000 a year. I presume this is two income earners per household.

• The average income for all Ontarians in 1997 is $25,000.

• In the Greater Toronto Area, the bottom 10 percent of families have an income of $9,600.

• The top 10 percent earn an average of $261,000.

That is a ratio of 1 to 27.

• Families at the bottom half of the income scale showed little or no improvement through the 1990s. Counting inflation, no improvement in income means reduced real income.

The income of the top 10 percent of families rose by 14.6 percent to $185,000 by year 2000.
This is classic case of the poor getting poorer and the rich getting richer.

Where are the immigrants in this income scale? They are in the lowest rank of the income ladder.
In a story about the census income figures, a quotation read: “there are massive increases in poverty among immigrant families.”

Child poverty rate fell 3 percentage points to 15.5 percent for children of Canadian born parents; it rose dramatically to 33 percent for children of immigrants, up from 27 percent in 1990.

Another quote from the same story: “We know the reason child poverty is so consistent is that immigrant families are so poor.”

For Filipino immigrants who arrived from 1980 to 1996, the average income in 1997 was between about $13,000 to $35,000. The later you came, the lower your income.

There are two graphs from the study of Professor Philip Kelly which made an indelible imprint on my mind during his presentation a few weeks ago. They show that Filipino immigrants in Toronto have the highest educational attainment compared to all other immigrants and the general Toronto population. And yet Filipinos have the lowest income compared to the other two groups.

In other words, if you are highly educated, and you belong to the immigrant population, you are most likely poor. And if you’re Filipino, you are the most educated, but you are the poorest.
Is there a social justice issue here?

Let me quote Olivia Chow from the Toronto Star story of May 2003: “Add those up (meaning no increase in minimum wage, cutbacks in support to immigrant settlement, increase in part time and casual jobs in Toronto) and it means that even though immigrants have high education levels, they’re stuck in a cycle of poverty. Add to that the increases in rent, and life is very,very difficult.”

Filipinos politically powerless

On the political front, it is easier to see where Filipinos are. There is not much to talk about. We have no political clout. At the three levels of government, we are next to nothing.

We have one elected councillor in Markham, Councillor Alex Chui. We have a Filipino who is the Deputy Lord Mayor of Niagara on the Lake, the well-liked Art Viola. But there are only three Filipino families in his town. We used to have an MP in Winnipeg who is of Filipino origin, Dr. Rey Pagtakhan who used to be a Minister in the Chretien government. But he lost in the last election.

In the political process, we don’t count, according to a former member of the Police Services Board. It may hurt our our pride but it’s true. We don’t count in any electoral campaign because our votes are hopelessly divided. We don’t have significant bloc votes, that is, if we ever vote at all. In fund raising campaigns for whatever cause initiated by mainstream groups, we do not have a significant presence.
But why don’t we have political clout? We are here in big numbers.

According to the 2001 census, the total population of Filipinos, by ethnic origin responses, is 327,545. Let’s round it to 350,000 to include those on temporary work permits like the nannies, the students and some workers.

In the Greater Toronto Area, we are 141, 895. In the City of Toronto, 90,215. Think about this, if we vote as one in Toronto alone, we can choose who the mayor will be. In the last municipal elections, we have seen councillors win by a few hundred votes or a few thousand. Given our numbers, we can choose even the councillors and exercise a strong political power in the City of Toronto. But where did our votes go in the last election? Although a lot of us voted for David Miller, some of our prominent leaders campaigned for Barbara Hall, for John Tory and even for Tom Jakobek? Jakobek of the infamous computer contract scandal?

In the last national elections, some leaders and elements of our community openly campaigned for candidates of opposing parties. Not that it is bad to choose your own candidates depending on your political persuasion. But don’t we ever consider the interests of our community? There are candidates and parties more politically opposed to the interests of the immigrant population and therefore more opposed to our community interests. We must never support them.

I read the speech of John Honderich, former publisher of Toronto Star, and now special ambassador to the Mayor of Toronto. He said that in Toronto Star they asked themselves sometime ago: if more than half of the population in Toronto are people of color or of ethnic origin, why aren’t stories in the media reflecting what’s happening in their lives? And because that picture has not been changed significantly in the media, the mainstream media is still largely irrelevant to the immigrant population.

In the same manner, I ask: If we as ethnic minorities are now the majority in the city, why don’t we have political clout, or why don’t we have political power?

Because there are barriers and these barriers are well-entrenched and have been there for ages. But let me talk about that later.

Let me first ask the question: Why are we Filipinos here in Canada despite the fact that we are poor economically and we are powerless politically? Why are we here in big numbers and why are Canadians not in the Philippines in big numbers? We are 350,000 in Canada while I doubt if there is a thousand Canadians in the Philippines.

We all know why. For either economic or political reasons or both. The lives of the poor and the lower middle class are so desperate over there that about 2,000 people leave everyday to work overseas. The main goal for many professionals and trade workers is to work abroad. The educational system is designed to produce graduates with marketable skills overseas.

People not only want to leave because they believe there’s a brighter future outside the country. They are encouraged to leave by government policy because the economy by design cannot absorb them, cannot give them decent jobs. (And dollar remittances are needed badly) Also by design of the global economy, there is no industrial development in Third World countries that can absorb an expanding labor force. And also, the industrial and rich countries need the cheap labor from the Third World countries like the Philippines.

That is why there is the Labor Export Policy initiated by the Marcos government in the 1970s and continues to this day. It is responsible for starting the export of highly educated, highly skilled cheap labor. The Philippine government loves to describe Filipino labor as globally competitive, a misnomer for highly skilled, highly educated cheap labor.

There are about 7 million Filipino migrants in 168 countries. The irony of it is that this modern day cheap labor, the overseas contract workers and nannies are able to send about 5 to 8 billion US dollars every year to the Philippines. While high government officials, including the military, are robbing the government treasury blind of billions of pesos, Filipino migrant workers are slaving away
their lives overseas and helping the economy afloat.

There is a more detailed account of Filipino migration overseas, including in Canada, in the materials distributed to you earlier this morning. So let me skip that part.

The use of cheap labor from other countries is not new. It’s been a practice of colonial and later imperialist powers for centuries. In the slave trade from Africa young black men and women were imported to work in the sugar plantations and cotton fields in the “new world”. There were also slaves even in Canada at that time. But the most stark example of export of cheap labor in Canada was when the cross-Canada railway was built.

Malcolm Guy said in his article, “Racism and Migration: The Saga of Filipinos and other Asians,” “Thousands of Chinese were brought in to build the most difficult and dangerous sections through the Canadian Rocky Mountains. At least one worker died for every mile of track laid. When the railway was completed, the government decided it no longer wanted the Chinese and so imposed a Head Tax on Chinese wanting to migrate to Canada. This was raised to $500 in 1904” (The equivalent of two houses at the time.) It is the predecessor of the Landing Tax now of $750 on top of other fees.
Cheap labor imported from poor countries is not new. It is as old as colonialism. We are still suffering from colonial impositions in the year 2004.

Let me summarize briefly. The Philippine government wants to export labor because its economy cannot absorb it. The more skilled and highly educated, the better because it is globally competitve. The industrial and rich countries want cheap labor for its industries. The cheaper the labor the bigger the profits.

Either as contract workers or immigrant professionals and trade workers, we find ourselves in the industrial and rich countries because we want better lives. But what do we get? Cheap wages and salaries because we are deskilled. Our education and our professional experience don’t count. We don’t have Canadian experience when we arrive so we get the lowliest jobs. A friend of mine told me this story — He was a journalist in the Philippines but after months without a job in Toronto, he was so desperate he applied for a job as dishwasher. He was asked in the interview if he had Canadian experience in washing dishes. Another journalist tells of his transformation from being an editor in Manila to a janitor in Toronto.

But the saddest stories are those of the nannies and domestic workers. It is a common experience that Filipino nurses, teachers or professionals arrive in Canada under the Live In Caregivers Program. They leave their families in the Philippines and work here for years they become strangers to their children. Many of them spend a fortune just to work here. Many of them find no employers when they arrive and are forced to work under the table just to survive. Many of those who have employers are made to work overtime without pay, seven days a week. They work about 12 hours including jobs not specified in their contracts. When they complain and refuse to work overtime, they are threatened to be fired or actually fired on the spot, leaving them with no income and no place to live. You can find some of these stories in the conference materials and in the websites of Filipino migrant workers organizations.

I want to go back to the barriers I mentioned earlier. Barriers that prevent us from having better economic income and political clout or political power. The biggest barrier of all is racism. It is a concept or a belief that a race or a group of people are superior, more intelligent and of a higher development than others. Malcolm Guy says, “it is an offshoot of the class system and has been developed to explain, theorize and legitimize the colonial and later imperialist project. It legitimizes the conquering, controlling and exploitation of one country by another, of one people by another, of one race by another.”

We cannot advance economically and politically because of the prevalence of racism in the consciousness of those in power and this consciousness is planted and propagated in the minds of those of the same race in the lower ranks of society. That is why we experience racist bias and discrimination in schools, in the streets, in the workplace, everywhere, from our interaction with ordinary people, who like us are not high in the social ladder. All of us in the lower rung of the ladder, whether white or of color, are made to fight each other on the basis of skin color because if we fight among ourselves, the status quo is safe and maintained. It is a classic divide and rule strategy of the old colonial times.

How did Jeffrey Reodica get into the fray of a racist conflict among young kids? The white Caucasian boys, identified with those who painted the slogan “white power” on the walls of their school, manhandled a Filipino boy in a basketball court and told his group to go back to the Philippines and eat rice. Jeffrey joined them the next day looking for their “enemies” and he was shot by a white police officer coming from the direction of the white boys armed with baseball bats.

There are other similar incidents in Montreal, in Vancouver and other cities in Canada where Filipino boys are targeted by the police, a clear indication of racial bias.

I want tell you about the case of an aboriginal boy, also 17 year-old, who was found dead in the snow, face down, with marks of handcuffs on his face. There were witnesses that he was last seen in a police van yelling for help because “these people will kill me.”

What this shows is whether you’re here in Canada first as an aboriginal or you’re among the Asian latecomer immigrants like the Filpino youth Jeffrey, you can be a victim of racism and even get killed by those who are bestowed with the power to enforce the law.

Revolutionary history

Filipinos have a glorious revolutionary history. Filipinos led by Andres Bonifacio staged the first Asian revolution that toppled a colonial power. It preceded the Indone sian revolution and the Chinese revolution of 1949. There were countless revolts, leaders and martyrs who fought the Spanish colonial power. We have the distinction of toppling a dictatorship in a relatively peaceful way in 1986 before the Berlin wall was brought down and before the downfall of the Soviet Union and Eastern European regimes. The Filipinos brought down the corrupt government of Joseph Estrada.

We have the number, we have the history, we have a just cause. What are we waiting for? We only want equal treatment, equal chance at political power, and inclusion in the Canadian society that was built in the first place both by the aboriginal people and by an immigrant population mostly from Europe and now mostly from Asia.

Let us all help build a great Canadian society based on the equality of all races. Let us eliminate racism that divides us from other equally toiling people of Canada whether white or people of color. Let us instead unite and face those in power who perpetuate racism and want to maintain the oppressive status quo.

If the Chinese have the advocacy group Chinese Canadian National Council, if the south Asians have Council of Agencies Serving South Asians (CASSA), and the Blacks have the Black Defense Committee, and there is Urban Alliance on Race Relations, the Filipinos have Community Alliance for Social Justice (CASJ) in Toronto.

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MARAMING SALAMAT. THANK YOU.