Seven years of relentless work in New Zealand’s bustling construction industry would catch up to 51-year-old Boy*, compelling him to welcome the holidays on leave. On December 20, 2023, mere days before Christmas, Boy and more than 700 overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) were laid off after recruitment firm ELE Group of Companies suddenly went bust.

ELE was a top player in New Zealand’s labor-hire scene, wherein agencies contract short-term manpower to client businesses. It has become a popular means to skirt regularization of employees. 

Migrante Aotearoa Chairperson Mikee Santos describes ELE’s going under as the “biggest closure of a company wherein Filipinos are the ones affected.” This, while the emergency aid that migrant groups have been demanding from the Philippine government remains in limbo.

Chronic underemployment and contractualization force OFWs to leave the Philippines only to be met with a labor climate just as poor abroad. When OFWs are left miles away from home with nowhere to run but the Philippine government, the state’s utmost duty is invoked: getting at the substandard work conditions that constitute the root causes of emigration.

Wearing Thin

The Department of Migrant Workers (DMW) has long packaged New Zealand as a migration idyll, with its progressive education system and liberal policymaking. But this starry-eyed picture skims over Boy’s daily ordeals in the country’s booming housing market.

Boy is a seasoned migrant worker. Paltry pay in the Philippines pushed him to try his luck in Qatar, then Singapore. Since arriving in New Zealand in 2017, Boy has brought in his wife and three children to live with him and just last year secured residency.

Since he entered New Zealand, Boy’s order of the day comprised of installing the jibs of cranes, mounting the framing of different structures, and other routine labor. The wage for construction men who work 30 hours a week, the minimum entitlement, is NZD800 or P27,700 weekly. 

New Zealand’s steep cost of living, however, forces workers to break even. “Minsan, dahil ‘yung [sahod] nila napupunta lang sa upa, may mga lumabas na ng bahay, natutulog na lang sa kotse,” said Santos. But even then, a graver expense is the weekly installments demanded by car ownership in New Zealand–a necessity for all workers in the “absence of good public transport infrastructure,” Santos claims.

ELE’s closure amplified the sting of these expenses tenfold. Later investigations found that ELE had been financially struggling halfway into 2023 when it lodged a request for additional funding to Deloitte, the network that represents it. On February 20, Deloitte’s report revealed that ELE owes creditors a total of NZD12.3 million. Yet, Philippine Ambassador to New Zealand Kira Azucena said that despite this, ELE stepped up recruitment of Filipino migrants.

ELE’s willful negligence became more evident with workers like Boy entering their third month unemployed. His job hunting has been constrained by cut-rate companies who go first after migrants without residence for their lower salary grades. 

Amid calls from Migrante to expedite the P35,000 subsidy from the Philippine government, Boy and other residents have not yet received aid. As of January, many tranches remain in the air–only 21 out of 97 ex-ELE workers in Christchurch have received aid while just 12 of 95 have gotten theirs in Auckland.

Deloitte relayed to ex-ELE workers the computations of their final pay last month and Migrante Aotearoa expects distribution of payments by March. But this does little to rock the boat of New Zealand’s labor hire arrangement–suspect number one behind the laid-off workers’ present strife.

The Triangular Trap

The triangular work or third-party arrangement quickly became a staple of New Zealand’s labor terrain—at the expense of a migrant workforce rendered cheap, docile labor. 

The labor shortage generated by the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes prompted labor hires to fill this vacuum with migrant manpower. Until 2016, 10,000 migrant workers entered the country, a prelude to New Zealand’s construction boom in 2017, when the floodgates opened to over 20,000 Filipino workers.

Multiple labor-hire firms emerged from the woodwork. Residential developers embraced labor-hires’ tripartite labor arrangement to avoid direct employment. ”Ang nagiging strategy ng labor-hire is to flood the job market ng napakadaming trabahador, so [employers] can hire at a lower pay rate,” Santos said. 

However, in 2023, twin surges in mortgage rates and material costs rocked the market. Dozens of construction firms–prime clients of labor-hires–went bust, stripping ELE and other labor-hire agencies of cause to operate. ELE’s eventual default revealed gaps in Immigration New Zealand’s (INZ) regulation of the employment placement industry. 

INZ billed the Accredited Employer Work Visa (AEWV) scheme to accredit employers before hiring migrants, but its implementation has been inadequate. INZ failed to sufficiently assess applicant companies’ capacity to support employees, making thousands of workers vulnerable to exploitation, including contractual hiring practices, according to a report by local news outfit Newshub.

To ensure the employment of OFWs abroad, the Philippine government required an Overseas Employment Certificate (OEC), a mandatory document that seeks to guarantee work for OFWs in their host countries. However, Migrante railed against the OEC, citing the added bureaucracy. The return of migrant workers from the Philippines to their host countries is bogged down by the OEC’s documentation fees and laggard application process, according to Migrante International.

Requirements like the OEC should ideally provide OFWs with recourse. Instead, they find sluggish aid and tiers of red tape–worsening the blow of a deficient agriculture sector and unstable employment back home, abetted by the state. “Sa mga meeting [kasama ang mga migrante], 100 percent sa kanila ay galing sa bukid ang pamilya … Di sila nagkakaroon ng lupa, so napipilitan silang umalis ng bansa.”

Revisiting the Blueprint

Boy’s experiences constitute a gloomy tapestry of stories shared by all Filipino migrant workers. A unifying element in all of these: migration out of sheer necessity rather than desire. “Sa Pilipinas may trabaho, pero ang kinikita ay napakaliit lang. Hindi malayong ang nagmimithing magkatrabaho ay iisiping mangibang-bansa,” Boy said.

DMW flaunted in January the return of OFW deployment to prepandemic figures, with 2.5 million OECs issued in 2023. But instead of glorifying sky-high remittances and the exodus of migrant workers, a counterattack must be launched to resolve these. The foundation of this campaign can be the passage of the Security of Tenure Bill, which requires employers to obtain a license before hiring, placing an added safeguard for workers against contractualization.

Even though 5,000 miles away from the Philippines, Boy finds himself rehearsing the same rituals that pushed him to leave home: work without respite, hopping between employers, and letting the day pass hungry. Boy’s seven-year toil in New Zealand will continue without first solving the dire straits that render him suffocated in his homeland and trapped abroad. ●

*Not his real name. The case study has asked the Collegian to conceal his real name due to the sensitive nature of the article.