Through the efforts of blogger Kevin Ray Chua, the issue caught the attention of Senator Mar Roxas, who sent a letter to Cebu Pacific asking them to explain the above incidents.

Finally, Cebu Pacific’s Guest Services Head Ivan Gaw was kind enough to respond regarding the said issue:

This incident had been an eye opener also for our company. With this incident, we revised our procedures for carriage of Deaf passengers and still not compromising safety. Since July 2008, Cebu Pacific accepts unlimited number of unescorted Deaf/ Mute guests in all of our aircrafts provided that they shall be properly briefed by our Cabin Attendants about safety, the use of seatbelt, oxygen mask, life vest, route to the nearest exit, etc. The only condition is that they must not be seated at any emergency exit rows.

…

I’m also happy to inform you that we are coordinating with the group of Sir Nonoy Concha and party for an awareness seminar about proper handling of passengers with disabilities. We are targeting mid-February. We also would want to include our learning’s from this awareness seminar to the front line training program. I am constantly in loop with them.

Rest assured that it’s not the intention of Cebu Pacific to discriminate anybody. We value all of our guest irregardless of gender, status, and condition. [Filipino Deaf from the Eyes of a Hearing Person]

Kudos to Cebu Pacific for their policy changes! I hope that this will set an example not only in the airline or transport industry, but to all industries and service providers, in understanding and handling the needs not only of the deaf but other persons with disabilities.

With Barack Obama’s impending ascent to being the 44th President of the Unites States of America, a dark cloud looms and threatens to blot out the “sunshine” industry the Philippines has been exploiting over the past decade.

In his website launched as a primer on his policies as President-elect, aptly named Change.Gov, Obama has outlined his views with regards to sending jobs overseas, outside American shores:

End Tax Breaks for Companies that Send Jobs Overseas: Barack Obama and Joe Biden believe that companies should not get billions of dollars in tax deductions for moving their operations overseas. Obama and Biden will also fight to ensure that public contracts are awarded to companies that are committed to American workers.

Reward Companies that Support American Workers: Barack Obama introduced the Patriot Employer Act of 2007 with Senators Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) to reward companies that create good jobs with good benefits for American workers. The legislation would provide a tax credit to companies that maintain or increase the number of full-time workers in America relative to those outside the US; maintain their corporate headquarters in America if it has ever been in America; pay decent wages; prepare workers for retirement; provide health insurance; and support employees who serve in the military. [Change.Gov]

The implications are therefore daunting. The Philippines may lose big given that the US is most likely its the biggest customer for business process outsourcing.

Business Process Outsourcing is, of course, not limited to call centers. While call centers were the primary “spark” that started the industry’s wild-fire spread (and remains to be its largest sector), other services are offered by Filipino outsourcing, including animation, software development, finance, logistics, accounting, and even legal services.

The positive effects of the growth of this sector is likewise far-reaching. When talent was brought to near-exhaustion in Manila, the industry was able to expand to other urban centers like Cebu and Davao, but services soon also rose in areas like Clark, Baguio, Bacolod, Iloilo, and Cagayan de Oro. Its expansion has allowed the Philippines to capture 20% of the English-speaking market ([PDF] as of 2004). It has allowed the Philippines to be third behind India and China, respectively, in terms of contact service outsourcing at least.

However, with this market now threatened by a major shift in US economic policy, it is of utmost importance that the local industry learn to adapt to these threats that may kill off the industry. Needless to say, the threats imminent to us would be similarly threatening to India and China, and it is inevitable that they themselves would respond to these policies once they are enacted into law perhaps in the second or third quarter of 2009, at the earliest.

So how do we respond? Personally I believe that the local BPO industry will benefit from the following:

• Seek new markets — While the US may be its largest customer, the Philippines will benefit from focusing on other similar English speaking markets, including but not limited to Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The Philippines may be able to benefit as well from learning new language markets (e.g., Japan or Chinese speaking countries), but this would probably be an uphill battle considering the learning curves involved.
• Competitive pricing — India leads the Philippines when it comes to outsourcing, but they are constantly plagued by increasing salary levels and high attrition rates that are making their services more expensive. It may be difficult to compete with our Chinese competitors, but Filipino companies can take advantage of the skilled-labor problems of India to their advantage.
• Focus on skills, not just language — The Philippines boasts of its fluent English speaking workforce, but its advantage should not be limited there. Local skills, talent, and innovation should be developed further to create a labor pool that is not only adept at slang and twang, but is likewise genuinely competent at their work. This will open opportunities which would not limit it to th English-speaking or US market.
• Move the focus away from outsourcing and towards creating products with value — This is particularly true for the software development and animation industries. The dependence on outsourcing revenue limits software developers, for instance, to making software as designed and specified by their foreign clients and counterparts. Instead of following the Indian outsourcing model, Filipinos should instead explore the Israeli software product model, wherein they create web-based or shrink-wrapped products (similar to, say, Google and Microsoft, but not similar in scale) that can earn them revenue. If Filipinos manage to create software products that are truly innovative, the profit margins for this type of development would prove to be much, much higher than that of the corresponding outsourcing model (admittedly, the risks involved would likewise be higher).

I’m sure the Philippine BPO industry can think of more creative ways to be able to adapt and respond to the ever changing global economic climate. Unfortunately, Obama’s policy shift once more underscores just how dependent the Philippines is on the United States. Successfully responding to this challenge will hopefully lead to less dependence on one big customer, and perhaps even develop internal markets so that we won’t be at the mercy of foreign investment and trade.

In a few hours I shall be setting off and driving north towards my wife’s home province of Pangasinan, my adopted province since an unfortunate idiosyncrasy of my life is that I could trace seven generations back to Manila-dwellers beyond which I’ll have to go to China. But I digress — the two hundred kilometer journey will bring us to central Pangasinan, near Manaoag, home of a popular cathedral and Catholic pilgrimage site. Now I didn’t realize it until the first time I drove that trip, that there is a very big difference in seeing things when you ride a bus and when you drive. The primary difference is your keenness on landmarks. Because you need to know how much more lower back pain and leg strain you have to endure (it’s a four hour drive in light traffic, six hours in bad), as well as remember where you can stop to eat or pee, you notice the structures along the road, especially on McArthur Highway once you get off of the North Luzon Expressway.

One thing I immediately noticed are the various stores that line McArthur Highway. You wouldn’t really notice one store when you see it, however: you would notice it when a huge number of them are all selling the same thing, side by side. Around Bamban and Capas, both in Tarlac, it’s the stores that sell pastillas de leche and other milk-based sweets. By the time you hit Paniqui and Moncada, for around 10 kilometers it’s watermelons that line the road: there’s even a 250 meter stretch of watermelon stores. Reaching Urdaneta City in Pangasinan, a similar 300 meter stretch is lined, this time, with bottles upon bottles of bagoong. Once you reach Binalonan town, it becomes native corn, although with much fewer sellers. Leaving McArthur highway to head to Manaoag, near the church itself it’s not only religious icons and trinkets, but tupig (sticky rice and coconut meat roasted within banana leaves) is likewise peddled.

Copy this, copy that, copy cat

It’s no different from many places in the country, for that matter. Los Baños has its ubiquitous buko pie, and at one point all buko pie stores in Pansol, each one less than a hundred meters from the other were named “Colette’s”. Manila has had different “food fads” in its history; it has shifted from burgers, to shawarma, to lechon manok, to pearl shakes. But it has to be Cebu’s dried mango producers who are most guilty of gaya-gaya mentality, so much so that not only were the products the same, but even the branding was compromised.

The number of dried mango producers have skyrocketed from the 80s through the 90s due to the popularity of the delicacy as an export product, but they have some serious identity crisis. The pioneer dried mango had chosen a green package in white lettering, with a clear “window” at the lower part of the package to make the mango slices visible. Soon everyone packaged their dried mangoes in a green package in white lettering, with a window. Only one or two departed from the usual scheme (one of them went blue and green, the other changed to orange-brown).

Apparently, if the Filipino entrepreneur is efficient at anything, they are efficient in copying product offerings of seemingly-thriving businesses, down to the packaging.

A nauseating business proposition

The GEM Philippines 2006-2007 Report reveals that four out of ten Filipinos are entrepreneurs, and of those, 19% belong to the Class C segment, 54% belong to the Class D segment, and 20% belong to the Class E segment. While some people contend that these 54% are “following in the footsteps of the taipans”, it doesn’t present reveal the extent of planning, research, and marketing that these business owners apply into their business — in fact, one could assume that these businesses do not have any such activities in their enterprises.

The findings also affirm the observations I made above:

Survey results tend to affirm the common notion that the typical Filipino business person is risk-averse (segurista) and lacking in originality and innovation (gaya-gaya). Such attitude can be a hindrance to being able to exploit new opportunities and growth potentials, which is important in building dynamism in the enterprise sector. [GEM Philippines 2006-2007 Report]

The irony in this statement is that while the Filipino is, apparently, willing to go into business, they remain to be inherently risk-averse and lacking in innovation. The Report expounds:

There is a common observation (and lament) that most Filipino business owners are content with imitating other established firms rather than innovating with new and unique products and services, the so-called gaya-gaya (copycat) syndrome. This appears borne out by the finding that surveyed business owners predominantly believe that their products and services are not perceived to be unique or distinct from others. A dominant 71% of business owners indicated that they would not be seen by customers as offering something new or unfamiliar.[GEM Philippines 2006-2007 Report]

Unfortunately the effects are adverse, profit-wise. Put copycat syndrome and cutthroat competition together with a lack of marketing, and what you end up with is a bunch of palengkeras ready to kill each other off. Without the prosperity brought about by high profit margins, it seems that poor Filipino entrepreneurs will remain poor, in spite of the fact that they have chosen to put up a business.

They aren’t following the footsteps of the taipans, after all.

Taking a road less travelled

According to the Principles of Entrepreneurship publication of the US State Department, the concepts and ideas that make or break the business can be categorized into four:

• An existing good or service for an existing market. This is a difficult approach for a start-up operation. It means winning over consumers through merchandising appeal, advertising, etc. Entry costs are high, and profit is uncertain.
• A new good or service for a new market. This is the riskiest strategy for a new firm because both the product and the market are unknown. It requires the most research and planning. If successful, however, it has the most potential for new business and can be extremely profitable.
• A new good or service for an existing market. (Often this is expanded to include modified goods/services.) For example, entrepreneurial greeting-card makers use edgy humor and types of messages not produced by Hallmark or American Greetings – the major greeting-card makers – to compete in an existing market.
• An existing good or service for a new market. The new market could be a different country, region, or market niche. Entrepreneurs who provide goods/services at customers’ homes or offices, or who sell them on the Internet, are also targeting a new market – people who don’t like shopping or are too busy to do so.

Emphasis mine.

Note that while the ordinary Filipino would-be entrepreneur thinks that the safest route to go is to offer products and services that has an existing market, they do not realize that going up against existing competition makes the business less viable. Unfortunately the illusion of safety — and perhaps, the misconception that it is easier to mimic an existing operation — leads them to the cutthroat, opportunity-devoid copycat market that typifies the business environment of the unsuccessful Filipino entrepreneur.

Blast-freezing one’s way to success

That being said, local taipan wannabes must learn to focus their efforts on the more fruitful ventures of offering a new or modified good or service to an existing market, or offering an existing good or service to a new market.

There are some businesses that are becoming big this way. Lety’s Buko Pie in Los Baños is a good example of a business that was able to find ways to offer a new or modified product to an existing market, and at the same time offer an existing product to a new market.

Deluged with numerous buko (coconut) pie competition, Lety’s turned its attention to an unsolved problem with buko pies: microwaving them would turn the pies soggy. With the help of the Department of Science and Technology, Lety’s was able to find a solution: blast-freeze the pies to prevent ice globules, which form during conventional freezing, from coming up. A nice side-effect: their buko pies can be frozen up to 12 months, which allowed Lety’s to export their products abroad.

Going off-road to genuine entrepreneurship

It is clear that while the Filipino is not bereft of technical skills and capability, they have much to learn with regards to business savvy, risk-taking, and innovation. If Filipinos (beyond the usual Filipino-Chinese) are going to achieve success, much effort should be taken to be able to help them think out-of-the-box, reduce risk-aversity, and evangelize the virtue of innovation (or more specifically product-development), which in turn would lead to a much productive and high-profit business environment.

The lessons of the current state of entrepreneurship in the country should not be ignored, or worse dismissed — further education in entrepreneurship should be nurtured for the lackluster nation to be able to catch up with its more prosperous (and under the hood, more adventurous) neighbors. It’s high time the Filipino entrepreneur should learn to drive off of the unentrepreneurial, risk-averse, copycat road.

While the racetrack-like Elliptical Road in Quezon City rumbles with noise, fumes, and traffic, a few silent automobiles make their own rounds in the Quezon Memorial Circle that the road borders. Humbly seating four persons max, the curious rides called G Cars (in a pun-loaded attribution to their inventor, Gerry Caroro) can be hired for PHP30 per lap. Caroro laments, however, that he never intended his invention as an amusement park curiosity. He intended it to be the solution to the country’s dependence on imported oil, as well as reduce pollution in the metropolis.

Unfortunately Caroro has difficulty finding an investor for his invention, a plight shared with most of the country’s inventors. As any dutiful citizen of the Philippines tends to do, Ronald Talion of the Filipino Inventors Society blames the government for this:

“It’s already mandated under Republic Act Act 7459 (Inventors and Invention Incentives Act) and yet, for some strange reason, our inventors have to fend for themselves,” Talion noted.

“The only support we get is the P178,000 that is given to us every November to celebrate National Inventors Week (NIW). Obviously this is not enough, which is why a lot of my colleagues were forced to seek support from abroad,” he lamented. [Inquirer.Net]

An automotive industry that never was

The plight of Caroro’s fledgling effort to produce a viable automotive technology is but an addition to the tragic history of the country’s automotive industry, shared with its ubiquitous mode of transport and cultural icon: the jeepney. Originally coming from surplus and left-behind military jeeps, roofs were installed and lavish decorations applied to convert former war-wagons into colorful passenger vehicles able to seat six to ten people at a time. From the 60s until the 80s, a vibrant backyard industry emerged, where jeepneys and “owner-type” jeeps were manufactured as low-cost alternatives to lavish, large-engined American cars or their cheaper Japanese counterparts.

The jeepney manufacturing sector was never able to make it beyond “backyard” status to become a genuine car-manufacture industry, though. Beyond metal pressing and stamping, and fabrication of various “mods” to adorn and embellish each jeepney, they never went to the stage of standardization, efficient mass production, and assembly line automation. Over fifty years of jeepney manufacture remained in the realm of hand-pressed, hand-crafted, hand-painted methods. Moreover, it is peculiarly unclear if any two jeepneys are exactly alike, and it is even dubious if any of them had followed a clear cut blue print of any sort.

The last straw, however, is the country’s dependence on Japanese-made surplus engines. Despite whatever expertise local mechanics could boast about in the knowledge of assembling, maintaining and repairing car engines, not a single company has attempted to create its own internal combustion engine with the intent of mass production. The country was relegated to using surplus engines for jeepneys, as well as assembling completely knocked-down (CKD) body kits for various Japanese and American car manufacturers (and even one type of Armored Personnel Carrier for the Philippine Army). Never was the country able to completely manufacture of any mass-produced automobile from top to bottom.

Due to higher-quality offerings of truck-cabbed alternatives with passenger modules in the rear, the jeepney is now dying a slow death. While they are still “King of the Road” in Manila, low sales and profitability has killed all but the most persistent jeepney assemblers of Cavite. Their demise, however, is more pronounced in Cebu, where Chinese manufactured “multicabs” and truck-cabbed jeepneys with Isuzu Elf and Toyota Hi-Ace engines, chassis and driver modules now rule.

An industrial pariah

This situation isn’t even isolated to the automotive industry: while the Philippines has been home to several multinational companies, none of these had resulted in the creation of large local counterpart enterprises. The Philippines hosted Intel since the 1970s, but has yet to have any local company that manufactures PC components (S3 Graphics, while founded by Filipinos Dado Banatao and Robert Yara, was established in Silicon Valley). This is in stark contrast with Taiwan, which is home to computing giants Acer and Asus, among others. Texas Instruments has long had its electronics plant in Baguio, yet no local electronics company has become prominent. American Power Supplies and International Business Machines has been in the country longer than Intel has. The list goes on and on.

It is obvious that, despite the brain drain brought about by the labor export industry, the country does not lack, or at least at several points in its history, has never lacked the means to produce technical expertise that industrialization requires. Neither is there a lack in investment and funding, as evidenced by the continued presence of big-name corporations in the country, notwithstanding moves to shift factories to China. Further evidence of the above is the continued establishment of business process outsourcing firms in the country, which implies both investment and skill.

The government is not entirely remiss in its support to local industry either. Just last month the Department of Science and Technology launched the One-Stop Information Shop of Technologies (OSIST) website (http://www.osist.dost.gov.ph) to assist technology experts and inventors in finding venture capitalists and buyers. While several online pundits question the PHP20 million funding of what essentially is a turtle-paced-loading website, the project will hopefully take off and become a useful tool in aiding inventors like Mr. Caroro in fielding tech innovations like his G-Car. It has to be noted, however that this is not the first time the DOST attempted to set up a program that it hoped would help local industries take off.

Asia’s uncommon manufacturing industry roots

Asia has, arguably, three main manufacturing powerhouses: Japan, China and South Korea, but they each have unique histories in terms of the growth of their manufacturing sectors.

Japan embarked on a sizable Meiji Emperor-sanctioned industrialization effort during the late 19^th century, and while for most of mid-20^th century they had the reputation of producing cheap imitations, relentless improvements in process and technology eventually allowed them to come up with advances above and beyond their Western counterparts.

China, meanwhile, isolated for much of the half-century after the Second World War, had to rely on reverse-engineering much of Western technology, as well as technology-sharing with the USSR, and thus almost forcefully expanded its local manufacturing capability, even before its shift to the capitalist market model.

South Korea, on the other hand, was a little bit more orchestrated, with the regime of Park Chung-hee implementing continuous 5-year development periods during the 1960s that nursed and encouraged industrialization, in a rapid expansion that was eventually termed as the “Miracle on the Han River”.

During the 1950s and 60s the Philippines enjoyed a vibrant economy and an apparently advanced manufacturing sector. The sense of security this brought, however, was false: the industries that the Philippines relied on were primarily American and non-indigenous; and whatever prosperity Filipinos enjoyed rested on the mistaken belief that these foreign investments will remain on the country indefinitely. By the time the problems brought about by the Marcos dictatorship manifested itself in economic collapse, the happy-go-lucky era of American-funded industrialization was already on the way out.

An unwanted local manufacturing industry

The local market was, itself, a challenge. While the Chinese had no choice but to use whatever products are allowed by the Communist government, and the Japanese and Korean markets are fiercely nationalistic in patronizing their own products, moneyed Filipinos were obsessing themselves with everything “state-side”. Everything imported from the US was a godsend; anything local was cheap and “bakya” (out-of-fashion).

Whatever local manufacturing industry offering there was on its own, save for those that were American-branded (e.g., Concepcion Industries’ locally manufactured Carrier air conditioners). Probably the only thriving local manufacturing industry was involved in textiles, clothing, or jeepney manufacture: the latter was even threatened to be usurped by the introduction of Asian Utility Vehicles like Ford’s Fierra and Toyota’s Tamaraw.

What eventually killed the jeep industry, however, were steady albeit imperfect improvements in the local transport systems, as well as increased spending power that weaned private vehicle owners to vans and cars and away from locally crafted jeepneys and owner-type jeeps. It did not help that the local market did not have a genuine automobile product to respond to the demand.

Questions in catching up with a global economy

It is not difficult to surmise that it is now nearly impossible to catch up to the manufacturing behemoth called China. It’s hard to compete with the business viability of going Chinese: cheap labor, power, and highly developed infrastructure trumps any sort of nationalist lament; it simply dictates against the principles of profitability and sustainability. It would be rather ironic to even note that Caroro and his G-Car might turn out to be better cheaply manufactured abroad than made in the country. It should be noted that the e-jeepneys in Makati, Bacolod and Cebu are all made in China.

However, the ill-effects of the Philippine labor-export industry tend to undermine whatever benefits, both real and unrealized, that the said industry has. Large populations of disunited families will be more damaging in the long-run, and skilled overseas labor has brought neither expertise nor industry that the country could positively exploit. The questions now arise: should the Philippines try, daunting as it may seem, to catch up with the Asian manufacturing giants? Should it refocus on other sectors, particularly in services (perhaps, business process outsourcing), which might have been effective for some economies (Hong Kong comes into mind)?

Will Filipino industrialization remain as an electric dream?

Yesterday, Janette Toral of DigitalFilipino.com twitted about “Experience of a first time OFW“, an article on the Kabayan Hotel OFW blog that discusses the thoughts and feelings of first-time OFW Gilbert Roque.

Gilbert’s plight is something that most of us have heard of already: not satisfied with meager wages and limited opportunities locally, he flew to Dubai earlier this year.

However, subtle revelations within the article raised my already-raised eyebrows. Do read the entire article, so that you can correct me if I took the quotes out of context.

First, the article talks about his education and job history:

Gilbert also took up computer programming in college. After he graduated, he worked as a sales executive in Makati for several months only. He quit the job after deciding to work in Dubai and also after much prodding from his mother. Thus, he became an OFW. [Kabayan OFW Blog]

Emphasis mine.

I work as a software developer in a foreign-owned IT company, and I participate in some local IT communities and organizations. The problem in the local IT industry lately has been the lack of skilled labor — too many highly skilled software developers have flown off to Singapore or elsewhere.

As a result, the salaries of developers with merely 3 years of experience and above have been skyrocketing, with local companies almost pleading for experienced developers to at least have an interview with them.

If Gilbert pursued the career path that he chose for college, there are quite a number of opportunities that he could have taken up so that he wouldn’t need to leave the country at all. Unfortunately, he took a job as a sales executive, a job that is certainly not as high-paying as one in the IT profession. Certainly, his job is not one that would easily present opportunities to earn a relatively high salary after only a few years, without leaving the country.

But what did Gilbert get in exchange of not pursuing a career in the degree he finished and dropping the sales executive job? A “robotic” job, apparently:

Q: So now, tell me about your experiences as a first-time OFW.
A: I left for Dubai in May 13, 2007, to work as a service crew at a fast-food restaurant. Upon arrival, we were picked up by a shuttle to bring us to our assigned flat. There were ten of us then. In the three days that we were in the flat, we were not allowed to go out. The only chance that we were allowed to go out is to have a medical check-up.

We started on our job after three days. I thought that they would somehow give us a few days to get used to the job. I was wrong, on our first day, we were treated as seasoned workers and expected to act as such. [...] Eventually, after a month of fearing for the worst, I got used to the job and was doing it mechanically. [Kabayan OFW Blog]

That his mother — herself an OFW for 15 years as revealed in the article — prodded him to take the same path, it appears to me that Gilbert clearly had choices that he either overlooked or chose not to take, because there was a more “tried-and-tested” approach that he could take up.

A subsequent question reveals that he never even entertained the possibility of working locally:

Q: During your early years in school, did it ever cross your mind that you would become an OFW someday? Did your choice of course in college have something to do with it, and your desire to finish your schooling?
A: I may have thought about it then. Because when you are surrounded by people who work overseas you tend to walk that path also. If I remember correctly, there was a time that computer related courses will get you a job abroad fast. So, yes I did choose computer programming, because I had plans of working abroad also. [Kabayan OFW Blog]

It is ironic that Gilbert blindly walked down the same path his mother did, when earlier in the article he shared the pains of growing up seeing his mother only a month at a time every two years. Ironic too, that he said that he knows that his mother wouldn’t have left if she knew “another way” to support her family:

Q: Was it hard for you to have an OFW for a parent?
A: Yes, but not because I despise her for it – but simply because she was not there as much as I would have wanted too. I know she worked so hard to provide a better future for us. I know also that if there was another way, she would have never left.

Q: For how long is your mother working as an OFW? How often does she go home here in the Philippines? How does that feel?
A: My mother has been an OFW for 15 years. She goes home to us every 2 years and stays for about a month or two. I feel that it is not enough, but what can I do. It is always so hard to say goodbye every 2 years, you never get used to that. [Kabayan OFW Blog]

Clearly Gilbert does not know that he is running in circles drawn on the ground by his mother and grandmother (whom he says was also an OFW), which is evident when he says that overseas work is a handed-down “legacy”:

Q: Do you think that OFW nowadays are getting younger and younger? What can you say about that? Do you think it’s a trend or a legacy passed on?
A: I know how it feels to be separated from a loved one. It is one of the reasons why I decided, now, to work abroad. It is better to be an OFW while you are still young, so that you will have ample time later to enjoy life. [Kabayan OFW Blog]

Which makes me wonder: how many OFWs told you that they were only going to work abroad for so and so number of years until they are able to save money? How many of them actually accomplished that feat so they don’t need to work abroad until they retire?

Reading the whole article, there are simply too many things that make me scratch my head: the lack of the ability to recognize opportunities presented, the lack of any real passion or concern for career other than a means to make ends meet, the treatment of overseas work per se as a career option, the acceptance of an abusive, menial, meaningless job just as long as it pays higher than — a job that could be matched financially and attained locally if only people try.

Gilbert is not alone however; how many people get jobs as call center agents, or take up nursing and caregiving, even if they are not genuinely interested in developing their careers in those fields? How many people work for the sake of working? How many people tolerate 8-5 drudgery, here or abroad, just to be able to pay the bills?

In the end, the OFW phenomenon might actually not be driven by simple poverty. Rather, it is being fed by a huge number of mismanaged careers, masquerading as a last resort to be able to feed and clothe one’s family when there are real alternatives that people simply fail to see. People always say that “beggars can’t be choosers”, but there’s a serious problem when a person begins to see themselves as beggars before they even pay attention to the choices they really do have.

There’s nothing wrong with Gilbert working abroad per se. It is the reasons why he is working that has to be questioned and — subsequently — people has to ask themselves about.

The National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN®) authorized Pearson VUE to expand testing availability for the NCLEX® examination to Manila, the capital of the Philippines. Exam delivery begins at the Pearson VUE-owned and -operated Pearson Professional Center in Manila on August 23, 2007 and exam scheduling opens Friday, July 13, 2007.[Pearson VUE]

This is so hot off the presses I’m not sure I believe it completely. I’ll research on where that Pearson VUE-owned and operated Professional Center is.

In the meantime, everyone oughta spread the word to our nursing grads and board passers. This is certainly good news for them.

UPDATE: I came across this Manila Bulletin article confirming the above. But I still can’t find an address for Pearson VUE’s Manila testing center for the NCLEX. All available addresses I see on the net are for Pearson VUE conducted IT accreditations.

UPDATE 2: Got that address and telephone number:

Pearson Professional Centers-Manila, Philippines +612 9478 5400 (EXT. 3)
27th Floor, Trident Tower
312 Senator Gil Puyat Avenue,
Makati City

• 7 hour flight delay
• A quartet of crying babies
• A staff that gives all kinds of excuses and lies
• No food
• No option to go back to the terminal and pick another flight

 
This is probably a valid reason to shout “I have a bomb!” just to be able to get out of the plane. Sure you’d get arrested, but at least there’s food in the jail, right? The plane feels like a prison when in this situation anyway.

I wonder if, in a similar situation, I could file habeas corpus charges against the erring airline?

On a similar note, a disabled, single mother from Beaverton, Oregan was incessantly harassed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) over allegations that she illegally downloaded music from the internet. Their harassments never stopped even after an expert who examined her computer proclaimed that she didn’t have any illegal copies of music on her computer. The persecution even involved threatening to interrogate her 10-year-old daughter.

How did the harrassment stop? When the court ordered the RIAA to prove that she illegally downloaded music.

Andersen finally filed a motion forcing the recording industry to provide proof that she illegally downloaded music. Hours before the deadline to respond, the recording industry dropped its case. [OregonLive]

So the RIAA can harass people with intellectual property lawsuits without any proof? Sounds like the RIAA’s on a witchhunt, burning innocent customers at the stake.