The eminent Nick Joaquin observed this about the inefficiency of Filipino labour in his seminal piece A Heritage of Smallness…
The Filipino who travels abroad gets to thinking that his is the hardest working country in the world. By six or seven in the morning we are already up on our way to work, shops and markets are open; the wheels of industry are already agrind. Abroad, especially in the West, if you go out at seven in the morning you’re in a dead-town. Everybody’s still in bed; everything’s still closed up. Activity doesn’t begin till nine or ten– and ceases promptly at five p.m. By six, the business sections are dead towns again. The entire city go to sleep on weekends. They have a shorter working day, a shorter working week. Yet they pile up more mileage than we who work all day and all week.
In essence, Filipinos work hard but their labour is not productive. For every hour worked, value created is poor. This is because Philippine society has consistently exhibited a dismal capability to take up technological and capital-intensive solutions to achieve large productivity gains. To achieve those, you need brains, not mere brawn. Joaquin further writes…
One reason is a fear of moving on to a more complex phase; another reason is a fear of tools. Native pottery, for instance, somehow never got far enough to grasp the principle of the wheel. Neither did native agriculture ever reach the point of discovering the plow for itself, or even the idea of the draft animal, though the carabao was handy. Wheel and plow had to come from outside because we always stopped short of technology, This stoppage at a certain level is the recurring fate of our arts and crafts.
Indeed, results matter. People who believe they are entitled to medals for mere effort are losers.
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