Outsourcing: The Philippines' Gain

ED Futures has been giving special attention to the business outsourcing issue, which is rapidly becoming one of economic development's most controversial issues. Here is a perspective from the Philippines.

Like India, Pakistan and Russia, the Philippines has a growing share of the world's high-tech jobs that have fled high-cost places, such as Massachusetts and California's Silicon Valley. But even workers filling customer orders, with few skills, have trouble competing with the $300 a month that is paid in the Philippines, one-fifth of what a worker in the United States would get for doing the same job.

Lured by lower costs overseas that enable them to increase profits in tough times, companies like Dell Computer, Procter & Gamble, American Express and Citibank employ 20,000 Filipinos to answer phones. The Philippine government says that call center jobs will double over the next year.

Filipinos also are competing for high-tech jobs like software development and engineering, the kind of work U.S. firms have been sending to India.

Stay tuned.

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