Daybreak is happy hour at a trendy bar in the Philippines’ financial district, the clientele are young and loud. Vodka cruisers and beer fly by the bucketful as good friends Cici, Pau and Jels go off duty along with the rest of the night-shift in the nation’s half-million strong business process outsourcing (BPO) workforce.
The young women really let their hair down on Saturdays, hitting bars, beaches or shopping malls all day so they can socialize with friends outside the industry and sleep for at least one night like a normal person.
Life in many ways is a blast for the young, single and educated in the outsourcing industry. Entry-level jobs bring salaries of US$300 a month with the promise of triple that after a few years’ experience — good wages in a country where a third of the population live on US$1 a day.
The outsourcing industry — which has soaked up millions of call center, accounting and other back-office jobs from the developed world — is becoming an increasingly vital part of the nation’s economy. Its 500,000 employees are the world’s second-biggest outsourcing workforce behind India.
Its revenues, which already account for 5 percent of the country’s GDP, are growing at double digit rates annually, according to the industry group Business Processing Association Philippines.
In addition, an entire community of all-day service industries — convenience stores, bars and fast-food restaurants — have sprung up to serve the needs of the booming sector.
However, there are concerns about the way the industry is reshaping young adult society, as well as the pressures the workers face as they remotely help customers and clients on the other side of the world.
The odd hours, irate clients, tedious work and performance demands often cause staff — particularly call center workers — to burnout young.
Cici, Pau and Jels — who spoke on condition their surnames were not used — have moved on from earlier call center jobs.
“Sometimes you would be handling 300 calls at once and 150 others would be on hold. You don’t have a moment’s rest,” said Pau, 32, who graduated to a higher-paying job handling office equipment procurement for US companies.
She said call center staff typically got only two 15-minute cigarette breaks either side of a 30-minute meal break every eight-hour shift.
While Filipino BPO workers earn 53 percent more than same-age workers in other industries, one in three quit every year, according to an International Labour Organization study released last month.
The turnover rate is four times the national average.
“Five years in one job is a long time in this industry,” Cici said.
The arrival of the BPO industry a decade ago also brought about changes in values, diets, and sexual behavior, according to Josefina Natividad, a professor with the University of the Philippines’ Population Institute.
“What shocked us most was that for both call-center and non call-center workers, the level of premarital sex was very high,” she said, citing a health and lifestyle survey on young Filipinos completed by her team this year.
“The world is different now and the single thing driving this I’m sure is technology,” Natividad said.
Both Cici and Pau said they had heard similar stories in the call center office they used to work at, which have beds in rest areas for exhausted staff.
“Our sleeping quarters were for both sexes. Some of my friends told me that there were certain things that happened there,” Cici said.
The trend has worrying implications for public health, said Teresita Marie Bagasao, the country official for the UN’s Joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS.
Most new HIV infections now occur among young Filipinos, compared with the 1990s when the country’s large overseas-based work force including sailors were the main risk group, she said.
Despite the stresses and risks, those in the industry see few other options in a country where the only way they could earn that kind of money would be to join the exodus of Filipinos working abroad.
Jels said she had earned enough in five years in the industry to pay a deposit on a condominium and said her priority now was to hopefully start a family.
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