Filipino sailors aboard foreign-flagged ocean-going vessels wired home a total of $2.461 billion in the eight months to August this year, up $250 million or 11.31 percent of the $2.211 billion they remitted over the same period in 2009, the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines told the Filipino-focused news publication, the Inquirer. “The foreign exchange coming in from sea-based migrant Filipino workers is growing twice faster than those coming in from their land-based counterparts,” TUCP secretary-general Ernesto Herrera said in a news release. “At the current double-digit growth rate, we now see the full year remittances from Filipino sailors abroad hitting around $3.7 billion.” Herrera, whose national labor center includes the Philippine Seafarers’ Union, attributed the sustained growth in remittances to the increased deployment of sailors and global demographics.
