“College graduate ka, sa call center ka lang nagtatrabaho?”
My older sister once told me that she received comments like this when she first worked for a call center company. To be honest, I also had the same thoughts about this: the idea of wasting what I have learned in one of the most famous universities in the country just to talk with foreign strangers over the phone and attend to their requests. Never did I imagine that I will be one of these so-called “graveyard warriors,” not until I see myself submitting my very own resume to a call center company two years ago.
Now that I’m still in this industry, what have I learned?
First, the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, particularly the call center industry, continues to ramp up exponentially. According to a report from the National Statistics Office, more than 400,000 people were employed in the BPO industry in 2012, and 83.5 percent of these employed individuals work in call center companies. The numbers are still expected to grow, with around 300,000 more employments posts projected to be filled up by 2016, as per the report released by PTV News earlier this year.
Such expansion has been justified by the recent report on the status of the BPO industry in the country released by the Asian Development Bank earlier this year. According to this report, the Philippines is the best destination for call center jobs, and the second global outsourcing destination of BPO companies. Our country being the third largest English-speaking country in the world, with half a million college graduates per year, explains this outcome. On top of that, the Philippines has one of the lowest labor costs in the world, along with India, attracts foreign BPO companies to invest in the country and employ more Filipinos.
Second, call center agents, based on what I observed in our office, come from different walks of life. There are high school graduates who were not able to continue schooling due to financial constraints. There are also working students who finance their studies by being employed in the industry. And there are also college graduates who were not able to pursue the degree that they finished due to employment issues.
These demographics of call center agents tend to show a lot of things about the current situation of the country. For one, education, especially tertiary education, still costs high, which makes people from lower income brackets decide not to continue their studies and join the labor force instead. Next, at a young age, some students feel the burden brought about by the high cost of education, pushing them to work and study at the same time. Lastly, for college graduates, the chances of being employed in the industry related to their degree stay low. For instance, nursing graduates, regardless of whether they took the board exams or not, end up working for call center companies due to limited slots for nurses across the globe.
Despite the situations that trigger people to submit their application forms, resume and other recruitment needs to call center companies, there is another face of this industry that is kept hidden to the public. For one, call center agents need to cope up with emotional and psychological stress caused by the nature of their work. They need to deal with different kinds of customers eight (or more) hours a day, with chances of talking to a customer who knows nothing but cursing associates or being racist and all that. Also, the pressure for associates to hit their metrics, like call handling time and survey scores, is high that they need to work really hard just to be able to stay in the company.
“We work day shifts, we work night shifts, we work, we work overtime, we work holidays and weekends… We take calls, we answer email, we are the reason they are investing in our country. They are here because they need the work we provide,” states BPO Industry Employees Network (BIEN) on their Facebook Community Page’s Manifesto.
This stress level pushes some associates to be engaged in unhealthy practices, particularly smoking. Most call center agents smoke, being a “stress-reliever” as its justification.
Apart from this, the graveyard shift of most call center agents causes one to changes his/her sleeping patterns, which in turn affects his/her health. A recent article published in The Equal Times earlier this year reported that lifestyle-related diseases and other illnesses “need urgent attention.”
“As well as sleep problems and fatigue, says the ILO study, workers also suffer from insomnia, eye strain, neck, shoulder and back pains and throat problems,” Equal Times writer Estrella Torres said in the article, citing a study on the health risks of working in a call center.
Even though the risks are quite alarming, call center agents still got attracted with the promise of the BPO industry: easy employment (you can get hired within the day, known as the same-day processing), assurance of regularization (most call center companies regularize employees six months after they got hired), and of course, high salary.
Lastly, it seems ironic that the government has high regard for the BPO industry and citing its contribution to the national economy even if the certainty of its existence in the Philippines is elusive. The industry is deemed as one of the most successful sectors recently. In spite of this, we need to look back to the orientation of the industry: it is funded by foreign companies situated outside of the country, so there is a big chance that these companies can be pulled out. If that happens, hundreds of thousands of people will lose their jobs. As it is seen as a blessing, so to speak, isn’t it possible that the industry can also be a threat to our own labor force?
Instead of relying on outsourcing our labor force to boost our national economy, it would be better if we develop what we already have in our country and establish an industry that we can call our own. For instance, why not develop our agricultural lands so that there would be no need for importing agricultural products? Why not create industries out of our own resources? That way we can still maximize our labor force without depending on other countries just to provide us one.
These days, whenever I talk to my sister about call center, we now share the same sentiments. Like her, I also tend to receive similar comments about being part of the industry. But instead of thinking about how to respond to these comments, I think of something else: the issue of employment is still present, and the BPO industry is not something to rely on. But as long as the BPO industry is here to stay, more and more Filipinos will still hold on to its promise of improving people’s lives.
SOURCES:
http://www.adbi.org/files/2014.05.06.cpp.sess2.1.bongato.call.center.bpo.phl.pdf
