What is wrong with being a “servant” anyway?

Why feel “insulted” when called a “servant” when one is in fact earning an honest living working as a servant.

If placed in the proper context, being a worker employed in the domestic services industry is a profession just like any other.

Filipinos however do not see things this way.

The trouble with Filipinos (and the irony that utterly escapes our limited sensibilities in light of all this Tsip Chao brouhaha) is that we generally treat the domestic help we ourselves employ in our homeland in an undignified and appalling way — far worse than they are treated overseas:

:D Their roles in the household are undefined (no employment contract stipulating working hours, scope of work, and benefit entitlements) and as such;

:D They are on-call 24 hrs a day — nothing stops their employers from sending them out in the middle of the night to buy a single cigarette stick.

:D We allow our own kids liberty to boss them around and verbally abuse them.

:D They are paid below minimum wage; and,

:D Their employers do not make contributions to the Social Security System on their behalf.

If anything was achieved by those 7,000 Filipinos marching in Hong Kong highlighting the “insult” that they feel hasn’t been rectified, it was that they facilitated the emergence of even more disturbing realities about The Filipino.

Filipinos are culturally predisposed to regard people employed in our local domestic services industry as socially inferior. As such, though laws may be in place (I’m not a lawyer so I may be mistaken here) that criminalise the above practices cited above, they persist nonetheless and are still seen as socially acceptable (at worst) or something that is not stigmatised among employers of domestic help (at best). The plight of servants in the Philippines — something not discussed in polite society — is but a mere speck in the vast banality of the bigger framework of injustice ingrained at the very fabric of Philippine society.

Yes, this low social standing of servants is ingrained from childhood (Point 3 above) even in the minds of Filipino professionals who go off to Hong Kong and other countries to work as, well, servants. Though well aware that they are indeed working as such, they don’t want to be reminded of that quaint reality.

It gets even funnier, folks.

The fact is, many of our slighted compatriots working in Hong Kong as servants probably still employ servants in the Philippines themselves.

Filipinos who prefer to be known by their former professions — teachers, engineers, and office workers — who now work as servants in Hong Kong themselves once employed or continue to employ servants back in their homeland — and most likely treated them or continue to treat them in the same appalling way that most Filipinos treat their servants.

Indeed, this latest of “issues” that grips the tiny mind of the Filipino is just another in a long list of “issues” that have had an unexpected effect of highlighting that renowned utter lack of inclination in the Filipino to reflect.

So why do we feel insulted by being called a “nation of servants”?

Perhaps it is because we ourselves, look down upon people who earn an honest living as servants.

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here’s a site i found interesting. One Tama. According to their page, “One Tama is a campaign that asks a very simple question: If all of us say we want a better country anyway, why don’t we try it out for one day?”

(thanks to @kulit for the heads up.)

three graphs showed startling numbers:

(click each image to see the bigger picture)

When asked ““Are you considering an entry or expansion to the nominated country in the following year” the participants gave the Philippines more than 50%, “no plans”.

When asked of companies with no commercial contract in the philippines (who have not done or doing business in the philippines), more 90% said “no plans”. And in the list of countries, we’re at the bottom of that company.

When asked about the attractiveness of the Philippines, for both those with contact and no, a resounding “3″ and again, behind everybody else.

conclusion: What is the Philippines doing wrong that Thailand and Vietnam are way ahead of us? If this condition is not turned around in the next 10 years, the Philippines will find itself the poorest of the poor. Far behind Vietnam. And no it wouldn’t be just government’s fault. It will be every Filipino’s head.

Don’t give me the fraking bullshit that we’re not affected by the global financial crisis or that our economy is somehow resilient. Even if that argument holds true that is past performance, and given this survey, future performance is cloudy. That concerns me and the writing on the wall should concern every Filipino.

So what are we doing wrong? How will you turn it all around?

It’s because:

We expect so much from presidents and so very little from ourselves.

We expect presidents to be saints but cannot seem to find it in ourselves to stop urinating in public. We expect presidents to be brilliant but cannot seem to hold ourselves to world class standards of excellence. We expect presidents to be accountable yet cannot seem to hold ourselves personally responsible for our own prosperity.

In other words, we set up our leaders for failure by setting standards of such scope as to leave little for us to be responsible for. When a President becomes responsible for “creating employment”, for example, guess what: suddenly, it is not our fault if we cannot find a job. Their failure can absolve us of our own failure to make things happen for ourselves.

This is not too different from how, left to their own devices, “key stakeholders” in an IT systems implementation project tend to press for no less than a do-it-all system that “automates everything from end-to-end”. When the possibility of such a system being built is raised (say, during vendors’ dimwit sales pitches), all of a sudden there is an excuse for inefficiency, poor data quality, poor governance, and overall poor operational practices — because all of a sudden everything is manual and prone to error.

A society of true achievers can prosper despite their president.

Strip away all the nice-to-haves promised by our half-wit politicians and regard our society relative to other developing countries. We have our democratic rights, a free press, and a relatively open economy. Flawed as these may be, they are still a whole notch better than most. Vietnam and China on the other hand are both complete antitheses of these even to this day. Yet with a very small relatively recent relaxation of their once oppressively tyrannical central state control of their economies, a flurry of economic activity had overcome these two states. With just enough breathing space, business in these countries, flourished.

Compare that to the Philippines, whose idea of oppressive totalitarianism is Marcosian — a teddy bear of a regime compared to that of China’s and Vietnam’s back in their bad old days (and even compared to the ones they have today). Compared to China and Vietnam, we have always been economically free — even in the bad old days of Marcos’s rule. Yet to this day, after “winning” our “freedom” in several “revolutions” since 1983, we remain not just an impoverished society, but one that sees no clear way out of this impoverishment.

So there is something quite funny about the way we obssess — more like quibble — about the “authenticity” of our politicians; as if an incremental improvement in a sitting president’s niceness will mitigate a fundamental bankruptcy of substance in our society.

I.T.P.S.

It’s the people, stupid.

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I’ve responded to their plurks but holistically, I think pretty much, whether you design a nation or a car or computer software or computer networks or if you paint on a canvas or build cities, this quote from designer Bill McDonough holds true and relevant. He said,

“Well I think as designers we realize that design is a signal of intention but it also has to occur within a world and we have to understand that world in order to imbue our designs with inherent intelligence so when we look back at the basic state of affairs in which we design we, in a way, need to go to the primordial condition to understand the operating system and the frame conditions of the planet and the exiting part of that is the good news that’s there because the news is the news of abundance and not the news of limits and I think as our culture tortures itself now with tyrannies and concerns over limits and fear we can add this other dimension of abundance that is coherent driven by the sun and start to imagine what that would be like to share“.

What do you think?

We blame government and in this case, some people blame Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Now don’t get me wrong, we can blame her for a lot of things— but poverty and hopelessness wasn’t invented by Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. If she wasn’t in power, we’d be blaming who was. It was Erap when he was President and we kicked him out for all those illegal gambling activities in that farce we created, remember? It was Ramos when he reigned. It was Cory when she was in charge and it was Marcoss when he ruled. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe they’re innocent because they and, generations of our leaders have some blame, some blood on their hands— but they’re not entirely to blame, not even half the reason.

How easy it is to wear a T-Shirt with the words, “get rid of poverty” or “President whomever sucks!” How is that any different when Jeep drivers call for fare rate hikes but never downgrades when fall. Why shouldn’t that market be deregulated?

For generations we Filipinos have been picketing on some issue, continuously blaming who’s in charge. We carry slogans and have them printed out, splashed across T-Shirts, newspaper ads, the Internet or whatever canvas they could find.

Grant Morrison started his run on Batman with an arc called “Batman & Son”. Batman in his public persona, “Bruce Wayne”, was in London at a high society function. He meets Jezebel Jet, fashion model turned leader of a small African Nation. Here’s a snippet:

BRUCE WAYNE: Tell me more about how a fashion model ended up running a small nation..

JEZEBEL JET: …I’m here to show everyone that Africa is more than just this year’s fashionable cause. It’s easy to wear a t-shirt that says “make poverty history”, until it fades in the wash.

BRUCE WAYNE: I’m all for it. And while we’re at it, let’s make wealth compulsory. It would solve so many of the world’s problems if everyone were a millionaire, don’t you think?

You didn’t think Batman has such a sense of humor, did you?

Speaking of fortunes, The Wall Street Journal has a post saying “Bernanke is Fighting the Last War“. It is a good read. Thought provoking:

“systemic risk” — the notion that allowing one firm to fail will cause a cascade that will take down otherwise healthy companies in its wake.

Ms. Schwartz doesn’t buy it. “It’s very easy when you’re a market participant,” she notes with a smile, “to claim that you shouldn’t shut down a firm that’s in really bad straits because everybody else who has lent to it will be injured. Well, if they lent to a firm that they knew was pretty rocky, that’s their responsibility. And if they have to be denied repayment of their loans, well, they wished it on themselves. The [government] doesn’t have to save them, just as it didn’t save the stockholders and the employees of Bear Stearns. Why should they be worried about the creditors? Creditors are no more worthy of being rescued than ordinary people, who are really innocent of what’s been going on.”

It takes real guts to let a large, powerful institution go down. But the alternative — the current credit freeze — is worse, Ms. Schwartz argues.

“I think if you have some principles and know what you’re doing, the market responds. They see that you have some structure to your actions, that it isn’t just ad hoc — you’ll do this today but you’ll do something different tomorrow. And the market respects people in supervisory positions who seem to be on top of what’s going on. So I think if you’re tough about firms that have invested unwisely, the market won’t blame you. They’ll say, ‘Well, yeah, it’s your fault. You did this. Nobody else told you to do it. Why should we be saving you at this point if you’re stuck with assets you can’t sell and liabilities you can’t pay off?’” But when the authorities finally got around to letting Lehman Brothers fail, it had saved so many others already that the markets didn’t know how to react. Instead of looking principled, the authorities looked erratic and inconstant.

Erratic and inconstant. hmm. Did you think those were just Filipino characteristics? heh. That and other things.

We’re all human after all. It is darn near impossible to change what others think or how they go about their thinking. On Helplessness i posted a comment:

Several years ago, i got a chance to peak at PGH’s numbers. i don’t know how they do it now, but back then they do charge for patients, if only minimally.

There are far too many people who are sick and even at minimal cost— maintenance and equipment can be overcome.

PGH i think is a reflection of how things are. Just like the state of EDSA is a mirror to the Filipino’s soul. There are many things wrong with PGH that can easily be solved. Its problems aren’t as huge as one might think. It suffers from the same disease as any government run agency is.

i humbly submit that PGH isn’t equal to health care, but it is an important aspect of delivering service. That’s not to say there isn’t a challenge in delivering health care in the Philippines, just as there is around the world.

but that’s not the point.

I see where MLQ3 is coming from.

Our nation stands a captive of our apathy and a prisoner of incapacity. Lulled by good intensions and seduced by rhetoric, we’ve permitted our national life to be gamed by politicians.

In this darkness, our Apathy stems from.

We’ve lost faith and that apathy born of broken trust, from young and old, powerful and small– every Filipino, arrogant and greedy, is all for himself now.

It is a universe where heroes are ruined. They fall from grace.

There is no common cause, only anger and fear. There is no one willing to make our world strong and free, to overcome challenges that threaten to overwhelm us. There are no heroes, only the blame game. Always with us what can not be done.

It is the disease of incapacity.

Many quarters are still holding on to hope that this Republic can somehow overcome these challenges. The slate of 2010 is shaping out to be merely the same old game: uninspiring, not surprising. Simply put: old, tired. ancient. Perhaps it is time to consider more vigorously that we must already write this Republic’s epitaph because it would be easier to start anew.

The Future does not wait for the Filipino.

The Frontier ahead of us is a world of profound transformation. It is filled with unknown peril and yet equally, opportunity.

Can you not see it?

Without doubt any future Republic will be born in the same universe we buried the dead one. It would be a universe of undefeated poverty, of unchallenged ignorance, of powerful prejudice and unequal surplus. It is understandable to shrink from that daunting task. Understandable but should be unacceptable.

Are we equal to the challenge?

Can our people draw upon courage that flows naturally in the Filipino? We require vigorous leadership. We require invention, innovation, imagination and most importantly— decision in our politics, in our economy, in education, in health care, in our pursuit of science. I would like to write, “abangan” (trans: wait for it).

I fear the truth is far more bitter. It is a deep “no,” for a Republic that is the land of the dead, the incapacitated where there is no hope at all.

mlq3 is correct.

youth has a right to be arrogant because it inspires innovation. elders have a right to put the uppity in their place but in the end, time takes its toll and todays elders will be replaced by today’s youth -who will be criticized in turn by today’s babies.

My generation fails to see that if we do not hold on fast to our politics. If we refuse to engage our elders with blatant rebellion— rebellion the kind of running for public office. Of challenging the status quo. Of raising the bar of expectation for everyone— not just those in government. We will join generations before us lamenting.

The bitter pill is that it may be the sins of our Fathers, but it is our children’s country. Every generation has its challenges. The bitter pill is that we maybe unwilling and unable to take it, conquer it. And our children shall inherit a nation similar to the one that we entered. That says something about us than it does the generation we critique.

The challenge of why institutions like PGH is the way it is because of the way we structure our assets. Simplistic I know. But a detailed break down would take an entire book that no one would read.

People still read right? Or do our kids simply watch Television?

In Look Ma! Giant Fries! Marck wrote:

Maybe because we have no choice but to content ourselves with the French fries of our society: that we can’t do anything about the poor, that the President deserves her spot because of the rule of law, that we shouldn’t save the poor, that if a free society cannot help the many who are poor then it cannot save the few who are rich…

Many lives have been transformed by the wealth being generated by Filipinos working abroad. It is the refuge of a population where we find so few jobs in country that greater opportunities exist elsewhere. We’re not the only country in the freaking planet to find greener pastures elsewhere. There is no disputing that the lifeblood of this country has been Filipinos living abroad.

Many have looked at the state of the country’s economy for years, and we’ve been drowning in explanation and analysis that hasn’t really changed much has it? Our people are still wondering, why the common public consensus is the hopelessness we breathe in day in and day out.

Have we paused and stopped and thought that instead of wearing black and white and yelling and blaming others— for things we can not change that perhaps, we ought to focus on the things that we can? Yes, standing up against a government that often abuse its power is well and good. Those things are important but that’s not all we need to accomplish and more importantly, can accomplish.

Run for public office! Or build businesses! Create! No matter how seemingly insignificant: they also serve those who stand and wait.

Those of us that do have a bit more, isn’t it our responsibility to grow that wealth? Isn’t it our responsibility to put that work to good use, by building businesses, creating jobs and thus employing people? Didn’t we learn in Religion class or in theology class or in Church that teaching someone to fish is much better than fishing for them?

Poverty is everywhere. It lives in the land of the free. It is living in first world countries and it thrives in countries that are developing. To fight poverty you don’t even have to be an entrepreneur, you don’t need slogans and T-Shirts or to go blame government why there isn’t any tickle down effect.

On What Gross National Product Measures, I wrote this:

This pursuit of material wealth does not include the beauty of our poetry, the depth of our music, the strength of our marriages and the enduring force that is the Filipino family. This GNP does not imbue intelligence in our public discourse nor raise the integrity of our public officials. Neither does Gross National Product measure the deafness of our middle-class and theologians to the fundamental gospel that incapacity is the greater evil gripping our nation, more than our outrage about the true nature of our public officials. Nor does it measure the blindness of our leadership to see beyond their petty concerns and see what our people truly need.

This statistic does not by any standard tell us how mute and hopeless and incapacitated the poor really are.

Gross National Product can not fully quantify the perseverance and level of sacrifice of the Filipino diaspora. It can never weigh the joys of our children at simple play, at simple pleasure. It does not measure our wit, our laugh, our people’s beautiful smile, nor the depth of our religious devotion and The Filipino’s courage that is God’s gift to our people.

Our Gross National Product measures everything in short except that which make life worth while. And it can tell us everything about Our Nation except why we ought to be proud of being Filipino.

Many employ drivers, or maids— that spreads wealth. Some even go far as to help educate their house-help, or the children of their house-help to give those people a change at a better life down the road. Ordinary Filipinos day in and day out help their relatives get on their foot— some provide for the education or give jobs to their relatives. We’re not entirely powerless to fight poverty or to help in the struggle against it. It is the right thing to do, work, grow the wealth, share the wealth: the glass is half-full, not half-empty.

this post is an update of, and borrows heavily from my Poverty: The Glass is Half-Full, Not Half-Empty

This effort is bizarre because it essentially pits the National Government against a mere historical relic (the sultanates) and two bandit groups. It is yet another demonstration of a quintessentially Pinoy affliction — an almost pathological predisposition to second-guess the otherwise moot. It is not too different from most other ways we conduct ourselves and regard the world; from “big” “issues” like the debate on the Sabah “question” (to some, it seems, it is still a question ;) ), to smaller things such as the limp-dick way that we manage traffic in most Philippine cities.

DJB cannot have made it more plain and simple:

[...] the Moro insurgents don’t really believe in self-determination. They just want their ransom payment for holding the whole country hostage all these years [...] people should challenge the politically correct idea that the Bangsamoro would be better off under their earliest oppressors, even compared to the later ones.

We Pinoys have an extensive track record of not being cluey enough to know when we are being insulted. Someone could be outright sitting on our fat faces and we’d be too busy “counting our blessings” and patting ourselves on the back about our latest dubious “achievement”.

Even more laughable is this chronic willingness to embrace bandits whether it be lowly MILF and commie thugs to morons like Ex-President Convicted-for-Plunder-but-Nevertheless-Pardoned Erap — even as we channel our precious taxes to the very institutions and agencies that they seek to destroy.

It’s almost like Pinoys have an aversion to harmony, order, and structure — something that seems to manifest itself in our aesthetic and design sensibilities. Instead of admiring the elegant simplicity of clean lines, we salivate over the grotesque. There is something to be said about the enduring “ingenuity” of the jeepney, the general ugliness of most Pinoy cities, and our sad inability to make our cuisine visually appealing to the international market. Ours is a truly adolescent society possessing the predictably unstable mind of an adolescent. We swoon over the seductive shortsightedness of the bad boy while shunning the long-term charms of the eligible investment banker.

It’s no wonder that our country is treated more as a trading position — to be ditched at the slightest whiff of bad news — rather than cherished as a buy-and-hold blue chip investment that it could have been.

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 “In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget–but never shows up in a budget–is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.”

via Adaptive Path interview with Pixar’s Michael B. Johnson.

Wonder how this could translate for 

1. Filipino businesses?
2. Filipino society in general?

At about the same time I was reading a comic book. It was a Batman comic book arc a few years ago called, “No Man’s Land“. This particular chapter that i was reading was written by Bob Gale (Back to the Future movie), and it was titled “Values“.

The story starts off with Gotham City being a victim of a plague and an earthquake. After this Katrina-level disaster, the US Government decides to close off Gotham instead of rebuilding it. Various personalities decide to stay in the City.

here’s an excerpt: (see jpg for snap of the page):

Peasant 1: No we have to give it to you. As tribute. And then you give us what we need. That’s how it works.

Batman: I don’t need tribute. I don’t want any. Don’t you understand? I got rid of your oppressors. The bad men.

Peasant 1: But they weren’t bad men. They protected us. took care of us.

Peasant 2: And Rhino’s not a bad man. He made sure no one got more than anyone else.

Peasant 3: Please, tell us what to do.

Batman thinks:

Now I realize who these people are. The destitue. Former welfare recipients. The “intellectually challenged”. the unmotivated. The people with common sense would never have tolerated Scarface’s regime. They left this neighborhood week’s ago.

Rhino: It ain’t about good guys and bad guys anymore, Batman. It’s just about survival…

Batman thinks:

Maybe Rhino’s right. Maybe Traditional good guys and bad guys aren’t part of the language.

Batman: Whatever you were told to do this morning? keep doing it. I’ll be back, Rhino.

two pages later…

Batman: You all work for me now, and these are my orders. It’s just like before. Rhino, you tell the people what to do and provide their rations— real food, not dog food. You give each lieutenant a weapon but no guns. Lieutenants, you provide the protection and collect the tribute. I get first choice of goods and supplies. You get first choice of food and drink. So already you’re doing better with me as your boss. You’ll never know when or where I’ll show up, but I’ll be around. So don’t mess up or I’ll take you out.

peasant: yes, sir.

peasant 2: whatever you say, sir.

Batman thinks:
Order. Rules. Structure. Without them, a civilized society cannot exist— freedom deteriorates into anarchy.

Alfred: Tribute, sir? Like a pirate? Like a despot?

Batman: It’s like a sign of respect, Alfred. It’s the language. And one cannot succeed unless one is fluent in the language.

Alfred: Are you fluent enough to succeed sir?

Batman: Not yet. But I intend to be.

If you’ve read this far, I bring this up for various reasons.

1) How often does it sometimes “feel” (given language like “keeping things afloat/surviving”) that the Philippines is a land of the destitute?

[even when it isn't, see Jon's recent and must read post on The Real Score on Filipinos and Entrepreneurship on why it isn't.]

2) That “For the Boys” standard operating procedure is the language of the land.

3) That really part of the struggle is to transform people’s thinking “that we’re crap and can’t do anything to,” “we can do this. we are doing this.” mentality.

What are your thoughts?

Here is his latest truism:

It is the Middle Class (along with the Upper Class) who has the spare resources to step back and act if it chooses to.

That comment is such a classic example of the sentiment of the backward mind, the embodiment of our world-renowned Juan Tamad archetype, and the absolute antithesis of what I express in a 2003 article on self-reliance where I say:

We pester the elite of our society with calls for acts of heroism when the burden of extra hard work in reality falls on the shoulders of the poor masses.

Dark clouds do indeed loom overhead as we face a future in a society dominated by the primitivist thinking of the majority.

Our inspiration should be drawn more from the true “heroes” of our sad republic — the Filipino-Chinese. They expected NOTHING from their hosts, maneuvered around the same dysfunctional governance we complain about, came to terms with our vacuous culture, and in the process of doing all that, self-made themselves into the captains of our country’s industry.

Maybe our goal should be to TOP THAT ACHIEVEMENT — not lie on the ground and die with our mouths open while we wait for the perfect president to be elected.

We Filipinos have been imbued with the idea that our hopes for prosperity lie squarely on the shoulders of the elite, the “haves”, a handful of leaders and/or a few “extraordinary” individuals. Our society has come to (or, more appropriately never matured beyond) a penchant for giving heroic labels to these “messiahs”, as if the Philippines is constantly waiting for a hero to rescue her from her dysfunction.

We expect heroic efforts from the few and continued mediocrity from the majority.

We expect the low product of the majority to be subsidised by the execptional output of the minority.

Our prospects for prosperity, however, lie within ourselves — not in a messianic bunch of leaders and exceptional few who are yet to come and not in the altruism of the more fortunate. What we need is the courage and open-mindedness to understand clearly what we need to do to re-tool our culture, mindsets and thought processes, and approach to doing things so that a nation-building machine that is truly able to compete could emerge out of the collective and quiet achievement of the majority.

We’ve already had our fair share of heroes. It is clear today that, for many of them, the size of their sacrifice has not been commensurate with the willingness of the people they sacrificed for to help themselves.

Great nations were not built on good intentions. They were built on business sense. Real change in Pinoy society will never be achieved through the “sacrifice” of altruistic “heroes”. True change will be driven by people who find no shame in expecting a buck for their trouble.