ABSTRACT
Surveys of attitudes and opinions towards work of people working in more developed countries, which are net importers of labor, are of great relevance to the less developed countries, which are the net suppliers of labor to overseas markets. One of the major net suppliers of labor is the Philippines; it has deployed millions of workers to dozens of countries abroad in the past four decades.
The objective of this chapter is to compare a number of ISSP countries as potential work destinations for overseas Filipino workers (OFWs). First of all, it uses the ISSP surveys on Work Orientations to examine the working-life dimensions of (a) job satisfaction and working hours per week, (b) felt deficiencies in working life, (c) difficulties found in present jobs, (d) willingness to make sacrifices for employers, (e) social relations at work, (f) flexibilities in job time and organization, and (g) several other non-income attributes of jobs. It compares Philippine and overseas standards along these dimensions in order to obtain an illustrative ranking of selected ISSP countries as attractive workplaces for OFWs. Second, the chapter uses the ISSP surveys on National Identity to establish the relative receptivity of potential host countries to immigrants. The chapter does not make any attempt to compare the host countries in terms of pay scales available to immigrant workers, since such data are not part of the ISSP modules.
The chapter focuses on the following twenty-one ISSP countries as potential workplaces: Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Flanders, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and the United States. Filipino workers are, in fact, currently being deployed to every one of these countries.
