I wasn’t quite sure whether to en-title this column “Devil Makes Work for Idle Hands,” or simply “Making Work” [I opted for the latter]. But dear reader, you get the message up front and can then decide whether to read on or just turn to another page!

The Philippines Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) is currently causing me, and it looks like lots of other people, big problems through their labored way of approaching things. I know of a local foreign invested company which regularly gets its phone and Internet service disconnected if the due date for payment is missed by more than five days, and this when they also have according to their records overpaid PLDT by a substantial amount and have paid in advance for new Internet and phone services. I’m sorry PLDT but five days credit for business accounts is just not a proper period, particularly when it takes months for you to sort out from your own records where a customer has overpaid. Add to this the quality of the PLDT DSL service, which is very poor and you have a situation that bears a lot of resemblance to extortion.

It’s very easy to cut people’s services and because the customers have no real means of redress for complaints or obtaining a fair decision in such situations, or other places to go to for a service; there is only one option, pay whether you like it or not (preferably in advance), and don’t complain. Inefficiency and incompetence has its financial rewards after all it seems!

My view of the Philippines and its 100 million population is that there is just not enough useful and real productive work to do. This of course by itself is old news. Everybody knows that. Problem is that when there is not enough materially productive work to do from which people will get adequate job satisfaction, then they turn to doing other things which are not materially productive and useful. They start robbing banks, shooting people etc. in extreme cases, and in less extreme cases they have to make their work such as it is spread out to fill the number of hours a day that they are meant to be at their workplace—“thank goodness for holidays that will allow us to spread our work out even more.” Another way of making an inadequate work load last to cover the hours necessary for reporting is to; ask unnecessary questions, lose things, get sick [for the number of days allowed by the usual local employment contracts], set more requirements that you have to wait around for people to satisfy, and then of course there is also more stuff to check and ask unnecessary questions about!

There must be an argument here for accepting higher unemployment rates rather than trying to make it look as if everybody is gainfully employed and all making their individual contribution to further economic development.

Cut down the numbers [of employees] by which you force greater efficiency, because people just don’t have time to fill/waste and then the economy will have a chance to develop more and faster, and there will be more really useful jobs. Make work where there isn’t any real work to just give more respectable employment statistics is to sink economic development into a morass of nonsensical paperwork and endless questioning.

It is undoubtedly inefficient and demotivating to the individual to employ too many people, it brings about the effects I have noted above.

Unemployment rates are a key indicator in economic assessment because it is assumed that they represent the underlying economic strength of a company or a nation, the belief is that people are always gainfully employed. Well, sad to say here in the Philippines, they are not all gainfully and efficiently employed. I don’t need to employ a maid to pass me the salt or pepper at the dinner table, or open and close the gates. I’m quite capable of doing that myself, but often in the Filipino household, jobs are created for the old family retainers out of paternalism—a responsibility taken seriously and frequently rightly so by the employer. But this doesn’t work in business to the degree it seems to happen here; is there really a use on a national basis of the Filipino cultural sense of responsibility to provide jobs where jobs don’t really exist, is this good in the longer term?

You may say well what has this got to do with PLDT’s rampant monopolistic practices, the answer to that is another facet of the same issue. There is clearly something in PLDT which doesn’t work as it should, what this is seems to be something of a mystery, but could it be that they are just employing too many people on a “square pegs in round holes” basis in order to contribute to boosting up the national employment numbers?

Mike can be contacted at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.