PAGASA in diaspora: weather forecasters quit jobs to join OFW bandwagon

meteorologist

So it’s not only the doctors and the nurses and the teachers and the physical therapists and the engineers and ICT professionals we are losing to richer and more developed countries.

According to a news report by the Philippine Daily Inquirer, among the latest to join the migration of professionals are weather men from the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration or simply PAGASA to you and me.

Is this PAGASA in diaspora?

In the past 10 years, according to the report, 24 key personnel have left PAGASA to accept job offers from abroad. These are highly trained and highly experienced forecasters succumbing to the lure of fat salaries and, possibly, attractive professional development opportunities outside the country.

The most recent batch that quit PAGASA has been recruited by the state weather agency of Dubai, which is in the process of upgrading its weather forecasting capability in a bid to become an investor and tourist attraction. Other PAGASA meteorologists who earlier left PAGASA joined either Australia’s state weather bureau or big shipping companies.

In the wake of Typhoon Basyang whose path and movement PAGASA tracked with a disappointing lack of accuracy, this news can be as disturbing as a forecast of yet another impending super storm.

These weather specialists perform a critical function. From the data PAGASA regularly gets from international observation satellites and facilities for weather anomalies, forecasting data for Philippine use is drawn. Based on the data, weather specialists monitor the movement, speed and strength of the weather disturbance, categorize them, and then give appropriate warnings to the public.

It is said that the skills required to be a weather expert are quite high. The job requires a lot of mathematical modeling to get the right data. On the other hand, there are no schools offering meteorology and climatology as an undergraduate course, though the University of the Philippines-Diliman offers graduate and post-graduate degrees while the Ateneo De Manila University is planning to offer some courses soon.

When President Noynoy lost his cool over the failure of our weather agency to predict Basyang would hit Metro Manila which caught the residents flatfooted, he may have assumed PAGASA was underequipped, not undermanned, much less being steadily drained of its key manpower. The agency now has 14 forecasters in a three-shift, round-the-clock schedule, two less than the 16 it should ideally have -- some of whom we can assume, in the light of what we now know of the "diaspora" taking place within its ranks -- to be relatively inexperienced.

The brain drain – the outflow of local professionals to jobs abroad – has been depriving the country of the skilled manpower it direly needs for its own development since the 1960s. That early, the United States was just about the only place that beckoned and the invitation was mostly addressed to medical professionals. The destinations became more diversified with the opening of opportunities in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, England, and countries of the Middle East. The career fields have also branched out to non-medical areas like education, information and computer technology, management, engineering, construction, and many others. A study done in 2002 by the International Labor Organisation (ILO) reveals that the number of professional workers who went abroad exceeded the net addition to the professionals in the country's work force in the 1990s.

After a surge of privately-initiated deployments to the Middle East, the Philippine government laid in place a system for monitoring and managing contract employment abroad. In 1975, over 36,000 overseas contract workers were deployed. This increased to over 214,000 in 1980. By 1998, the annual number of Filipino workers leaving for abroad – consisting of those newly hired and those renewing their contracts – has risen to over 791,000.

We don’t need statistics or studies to know why our countrymen leave. We who have stuck it out here need only ask ourselves if we would not at least be severely tempted given the same chance to work in prosperous countries. The local job market has been a tight one as far as one can remember, resulting in the phenomenon of the educated unemployed. With the poor job generation rate in this country, it is not surprising that some of those who could not be absorbed by job markets here would be absorbed elsewhere.

PAGASA weather specialists earn from P20,000 to P32,000 a month, depending on their salary grade or rank. While compensation rates are periodically upgraded, these are but a fraction of the pay waiting for them in weather agencies in places like Dubai and Australia. Shipping companies and their insurers, for example, are willing to pay big bucks to keep track of the weather -- from USD500 to 1000 per forecast.

Overseas contract work has poured in huge dollar remittances into the country’s coffers, earning for OFWs the already clichéd sobriquet “new heroes of the economy." These remittances have grown from USD2.8M in 1975 to USD5.7M in 1997, or a growth rate of about four percent a year, outpacing our exports of goods in terms of annual growth rate (though not in absolute amounts). But any social observer worth his salt knows at what steep social price these economic contributions have been achieved.

The brain drain goes on unstemmed, stumping policy makers. It will continue to do so until the country achieves a higher economic growth level, increases generation of jobs, raises real incomes, and narrows the gaps between wages earned here and those earned in most migration destinations.

In the meantime these improvements remain in the realm of dreams, let our leaders think out of the box in finding ways to stop our critically needed specialists in government from leaving.

What about a PAGASA counterpart to the University’s professorial chairs awarded by the private sector to augment teaching salaries? What about bilateral or international grants translated (partly) into honoraria? What about exempting critical government agencies from the Salary Standardization Law?

Those are just a few random, if not so bright, ideas.

Photo by dennis crowley, c/o Flickr. Some Rights Reserved

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