We celebrated Labor Day yesterday with the usual statements about the rights and welfare of workers. Not much attention, however, has been given to what the future holds for labor in a digital and networked age.
This topic is relevant in Cebu because we are home to close to 200,000 workers in the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry. This does not count the number of freelance workers using the online platform.
The Philippine Statistics Authority defines BPO as the leveraging of technology or specialist process vendors in order to provide and manage an organization's critical and/or non-critical enterprise processes and applications. The most common examples of BPO, according to the PSA, are call centers, software development, data transcription, accounting, and payroll outsourcing.
Internet-enabled technologies have ushered the growth of the BPO and other related industries. This development challenges our traditional notions of terms and conditions of employment. While protections of the rights and welfare of the working class have been blurred by the digital and networked environment, our industrial age laws and regulatory frameworks are too slow to adjust in bringing new forms of protection for workers.
For instance, many companies are now findings ways to remove the "employer-employee" relationship in their labor contracts. Because the internet enables them to outsource jobs to freelance workers, some companies now make sure that workers at the other end of the line are treated as self-employed or independent contractors. They demand that workers register with the Bureau of Internal Revenue and issue receipts as individual service providers.
Further questions come out of this development. Who pays for the worker's social security, housing benefits, and health insurance? Are there still guarantees on the right of security of tenure under this new setup? Can so-called individual service providers form a union with the same rights under the law on labor relations to protect the rights and welfare of group members?
On the other hand, Cristina, a BPO worker, sees a positive difference in her job from the traditional office environment. "You can ask to come to work in shorts and shirt. You can choose not come to the office if you have a valid reason like flooding in the city, and still get the work done," she says, "people in the IT industry get more perks for good performance also."
Amy, a home-based worker for 10 years now, sees the arrangement as advantageous for her, being both a stay-at-home mother and one who needs a job to supplement the family income. "I own my time. I get to take care of the family and now, I am also able to take care of my mother," she says. "Money is easy working online. Time management, however, can be tricky."
While the digital and networked economy is good for some workers, for others, flexibility of work hours and accessibility through smartphones and the internet mean no clear delineation between time at work and time off from work. If you dread opening your email on weekends or evenings because of work-related messages, you are definitely not alone.
Just like the emergence of workers' rights movements during the industrial age, our society today must work to achieve fair and just terms and conditions for the labor sector under the digital and networked economy. We in Cebu are in a good position to contribute to this effort because we can study the situation of our many BPO workers here and discuss the proposal of new laws and regulatory frameworks with them.