Corona Daily 285: They Don’t Want to be Heroes

Few professions are as dominated by women as nursing. As a result, nursing remains underpaid, underappreciated and little protected. Philippines is a major provider of nurses worldwide. USA has about 150,000 Filipino nurses. In California, every fifth nurse is a Filipino. In April, Philippines banned its nurses from travelling abroad. Seven nurses with work visas to the UK were deplaned before take-off.

Health secretary Duque said the government was appealing to the nurses’ sense of nation, sense of people and sense of service.

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A Filipino nurse earns $5000 a month in the USA, $2000 tax free in the Middle East. Germany gives them $2800 plus free language training, and they are unionised. Even in war zones like Yemen, nurses get free lodging and insurance, allowing them to save most of their salary. Abroad, the nurses are not required to do any non-professional work like sweeping floors. Over the years, most nurses are able to buy a house and a car for their families.

Philippines Department of Heath offers a starting salary of $650 a month. This year it pays an additional $10 per day as Covid-19 hazard allowance. Private nurses make as little as $100 a month. The shortages make the nursing staff work up to 36 hours per shift. Protective gears are in shortage, nurses can’t get tested regularly. Hospital beds are not reserved when they get sick. Inside Philippines and abroad, most nurses are concentrated in bedside and critical care – the exact opposite of social distancing. Filipino health workers have fallen victims to covid-19 at home and abroad. They would still prefer to die abroad, just as they prefer to live abroad.

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As per WHO, the world has under 28 million nurses, at least six million fewer than it needs. Working conditions in the Philippines have made matters worse. Earlier, hospitals established volunteer positions with no pay. Later, nurses were paid a nominal stipend under schemes called “in-hospital training programmes”. Most nurses who serve abroad have spent the first two mandatory years working in the Philippines. Only about 20% of the annual 100,000 nursing graduates find jobs abroad. Others look at the conditions and pay, and prefer to work in call centres or hotels instead.

“I have served my country already.” Said one of the nurses stopped from going abroad. “I don’t want to be a hero again. I am looking out for the future of my children.”

The Filipino nurses not allowed to go abroad are called the “priso-nurses”.

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To understand why Filipino nurses are such a major force in the USA, we must go back to 1898, the year in which America colonized the Philippines. Wars being a regular feature of life, America wished to create a cheap, docile class of nurses in large numbers. They opened nursing schools where American teachers taught western medical practices to Filipino students. English was taught along with nursing training. The program was euphemistically called the ‘benevolent assimilation.’

Filipino nurses looked after American soldiers during the two World Wars. But after 1946, when Philippines became independent, America began giving the nurses non-immigrant visas. They could work for years, without becoming citizens. This changed in 1965, when immigration policy became softer. Filipino nurses were still given the most unpleasant jobs in health care, but now they could raise their families in the USA. Marcos, the Filipino dictator in the 1980s started looking at them as an “export product”. Indeed, in 2019, Filipinos abroad sent $35 billion back home, making it the world’s fourth largest recipient of overseas remittances. A majority of the 13000 nurses who leave Philippines every year to work abroad go to the USA.

One hopes USA and the other countries will one day appreciate the unsung heroes of the pandemic.

Ravi