STO. TOMAS, Pangasinan, Philippines – President Arroyo has ordered economic managers to study the proposal of Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Ralph Recto for the government to set up a fund to extend temporary unemployment insurance to workers who lose their jobs, with money to be provided by the Social Security System (SSS) and the national government.

Recto proposed during the Cabinet meeting that P5,000 or P10,000 be given monthly for six months to SSS members who lose their jobs due to the economic crisis.

I’m sure people will find ways to game that dole out so it doesn’t actually find its way to the poor starving masses.

This country already has an informal welfare system called the OFW. It is a mechanism by which Filipinos working abroad pay for their relatives studies, expenses in the Philippines. This country doesn’t need to institutionalize a welfare state further.

What does the government need to spend money on? It needs to reaffirm hard work. It needs to reward hardworking Filipinos in Government and in the Private Sector. How can government do this?

Through the tried and tested formula of spending on better infrastructure projects. Build more and better roads. It needs to build up telecommunication infrastructure, it needs to rapidly expand trains and whatnut. So get a government network up and running. Buy IT, buy a network infrastructure that will in turn get Globe, Smart and myriad Information Technology companies a contract with the government, which in turn feeds more people.

Create jobs and jobs mean money for people to actually buy more goods and services. This economy needs to circulate money. It needs to grow and thrive in the Philippines and not wind up going abroad to gather dust and interest. It is the classic multiplier effect that real jobs in the private sector mean more money for government.

Instead of providing six months to SSS members, increase pay for existing government health workers. Buy more medical equipment for hospitals (which in turn fuels the local medical equipment business). Better government hospitals mean increase in competition for Privately run hospitals who in turn will have to respond appropriately. So funnel money into those institutions government already have. In turn, those people will spend more on their loved ones. They’ll buy more with greater purchasing power, and hospitals get to save more lives.

Give police better pay. Whether they spend that money on their real wives or their mistresses doesn’t matter, right? the fact that they’ve got money to spend means it goes to Jollibee, it goes to Smart and Globe and to National Bookstore for kids come June 2009. Also buy police real gear— communications and fuel and real training and I’m sure the local ammunitions industry will benefit as much as the local oil industry.

We need better schools and better teachers and better gear for government.   Government needs to buy more teacher training, and find more efficient ways to spread education. The kind of education that makes people think, and not just the ability to give out facts and figures that anybody with a brain can google.

Government needs to spend money where it can count and not waste its time on dole-outs.

The Philippines needs to keep the wealth it gets and circulates it in the broader economy. Jobs and Infrastructure are classic tools of government. Government needs to spend what little money it has and make it count. Make this wealth grow and thrive. That’s the best way to endear yourselves to people’s hearts and not to artificially buy their votes. Because in the end, the consummate politician will talk dole-outs masking as a bleeding-heart for the poor while missing the broader picture that actually changes lives. That would be the difference between a statesman and a politician, I guess.

thanks to Rom and Marck for the heads up on the news article.

Perhaps one of the positive developments in the Philippines is there is a “boom” in science jobs never before seen. This is a direct result of continued increase in S&T funding by the Macapagal-Arroyo administration over the span of 5 years. This science investment as finally translated as full blown research programs. For example I have written about the 17 urgent senior research associate jobs in an earlier post. I just learned that more then 30 jobs are needed initially. When the research programme enters its second phase, there will be more jobs available that each lab can employ a complement of 50 to 100 people.

We just hope that when the research programs end, economic times would be better and investors would be attracted to the new opportunities provided by these activities. As for the teaching sector, I was informed that the country’s top universities are in need of many new PhDs  in their attempt to improve faculty profile and output. Perhaps this is a positive result of those despised university ranking surveys! :-) Not only PhDs are needed in the universities. In teaching colleges, Masters degree holders are needed to teach the basic sciences. This is also noted in the professional schools.

Since there is a demand for these services, the salaries have started to become extremely attractive that some science grads have DITCHED the CALL CENTERS for the lab! The senior researcher jobs with all the benefits may give a young man/woman about 25K a month something that only a few call centers can initially match.

As for the PhDs, the salaries in the private universities are quite attractive and approach middle management  rates in the corporate world and offer the possibility of TENURE, something rare in the corporate sector.

If these positive developments continue, the country might see the start of a science driven economy. But this will require a long term vision for the politicians and investors. So in 2010, we have to ask the presidentiables what their ideas on this are.

Too bad I got by BSc ages ago!

Unfortunately, job losses are not limited to the electronics industry — experts believe that Intel was only the beginning, and more companies in the Philippines will be laying workers off. Furthermore, OFWs themselves are being hit with layoffs, the worst of which was the loss of jobs of around 3000 workers in Taiwan.

The silver lining in this landscape of layoff despair is that the local IT (the internet and software part of it, not the hardware part) as well as the BPO industries are faring well, with some experts believing that the jobless can be absorbed by these industries altogether:

According to Lauro Vives, president and chief executive of research of XMG Asia Pacific, the IT and BPO sectors can absorb the displaced workers, provided they have the required skills.

Lack of jobs should not be a problem for the Philippines as there are activities that are in the pipeline in the IT and BPO sectors in the next few months, he said.[Inquirer.net]

This news was inadvertently supported by Citibank, which announced a significant expansion of so-called “knowledge process outsourcing” division in the Philippines.

Not all is bright and dandy in those industries either, however. In the same article, Accenture confirmed an earlier announcement that it laid some 500 Filipino workers off. It’s confusing, however, on whether those 500 were part of the call center group (as reported in the above article) or the solutions group (as rumored here).

And if you think the call center industry is safe, think again: late last year, Dell has started moving call centers back to the United States after constant customer complaints of having difficulty talking with Filipino and Indian call center agents. While the service has a higher price than Dell’s regular customer support services, it underscores the not-so-obvious fragility of the call center industry and how American customers receive non-American customer support agents.

Indeed the only lesson that we can learn above is that there’s no such thing as a safe haven in the world economic crisis that we’re experiencing today. There’s simply no way to play it safe, and perhaps it’s because it’s just not possible. In fact, some people survived and prospered by playing riskier cards in tough economic times, and some of the biggest local enterprises were born in the middle of the most dire periods in history (National Bookstore was established during World War II, and Jollibee started in the shadow of Martial Law, for example).

What is clear, however, is that a person has to keep his eyes peeled and his ear close to the ground, because in tough economic times, standing still and oblivious will be the surest way to perish.

My friend (from the apartment building where I live when I’m not being my mother’s daughter) Chick works the graveyard at a call center. I call her Chick because her boyfriend’s name is Ken. I could have called her Barbie but that’s not how my mind works. She loves her job too, because it pays enough for her to have an interesting Friday night out twice a month; because it pays enough to keep her in Greenhills-designer bags and tight-fitting camisoles; because it pays enough that she can afford a mocha frap at Starbucks three days a week; because it pays enough that she can convince herself she can delay taking the CPA board one more year.

I went to a job fair recently, and I was struck by how pretty everyone was. Even the guys. I filled out a couple of forms – nothing serious, really, just wanting to get a feel of how it will be like when I finally get out of school. While I was laying my chicken scratches on the forms, I couldn’t help but overhear the conversations of the hiring people. It was so valley-girl. So hollywood-cliche. Everyone just “loooooooved” the new song, and “ohhhh myyyyy gawd!” wasn’t Paolo so cute? And they were “like, shit PAAAAAAHre! the ride was so sweeeeeeeet!” and everyone had a “pad” or a “flat.” If this was what new graduates were exposed to at these job fairs, then it’s not surprising that so many kids are flocking to call centers. The bait – although I doubt that the ‘bait’ actually realized that was in the fine print of their HR contracts – was pretty goddamned irresistible. Good thing I read alot when I was a kid; I was no stranger to the house made of candy and cakes that so entranced Hansel and Gretel.

Another friend Tickles – real name Tess (figure it out) – says she works at a call center, but people around here think she’s lying. She comes in at 6 in the morning; she leaves at seven in the evening. Sometimes, when I arrive early enough to catch her just before she leaves, we sit around and smoke. She tells me about this boy she’s sweet on at work and how theyre both saving money for their wedding. She says she loves her job too, but there are times when I can’t help wondering why she leaves for work all pretty and fresh-faced, with hardly any blush, but comes home wearing pancake make-up.

Sometimes, listening to the conversations going on around me at work, I wonder if I haven’t strayed into a cave sometime during the neolithic age. There I am, surrounded by cavemen wearing neckties, talking about their latest exploits as though the cavewomen were either deaf or not there at all. This is where I learned what GRO stands for, and FM, and LD. This is where I learned that a few centimeters of cigarette ash in the LD is supposed to make the GRO more e-z. I actually sent Mythbusters an e-mail about that. Haha. Morons. That shit doesn’t work.

Howard works at the salon. He’s doing shampoos now, but he says he’s learning how to cut and blow. He always jokes that all he really needs to learn is how to cut. He dropped out of school when his dad up and left his mother. Now, he has dreams of owning his own salon some day. Whenever he brings it up, I always ask him “Howard can it be?” But he never gets the joke. That’s ok. He laughs enough for ten people anyway. He hates GMA with a passion because his dad was a cop. In his mind, cops are just extensions of GMA’s evil. He’s happy with his job too, and he saves all his tips. To date, he has bought a first rate pair of scissors and a Denman brush.

I was at the salon the other day, getting a haircut. Aaaah. Sometimes, being a woman has its benefits. LOL. The topic that had all the parloristas abuzz was, of course, Brian Gorrell. Having assiduously followed Gorrell’s blog for awhile, I was pretty amused at how wrong they were getting some parts of the story.

Honeys, he’s Australian, not a Filipino who became an Australian and wanted to become Filipino again.

He has HIV, not AIDS; there’s a whale of a difference.

He wasn’t forced to give the money. He gave it of his own free will. And its in Australian Dollars, not US.

DJ Montano is not related to Troy (I think) and he is most definitely not a disk jockey.

Only DJ Montano actually owes him money. The rest of the Gucci (Gu-chi, not Gu-si) Gang doesn’t owe him anything. He’s going after them so they’ll be forced to force DJ Montano to pay up if only to shut Gorrell up. And no, the strategy doesn’t seem to be working as planned. Instead, it seems that Gorrell is becoming something of an internet legend which, of course, has its own rewards.

Marie doesn’t have a job. She’s a full-time student. At least that’s what she tells her mother in Italy. She lives alone, like me, and she get’s up at about half-past three. In the afternoon. Her day starts with cup noodles and a quick shower. Then it’s off to the mall. She’s back by nine with friends in tow. They drink red horse until the cows come home. She sends her class cards to her mom regularly. I have no idea where she gets those things. She seems happy enough, except that every now and again, she’s prone to pounding on my door crying that she thinks she’s pregnant. Everytime, she swears she’ll never do it again, but when she starts to bleed, she forgets.

The internet is a wonderful thing. With it, I get to chat with my mom a few minutes everyday – mostly before I go to bed. When I first discovered how much I enjoyed the internet, I toyed with the idea of blogging for a living. I thought, now there’s money for nothing. But breaking into the blogging-biz is not as easy as it looks. Oh sure, you can have a blog up and running in under five minutes, but getting it to make money for you is a different story entirely. For one thing, there’s the matter of generating content people will want to read. As with any business, it’s about returning customers – or in this case, readers. Just this morning, I was talking to a cousin of mine and I asked her what she wanted to do with her life. She goes: I want to blog. For alot of kids nowadays, apparently blogging ranks pretty high in the list of jobs I’d like to have. I swear, kids are getting more and more hedonistic nowadays, always on the look-out for jobs that they think bring in money without requiring real work. Too few kids nowadays think of jobs as a way to a better future, just as a means of making dough for the next round of pleasure-seeking. Morons.

Mark, at work, wants to be a lawyer someday. For him, his job is a ‘stepping-stone’ – he loves that word. He’s a pretty sharp researcher and I think he will be a lawyer at some point. But the clock’s ticking. His wife just gave birth and he knows he can’t raise a family on a legal researcher’s salary. Oh well, maybe the fourth time’s the charm. In the meantime, he sells chocolates that his wife makes. I don’t eat chocolates alot, but whenever I get some financial slack, I buy a box and share it in the office or in school.

On weekends and long holidays, I go home to be my mom’s daughter for awhile. When I’m there, I usually see cousins and their friends. I get dragged to Starbuck’s more often that I like, and I witness more impulse buying than I’m comfortable with. At first, my cousins used to tease me about being so tight-fisted. But eventually, they stopped. At first I thought they had just gotten tired of the same old joke, but recently, I found out the real reason. On one of my visits, and just before we were supposed to go to the mall, my mom pulled me aside and tried to give me money. “Your cousins are worried,” she says. I laugh my head off and kiss her. Not being too finicky, I gratefully pocketed the money and was just as tight-fisted as ever.

a type of blog event. It is similar to a magazine, in that it is dedicated to a particular topic, and is published on a regular schedule, often weekly or monthly. Each edition of a blog carnival is in the form of a blog article that contains permalinks links to other blog articles on the particular topic.

Filipino Voices will hold a blog carnival every second and fourth Sunday of the month. Each topic will be announced that week and all submissions must be made no later than 12 noon of that Sunday.

If you wish to participate in the blog carnival, please leave a brief comment on this post regarding your article and the url of that article.

Our current topic is a timely one, indeed the state of our job market plays an important role in the progress of our nation. If we can’t provide a qualified workforce and well paying jobs for that workforce, our nation cannot and will not progress.

Vox Populi! And may your voice come with analysis, propaganda allowed, but solutions and analysis are most welcomed too.

Update: April 29, 2008 – seeing that the submissions haven’t been all that swell, we’ll be continuing this blog carnival up until the next topic. Considering it was our first Blog Carnival, we’re still happy that even a few chose to participate. Thank you.

The Articles

1. Job Stories by Rom
2. The Politics of Labor Relations by Butch
3. The Pinoy Worker In A Flat World by Patricio Mangubat
4. Eating Words by Marck Ronald Rimorin