| There’s still some charm left in the UP Diploma, but it’s no longer a foolproof guarantee of a dream job.
UP School of Labor and Industrial Relations (SOLAIR) Dean Jorge V. Sibal says that employers still prefer graduates of the University over other jobseekers but the severity of unemployment in the country could limit their career options. He points out that since the unemployment rate has been on a steady rise these past years, even college graduates are finding it difficult to get a job. In “Public Forum-Dialogue on the Exodus of Mission-Critical Personnel and Professionals,” which was held last March 4 at the UP SOLAIR Auditorium, it was revealed that from 1980 to 2003, the country’s economy managed to create 14.7 million new jobs but, within the same period, 17.7 million newcomers also entered the labor force. In other words, the additional 0.6% jobs that were created were not enough to absorb the 1.4% increase in the labor force. As a result, unemployment among the schooled segment of the labor force increased as well—29% among high school graduates and 17% among college graduates and undergraduates. Dr. Virgel C. Binghay, coordinator of UP SOLAIR’s Graduate Studies Program, traces the country’s unemployment woes to the decision of many companies to relocate their manufacturing plants to other countries. Multinational companies, he says, now seem to prefer China, India, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia because these countries offer cheaper labor and bigger market for their products. Bright spots Dr. Binghay observes that these opportunities all fall under the service sector. This is not good because there should be a balance among the service, agricultural, and manufacturing sectors. “Especially in our case,” he points out, “since most of our workers belong to the agriculture sector. While we welcome the developments in the service industry, we must be wary of the slump in agriculture and manufacturing because it means disenfranchisement of the workers in these sectors.” Indeed, in 2004, the service sector ate up the biggest chunk of the employment pie with 48% while agriculture came in second with 36%. Manufacturing, meanwhile, posted the lowest share with 9.7%. Dean Sibal, however, points out that “most of the jobs created in agriculture and service sectors were low-quality jobs.” Opportunities overseas Demands in the aviation industry are particularly surprising, says Dr. Binghay: “We’re losing a lot of our pilots, aircraft engineers and technicians, and traffic controllers to other countries, especially India and the Middle East.” Even the linemen of the Manila Electric Co., he adds, have also been getting job offers from Australia, New Zealand, Oceania, and Papua New Guinea, among many others. UP graduates, notes Dean Sibal, will most likely find themselves in the small but highly-paid group of knowledge workers who are mostly based in the US and Europe. “Although small in numbers, Filipino knowledge workers turn over more than one half of the entire remittances since many of them are highly paid professionals and technical workers,” he explains. Next to India, the Philippines supplies the most number of knowledge workers to the rest of the world. “Lately, however, some local industries have felt the crippling effects of the loss of mission-critical professionals and technicians,” Dean Sibal explains. These critical sectors include aviation, shipping, information technology, steel, petrochemical, telecommunications, health care, and education. “We need to temper sending our mission-critical personnel and professionals abroad,” he says. “We must bear in mind what management guru Peter Drucker said: Knowledge workers are the key to competitiveness of enterprises and national economies. This is the reason developed countries deliberately pirate the knowledge workers of developing countries. They need to be ahead in competing with the rest of the world at the expense of developing countries.” Regulating the exodus of workers, according to Dr. Binghay, is actually done in some countries. “Yes, I recognize that part of globalization is the free movement of people,” he says. “But can you imagine our hospitals without competent doctors and nurses or our airports without traffic controllers? Our country will be paralyzed. We must also protect our country.” Other options Yet another alternative for new graduates is to go back to school to pursue a master’s degree. Aside from acquiring more knowledge, competencies, and skills, some students turn to graduate schools in the hopes of landing a job through their classmates, most of whom are already working. Both Dean Sibal and Dr. Binghay, however, do not approve of this strategy. “Except in pure sciences, I would not advise new college graduates to pursue graduate studies right away. Studying and applying what you learned in school in your place of work or practice of profession is the best combination for a successful graduate student,” says Dean Sibal. “So go get a job first, even if you start at the bottom of the organization ladder.” Inexperienced students in graduate schools also are a problem for professors, points out Binghay. “That is especially true for us in SOLAIR where we teach about the world of work,” he explains. “A student who does not have any work experience will not be able to relate to our discussions. When we talk about Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), for example, what does that student know about CBA other than what he or she has read in the book? There are a lot of things about the work place that are not in the books, so our discussions are enriched by the individual or collective experiences of both the professors and students.” |
Category Archives: Labor
Balancing Act: Karina C. David on unions in the academe
The government runs on structure. Standard procedures regulate most, if not all processes within its agencies, subdivisions, and instrumentalities. The distribution of power is defined by strict hierarchies. Personnel are selected through a consistent pattern of recruitment; once appointed to a permanent position, staff members enjoy stable linear careers. Terms and conditions of employment, from salary grades to grievance mechanisms, are fixed by law.
If everything has its specified place and function in government, why the need for labor unions in the public sector?
Prof. Karina Constantino-David, former faculty member of the UP College of Social Work and Development and former chairperson of the Civil Service Commission (CSC), says labor unions give ordinary workers a voice in governance and the policy-making process. “The assumption is that policies and governance are always well-meant,” she says, “but management does not always foresee all the consequences—especially the seemingly trivial ones—of its decisions, no matter how great or noble its intentions are.”
Prof. Karina Constantino-David
In 2000, for instance, to celebrate its centenary, the CSC issued a policy which required government employees to wear Filipiniana (national dress) on Mondays, a simple means to promote nationalism. “When I asked high-level employees [about the policy], they told me that they were happy about dressing up at least once a week. But when I asked rank-and-file employees, they said that while it was nice to wear terno, they found it difficult to do so while taking public transportation—the tricycle, the jeepney—for fear of ruining their elaborately designed and intricately embroidered gowns,” David relates. “Not that it was their fault, but clearly, policy-makers did not anticipate such a difficulty because they go to work in the comfort and convenience of their service vehicles.” In May 2001, David modified the policy by requiring government employees to simply have a distinctly Filipino touch or motif in their Monday attire.
Individually, ordinary workers can hardly be expected to approach management about their concerns. On the other hand, it would be tedious for management to address the individual grievances of employees. Unions, according to David, provide a feedback mechanism that allows both management and workers to settle issues quite effectively and efficiently. Furthermore, this feedback mechanism enables workers to participate in the formulation, revision, and even in the implementation of policies.
Limitation in participation
Participation, however, should not be mistaken for having the power itself to make the decision. David says unions should keep in mind that, in the government, there are laws that specify which individuals make decisions and are held accountable for them. In the ç, she says, workers are more fortunate than most government employees because they are represented in the University’s highest policy-making body—the Board of Regents (BOR). “They have faculty and staff regents to communicate their concerns and assert their rights when the Board makes policies and decisions,” she says.
Despite this privilege, however, the unions in UP (and in all other educational institutions, for that matter) should recognize one important limitation in their bargaining power, that is, keeping their hands off issues that are purely academic in nature, such as a proposal to institute a new curriculum or a proposal to conduct research on a particular subject.
David stresses that these issues should not—and in fact, cannot—be resolved via numerical strength or by any means other than expertise. When it comes to such matters, academe-based unions must yield to the decisions of the University Council (UC), whose members are the recognized experts in various academic disciplines. Even the UP Charter recognizes the UC, although its actions and decisions are subject to the approval of the BOR, the highest academic body in UP. Unions should step in only if the UC incurs employment-related violations, such as questionable expenses in implementing programs or the displacement of an employee because of the pursuit of a specific academic undertaking or decisions made in a procedurally flawed manner.
Since UP is an academic institution, David says the unions are expected to come up with proposals that are based on studies, backed up by statistics when necessary, and supported by well-reasoned arguments. As much as possible, strikes or other concerted activities should not be the main tactic of choice. Unlike the private sector unions, public sector unions negatively affect the very people they are supposed to serve when they engage in work stoppage.
Balancing self interest and public service
Unions, whether in the public sector in general or the academe in particular, ought to understand that they are operating in an environment different from the private sector, where negotiation agreements between management and workers are mostly focused on the subdivision of profits. In the public sector, there is no profit to talk about. Moreover, government employees are actually working for themselves and the rest of the Filipino people.
Thus, says David, public sector unions have two essential functions—to protect their self-interests and to advance public service.
Self-interest refers to government employees’ welfare. Since unions cannot negotiate employment terms and conditions that are already provided for by law, which include salary adjustments, David issued a policy during her stint as CSC commissioner and Public Sector Labor-Management Council chair, that instituted a system whereby unions and management in each agency can agree on mechanisms for generating savings—a minimum of 50% of which must be distributed to the employees as a Collective Negotiation Agreement incentive. “Except for big departments like the Department of Education and the Department of Health, I know that government agencies have or—if they choose to—can have savings from their budget,” she says. “In the eight years that I served the CSC, I never asked for any increase in our budget yet when I left, the Commission had accumulated a savings of P300 million—more than enough to fund their Collective Negotiation Agreement for the next three years.”
How did CSC do it? David, who proposed the revamping of the government pay scale in order to make salaries of government personnel competitive with their counterparts in the private sector, implemented pragmatic cost-saving mechanisms. Apart from setting the example by cutting out unnecessary expenses in her own office, she enjoined employees to take the CSC budget seriously by making unit budgets transparent and specific. She then issued a policy to ensure that whatever amount could be saved by each unit would redound to their benefit every year. Fifty percent would be allocated to ensuring Collective Negotiation Agreement benefits while the other 50% could be collectively used by the unit staff in team-building activities. This was enough to motivate them to devise and implement cost-saving mechanisms, such as monitoring the use of office supplies and the efficient use of electronic equipment, particularly those that are heavy on electric consumption. By the time her term ended, almost all offices had the occasion to spend a few days in places like Boracay, Bohol, and Baguio through the savings that they had generated.
Savings strictly refer to sums in the budget that are not expended because functions are accomplished at less cost. She noted that in many occasions, when unions aggressively pursued welfare benefits, management resorted to simply cutting projects and services just to have “savings” to distribute to the employees. In this case, while unions were able to protect their self-interest, it was done at the expense of public service.
“Unions in the public sector should not forget that there is a balancing act between promoting their self-interest and improving public service,” stresses David. “It is a tough job but, for me, a responsible union does not forget that government employees are working not for personal profit but to serve the Filipino public.”
She laments that most unions in the public sector have been unable to negotiate beyond self-interest. They have also become stuck in the belief that if they are not able to get their demands, they can always hold a strike and paralyze operations in their agencies. They do not realize that ordinary people who cannot fulfill their transactions with government—and not management—are the hardest hit by such strikes.
David posits that it is in places like the academe, particularly in UP where reasoned arguments are the norm in any form of debate or negotiation and where service to the nation is a mandate and not merely a mouthed goal, where changes in unionism in the public sector can best be demonstrated. Furthermore, the unions in the University have the advantage of representation in the BOR.
What needs to be done is to use this advantage wisely.
Dear Elizabeth 