Charge to the exit

Why is the government criticized for limiting foreign workers to three years in the CNMI? Employers say the limit disrupts business and induces more expenses in the constant changeover of employees. The workers are largely unheard. But they’re understood to have found expression in the employers’ opposition. Put on the defensive, the government says this is the time to begin the process of phasing out foreign workers and supplanting them with locals.

The limit marks the first bold step at shifting local attitudes away from the government for employment. The tendency among locals to gravitate to government for jobs has been at issue since time immemorial. Indeed if this isn’t the time to alter the view that the government is one big employment agency, when is? And if the
Tenorio administration doesn’t bite the bullet now, who will? Case over.

Perhaps the government would have been spared the mouthful if it had demonstrated that it was not merely trying to conveniently wriggle itself free from the onus of breaking stereotypes that posed as a wall of divide between locals and private companies. But that burden is now cast on the employers for them, and only them, to bear. Truth is, the government has made token efforts only at making locals up to labor-market demands. (Having said that, I must state that I myself am a contract worker, who may be let go at the slightest hint of having outlived my usefulness. I also fully understand that foreign workers are situated as guests who, at the pleasure of the host, may go or stay.)

The government, its advocacy for private enterprise notwithstanding, still remains the best option for many locals. For one with a family to raise and a mortgage to pay, for example, the government can well make the difference between survival and comfort. Elsewhere, a job applicant is routinely measured against some level of competency. And who knows how much longer might a company continue to walk with wobbly knees. In a patronage-ridden government, a soft, well-paid job is as easy to come by as whistling an off-key tune. Forget about job skills; it’s not as if one will dig his fingernails into some greasy factory machine or in a stack of paper files. Besides, a politically connected circle of friends or relatives will more than smooth the way.

But should the government be faulted for trying to accommodate as many jobless constituents as it possibly could? Maybe not. The indigenous people had a long history of deprivation, stretching back to the days when there was hardly anything to scrape around. Then suddenly, they woke up one day a little richer than the day before.
True and meaningful economic development occurred only in the years following the 1976 Covenant. The Northern Marianas was left to start over when the war almost annihilated the local population and flattened the best farmlands. A so-called security closure during the U.S. Naval Administration also inhibited foreign investment.
It wasn’t too long ago that locals broke off the shackles of subsistence living; that’s when, in the 1980s, the economy blossomed into self-sufficiency.

The economic growth in the 20 years or so since foreign investments poured in was stunning, to say the least. And the growth might even have come too fast for locals who otherwise could have taken a ride on the economic train if only they possessed skills anywhere near acceptable level. In the rush to get started, companies brought in workers, whose size had grown proportionately to the need for them. The economic growth buoyed the government which, of course, embraced those who had lost out in or been missed out by the rat race. As the level of prosperity rises, so government perks shoot up to ludicrous proportion. That effectively sets government employment apart as lucrative in the personal economic order.

Evidently, the government had drifted into passivity for far too long, perpetuating the notion that it’s all right to be stuck in a parasitic kind of employment. In the space between now and back to the infancy years of economic development, there was hardly any significant effort that might have instilled corporate culture among locals. That government jobs pay way better simply renders an impossibility attempts to persuade locals to change course now.

There’s little doubt about the political complexion in the limit. A U.S. proposal to apply federal immigration laws in the CNMI only fanned fears of transfer in power to an ever-increasing number of workers who, if enfranchised, could drastically change the local political landscape. There’s no question that the limit must come sooner or later. But ramming it down amounts to holding the employers to account for the government’s failing.