compensation

moving on…yet again

I guess I hit rock bottom when I took the cliff dive. A month ago I was so eager to make the jump that I must have jumped without really looking or thinking, that is. Not that I have any regrets for jumping – I relish the adrenaline rush of the thrilling escapade yet I will be a hypocrite if I feign success over what I did.

Nope. I was not successful. I fell, dear reader. I did. And the bruises hurt.

I love the job I have right now. There is nothing compared to the joy of figuring out the words being dictated – medical words that are really hard to understand coming from a non-native English speaker. The joy that rushes through my veins whenever I understand that the doctor was saying Coreg when all I can hear was courage is uncomparable.

Yet for all my praises for this job, equally are my disgrunts on how the company works. I know there are no perfect companies out there but this company exceeds the limit. For one there is the constant dispute over our very minimal salary. I learned today that PGS stands for President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo Scholars. We are called PGS trainees at work. I learned that PGS were given something like 10k, half of which goes to the company and half to the trainee or training costs I figure. This would include our allowance. What I do not understand then is how come, with such a fair amount of budget, are we entitled to get only a hefty 50php allowance per day? And to think we are already learning account specifics. Shouldn’t it be that when one trangresses to learning about account specifics they earn higher, possibly not a trainee’s allowance but an employee’s wage? Sad to say that it not my case.

And yesterday, when my mom learned that we were the ones who would still have to laminate our IDs and pay for our ID cords, she was astounded – urging me not to report to work any longer and to quit from the training. She goes further to state that by what she observes of my current health status, the allowance won’t even cover for my medical bills.

Furthermore, she states that I do not need to really work – a daughter’s dream, I must say. How many kids now a days can hear their parents tell them that they must not work yet? That the parents would still be willing to shoulder their kids’ expenses? In reality, my mom just wanted me to stop tiring myself out in a work that promises no higher compensation for the amount of work I put in.

She further urged that I could always do freelancing especially now that I can see the potential I have in that field. Working at home does seem like a very appealing idea especially when your alarm rings at 5 am on a very rainy morning.

Yet I procastinate. I must give my intent to leave now – if they will let me go, I really do not think so – not after the performance I’ve set in in the past weeks (Trainee of the Week for 2 weeks.. hmm..). But I want to leave. I do want to rest for a while. Not be employed but rather stay at home doing odd jobs or freelance jobs. Not answering to any boss. Working at my own convenient time. Of course there are downsides to it but that is yet to be explored. 😀

I may get in trouble for this. I hope not though. In the end, I realized that although mental satisfaction can be provided by a job, compensation or salary is still an important consideration for work satisfaction. And if one or the other is not met, work quality suffers in the end.

utopia in the corporate world

Thirty more minutes to go until work is officially over for the day. As always, I find ways to blog while at work. Yipee! I still cannot comprehend entirely how I became a blogger by nature – by passion – when years ago I detest personal bloggers and their apparent livid disclosure of themselves. Now, I am on the forefront of personal blogging – shamelessly mixing personal experiences with social concerns and as such expressing my views.

If days ago I had been ranting about how regretful I was of transferring companies way too soon, after hours of listening to medical dictations and learning about urinary diversion, cholecystostomy, erectile dysfunction, deep epigastric veins and corpora cavernosa, among others, I am enjoying the job more and more. Indeed, I am here for the learning, not for the monetary compensation.

Then again, if I was not an activist or a rebel back in college, despite the nature of my surroundings, I find that I am becoming one at work. I seem to be on the brink of not only inciting the company HR or administration, but also my co-workers, to care more about our rights and working conditions. Take for example my utter stupidity at signing a contract stating a bond of 2 years but withholding information about the exact monetary compensation. I believe, albeit too late, that when we sign contracts, the interests of both parties must be clearly stated. Unfortunately, it seems the contract I had signed stated only one party’s intentions clearly and blinded by desperation for a new job, I signed all too eagerly. What happens afterwards, I can only shudder in fright and pray that no anomalies arise.

Then again the corporate environment is really one heck of a maze that still presents a lot of labyrinths left to be explored. I have still a lot to learn about how this world works and how I can use things to my advantage. Also, I discover that indeed I am too idealistic when it comes to what I want to do or what I want to happen in life. A friend asked me what kind of job I wanted and I replied “a job that would give me fulfillment, constant learning and high compensation”.

Now I know I am wishing for the clouds.

When I was young they said that if you study in the best universities of the country like UP, you would have no difficulties finding a job and getting well-paid for it. I have strived for quality education with the intention of finding a job that would compensate well for the skills I’ve worked hard to achieve and learn. Eventually I learned that such is not always the case. In this country that is deep in international debts and filled with greedy and corrupt public servants, most graduates of premier universities find themselves slaves of the BPO industry or candidates for work abroad.

I have had the impression that as a scholar of the country – both when I was in high school and college – I would be working to pay back the taxpayer’s money used to finance my education. I had no inclination that I would be serving foreigners right in my own hometown.

When I went back to Bicol, I was prepared to earn a much lesser salary than what I know I could earn if I was working in Manila. But nothing had prepared me for the reality of how little I could actually earn – and this from reputedly high-paying international companies.

When I left the BPO company I was working for which was paying me a ridiculously small salary, I expected that I would be moving on to a company that would somehow compensate me higher. I was gravely disappointed. I would be earning something even lower (by almost half!) of what I was previously earning – and that is after 3 months of training! For the 3 months of which I am a trainee, I would only earn about a quarter of the daily wage I was earning before. That is what they call an allowance. Not exactly a salary.

My mother kept urging me to be wary of these companies. She kept informing me that these companies have some anomalies in how they transact their business; that just because they are in the province they think they could get away with it. Apparently, it seems that most international companies, particularly of the BPO kind, think that they could expand into provinces and subsequently cut their costs by paying their employees less compared to their Metro Manila counterparts.

Isn’t that a bit unfair? They justify that the cost of living in the province is cheaper compared to Manila but still I think it is unfair to give a ridiculously low salary on that basis. As such what they are paying would not even sustain two persons – it is barely enough even for one. How do they expect those with families to sustain their lives then?

And our government, unfortunately, tolerates such.It seems that for them, as long as they can provide jobs to the jobless, then they are content. They won’t bother to think of the quality of job they provide and whether the international companies are doing an injustice to its employees or not.

These doubts, these questions, unfortunately, I can only air out here. For nowhere in my previous or my current company do I find any avenues to vent them out, lest even to air them. I’m afraid that these companies, they see their employees too often as commodities – as people too desperate for a job that they would jump at anything offered to them. Is this what our country had boiled down to?

The youth are encouraged to finish college educations; to graduate with a college degree; to enter premier universities – for what? To become slaves to international companies that are taking advantage of our country? How long will we remain slaves? Can we not really procure jobs for our own – jobs that would pay the right amount of compensation – fitted to your own skill, education and capacity?

Will we ever get out of the rot that we are in?