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Work-Life

Earlier this month, an international recruitment and placement firm gave the Philippines the second worst work-life balance score among 60 countries surveyed.

Remote’s Global Life-Work Balance Index gave Manila a score of 27.46 out of 100 in work-life balance, just above Nigeria’s capital Abuja, which earned a score of 16.15 that put it at the bottom of its index.

The study that aims to represent how the “business of each country looks after the lives of their employees and put life before work,” evaluated average working hours per week, minimum wages, annual leave policies, sick pay, maternity leaves, healthcare, and other factors in 60 countries with the highest gross domestic product.

At the top of the list in the global study are New Zealand, Dublin, Brussels, Copenhagen, Canada, Germany, Finland, Australia, Norway, and Spain.

I don’t think any Filipino will dispute this study, because it sounds pretty accurate. When it comes to work-life balance, Filipinos probably have the worst of it, and if you come to think of it, that study didn’t even take into consideration the cost and impact of the terrible traffic in Metro Manila.

Work-life balance is a foreign concept for Filipinos, who from the start, are born, bred, educated, and trained to be exploitable employees. It is no coincidence that our leaders take pride in our resilience, because we can take anything and at the end of the day, still be smiling.

We have a school and value system that teaches Filipino children the value of hard work and frowns upon smart work. In a land where all-nighters and terror teachers who give insane workloads are seen as positives, and schedules are punishing, what comes out of the educational system is a workforce that is just thankful for a job, any job, and more often than not, ready and willing to be overworked and underpaid.

Even when it comes to religion, the most dominant one in our country is one that glorifies suffering and tolerance. How can suffering be not cool when its primary symbol is a guy hanging from a cross, after having been scourged, tortured, humiliated, literally moments from an agonizing death? How can its followers not tell each other that it is ok to suffer and bask in their resilience, and default to not being a little bitch when it seems like the work-life balance situation seems a bit off kilter?

Given the culture, religion, training, and indoctrination, it is easy to see how a lot of employers in the Philippines end up exploiting the resiliency of the workforce. When the majority are willing to work their asses off for peanuts, any HR department can simply wait for those who complain too much and demand for work-life balance to quit, knowing fully well that there are hundreds waiting in the wings to replace those softies who have somehow adopted that strangely foreign mindset of working to live, instead of living to work.

The problem is that even when people rise through the ranks and even get to achieve some kind of work-life balance after a few decades in their industry, they somehow retain that exploitative mindset and apply it to the next generations, ensuring the continuation of the vicious cycle which guarantees that our country will probably be at the end of most work-life balance rankings for a few more decades, unless a cultural revolution somehow takes place.

Whatever that revolution is, it’s going to have to be significant, because our work-life imbalance was already supposed to have been threatened by the work from home regime brought about by the COVID pandemic. Many thought this would tip the scales in favor of the life side, since people were going to be working from their home court, but what actually happened was it allowed the work side to break the boundaries of home, and now, people are actually to expected not just to work from home, but also work at home, even after the return to office order. WFH may have improved the quality of life and favored that side of the equation in some countries, but in the Philippines, it looks like the work side has even managed to win. Employees cannot get away from their bosses now, even from the sanctuary that is home, after that formerly sacred sanctum was permanently breached by the WFH battering ram.

Work-life balance and quality of life and go hand in hand. Without one, there cannot be the other. So, until we get the former right, the latter cannot exist. And as of now, it doesn’t seem like Filipinos are ready to fight and win the war to get their work and life balanced. Employer’s bad habits, coupled with a pushover workforce, and a people that see suffering as normal, along with a government that doesn’t seem ready and willing to fight for that particularly complicated cause, are all conspiring against Juan dela Cruz.

Until that happens, it looks like we will just have to count on our famed resilience to get us through our work days for the rest of our lives.*

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February 2025
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