Ang Kape Ni LaTtEX

When someone says “life is unfair”, it often means something bad happened to that person. Most people don’t realize the duality that “fairness” implies. So I’ll invoke that duality in saying that “life is unfair” because something lucky is happening to me.

I guess you’re wondering why.

Early the other evening an HR officer called me asking me to come to their office for a job interview. I declined. I’ve recently just joined my current employer after resigning another job I just held for over four months, and I don’t want to have had been involved with four different companies within a year. Besides, I was unfamiliar with this caller’s company.

She insisted.

The caller asked me how much I was earning in my current employment. I said “X”. To which she replied: “Oh, that’s not a problem! We could give you much higher than X a month for your services…” At which point, as if on cue, my phone died. It was low-batt the whole day and I wasn’t able to charge it.

I texted the woman when I was able to turn my phone on again, declining the offer once more.

I have been receiving calls similar to the above for the past 3 months. Last December, just before I joined my present employer, I actually had two equally “juicy” job offers to choose from. Of course I had to turn one down. But it didn’t stop there.

The calls are a result of my current IT specialization experiencing a jump in demand these past few months, particularly from US clients seeking to outsource IT projects here. I learned the technology early on in a popular banking institution, so the combination of years-of-experience plus credibility from where I garnered that experience is doing wonders to the “noticeability” of my resume in sites like Jobstreet.

So now I am getting offers of “much higher than X.” Modesty aside, I’ll just say “much higher than X” is something in the neighborhood of PHP 40,000 a month.

This is the time that I say “Life is unfair.”

Life is unfair because here I am turning down 40K-a-month offers when all around me some colleagues and friends couldn’t even find 12K-a-month jobs. Two of them are people close to my heart. If only I could split the 40K to two 20K-a-month jobs and give it to them, I would. But I couldn’t.

I even joked to one of them about it… if only I could transfer my skills and experience to you, I would. It’s so unfair to her, considering that she entered the workforce a full year ahead of me. And she’s earning a measly 11 thousand pesos a month.

Choosiness?

The following day, as if fate sought to underscore the irony, an Inquirer article quoted Trade Secretary Peter Favila as claiming that there is no real job crisis; he says Filipinos are just choosy job pickers:

“Some Filipinos have a tendency to aspire to be the vice president immediately upon hiring or they want to be able to pick the time and place of work. Those who can’t get what they want choose to just wait till their ideal job falls on their lap,” Favila said.

He cited the experience of the Korean shipbuilder Hanjin Heavy Industries and Construction at a recent job fair.

The company needs a minimum of 7,000 workers in line with its plan to build 16 ships at its $721-million shipbuilding facility on the Redondo Peninsula.

Favila said Hanjin found many qualified engineers, welders, pipe fitters, foremen, crane operators and agriculturists, but most of them balked at the prospect of relocating to the jobsite in Subic Bay, Zambales province. [INQ7]

Favila’s statement is partly correct, because while there are a lot of Filipinos who can’t get proper jobs, a lot of Filipinos also opt to wait for their ideal jobs. We have to take into account the fact, however, that not all people take up a job just for the sake of having one, and we have to take the “overhead” into account.

First, if the jobs that Hanjin are offering have proper compensation, free board, lodging and food, and the option to relocate the workers’ whole family to a community that will nurture it, I’m sure a lot of people would be willing to sign up. But if the job only offers you minimal pay, and the company doesn’t subsidize board and lodging, then what can that person send home to the family he is supporting?

Second, I’m also almost sure that these people turning down jobs from Hanjin are the kind of people who can afford to choose to turn down the offer. If there is a high demand of a similar skillset abroad (considering the pace of construction in the Middle East these days, especially in Dubai), the worker would be better off pursuing that, where the same tasks will give a higher amount of money to send home for the same amount of time away from the family.

The Laws of Suppy and Demand

Of course, several people reacted to Favila’s statement, with a follow-up article yesterday on the same paper:

Representatives Joel Villanueva of Citizens Battle Against Corruption (Cibac) and Teodoro Casiño of Bayan Muna reacted strongly to Favila’s claim Wednesday that many Filipinos were unemployed because they were choosy about jobs.

Villanueva said Favila’s assessment “insults the millions of Filipinos who are treated as slaves abroad, working in dire conditions away from their loved ones, just to provide a decent life for their families.”

He said the fact that teachers were willing to become domestic helpers, while doctors worked as nurses and caregivers abroad belied Favila’s observation. [INQ7]

His statement underscores some disturbing facts.

The laws of supply and demand state that if there is a shortage of the supply of a particular good or service, its demand should shoot up enough to drive the price for that good or service up as well. This is exactly what is happening to IT professionals having my set of skills, and I consider myself extremely lucky for having made the right decision to specialize in that technology.

Unfortunately, the same isn’t true for doctors. Considering that the Philippines is currently undergoing a shortage of doctors, many doctors are still overworked and underpaid, especially those serving in government hospitals. Naturally, a lot of them would rather take up nursing and take advantage of the demand abroad.

Disparity in the quality of (English) education?

Ironically, there are multitudes of job opportunities available locally which are also experiencing a shortage of skill due to the disparity in the quality of education amongst class divisions. For example, call-center industry leaders are lamenting that they cannot find enough qualified customer service representatives to fill demand.

Some might remember that, when call centers were just starting, they were able to hire mainly graduates from the local “big four” universities (UP, DLSU, ADMU, UST). Because of the high number of such graduates willing to take up call center jobs, however, the entry-level salaries of such professionals also came down: the starting price of 20 thousand pesos per month slowly inched down to 15 thousand pesos per month. This was aggravated by the intense competition between call center companies, thus forcing many industry players to cheapen their services and, consequently, lower their operating costs.

With the entry-level salary of the call-center industry now down, the number of big four graduates willing to join call centers also came down. This meant that call center companies had to settle for graduates from other colleges, many of which did not exhibit the same level of language proficiency as their predecessors.

The call center industry is now on the brink of experiencing a shortage of skilled workers similar to that of medical fields.

A question of Jobs vs. Careers

An equally disturbing observation is the apparent treatment of people of their careers. Many people look at their jobs as a mere means to obtain a paycheck on the 15th and 30th.

I don’t believe that teachers who chose to be domestic helpers actually love teaching — if they did, they would’ve sought a similar job abroad. Perhaps these people are the ones who really don’t have a choice; however, a lot of times the availability of choices is commensurate to the effort of a person to find what choices really are available for them.

This would especially be true for highly educated workers, some of whom, unfortunately, willingly embrace menial jobs overseas.

A four-way paradox

Now we are faced with a menacing four-way paradox: We have a lot of potentially high-paying job opportunities locally, but too few people with enough skills to fill them up. We also have a lot of unskilled laborers: but there are few jobs to go around for them too. We have highly-skilled and educated workers who do not appreciate their job beyond a means of income. We have a multitude of countrymen who might have that passion to build a career, but do not have the means to afford the education required to attain the same.

That is not to say that there aren’t any people who are as highly-skilled and highly-educated as they are highly passionate, but if their career is one peddled by second-rate diploma mills through inadequate-but-seemingly-legitimate degree programs, they are bound to suffer the same fate.

Life is unfair that way. It doesn’t hurt to be lucky, after all.