Two articles about two dramatically contrasting jobs appeared this month (February, 2015).
Upside Article: The Philippines has become the call-center capital of the world
The first article, which appeared initially in the Los Angeles Times, was picked up by my local paper, the Green Bay Press Gazette on Sunday, February 22. I was surprised because the Philippines does not get a lot of attention in Northeastern Wisconsin, so I was pleased to see it.
It has probably been at least a year now that the Philippines has passed India as the call-center capital of the world. The accent you now probably hear sounds a bit more American than Anglo-Indian. That's because the Philippines was a U.S. colony when English became an established language there. When I call about my cable bill, I personally find it much easier now to understand the speaker's English, not that that helps change the amount I have to pay. The article shows how a young woman, Joahnna Horca now earns about $700 a month as a call-answerer. That salary is more than "many general physicians earn in the Philippines." And it is way more than she would make as a social worker, the area in which she received her college degree. Bottom line for the country: $25 billion in revenue, accounting for about 10 percent" of the economy. Still I suspect that Ms. Horca might rather be a social worker, if she could afford it. The next article shows a dire need for social workers.
Downside Article: Chronic poverty is fueling child labor in the Philippines
The second article appeared in a source that is new to me, ucanews.com. The web site promotes itself as "Asia's most trusted independent Catholic news source." I found this article just about the same time that I read the one above. It had appeared originally on February 2, 2015 and was picked up more recently by the on-line news source, CathNews. com. I have greatly condensed the article, which certainly merits a fuller reading.
As the title suggests, this article reminds us of the huge economic gulf between groups in the Philippines, between someone like Ms. Horca and one of the article's featured individuals, Geraldine Aboy. Ms. Aboy is "a 14-yr-old child laborer from the Manobo Pulangiyen tribe," who works "on a sugarcane plantation in Mindanao." To be more specific, Ms. Aboy works on a sugar plantation in the Province of Bukidnon in north central Mindanao, quite a distance from the sometimes more dangerous far-western part of Mindanao where an uneasy truce currently exists between the government and the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao. Politically stable and a province that should attract lots of tourists, to judge by the "More Fun in the Philippines" pictures, Bukidnon nonetheless suffers "chronic poverty." Children, such as Ms. Aboy, leave their villages and go to camps away from home while the cane is being harvested. They work literally from dawn to dusk for about $2.70 per day. Schooling is, of course, no longer a prospect. In short, a formula for chronic poverty.
