BPO industry limits Filipinos to servitude – IT exec

The business process outsourcing and information technology (IT-BPO) industry may boast of high growth, but an IT executive laments that the industry limits Filipino innovation and has people functioning as “machines” and “servants” for established BPO companies. “Filipinos are treated like machines. People are plugged into a machine, like in the Matrix movie,” said Kevin Leversee, general manager of iGo2Group.com.au, an Australian start-up IT company based in Clark, Pampanga. Leversee said that unlike a place like California’s Silicon Valley, where IT students are taught to come up with their own ideas and start a business from there, in the Philippines “they are teaching Filipinos how to support the inventors [in Silicon Valley].” Filipinos are being trained to work for established BPO companies “like servants” instead, he said. “[The IT-BPO industry] has to be both inventing and innovation. We don’t want to create a nation of servants but that of artists and artisans,” he said. GMA News Online has contacted BPAP executive director Gillian Virata, but she refused to comment on the issue. Meanwhile, Hernandez could not be reached for comment as of posting time. According to BPAP’s public relations office, the organization will meet “internally” to come up with a statement on this “sensitive issue.” Cheap labor For Leversee, the IT-BPO industry owes its growth largely to cheap labor. “Why is the Philippines big? Because you’re cheap,” said Leversee, who has also served as CEO of a company helping tech startups named Startupdragons.com. “You sell it for a $100 in the States and it cost you $50 here. Here’s the thing – there’s Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, they’re all competitive. And what is the Philippines? The Philippines is cheap labor,” he added. Leversee, however, noted that he does not hate the IT-BPO industry, but said that much needs to be done to turn the industry into that of innovation and not “just answering calls.” “If you are trained to answer phone calls, you are born a slave,” he said. BPO IT in 2011 According to the industry's umbrella organization, the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP), the Philippines as an IT-BPO hub is “growing at a much faster rate than their counterparts in developed economies.” “Last year’s revenue of $11 billion and labor force of 640,000 employees contributed largely to the country’s overall rank as the world’s top choice for voice and number two for non-voice, complex services,” said BPAP president Benedict Hernandez in an e-mailed statement Wednesday. In an earlier report, Hernandez said that the industry could grow to $25 billion in 2016, accounting for about 9 percent of GDP and capturing 10 percent of the global IT-BPO market share.   Hernandez also said that the contact center sector grew by 21 percent and remained the largest sector at 65 percent of the industry. He cited a report by the Contact Center Association of the Philippines that said the sector had 416,000 employees and provided $7.4 billion worth of services by the end of 2011   Meanwhile, the Healthcare Information Management Outsourcing (HIMO) Association of the Philippines reported that the HIMO sector employed 24,700 and provided as much as $277 million worth of services to global-end users.   The animation sector, however, shrank to $128 million, down 10 percent year-on-year. According to the Animation Council of the Philippines Inc. (ACPI), it lost some contracts due to tight competition in back-room animation. The industry is expected to grow by 19 percent this year – from an earlier estimate of 15 percent at the start of the year, Hernandez said. An industry road map places IT-BPO generating $25 billion in revenues and employing 1.3 million Filipinos. "We will not just defend our current status, but lead the rest of the world," Hernandez said. — BM, GMA News