Employability of offshore service sector workers in the Philippines: opportunities for upward labour mobility or dead-end jobs?

Critical concerns have been raised about the quality of employment in the offshore service sector in developing countries, suggesting that many activities have an inherent paradox of highly educated workers performing low-skilled jobs. Based on empirical data collected in the offshore service sector in Baguio City (the Philippines), this article analyses the knowledge and skills acquisition of workers using the concepts of employability and generic skills. The article demonstrates that offshore service sector work is part of a longer-term career planning of workers and an opportunity for strengthening their employability on the global labour market. The early stage of development of the offshore service sector provides workers with opportunities for local upward labour mobility. The article argues that the sector should be looked at from an employee-based perspective that emphasizes their employability and generic skills acquisition in order to understand the longer-term benefits of the sector for developing countries

Islands of globalisation: offshore services and the changing spatial divisions of labour

The changing international division of labour presents opportunities for developing countries to attract foreign investments and generate employment in the offshore service sector. This paper focuses on developments in the Philippines, which has become a large exporter of business process outsourcing services over the past decade. The sector employs close to 800 000 highly educated young workers, the majority of whom work night shifts in call centres. Where do offshore service firms invest in the Philippines, which spatial transformations occur as a result, and why? This paper maps the location of offshore service investments on a national and regional level and traces the genesis of service-based special economic zones (SEZs), which combine functions of service delivery for global markets with increasingly globalised consumption patterns. These service-based SEZs arise due to location choice factors of foreign investors in services offshoring, who require skilled labour and prefer modern and secure environments, modelled according to their home country. Changing government policies on spatial zoning facilitated the rise of these SEZs in central business districts in Metro Manila and existing powerful real estate developers not only enabled this development, but are also the primary local beneficiaries of this feature of contemporary globalisation