The Pinoy Worker In A Flat World

Written on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 1:49 pm | by Patricio Mangubat

Workers of the world, awaken!

Rise in all your splendid might

Take the wealth that you are making,

It belongs to you by right.

No one will for bread be crying

We’ll have freedom, love and health,

When the grand red flag is flying

In the Workers’ Commonwealth.

–a song by Joe Hill commemorating the struggle of the first May 1 movement in 1884

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that beyond human existence lies nothing.

If this is true, then, what hope lies for the Pinoy worker? What life awaits those who traditionally work in factories and sweatshops throughout the country?

In a flat world such as ours, intellectual capital is perceived to be more valuable now than production. With technology totally eliminating the human factor in production, the machine has proven to be more important than the worker.

This begs for a re-examination of the worker’s place in the scheme of things.

During the Industrial Revolution, the workers know how powerful they are. Without them, factories can’t go on producing.

Now, everything has been mechanized. You see less and less people being employed by factories because computers can do the same stuff that a worker can do, and with less stress of a shutdown due to a picketline or a labor strike.

Lazzarato (1996) puts it simply as an era of “immaterial labor”, a dig against Karl Marx description of labor as related to material production. Like all labor, such requires physical activity, but an “immaterial” one due to its result. Lazzarato defines it as “the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity” (1996, 133). According to Hardt and Negri (2005, 108), it creates “immate- rial products, such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship, or an emotional response.”

It’s a departure from Marx in the sense that it makes not just objects but “subjectivities” (Hardt and Negri, 2000, 32). Hardt and Negri agree that its “biopolitical production, the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another.”

With this shift in the way the world perceive labor, what then, for the Pinoy Worker?

I think this administration is aware of this. That’s why, today, in commemoration of the 1884 struggle of Chicago workers in the State which led to May 1, they’re encouraging workers, especially the OFW’s, to engage in entrepreneurship.

whatever my friends from the labor movement would say, this paradigm shift from material production to immaterial labor poses a serious threat to the relevance of labor unions. Why?

In a highly mechanized world, labor’s place is threatened with extinction. With the world being increasingly transformed into geo-economic divisions, how will the Philippines stand a chance against such giants of production, like China and India?

Compare the Filipino worker with their counterparts abroad and you’ll see that companies prefer Chinese and Indian workers than Filipinos. First, the standard of living there is quite low. Second, they don’t complain. And third, they are not picky or choosy in their work.

Yes, we do say that we’re more educated and speak correct English than these Chinese or Indian workers. Yet, the new trend nowadays is for companies to adapt to the language and trash the language barriers instead of workers adapting to the company. Likewise, Chinese workers are learning English. Indians, by the way, speak the Queen’s language, better than us.

So, where’s our advantage?

As the world behaves in an informational mode, fewer and fewer companies produce material capital and more and more rely on intellectual capital. With the paradigm shift, more people need more info-based education rather than skills-based.

That’s good for modern, highly-industrialized societies like those of the US, Europe and Singapore. But, what about the Philippines, which positions itself as a viable investment haven for producers of goods?

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About The Author: Patricio Mangubat is a pseudonym. It means "country fight". Yet, the one behind this name is real. He can be briefly described as a long-time activist as well as a communication strategist. He blogs at The New Philippine Revolution.

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9 Responses to “The Pinoy Worker In A Flat World”

  1. Blog Carnival: The Philippine Job Market and The Filipino Worker | Filipino Voices on May 1st, 2008 1:52 pm

    […] The Pinoy Worker In A Flat World by Patricio Mangubat Tags: blog carnival, blogs, jobs, labor day, philippine job market Add to del.icio.us | Digg this! | Yahoo MyWeb | Google Bookmark It! | Stumble It! About The Author: Nick is a passionate Filipino, and a political junkie. His personal blog is at Tingog - The Voice of The Filipino, and he is also the founder of FilipinoVoices.com. He has been blogging since 2006. […]

  2. benign0 on May 1st, 2008 7:48 pm

    Our contemporaries in the region — Malaysia, Singapore, and even Thailand are quickly moving into higher-added-value production while we are still stuck on labour-added-value. This in turn keeps us stuck on price competition rather than on quality- and innovation- based competition.

    We can only compete on price for so long as China and Vietnam — with far lower labour costs have already started eating away at our labour cost advantage.

  3. Jon Limjap on May 1st, 2008 7:53 pm

    Focus on services. Focus on intellectual (immaterial labor). The new industrial revolution is software development. Educate more people in it!

    I commend that congresswoman who proposed that ICT hubs be established in all provinces outside of the province urbanity or capital; while her project is ambitious she’s at least on the right track.

    It’s hopeless to catch up with India or China now in manufacturing, and it is utterly useless and brainless to wallow in the tradition of manual factory labor. Time to adapt, time to catch up. Time to start fighting for real.

  4. Pumpy on May 1st, 2008 8:17 pm

    Given peak oil (and peak food and minerals), global warming, a global credit crunch and possibly major problems that will hit financial systems worldwide, possibly more conflict over scarce resources (perhaps even including water), and the threat of epidemics and pandemics, can we still expect a “flat earth” and more globalization?

  5. benign0 on May 2nd, 2008 9:34 am

    Globalisation and ‘flat earth’ seem to benefit only countries that are strong producers and tend to disadvantage countries that primarily consume.

    The way “globalisation” is pitched, it promises to

    (1) opens broader markets for producers; and,
    (2) broadens scope of available products and services to consumers.

    BUT

    For countries hooked on consumption — such as the Philippines — with utterly weak track records of high-added-value production, the effect of Item 2 is like letting a 3-year-old kid lose in a candy store selling cheap sweets.

    That’s the Philippines today — hooked on Chinese celphone trinkets and Mekong Delta rice.

  6. Nick on May 3rd, 2008 4:17 am

    Benigno, everyone is hooked on chinese trinkets, it’s not that globalization is such a bad thing, it’s just that bigger and more powerful countries (and companies) are gaming the system..

  7. Jon Limjap on May 3rd, 2008 1:30 pm

    Nick,

    Boohoohoo, they’re gaming the system.

    Problem? We’re letting them, falling into the cheapest of their ploys.

    Will there ever be a time when Filipinos cease to be pushovers?

  8. Nick on May 3rd, 2008 5:56 pm

    Jon, we’re not complaining here, we’re just stating facts.. That’s why when we get shit like JPEPA being shoved down our throats, I don’t see the vast majority of oppositionists to this “treaty” as being pushovers or falling into their ploys.

    Quite the contrary, these are things we have full control over. But when markets are the talk here, I just don’t think a simple action as not “falling into the cheapest of their ploys” is a concrete action at all.

    We’re no pushovers, but concrete solutions are hard to come by especially with The World Bank, WTO, and other so called “independent” world organizations, who have at the heart of their hierarchy, officials close to Washington.

    So, no crying over here on my part, just stating the facts, letting everyone know, and hopefully enlighten the people a bit. That’s the first step after all, lest we just punch wildly at an enemy we know nothing about.

    Hopefully, at the heart of that statement, you mean government officials who let the country be pushed over. I say, the only concrete action against that, is to wipe out these damn trapos once and for all. And thus, we go back to Cocoy’s need for a new politic in The Philippines… Maybe then, we can get some guts, and balls into these officials who ultimately make the decisions for the masses.

  9. Jon Limjap on May 3rd, 2008 8:11 pm

    Nick,

    My only point is, if we want to be treated fairly by these powerful countries and corporate interests, then we should know how to play their crazy little games.

    That the JPEPA is encountering huge problems regarding its ratification is, for me, a good sign.

    Benign0’s contention on our being “hooked” — well, that problem isn’t exactly new. In the previous generation we were hooked on everything “steytsayd”. How do you something so deeply ingrained as that?

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