Ask Your Career Counselor

Ernie O. Cecilia
Philippine Daily Inquirer

LAST DECEMBER 14, The Philippine Daily Inquirer gave a simple thanksgiving party for its advertisers. It was organized by Jesse Francis Rebustillo, PDI’s classified ads manager and editor of its Working People section. He turned out to be a fine host and emcee as well.

PDI President and CEO Sandy Prieto-Romualdez gave a very engaging welcome address.  Jesse also invited foremost columnist and writer Armando Doronila to grace the occasion. The former labor secretary, Marianito Roque, gave a prognosis of 2011. Roque retired from government service but is now active as a consultant. After his prognosis, I was also asked by Jesse to give a short talk to the advertisers. Most of what I said are printed here.

 
Bright prospects

Consultant Roque gave a positive forecast of 2011. In fact, he looked beyond 2011 and noted that Qatar will host the FIFA tournament in 2022. This implies massive infrastructure projects in Qatar, where Filipinos in the construction industry will likely be most needed. Roque also cited IBM’s report that the Philippines has overtaken India as the choice destination for BPO (voice) contracts. This augurs well for the young BPO industry in the Philippines, except that there seems to be some difficulty with the supply side.


2012 predictions

I agree for the most part with Nitoy Roque. But I prefaced my short talk with a warning that, as predicted by several seers, the world will end in 2012. Of course, I was not serious. But listen to this trivia just the same. It’s an interesting conversation piece.

Eight or nine different cultures, including the Maya, Hindu and Hopi, predicted the end of the world in 2012. The Mayans made a calendar starting on August 11, 1134, and ending on December 21, 2012. Whether they meant to end their calendar on that date to signify the end of the world has been subject of a long debate, but researchers found that the Mayans had a reason for it.

The next winter solstice, when the sun reaches an extreme in its motion, will happen on December 21, 2012. During the same date, astronomers also predicted a strange galactic alignment, where our own Sun will be at the center of the whole Milky Way galaxy. When heavenly bodies align, usually strange things happen to the planets. Another worrisome observation is the study made by brothers Dennis and Terence McKenna. At the prime of their youth, they combined mathematics, Chinese culture, LSD and other hallucinogens to make a prediction of the future. Terence saw the end of the world in his trance. In his lucid moments, he derived a mathematical formula that predicted 2012 as the end of the world.

Nostradamus seems to have predicted several events, including the September 11 incident, with cunning accuracy. While he had no specific quatrain about the end of the world, he warned of “fire in the sky…trailed by sparks” that could resemble a comet or asteroid hitting the earth. As scientists already said, the last time asteroids hit the earth, all the dinosaurs were killed. As we write today, hundreds of asteroids are in space, and nobody knows how to tackle the problem.  Well, the apocryphal movie Armageddon could help give our scientists some ideas. Of course, this talk of end of the world in 2012 is probably not accurate. I’ll bet that most of PDI’s advertisers will likely be here in 2012.


Global prospects

If you are in business in the Philippines, there are certain indicators that you should monitor — among others, the global market, Philippine government policies, and politics, our national pastime.

The economies in Europe and America are encountering some problems. Economic growth will likely be in Asia. The G-8, composed of the US, the UK, Japan, Canada, Germany, France, Italy and Russia, has been replaced by the G-20. This block welcomed emerging markets including, in alphabetical order, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain and Turkey. In Europe, the economies of Spain, Greece and Ireland experienced severe troubles but are slowly recovering. As usual, viability of Philippine exports tend to be severely affected by foreign-exchange fluctuation.


Government policies

Among the new administration’s 22-point agenda is the realization that business is the engine of the economy. The Chief Executive and his Cabinet seemed to understand and support this proposition. However, there seems to be some uncertainties in the other branches of government in terms of predictability for doing business.

In a typical six-year Congress, some 150 to 200 labor bills are filed. The mindset of most legislators seems to be that if a bill is anti-business, it must be pro-labor. Not true. As we write today, scores of so-called pro-labor bills are in both houses of Congress. Today’s House of Representatives have done in five months what the past Congress did in five years—consolidate all bills on Security of Tenure and draft a Committee Report.

Unbeknownst to many legislators, the Bill is in fact anti-labor. If you know that it takes investments to create employment, then the Bill on Security of Tenure is anti-employment.  During the first 100 days of this administration, the bosses (the Filipino people) have spoken.  Seventy-five percent said that the government’s priority should be job creation. President Aquino is right in courting investors to set up shop here or increase their foreign direct investments (FDI’s) to the Philippines. In 2009, most of the FDIs in the Asean went to Singapore (US$16.8 billion), Thailand (US$5.9 billion), Indonesia (US$4.9 billion), Vietnam (US$4.5 billion) as against the Philippines’ US$1.9 billion. As we write today, creation of more jobs due to a sizeable amount of foreign investments can be realized in the Philippines barring any undue, unpredictable and adverse changes in the rules of doing business here.

There are several critical bills paraded as pro-labor, but are actually anti-labor, such as those on mandatory profit sharing, P125 wage increase, security of tenure, etc. The intentions of the bills are good, but the bills are not the solutions to our problems. If there is rampant unemployment, making it difficult for people to lose their jobs is not the solution—it will lessen creation of jobs. If the cost of living is high, the solution is not to increase wages—it will create more inflation resulting in higher cost of living. The non-wage earners will be hardest hit. If government can reduce the cost of energy and make food on the table more affordable, it shall have solved the greater part of the problem.

 
Prognosis

The year 2011 will be good or bad for the Filipinos, depending on how various sectors position the Philippines in the global market. On one hand, the Philippines is being proclaimed the best destination for business process outsourcing contracts. On the other, we are shooting ourselves on the foot by creating more restrictions for investments to flow into the country. The people must take an active part in governance. As I see it, governance is so critical to be left to the hands of government alone. What 2011 brings is what we will allow our government to shove to us.

Here’s my message to PDI advertisers. When business is good you can afford to advertise.  When business is bad, you can’t afford not to advertise.

(Ernie is current chairman of IR Committee of the American Chamber of Commerce (Amcham). He also chairs ECOP’s Long Range Policy Planning Committee. He was also president of the Personnel Management Association of the Philippines in 1999. He is the pPresident and CEO of EC Business Solutions and Career Center, a human resource consulting firm. His new books, “Life’s Big Lessons” and “Life’s Big Lies,” are now available at book stores. He can be reached at ernie_cecilia@yahoo.com.)