EDITORIAL - BPO and call center industry marginalized? Wow!

And the list simply continues regarding the partylist and why, at the first opportunity we get, we should once and for all abolish the system to put an end to the madness. What early benefits may have been derived from it have now all been wiped out by the big joke it has become.

Listen to this. Did you know that there is — diay — a partylist for the BPO and call center industry? There is, and it is called AKMA-PTM. And while one of its advocacies deals with rising cases of HIV in the industry, which is valid, we wonder if the group itself is.

Oh, of course it is valid since it has obtained the necessary accreditation. But the question deals more with the why and the how come. To go back to how this entire mess came to be, the partylist system is supposed to give a chance to the marginalized to be heard.

As understood in the context of Philippine society and politics, the term marginalized refers to the poor, the powerless, and the oppressed. The partylist system, despite its tendency to be redundant, was rammed down our throats if only to give the marginalizes some importance.

But in the context of how Philippine society and politics understand marginalization, nothing could be farther from being marginalized than the BPO and call center sector. There is no putting this sector under the same marginalized tag as, say, the disabled.

The BPO and call center sector is one of the fastest growing industries in the country today. There are BPO and call center establishments in almost all major urban centers, with each company hiring highly educated applicants by the hundreds, if not thousands.

And the salaries enjoyed by those employed in this sector are such that they are drawing warm bodies away from other fields. In fact, their good pay has given them too much liberty many have fallen precisely into habits that now give them the kind of headache STD and HIV cause.

Again, the AKMA-PTM is a valid partylist organization as it has its accreditation. That is not our beef. Our beef is why it was accredited in the first place. We are exasperated because no matter how we try, we just cannot justify the BPO and call center industry as marginalized.

And we are not even singling out AKMA-PTM because we have written so many times before in this space about our incredulity over many other supposedly marginalized representations that are simply not representing the truly marginalized. Let us stop the travesty already.