From his modest kitchen, Alvin Dennis, 35, manages rental accommodation on Airbnb in California. On the screen of his computer, placed on a table at the back of the room, are displayed readings of noise detectors as well as the number of telephones connected to Wi-Fi in each rented apartment. If everything is racing, it's that there's a party . In his low, calm voice, he then called the local police. On the other side of the ocean.
Alvin Dennis lives in Luna, 300 km north of Manila, with his wife, Marites Nonesa, and their four young children. The couple are among some 1.5 million Filipino web freelancers, according to various estimates, who are enjoying the boom in a trend from industrialized countries: business process outsourcing . BPO). And with the pandemic, which has opened up a world of possibilities through remote work, the boom is accelerating.
For the past ten years, it is no longer so much call centers or production chains that North American, European and Asian companies have been relocating to emerging countries such as the Philippines, but rather mandates for virtual assistants. , website moderators, podcast creators and other watchdogs like Alvin Dennis. Mandates better paid than in factories and call centers, but much less than an employee from a northern country would command.
These contracts, whose duration varies from a few days to several years, freelancers find them on platforms which, like Uber or Airbnb, connect a customer and a service provider, whose reputation is establishes with comments. Some experienced workers manage to build successful careers, even becoming managers of companies abroad without leaving home.
The most popular of these platforms, Upwork, is Californian, but others are emerging, including local ones like onlinejobs.ph. A whole ecosystem is also beginning to emerge around “platform work”, with firms of freelancers, trainers, influencers… Even the government is promoting online work.
The archipelago of 7,000 islands and 110 million people is renowned as an international supplier of cheap labor, with its workers bearing Spanish names but fluent in English (the Philippines was part of the Spanish Empire for three centuries, before becoming an American colony in 1898). In this state which became independent in 1946, the economy has developed around services, in particular call centers, which have grown for 25 years. Two million Filipinos also emigrate periodically to work in construction, health or housekeeping - the overseas Filipino workers (OFW) -, half in the Gulf countries, the others scattered from Hong Kong to Canada .
When the pandemic arrived, with employees losing their jobs and those resigning for fear of contracting the virus in crowded offices or on public transport, a huge workforce was freed up. To the delight of freelance platforms. Barely a few years old (Upwork, for example, was created in 2013), they have seen their growth accelerate. According to the American online money transfer company Payoneer, income from freelance work on the Internet more than tripled from 2019 to 2020 in the archipelago. And it's not over: according to Microsoft's Work Trend Index, 46% of Filipinos aged 20 to 40 were thinking of changing jobs in April 2022 and favored telecommuting.
A few days in Manila are enough to understand this desire. In this megalopolis of 14.4 million inhabitants crushed by a humid heat, where children beg not far from flashy skyscrapers and shopping centers devoid of any charm, the traffic is hellish until late in the evening. The working masses are forced to use inefficient public transport — crowded subways or jeepneys, those old American jeeps modified as buses, which you enter by bending over.
Above all, working on a platform makes it possible to earn the equivalent of five or six Canadian dollars per hour. It's a fortune in Manila, where the minimum wage amounts to 13 dollars a day (570 Philippine pesos).
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HASlvin Dennis and Marites Nonesa didn't just change jobs when the pandemic hit. Their life changed: the couple left the capital for Luna, 38,000 inhabitants, where the Marites family lives. The government, considering minors as unfit to follow health rules, in fact banned those under 15 , then those under 18, from leaving their homes, a measure that lasted until November 2021. Here, the children had a lot more freedom,” says the 34-year-old mother, showing me the courtyard shaded by some beautiful trees. She is an assistant to a Taiwanese real estate investor active in California, having long been an online English tutor for Chinese children.
It is sometimes very hot under the tin roof of the small house that Alvin and Marites rent. And during frequent power outages, you have to start a generator - which contributes to the growing digital carbon footprint - but it's better, they say, than going to work for a pittance in a semiconductor factory in Taiwan, a possibility Alvin has considered in the past.
Like them, many former call center workers have recently become virtual assistants. They perform secretarial-like tasks for English-speaking entrepreneurs around the world. “You need the same basic skills: communication, the ability to deal with strangers, to jump from one task to another,” observes Cheryll Soriano, professor of communication at La Salle University, Manila . “The rest, like online marketing, is learned on the job by watching videos on YouTube or taking a course. »
Christian Lozada, 29, is one of those who benefit from this new deal. In 2019, this resident of Antipolo, very close to Manila, launched a freelance agency, Telecrew Outsourcing, on which it has been raining CVs since 2020. The entrepreneur, who specializes in particular in cold calling for real estate agents (calls to potential buyers or sellers), has a pool of 150 workers to offer to its clients, including the American giants Century 21 and RE/MAX.
To be part of his team, the candidate must demonstrate that he speaks fluent English and has a reliable Internet connection, then pass a personality test. Jazzlyn, Christian's wife and right-hand man, explains: “The client has the assurance that the person he is working with is really the one he needs. The agency finds its clients on the Upwork platform, which allows it to gain visibility, but also to benefit from certain services. For example, to make sure freelancers don't twiddle their thumbs during their tenure, Upwork takes screenshots on their computers several times an hour. At Telecrew, a full-time employee has the sole task of monitoring these shots.
The freelance community has also given birth to its stars, mentors who provide advice on YouTube or Facebook.
In Poblacion, a colorful suburb of Manila where trendy cocktail bars sit side by side with gloomy massage parlors, the elegant Maria Korina Bertulfo, 28, wearing a loose tangerine shirt and a huge lion tattooed on her calf, tells how she started from scratch : “In 2017, I quit the call center because my two-year-old son cried all night when I was at work” — jet lag obliges, both call center employees and platform workers mostly work at night. “I immediately found my first contract on the onlinejobs.ph platform: managing appointments by email for a Canadian tattoo artist. Her life then changed completely: she no longer had to endure heavy traffic, and her monthly income went from 500 to 815 dollars. “I did this for two years. »
Convinced that all young mothers can take advantage of opportunities arising from the Web, Maria Korina Bertulfo launched a Facebook page, Filipina Homebased Moms (FHMoms). Her goal: to “create a community” of female freelancers so that they can get out of isolation, exchange tips or job offers. His first videos explained how to find clients or organize his schedule. She then offered paid training. Five years and 360,000 subscribers later, FHMoms has become a company, which has 15 teachers (freelancers, of course) and around fifty mentors, and which also offers a computer rental service for beginners. The former teleoperator "MK" now travels all over the Philippines,
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Thanks to Maria, I learned how to make proposals, land interviews and answer questions,” says Vanessa Quinto, 41. We meet her at her home, in one of the haphazardly arranged houses on the green hills of Baguio, a city of 300,000 people, a five-hour drive north of Manila. A stay-at-home mother with no training, she decided to enter the labor market after having her third child. She started with telemarketing (unsolicited advertising calls) and now masters all secretarial tasks. And she converted her husband, Tom, ex-salesman for a car dealership.
“In the beginning, I was doing data entry while waiting for buyers at the garage,” he explains. When his father fell ill in 2018, Tom quit to become a caregiver and tried his hand at freelancing. Self-taught, he specializes in graphic design. He claims to have found happiness: “I lived under pressure, I never saw my children. Now I take them to school. »
The freelance market on the Internet is not without risk, however. “There are a lot of scammers: on two occasions, we were not paid after accepting contracts found on Facebook groups, says Tom Quinto. Since then, we have stayed on the platforms, because they block the amount to be paid on the customer's credit card. So much the worse if they monopolize up to 20% (in the case of Upwork) of the value of the contract.
Despite their staggered schedules, their long hours in front of the screen, the presence of toddlers and the time they devote to developing their skills in order to land better mandates, the couples interviewed show no signs of overwork. Before taking the leap to freelancing, they already had demanding jobs and impossible schedules, some recall, and they are fortunate to have a strong family network that helps them care for the children.
"You have to put yourself in the Philippine context", comments Professor Cheryll Soriano, from the University of La Salle. “Our country offers few professional opportunities. If people are heading in such large numbers to these jobs, it is because they come to the conclusion that it is better for them. »
But also because the government wants it. On the heights of Baguio is the regional branch of the Department of Information and Communications Technologies (DICT). In 2016, when platform work was beginning to take off in earnest in the country, this ministry was given a mission: to promote online jobs, with the aim of enabling young Filipinos to earn a living in their communities. rather than overseas. “They have strong family values and don't want to leave, but there are very few industries in the countryside. As for single mothers, they are often stuck here without a job,” said Allan Lao, head of the Operations Division.
The DICT has set up a free training program, digitaljobsPH. After 12 days of intensive lessons, students take their first steps under the supervision of their teacher for 21 days. Objective: to have found a first client at the end of this period. The most popular training courses concern the positions of virtual assistant and social media manager, but other more niche ones are also offered, such as those on marketing on YouTube, the creation of podcasts or architectural computer graphics.
The sector is largely dominated by people in their twenties and thirties, show regional data from the DICT. Women make up two-thirds of the registrants — the oldest was 59 at the time of our visit. Almost all the students come from urban areas: barely 26% of the municipalities that make up the administrative region of the Cordillera (whose capital is Baguio) have access to high-speed Internet.
The connection of rural households is slowly improving, so that some young people are taking advantage of this to lead a freer life. A two-hour drive from Baguio, the surf beach of San Juan is attracting more and more of these new Filipino "digital nomads", who only need an Internet connection to work. Some have original tasks. “I know a titlist of pornographic videos,” laughs Wya Lorin, who owns a juice bar in an alley near the Pacific Ocean. His sister Willette, co-owner of the bar, works for American websites devoted to dogs: she edits the texts so that they appear in the first search results on Google.
n the chorus of praise for the digitalization of the economy and the opportunities it brings, you have to search hard to find dissenting voices. Dime Rivera, 24, is one of those who show a touch of pessimism: “The Upwork platform is becoming saturated, because there are not only Filipinos, but also a lot of Indians. Some clients try to exploit us: I have already been offered a dollar or two an hour! For the past year, she has been spending her nights managing the Facebook pages of two American real estate agents from her studio in Manila.
Maria Fatima Villena, freelance writer of technical documents such as public policies or research, agrees: “It's a very individualistic environment, where it's difficult to negotiate. If you are a young person with little experience, you will probably accept obscene pay. This is why this forty-year-old is involved with some forty of her colleagues in the Guild of Freelance Writers of the Philippines, which was the first organization of freelancersofficially recognized by the Ministry of Labor in 2020. This recognition allows the NGO to give its opinion during consultations on the future of the sector. For Maria Fatima, it is urgent that standards be established, such as minimum wages, so that working conditions remain acceptable.
Professor Cheryll Soriano sums up the problem this way: “The DICT pushes to create as many jobs as possible, without being interested in the quality of those jobs. Baguio verification: Allan Lao, the head of the DICT Operations Division, is unable to tell us what happened to the cohorts formed two years ago. "We really need to improve our monitoring," he admits.
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To Quezon City, a city in Metro Manila, the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS), a public body whose purpose is to advise the government on socioeconomic policies to adopt, is conducting a study on online work. Funded by a Canadian crown corporation, the International Development Research Center (IDRC), it is the first of its kind to focus on the challenges that new web freelancers face, particularly women.
Researcher Lora Kryz Baje welcomes us to the PIDS offices, located on the 18th floor of a tower in a complex combining condominiums, shopping malls and franchises of international fast food chains. She repeatedly comes back to the fact that platform workers operate in a gray area. “They have different perceptions of their status: they see themselves as self-employed, entrepreneurs, temporary employees… But if your status is poorly defined, how can you obtain adequate social protection? » she underlines.
A constant appears in the research carried out by the PIDS or academics like Cheryll Soriano: the other ministries are struggling to keep up with the pace set by the DICT, in a hurry to create jobs, and have fallen behind in the supervision of platform work. Indeed, this one does not only bring dollars, but also several challenges. For example, how to control (and therefore tax) these sums paid from abroad? All of the people interviewed assured us that they declare their income honestly, except for one. She said she was poorly informed about the procedures and frightened at the idea of being asked an astronomical sum in taxes.
On the health side, freelancers can voluntarily contribute to social security or choose private insurance, but many do not and find themselves without any safety net. And that's not to mention the many annoyances encountered in their daily life: thus, Maria Korina Bertulfo had to pay for her house in cash, because the bank did not understand what her job was and did not want to lend her money.
In various ways, self-employment done on platforms is akin to informal work, and can therefore be a regression for workers' rights, the PIDS team worries.
We are swimming in the midst of a paradox here, since women freelancers see this work more as an opportunity to be seized. They are twice as numerous on the platforms as men, according to the PIDS. They say they appreciate the flexibility: they can generate an income without being blamed for neglecting their family obligations. In this Catholic and conservative country, 54% of women had no paid work in 2020, and three-quarters said they could not work because of domestic chores and childcare.
But even when they log long hours on their computer, this "invisible work" continues to fall to them, note the PIDS researchers.
However, the latter make a different observation: for equal work, there is no wage gap between men and women on the platforms in the Philippines. Other observations of the PIDS are beginning to be taken into consideration at the political level: two bills are currently being debated in Congress. They could lead within a few months to the recognition of certain rights for freelancers, such as being included in the existing social security systems and benefiting from a simplified tax system. Freelancers would also be entitled to a written contract as well as remedies against online discrimination and harassment. Another proposal is to create a universal employment insurance program, which would allow them to receive unemployment benefits in the months when they have no clients.
The DICT also has a lot on its plate for the next few years: it will have to improve access to the Internet in rural areas, in order to reduce inequalities in access to online jobs between towns and villages and thus satisfy all workers. wanting to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the digital economy, in this post-pandemic virtual world that is changing so quickly.
