By The Book

END OF THE LINE A typical jobs fair scene in the country

He was supposed to be doing something worthwhile, something for keeps. Instead he ended up doing the opposite. For a time, he thought, he would stay there for good, that it's going to be his last stop, his final stint as an employee. Little did he know he would spend the rest of the year as an outsider, not as someone he envisioned he would become, a mainstay. But as it turned out, everything came into place after his short stint in that company, something he did not expect even before the arrival of his notice.

Dana Baron was once in a crossroad. After almost 11 months of working as a comptroller in a logistics firm, he suddenly found himself out of work a year after. When he broke the news to his wife, he could almost hear the cracks coming out of her voice, "What are going to do now?" she said. Luckily for Dana, an old patron who had heard about his situation took him in as a sales representative in his own company, to which Dana, now a manager, have been serving the enterprise for more than five years. But it was something Dana will never forget. The prospect of facing the rest of the year without a job was simply too much for him.

Perhaps some of us are into that situation, one way or another. Dana's plight could be a sorry description of how volatile our job securities could become, regardless of how long you've stayed in the company or how qualified you are as an employee. Every year, we lobby about the need to have more jobs for the sake of our survival and our economy, and that the only viable option for us is to stabilize that much-needed work. But with our unemployment rate rising as fast as that flood outside of our homes, it is only a matter of time before its dregs spill over, and the next thing we knew, we might not be able to feed a lot of hungry mouths out of extreme want. 

I certainly could relate to Dana's situation. I, too, has had a lot of crossroads as far as jobs are concerned. But mine was too predictable, not unlikely, and I always think of any job as a holdover. I started quite early. I was still 17 when I had my first paycheck. I paid my way through college, a working student, always trying to make ends meet (until now, unfortunately). I have been working for the past 18 years, with varied job descriptions: bellhop, waiter, part-time teacher, office clerk, journalist, editor and even a boy-Friday (to my son, of course). Part of the reason I always see my job as a holdover though it's because I somehow lack the necessary papers to back it up, diploma and all that. Otherwise, I could probably handle any job out there.

If Dana's situation, with all of her academic requirements and connections intact, had fallen prey to these issues surrounding job securities, how much more to those lesser known animals infesting still in the workplace, those beasts of burden like me, who could be dropped at an instant without prior notice? I guess that's just the way things are and the way things work out in our respective workshops. And perhaps the reason why our unemployment rate is going off the charts, since we tend to look at our "papers" instead of the capabilities of our personnel, as if those papers are actually doing the dirty work. Qualified workforce but unqualified personnel. And to think that's an entirely two different items. 

But we still need those papers. It would be impossible to ignore them, given the variety and number of applicants coming our way, but I think there has to be some changes somewhere. Still, these documents are an indispensable part of the business. And so do our workers, our beleaguered personnel. They, too, are indispensable. I bet when Dana was invited by his former customer for a new job, his qualifications had served him only as a compliment to his experience as a comptroller from his former employer. I suppose it did not dictate in a way we always handle an application. That's a rare situation in our country, given our penchant for anything "by the book" as far as employment goes, eventually disregarding any human factor at all.

Not unlike in other countries where your capability as a potential employee could be a difference-maker in terms of getting that desired job, and getting the job done, your certification or what have you, could come in later. I have seen this a long time ago when I had a friend who applied for a job in a book-making company in Davao City that was managed by an American. And after a few questions in his interview, my friend was on his way for a job the following day. And not only that, his new boss gave him some cash for him to buy a new pair of polos for his first day at work. "People like you need to start on something," his new boss said. That wasn't so difficult. And suffice it to say, what his new employer was looking for was something out of the box, or out of that conventional application process we usually have at a nauseating rate. My friend was able to pull through and secured that job like the rest of us. Seldom do you find that in our own backyard.

What we do have here is a bit cold, categorical and downright catatonic. Like this job fairs we always have in our malls, I don't understand the dynamic of such an event, I think it's cruel to ask for an entrance fee to those people who are seeking jobs, in the first place. My heart goes out to their budgets as they go along seeking greener fields under the sun. And if employed, we see employees having all the qualifications in the mill, all the supporting papers of Jimmy Santos (where is he now), but couldn't execute properly what seemed to be a simple task, even a menial work. Somehow it is a disservice to those who haven't been able to penetrate in the inside, those who are in some ways more qualified (not necessarily in the academic sense) but was unable to get through the politics of it, that paper mill.

Good thing for Dana though he was saved at the last minute. Thanks in part to his valuable experience as a comptroller from his previous employer; apart from it, of course, he would not have made an impression to his former customer, now his immediate boss. It would have been different if he had applied for that job. And situations like this always make me grounded, at times sententious about it. I don't have the luxury like that of Dana's when it comes to jobs, but it is something I would like to change if and when I am faced with it. The chances of me getting that desired job is so slim, I might not be able to survive when it comes to papers, how much more if I go "by the book".