Where there’s smoke, there’s fire

Employees are getting fidgety over goings-on at the UCPB-CIIF Finance and Development Corp., the company tasked by Malacañang to hold on to around P1 billion in earnings from the coco-levy fund for relending to coconut farners and entrepreneurs.

Its chairman used to be the former Agriculture Secretary Leonardo Montemayor, but last January 31, he was asked to resign and replaced by a certain Ceferino Patinio, former president of Planters Products Inc. (PPI), the milking cow of the Department of Agriculture (during President Aquino’s time, PPI was the recipient of a P400 million grant from Malacañang. No account has been given as to the disposition of the money.)

There are talks that Patinio was appointed to his new post as a favor for PPI’s involvement in authenticating "ghost" deliveries of fertilizer.

Sources say that there are very strange and foreboding movements at UCPB, indicative of far worse things to come. Farmer leaders at the board of UCPB and its subsidiaries (like J. Faustino and R. Royandoyan) were replaced by the likes Efren Villaseñor and two other unknown farmers. Villaseñor is a rehash, having served as UCPB director until he was booted out by the Presidential Commission on Good Government under Haydee Yorac.

The same sources pointed out that when Yorac was with the PCGG, the likes of Villaseñor could not penetrate the shield she and PCGG had created for the levy. But as early as last October, Mike Defensor was assigned by the President to "handle" all matters pertaining to the levy.

When Camilo Sabio was appointed to the top PCGG post, changes in the UCPB board as well as in some of its subsidiaries were effected.

And now, UCPB-CIIF is embarking on a fertilization program for the coconut industry, which hopefully was not patterned after the program of the World Bank which miserably failed because of too much graft and corruption. Among those who are pushing for this program by UCPB is Danny Encarnacion, former administrator of the Philippine Coconut Authority who was appointed by Malacañang to head the UCPB-CIIF Oil Mills Group.

UCPB-CIIF Finance has in the past lent out almost P1.2 billion in several cycles, with past due maintained at less than 10 percent. It has extended scholarships to children of coconut farmers, adopted schools in cocofarming communities, trained and financed coco farmers and wives in livelihood enhancement projects. Its directors were receiving with a measly P3,000 per diem for the monthly mancom meetings and P5,000 for the quarterly board meetings. It does not give out service cars but maintains a fleet of four cars for both operations and for the directors in case they need it.

Patinio, who is supposed to be a ceremonial chairman, has already expressed his desire to have a direct hand in operations, wants his own room at the office, a service vehicle, among others. His predecessor Leonie didn’t have a room, meets with people at the conference room, and contends himself with an old Toyota Hilux Model 1994 as his service vehicle when he does his field visits.

Mikey Arroyo also reportedly placed as one of the directors, a certain Quintero in his late 20s from La Vista. Rumors are that he plays basketball with Mikey and has no credentials nor experience in management, aside from helping in the family business.

Just recently, UCPB CIIF Finance had its first board meeting in Aklan, and according to the grapevine, Sabio personally requested that he be made a member of the board and asked that the P5,000 board meeting allowable be released immediately. Isn’t that pathetic?

The chosen few

Many are called but very few are chosen.

This is the problem facing the Philippine call center industry as operators find difficulty looking for applicants with adequate English language communication skills.

According to a report from the American International Group (AIG) Business Processing Services released by the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines, at least 60,000 additional call center seats will be opened up this year, from companies like Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co., Convergys Corp., ICT Group, eTelecare Global Solutions, Teletech Holdings, ClientLogic Corp., Sykes Enterprises, PeopleSupport Inc., IBM Corp. and Sutherland Global Services. We’re just talking about the big names here. A number of smaller companies have recently opened up and are aggressively recruiting. Also looking to add seats in their captive call centers this year are AIG, Siemens AG, Dell and JPMorgan Chase & Co..

Quoting the AIG study, TUCP secretary general Ernesto Herrera says that with less than four out of 100 candidates eventually qualifying and getting hired, over 16,000 job candidates are needed to sustain the operations of a 1,000-seat call center each year. And in order to support projected 2006 growth in the local call center industry, over 1.6 million applicants are required.

The 1.6 million job candidates needed is over four times the estimated 360,000 English-speaking college graduates that the Philippines produces each year, thus implying that call center operators may have to tap the country’s large pool of unemployed or underemployed young professionals, according to Herrera. And the 1.6 million applicants needed for the additional call center jobs do not include the candidates required to fill up existing seats that may be rendered vacant this year as a result of attrition considering that at least 20 percent of call center agents leave within 12 months from hiring date, due to a variety of factors, including night work exhaustion, with a significant number of them moving out of the industry altogether (and not just transferring to another call center operator), the AIG study mentioned.

US-based Cyber City Teleservices Ltd. has been unable to fully operate its call center in Davao City, due to lack of qualified agents, despite aggressive recruitment drives throughout Mindanao that attracted thousands of applicants.

According to the Business Processing Association of the Philippines, at the end of 2005, Philippine customer care call centers alone had 77,000 seats, mostly operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and employing 112,000 workers, according to the Business Processing Association of the Philippines.

One of the top executives of Convergys tells me that call center operators no longer aspire to lure applicants from the top schools which include UP, Ateneo, DLSU and UAP, whose graduates no longer want to be call center agents because they finally realized that it is dead-end job. Thus, the operators are forced to go to the second-tier schools such as UST, UE, and FEU, to name a few, where there are also equally qualified graduates.

The call center industry also has to compete with other employers offering higher pay such as those from the medical transcriptionist industry which also requires English-proficient agents.

It won’t be long before other countries catch up on our waning English proficiency so unless the government does something fast and reinstates English as the medium of instruction in all levels, the Philippines may lose a chance of a lifetime.

Employees speak out

If plans push through, then a group of concerned rank-and-file employees at the Development Bank of the Philippines should be filing a case against DBP chairman Vitaliano Nanagas sometime next week with the Ombudsman for violation of the anti-graft and corrupt practices act.

The group has in its possession incriminating audit documents and reports concerning alleged personal expenses by Nanagas being charged to the government financial institution.

Included in the Jan. to Dec. 2004 report are the purchase of three computers for the use of the Office of the Chairman without the corresponding memorandum receipt totalling around P100,000. Also included in a liquidation report by Nanagas are several purchases from Duty Free Philippines as "pasalubong" and gifts to certain individuals who I’m sure will not admit receiving the gifts from him, if indeed they received them.

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