Come Home to BPO
By Gary B. Olivar

As someone who’s worked abroad longer than he has in the Philippines, I’ve always been partial to the ambitions and adventures of the immigrant, the expatriate, the OFW.

Not for me the usual hand-wringing about brain drain or abandoning the Filipino people. Exhortations to stay home and sacrifice for the good of the country fall on deaf ears in my case.

In my experience, the source of such exalted sentiments tends to be politicians preening for the media, do-gooders who can’t see past the naïveté of their good intentions, or—worst of all—sour grapes who can’t get the visa or the job offer to go abroad themselves.

I base my possibly unorthodox thinking on a couple of eminently reasonable principles:

First, one’s loyalty is usually to himself and his family first, before his country. Remember that the earliest cavemen were organized as families long before the nation-state came to be. Individualism and filialism were hard-wired by the Creator into our biological code. The drive to improve oneself and provide for one’s family is always a noble cause. By contrast, patriotism and nationalism very often are not.

Second, it is the free market that makes overseas work and immigration both attractive and possible, through the global mobility of labor as a scarce economic resource. Because labor—together with other factors of production—is free to go where it is most productive, i.e. where it is paid the most, the international economy becomes more efficient. More goods and services become available at lower prices to more people worldwide. Who could argue against that?

Of course there are costs involved, especially on the human and social side. In the case of OFW’s, we have all heard the stories of broken families, unscrupulous labor recruiters, mistreatment by employers, and—not least of all—neglect by the same government that loves to praise OFW’s as “mga bagong bayani”.

But, as Chairman Mao famously said once, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.

The Industrial Revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries was characterized by the egregious exploitation of sweatshops and child labor, pillaging by robber barons, and the disappearance of entire economic sectors under the relentless advance of capital and machinery. More recently, the former Soviet Union went through a prolonged repeat of that long-ago experience as it struggled to build a market economy.

The experience of Filipino OFW’s is not a solitary one, not at all the first in the world, nor by any means the last. Social dislocation and human tragedy are the inevitable attendants at the birth of new economic paradigms, as man continues to extend his mastery over nature’s resources.

This is why I find myself enthralled by the opportunities being opened up today by the burgeoning new business process outsourcing (BPO) sector in the Philippines. BPO now allows me to take the very same principles I mentioned above and—with no loss of face at all—ask my fellow expatriates and OFW’s, this time, to seriously consider coming back home.

Under the biological principle that family and self trump most everything else, what could be more satisfying to the Filipino in exile than to be able to rejoin his loved ones and reconnect to his tribe? This is a dream that these days is prompting the ageing immigrants of the sixties and seventies to leave their adoptive homelands in the West and retire to their true home.

With the opportunities being opened up by BPO, one no longer has to wait to retire before coming back. Under the market principles that drive labor to its most efficient, i.e. highest-paid, uses, the Filipino exile no longer has to sacrifice his wallet by coming home. Within the BPO sector, he can look forward to career opportunities that are financially and professionally meaningful.

One might quibble that BPO is too new a phenomenon, perhaps ephemeral, perhaps just the latest fad, a flash in the pan. And because of this, one might worry about long-term issues like job security and satisfaction.

But the underlying trends do not support such pessimism. Consider the following:

Filipinos are not only English speakers, but Anglophiles to the bone. Someday, perhaps, China may produce medical transcriptionists who’ve learned English by the book. But they will not understand idiomatic American English the way Filipinos can, being products of “four centuries of Spanish convents and half a century of Hollywood”.

Filipinos may be Anglophiles to the bone, but their hearts are still full of Asian grace—the impulse to welcome a stranger, assist the needy, comfort the afflicted. It is this more than anything else that makes Filipina nurses loved everywhere. Someday, perhaps, the call center operators of India may shed the hard, brusque attitudes lurking just under their practiced tones. But don’t hold your breath.

Filipinos are not only conventionally literate, they are also innately creative in a way that allows them to excel in outsourced animation as much as in the more prosaic back-office areas of accounting and legal support. It is this quality that gives Filipinos a real chance to move up the food chain of BPO into higher value-added activities.

Any sunrise industry is bound to have more than its share of problems and issues, and BPO is no exception.

Attrition is a chronic problem, and the jury is still out on whether the Philippine government can muster the political will to reform the educational system into a reliable supplier of well-educated new entrants into the BPO pool. Relatedly, heavier regulation and taxation continue to be a real risk, as the political hacks and the rentiers in the bureaucracy cast a moist eye on an industry that—unlike them—truly works for a living.

Within the industry, an organizational gap is growing between the masses of young people who crowd the front lines of service delivery, on one hand, and the handful of owners and expatriate managers responsible for the entire enterprise, on the other. Whether or not the young front-liners are offered executive development opportunities and a career track into the ranks of higher management remains to be seen.

But as any executive knows, a business problem is simply an opportunity in disguise, waiting to be uncovered by those with the necessary skills and fortitude.

At the end of the day, though, the REAL reason it’s worthwhile for the Filipino exile to come home to the BPO sector, is the opportunity to work with the kids—to make his presence felt, to teach them what they can learn from him, to make a real difference in their lives.

Earlier here, I commented that patriotism and nationalism are often not noble sentiments. This happens when they spring from the statist point of view, when they are animated by abstract concepts like “motherland” and “fatherland”, when they are ideological rather than inspirational.

But if the wellspring of such sentiments is a profound recognition of the national community as simply an extension of one’s family and one’s neighborhood—the Tribe, if you will, writ large—then such sentiments will not lead you astray. And it is the kids, the young ones, who look to you—a mere relic of the past—for the clues to their future—it is they who will be your guide.

There are many of them in the BPO sector back home. And they’re all waiting for you.

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