Giancarlo Angulo's Blog
Had a lot of nice points but this sentence was really good. For people motivated by money read the whole thing!
Managing your finances in real life – the fun way – is very much like earning gold in a computer role-playing game. Earning money is play. Spending money is also play. If you aren’t having fun, you’re missing the whole point.
via A Fixed Income Is a Sucker Bet.
(March 19, 2008)
I’ve been recently going around call centers recently trying to polish my interview skills.
Because of this I’ve been to a lot of websites, local sites and job fairs where call centers have booths.
A welcome trend is emerging. The trend is the constant trickle of jobs to places outside of the Makati Central Business district, the Ortigas Area, Eastwood Libis Area, Alabang Area that probably comprises the center of the Philippines BPO/IT/Call Center Industry. New sites include (from memory not meant to be comprehensive) Angeles, San Fernando Pampanga, Baguio, Antipolo, Cebu as a region, Subic and Clark.
I can think of reasons that necessitate this (okay I cheated, called some friends who worked in call centers mostly middle managers, not the decision makers but at least in the loop.)
More Permanent Reasons
Less Permanent Reasons
In the Philippines the minimum wage is set by the local regional wage boards. The wage boards consist of representative from the government, business and the labor sector. In the Philippines NCR generally has the highest wages followed by neighboring Regions, then followed by Cebu , and Davao. This pattern fluctuates depending on the economic health of a regions, although the NCR has the highest wages by at least 5 percent has been true since I started following the regional wages.
This means that barring tremendous growth in economic activity and productivity the cost advantage of provincial call centers are here to stay. I was actually surprised when I found out that the starting salaries of call centers for the same position had around 40-50% difference. Yes I didn’t mistype, Provincial call centers are paying only half of what they are paying to their NCR agents. Another surprising thing is that even with this difference call center jobs in the province are considered high-paying, because anecdotally only the big companies offer salaries that are equal to the regional minimum wage.
The lower turnover is mainly due to the lack of job mobility, there just isn’t any other to go to. One call center is largely the same as another and with the still small number of call centers outside of NCR and Metro Cebu lower turnover for considerable.
The smaller number of competitors is mainly a function of competition. The best paying, best workplace call centers definitely get the best people to work with, which means that a lot of other call centers have to settle with whats left. Call centers that have provincial sites tend to either pay lower or have less benefits.
The need to reduce cost is mainly due to the overall weakness of the dollar. We must understand that most of these contracts were negotiated during the time when the Peso-Dollar exchange rate was around 55-1 whereas currently (updated as of August 25, 2008) the Peso-Dollar exchange rate is hovering around 45-46 pesos per dollar. For companies that have razor thin margins , the exchange rate is really devastating financially. Moving to places where costs are much lower becomes a necessity especially when it is hard to forecast where the US economy and the Dollar-Peso Exchange rate would be in the near future.
All these factor combine to make provincial expansion a short to long term trend.
Of course if the overall weakness in the US economy continues nobody knows definitively if it would cause a contraction or expansion of Philippine call center industry.
The influx of disposable cash is important because it is transformative in a way, through unintended consequences will be followed up in a different post.
Some Ideas on what local government units or local groups could do to help this process will be followed up in a different post.
Some problems this may possibly cause will be followed up in a different post.
from here:
Florida’s enormously influential first book, “The Rise of the Creative Class,” laid the sociological foundation for an idea many of us in the Bay Area had already understood intuitively: that creative people like artists, scientists and entrepreneurs – not big corporations, government offices, or generic infrastructure – fuel economic development.
The statement speaks for itself, but a little googling would show us that countries in general but specifically cities and technology hubs/areas are constantly trying to “move up” the technology output ladder.
Why is this?
Simply put the economic rewards of different rungs in the technology ladder is not linearly distributed. This is because of the productivity per rung is quite different. This makes evident the force multiplier that technology is, and with it the fact that even though we are all given 24 hours a day people from technologically superior places can do more work and earn more money with their 24 hours.
Take my country the Philippines as an example. Based on my personal experience (If the NSO published this in the web then I wouldn’t need to base this on my own experience, and yes I tried googling it ) NSO published statistics the wages of Filipino workers have been essentially stagnant (adjusting for inflation at 5.4%, NSO ). This would be very strange to anyone who has heard of call centers and BPO but the fact is Filipino “knowledge” workers are at the low end of the knowledge spectrum and are thus replaceable cogs in the knowledge sweatshops of “the Man”. The only way for the Philippines to get more revenues from the call center and BPO industries is to throw more people at it.
Why? As the early call center employees are finding out, positions for non executive, management work prefers people with some experience but are not too expensive. Put in another way: BPO if you do not have leadership skills or are not into teaching/training is simply not a career.
What then is a possible way out for my country in to this sideways movement? The highlighted qoute tells us this. You must foster artist, scientist, entreprenuers or creators in general. Only through the constant creative output of these people will we find ourselves out of the lower rungs of the tech ladder.
A positive effect of a relatively large group of young people with a relatively large disposable income is the fact that it tends to foster creative persuits such as bands, films, and the like. It has always been my belief that the resurgance of the local pop-rock, punk-rock or rock scene in general is due to call centers who give money to the fans who thus transfer these to the musicians. Not enough for the dream life, but enough for our artist to survive.
The final cog would probably be to internationalize the creative output of our artist, in the same way that the english speaking public is subsidizing the english rock bands, the chinese speaking public are subsidizing Chinovelas,Koreanovelas,Japanovelas. We must try to make south east asian countries along with the US,England etc all the countries where we have similarities with subsidize our artist and musicians specifically.
This has been a longish post and I salute your persistence in reading some musings.