Page 2 of 2 Filipino diaspora moves
up value
chain By David L Llorito
Army], secessionists, and terrorist
groups. The Australians do recognize this Filipino
talent," he said.
As more Filipino
professionals move offshore, local companies are
scrambling to recruit from a thinning talent pool.
"In just 12 months, we lost about a dozen
human-resource officers to other companies," said
Raymond Santiago, corporate-affairs manager of
Unilab, producer and exporter of prescription and consumer-
health products.
Noel
de Leon, country manager of Mercer Consulting, a
global human-resources company with clients in 42
countries, attributes the fierce global
competition for Filipino talent to demographic
change in the US and the Asia-Pacific region.
"There's a war for talent out there because China
is growing so fast," said de Leon. "The trend of
rising demand for skilled workers is really
Asia-Pacific-wide."
In a recent regional
survey, Mercer found that anywhere between 50% and
77% of companies in Japan, South Korea, mainland
China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia,
Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Australia and New
Zealand had expressed intentions to hire more
English-speaking staff, even as many of them are
experiencing high local worker attrition rates.
"And where are they going to get new talents?
Naturally, many of them will recruit from the
Philippines," said de Leon.
And global
economic trends show that demand will grow before
it diminishes. In a recent paper titled "Global
Competition for Skilled Workers and Consequences",
Manolo Abella, a Bangkok-based labor-migration
expert who formerly worked for the International
Labor Organization, said the intensifying battle
for Filipino and other English-speaking
professional talent results from "the growth of
global supply chains" brought about by trade and
investment liberalization.
"The emergence
of these global production structures has been
everywhere accompanied by greater movements or
transfers of technical and managerial personnel,"
said Abella. "Another important development has
been the growth of informal as well as flexible
forms of employment, opening markets for foreign
workers willing to enter occupations or sectors
abandoned by [local workers]."
According
to Dieter Ernst, an economist and senior research
fellow at the East-West Center based in Hawaii,
the trend toward downsizing of local staff among
US firms since the late 1990s has also been a
major factor in the hiring trend. Ernst explained
that because many US companies operate on very
lean staff, many of these firms are now scrambling
for lower-paid, but equally skilled, foreign
workers.
"For many high-tech companies,
competing for scarce global talent has become a
major concern," said Ernst. "As a result, global
sourcing for knowledge workers now is an important
global manufacturing and supply-chain strategy.
The goal is to diversify and optimize a company's
human-capital portfolio through aggressive
recruitment in global labor markets."
But
what's adding real fire to the global
professional-talent war is increasingly aggressive
recruitment from the US, Canada and Australia,
especially in regional areas suffering from low
population and labor-force growth. For instance,
Canada and Australia have been offering permanent
residence and citizenship as incentives for
skilled migrants, including from the Philippines.
Through its so-called H1-B visa program,
US firms have been increasingly aggressive in
trying to lure IT workers from the Philippines to
Silicon Valley. Middle Eastern countries such as
Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been giving
temporary admission to skilled engineers, welders,
pipe fitters, accountants, journalists and
advertising people from the Philippines and other
Asian countries. And Australia is now using its
universities as so-called "academic gates" for
attracting skilled migrants from the Philippines
and all over the world.
Slowly but surely,
the mounting professional exodus is driving up
wages in the Philippines. Patrick Marquina,
associate consultant for Watson Wyatt, another
human-resources-related firm, says 148 Philippine
companies involved in manufacturing, business
process outsourcing, banking and other industries
have in the past year all raised their pay scales
by an average of 9.2%, or nearly three times the
benchmark inflation rate.
Rising pay
scales, Marquina explained, are moving fastest in
the outsourcing and IT-related businesses. Still,
several economic analysts and corporate executives
believe average professional wages have risen too
little, too late, and fret that the mounting
exodus of talent from the Philippines is adversely
hitting overall national competitiveness.
Labor expert Abella said: "Experience has
shown that human capital, rather than
natural-resource endowments, is the key to
economic development. The current competition for
the highly skilled has raised alarms that ...
developing countries will have difficulty in
creating a critical mass of professionals and
technical workers needed to raise productivity."
David Llorito is a researcher at
the BusinessMirror, a Manila-based daily
newspaper. He has more than a decade of experience
in socioeconomic research, policy analysis and
business-economy journalism in the Philippines.
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