Help I’m Trapped in an Offshoring Company in the Philippines!
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Disclaimer: This is a work of creative non-fiction. The feelings expressed by the first-person view character in this work are an amalgamated result of multiple personal interviews, observations, and my own internalized feelings. This is not reflective of all BPOs and their clients.
I log on to the desktop I was assigned upon onboarding, sweat seeping into my polo from the commute on the MRT on its second day of a malfunctioning condenser. The same MRT reported by the Philippine Daily Inquirer to have broken down a record 500 times last year.
Welcome to Manila.
A quick Google of the words ‘offshore company’ will, on the very first page, give you results like:
Australian Companies: Why They Choose Offshoring to the Philippines
What Is An Offshore Company And How YOU Can Benefit
Offshore Companies, Reduce your business cost!
Offshoring, is what they are calling a “fantastic opportunity.” They speak of the recent government mandated K to 12 program in 2016, where basic education in the Philippines was lengthened from 10 years to 12.
Outsourced PH says the program had “provided [Filipinos] with the skills needed to be very valuable to Australians offshoring to the Philippines.”
College teachers had lost their jobs for 2 years until would-be students made it out of high-school. Public schools struggled to gather the resources to keep up. But we adapted. What other choice was there?
Obviously, this means that wages are also much lower than in other countries. Your company benefits from this arrangement due to the cost reductions of offshore workers. You’ll be getting the same tasks accomplished for as little as half of what it would cost you to employ someone in Australia!
Doesn’t that sound exciting.
You’ll be getting the same work, but we are worth half of what the people in your country are worth.
World-class work for “third-world” costs.
There is this old Filipino myth of a beautiful monster that at night, would be able to leave half her body. It made it easier for her to fly, to hunt. Her lower half had weighed her down.
The old had named her manananggal, which can be translated to “one who removes.”
An Offshoring Company, otherwise known as a Business Process Outsourcing Company (BPO), is a little different from say, a large multinational like Nike or Google opening an office somewhere in Southeast Asia.
The expansion of foreign operations past international waters is decidedly for us nowadays, a good thing.
You know — despite centuries worth of history that speak towards the contrary.
No, a Business Process Outsourcing Company specifically provides YOUR company with Offshore Workers.
They will do your work for you, they will answer customer phone calls on your behalf, they will code your software and design your systems, they will be completely dedicated to YOUR company — BUT they are NOT employed by you.
Direct employment would mean additional fees. Taxes. Documents and permits and certificates. And they don’t like paper over there. They say it’s bad for the environment.
Imagine being able to utilize the labor of an entire team for the cost of one of your own. Our sole reward being the association with your multinational brand.
Because Pinocchio, how your parents dreamt for you to work for an international company! Their child, bestowed with the chance to make a real difference.
Because if you aren’t working for a foreign company or that Old Manila Money, you’d hit the glass ceiling pretty fucking fast my dear. And then will you have the chance be real at all?
Pay up to 70% less per employee!
- An ad for a Philippine-based BPO
Short answer, we get paid less. Way less. BUT it’s still more than we could get in even a reputable local company. Way more.
Oh but this is a different kind of BPO, we have a pool table, and table tennis. We do yoga on Thursdays to relieve the tension building in your temples. Speaking of, let us be your temple now. A place of first-world worship, we’ll let you keep your dreams here. Here, we’ll allow even you to have the international employee experience.
We are involved with two companies, the BPO and The Client. (The Client — who we most definitely, by all definitions of the word — work for, but are not employed by). Therefore we function under two different mission statements, and two “Employee Handbooks.”
We follow two different timezones and two sets of rules, at all times. Such is the duality of the BPO! You are two places at once. A manananggal.
Almost weekly, a tall man with an American accent enters the office leading a small group of foreigners. He might have been Filipino at one point (maybe he still is). It’s an office tour. “Filipinos are very loyal” he tells them. We are never addressed personally or otherwise. We ignore eye contact; fish in an aquarium.
Effectively, we work every holiday. Local or otherwise.
The triad of days between October 31 and November 2, the one that ends on All Souls’ Day, used to be a sacred holiday. The grandest in-country migration we see year after year. We call it Undas. The journey to the physical graves of our dearly departed. A day to honor the Dead.
No, we have to save our leave balances for the End-of-Year Office Closure. If we haven’t earned enough leave credits by then, we won’t get paid during a shutdown we never asked for.
You are absolutely responsible for making sure that you’ve earned enough credits before the shutdown. No exemptions. We exempt you, we have to exempt everyone.
Every sickness is a struggle to keep our leave credits within the natural number spectrum. We can’t afford to hit the negatives.
On the Slack channel, we are thumbnails spouting ellipses into pixel words. Our images set against white, a digital voice on a flat screen. We are always smiling — our English, excellent.
If you never have to hear the hard consonants that wrap our vowels or the occasional slip in verb-tense, you might never have guessed it was not our mother-tongue.
My mother spoke to me in English. Filipino was reserved only for when she was angry. Oh how syllable after syllable overflowed from her mouth in strings like the rosary beads she kept in her purse.
Her hair was always dark, always long. In 1898, we became the United States’ first and only colony. The Philipines is the third largest English speaking country in the world. She thought it would give me an edge in a world that was not always kind to people of color. I can’t say she was wrong.
You can try to forget the wage gap between you and your foreign colleagues, but you won’t.
It’s a difficult thought to ignore: knowing that the one thing keeping you from advancing your career on the international stage, is not your skillset — it’s where you live.
So honestly, if I dig through all the resentment and all the pride, you’ll find gratitude. Gratitude that The Client chose here, chose me. It is an opportunity no matter how you look at it. And opportunities come with costs.
My officemate’s leave request was denied for the last time. He had wanted a day off to be with his family in the province. They told him no. The company would be busy because the Australian office would be out for Easter. It’s upper management — I can’t change the rules. That was his last straw.
We’ve hit the glass ceiling anyway. And in this case, like in a million other cases before him, the only way up, was out.
He’s packing his bags to Singapore as we speak.
The call center agent in front of me hasn’t had a raise in 3 years. He has 2 kids.
A burger in Australia costs a sixth of my daily wage.
I’ve earned 6 burgers today.
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💡 You’ll be able to find my work on: alexinebeltran.com
