Employment and wage practices of Japanese firms in the Philippines: convergence with Filipino-Chinese and Western-owned firms

In foreign-owned Philippine firms, human resource approaches and practices tend to converge. Japanese-owned firms localize their human resource practices by emphasizing local standards and practices in compensation, hiring, recruitment, job assignments and the like. On the other hand, Western-owned firms tend to adopt well-known Japanese style practices. Filipino-Chinese-owned firms tend to be traditional, emphasizing both informal and hierarchical control mechanisms which put a premium upon loyalty and trust, through familistic, informal but hierarchical control mechanisms. As the owners of these firms pass on control to the next generation, they tend to hire professional managers. These managers include younger generation Filipino-Chinese educated abroad. They are torn between the rational, and traditional norms and practices insisted upon by their Confucian-oriented elders, and the demands of a competitive and ever-changing technology and economy.

It is quite meaningless to attach adjectives like ‘Japanese’, ‘Filipino-Chinese’ or ‘Western’ to universal concepts like industrial relations and human resource approaches - the search for the best approach in work relations is beyond the issue of convergence or divergence.     

Converging and Diverging Trends in HRM: The Philippine ‘Halo-Halo’ Approach

The article is an analysis of case studies of human resources in seven large, industry-leader and influential companies in the Philippines. The author analyzes the trends, and the motives for convergence and divergence of practices, in the workplace arising from openness to foreign investment and global/regional competition. Benchmark practices in human resource development bring about convergence, but innovations with entrenched local work practices and sensitivity to local cultural values ensure that Philippine HRM has its own characteristics. These practices could be called the Philippine meztizo or halo-halo (mixed) approach - most appropriate in the Philippine workplace, but which may not work in other foreign contexts.     

Perception of the acquisition of generic competences in engineering degrees

The aim of this paper is to analyze what generic competencies at the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya (UPC BarcelonaTech) are most evaluated by the teaching staff belonging to the first curricular block of industrial engineering degree courses at the Barcelona Escola Universitaria d’Enginyeria Técnica Industrial, and also to relate these competencies to the assessment tools and the types of session most frequently used in the evaluation of the said competencies. Furthermore, it is intended to determine the level of acquisition of the generic competencies (related to their profession) as perceived by the students themselves during their course of study and their completion of the Final Year Degree Project (Project Trabajo Final de Grado—TFG). To that end, a group of 140 university teachers and a population of 145 students were each the object of an anonymous online survey while they were engaged on the Final Year Degree Project (TFG). The results of this survey show that the competencies most evaluated by the university teaching staff, in order of importance, are as follows: autonomous learning, the effective use of information resources, teamwork, and good oral and written communication, while the most frequently used tools of assessment are the rubrics. Autonomous learning is the generic competence perceived by the students as being the one most acquired during their completion of the TFG.     

Tensions in industrial democracy and human resource management: a case study of Japanese enterprises in the Philippines

Critical areas in the entry of Japanese enterprises in a developing country like the Philippines involve the following: internal labour market formation, wage and compensation system, labour-management relations schemes and other management strategies. Human resource development in Japanese enterprises in the Philippines faces structural and institutional barriers. A high turnover rate of workers is one structural barrier, involving the labour market, which prevents the internalization of skills. There is an emphasis upon job-based wages and a reliance upon the local minimum wage standards both of which are distinctly non-Japanese practices.

There is a serious gap between perceptions among Japanese expatriates, Filipino managers and the local rank-and-file workers with respect to the hierarchy of factors in wage determination. Differences with respect to the concept and valuation of work add to the problems of communication.

In the Philippines, there are structural and institutional barriers to co-operation and the formation of consensus between the workers and the owners of the means of production. A long history of jurisprudence on labour-management disputes provides an incentive to resort to the legalistic approach to settle conflicts involving work relations. This paper will examine some of the tensions that occur between the expatriate Japanese firms and the industrial relations system of the host country.     

Human resource management in Japanese enterprises in the Philippines: Issues and problems

Since the latter half of the 1970s, interest in Japanese management and industrial relations increased in developing countries aiming to emulate the success of Japan. The entry of foreign investment to the Philippines also involves tensions related to human resource utilisation. This paper, using primary data, surveys the issues related to human resource utilisation among Japanese firms operating in the Philippines. The paper focuses upon labour market internalisation policies: hiring and recruitment, skills formation through on-the-job training, job assignments, job rotation and wage determination.This paper was written while the author was on study leave as a PhD Candidate (Mombusho Fellow) at the Faculty of Business and Commerce, Keio University in Tokyo. Acknowledgements are due to Prof Yoko Sano, Prof Hideo Ishida, Prof Haruo Shimada, Prof Ryohei Magota, Mr Hiro Nagai, and Mr Masahiro Abe, and colleagues from the U.P. SOLAIR for their advice and suggestions. The Japan Foundation supported part of the research, and is gratefully acknowledged.