Senator Imee Marcos has spotted opportunities emerging for jobless nurses amid bleak forecasts of a surge in Covid-19 cases worldwide after the Christmas holidays.
Marcos said registered Filipino nurses can consider taking up some 3,000 vacancies in the United States, “possibly more in coming weeks,” which have emerged due to staffing shortages particularly in California, Texas, Florida, Minnesota, and New York.
Rising cases of infection across America have been aggravated by the fall-winter flu season, forcing nurses who used to shuttle in from other states to stay put, Marcos explained.
“The cold reality is that America’s need for nurses answers our own need to curb high unemployment and put food on the table of whole Filipino families,” Marcos said.
“The lack of a national policy on job creation and recovery has given the unemployed limited options,” she added.
Marcos said that many overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) are among the estimated 200,000 nurses who have lost work and come home or remain stranded in taking up jobs abroad since border controls began earlier this year to stop the spread of the pandemic.
As of September, almost 40% of the country’s adult labor force or more than 23 million people are out of work.
“Let’s hope that the roll-out of vaccines accelerating next year will ease unemployment,” Marcos said. (via Senate)