4        Findings

4.1       Survey and Interview Responses

Of the 80 executives from the four property development companies targeted for survey, 35 responded.  This puts the response or fulfillment rate at 43.75%.  This is considered high when using survey questionnaire data collection method as most surveys have a fulfillment rate of 30% or below. The quality of responses is almost perfect, with just a three respondents failing to complete the survey with a few questions unanswered.   Of the 20 invited for interview, 11 accepted and were scheduled for interview, but two backed out due to some unplanned work requirements at the last minute. With nine respondents to the interview, a 45% response rate was achieved.  This was enough considering that saturation was reached on the 7^th interview where the last two responses yielded no new thematic outcome.  

4.2       Results of the Survey

            4.2.1    Part A: Demographics

·         Majority of the respondents were male at 88.6% which closely represents the male-dominated employment in managerial positions in the UAE corporate landscape. 

·         Most of the respondents were married at 65.7% which reflects the high demand placed by UAE society on having a family. This may be attributed to the observation that companies generally promote staff whose marital status reflect on their maturity to be responsible managers where they are assigned.

·         Most of the respondents at 41.8% belong to the middle income group with 14.5% indicating they were in the high income brackets which are the more senior managers.

·         As may be expected, majority were in their 30 – 40 age group at 48.5%, closely followed by respondents in the 40-50 age group representing 31.4%. This is indicative of the high level of experience of the respondents with the company at the project management level.

·         Majority of the project managers at 60% have completed undergraduate degrees and the rest have post graduate degrees.

·         Only 7.3 % of the respondents have less than 5 years of experience in managing multicultural projects.  The rest have 10 years or more.

            4.2.2    Part B:  Multicultural Project management experience

2a        What is the percentage of multicultural projects you have handled over the total projects in a given year or over the last 12 months?

            Figure 11 shows that most project managers surveyed (51.4%) have managed multicultural projects 100% of the time in their current job position during the last 12 months.  Another 34.3% claims to have handled multicultural projects at between half and 75% of all the projects they have managed.  Together this constitutes a clear majority of around 85.7% managing multicultural projects most of the time and this preponderance of multicultural projects confirmed that dominance of multicultural projects in the UAE as discussed in the literature section. 

2b        Are you bi-lingual or capable of communication in a second language such as English?  And if so, how proficient are you in a second language?

The results reveal that with the exception of three project managers in the sample, all respondents have bi-lingual communication competencies with 45.7% admitting full literacy in the second language (not necessarily English though this is in the majority), while the rest have limited literacies or will need further enhancements.

3          Relative Importance of Project Management Skills

            Table 6 presents the results of the survey in ranking three major project management skills and shows that all three occupy a high valuation in the perspective of the sampled project managers in the four Dubai-based property development companies.  But among the three, communication skill has the slight edge with 97% of the respondents indicating it is a very important dimension in project management.

4          Cross Cultural Communication Skills

            Results of this part of the survey is presented in Table 7 which pointed to the ability to manage cultural diversity as having the highest importance as indicated by 60% of the respondents.  This was followed closely by the ability to use English as second language, and the ability to use this second language to inspire teamwork.  The ability to train foreign workers got the lowest ranking which hinted to the fact that while project managers can provide coaching to team members, the training aspect is not a primary responsibility of project managers and that HR or other 3rd party language training schools are better tapped for this purpose. Nevertheless, majority of the respondents ranked it as important part of communication skills, though not as important as the others.

 

5          Project Management Areas where Communication is Important

            Surveying the insights about the areas in a multicultural project undertaking where communication plays an important part resulted in close ranking among the areas that have been randomly selected from those indicated in Section 2.4.2.  Table 8 presents the results with management presentations on justifying new resources as taking the most important area in project management where suitable communication skills can make a difference. d. This is followed closely by conflict management which recognizes the social interactivity among diverse ethnic groups as potential sources of misunderstanding and eventual conflict if not addressed immediately using appropriate language that the parties can understand. The least important area is project planning which may be explained by the fact that this is more of a responsibility taken by the project manager prior to the project engagement itself.

            4.2.3    Interview Results

            The interviews conducted on a face-to-face session were captured on a mobile phone recorder and transcribed verbatim with some corrections in grammar and vocabulary.  There were common insights which were summarized and grouped into themes, and presented in the table below. Only the salient common responses are summaries and presented.

1.      What do you think are the most important qualities of a project manager in a multicultural project management setting? And why?

Interviewee: 1, 3, 4, 8 and 9	Team management skills are the most important.  The PM has the duty to steer the team towards delivering expected outcomes, like a sports team manager, only the demand is greater since you have several nationalities involved. As a PM, the overriding requirement is to lead a ragtag team in fulfilling expected deliverables.  A people-centric attitude that values the insights of team members is another quality since how you communicate will depend on this attitude.  We're talking about implementing a project by people, not machines.  Motivating them towards a common objective is knowing their interests and dispositions and harnessing these towards a common purposive action can make a big difference in the success of a project. Integral to this is the ability of the PM to understand non-verbal communication among other nationalities as they often go beyond what is spoken or the literal meaning of word
The ability to foster teamwork through a people-centered appreciation of one’s team members is the common theme among interviewees in this question. This is one quality that involves communication skills to enable the PM to understand the dynamics behind team development so that a common understanding about what is important in a project can be achieved. The skill is not limited to communicating in a language that everyone in the team understands such as English, but is also about understanding the social implications of non-verbal language cues that transcend structural limits of language.
Interviewee: 2, 5, and 7	Communication skills are the most important. Information is the lifeblood of any organised effort working to achieve a common object.  Information dissemination through sufficient communication skills makes the PM a facilitator and a conduit to achieve and maintain smooth information flow that is important in any project management effort.
Communication and information go together as  the smooth flow of information being sent, processed and received by a person is what communication is all about.  This flow becomes even more difficult to maintain in a team made up of various nationals speaking in various tongues but have to understand each other as they work together.  Information is circulated and generated in project activities, from objectives, plans, issues, risks, problems, deliverable expectations, timeline, failures, and project status, a good PM should be able to communicate the relevant information to all team members as applicable.

2    With team members from various countries, do you think a second language is a prerequisite to get the project working smoothly?  And Why?

Interviewee: 1, 3, 5, 8 and 9	In today's globalized industries where we operate, it can't be helped that English becomes part of the communication skills of our management staff that have to deal with our foreign principals and counterparts in many of our construction projects.  We deal with workers from a few countries most of which have already a working knowledge of English. We also coordinate with several suppliers in Europe and America and English is an international language.
Interviewee: 2, 4, and 7	A second language is a must.  Depending on the project’s team composition, this can be English. French or Spanish. We have a project management staff trained in these languages and are deployed accordingly.
Except for one interviewee whose company prefers to use interpreters in their projects, all interviewees share the same sentiment that a second language is necessary in conducting their project management efforts. They recognize English as an international language and even require it among their management team whose key members are also trained in ESL.  Others not only have PMs trained in ESL but also French and other languages as required in their projects.

3    What problems do you generally encounter when managing multicultural workforces in a project?  And what solutions should be in place to address or prevent them from occurring?

Interviewee: 1 and 8	Enabling the team to gel as one towards a common objective takes care of 90% of the work needed to succeed in project management.  To this end, we embark on team building exercises which, depending on the hierarchies of a project team, can take up to a month prior to actual project work.
Again the issue of teamwork emerges but this time, the solution is about embarking on team-building where issues and potential conflicts can be identified and addressed right at the start of any project engagement.  Such sessions are communication-intensive and often conducted by a 3rd party resource that is trained in developing human capital in an organization to work as team.
Interviewee: 2, 5, and 9	A second language is great but one has to distinguish between the ability to speak and understand the language for everyday causal use and the ability to digest complex technical documents.  This is often the problem we encounter and it often takes a few meetings to explain verbally in more casual linguistic style what a document contains and how its details relate to the project.
Interviewee 4	Misunderstanding occurs when the PM fails to listen attentively to questions and issues raised by foreign team members, especially in matters of complex technical natures.
This reflects the various levels of communicative competence that starts with conversational skill and progresses to the ability to read complex content in a language.   The two go together can the ability to read complex technical documents is a must for multicultural projects that are have high technology content.
	Depending on the project, I have to say that some nationals are more problematic than others. In addition, it also depends in what functions they are assigned. Those in management and consultancy positions offer little problems but those in the contractual labor groups have the most, especially among cantankerous Indian nationals who can't seem to get along with other nationals.  Filipinos as great and they offer the least problems.  The solution we adopted is to limit ethnic involved to Chinese, Filipinos and Pakistanis who, based on experience, have given us the least headache.
This problem may be subjectively perceived and the solution adopted can be seen as biased against certain nationalities or ethnic groups.  But one cannot argue over experience when the post-project assessments point to observed empirical difficulties in multicultural projects as being caused repeatedly by certain nationals more than others in a project team. The solution adopted has been to choose the set of overseas contractuals and expatriates that have presented that least problems to the project team. Hence, a level of culture favorites have emerged with prejudices against certain nationals.

4.    In your opinion, do you think there is a need to improve the communication skills of project managers in the country to meet the challenge of Vision 2021?  If so, in what areas?

Interviewee: 1, 6  and 8	Projects share similarities that allow some degree of predictability and we don’t need to add to the uncertainties by not structuring and formalizing the communication process so that cultural awareness and teamwork are in place right from the start. Misunderstandings are normal but if we train our PMs to be acute aware of cultural nuances within a procedural framework, projects can sail through the communication barriers emerging from cultural diversity. That’s what we do to give us confidence in meeting Vision 2021.
The issue of fostering cultural awareness and teamwork surface again but the concept here is to overcome the challenge through a structured and formal approach to communication  which can be done through procedural methods such as regular meetings, teambuilding sessions and form-based reporting.
Interviewee: 2, 3, 4, 7, and 9	The ability to communicate goes beyond casual oracy and into comprehending complex technical documents and writing detailed reports that can be understood by target stakeholders.  It is important that we train our people in the technical aspects of writing and comprehension skills to complete their second language literacy they have acquired from university education. Either that or we get consultants and interpreters who can do the work for us.
Reading and writing skills that go beyond oracy is one area that need improvement and project managers who are new in the field can benefit from in-house training to further hone the 2nd language skills.  The alternative to use 3rd party interpreters and consultants is always there and may be used to augment the translation or writing of reports depending on the exigencies of the project.

4.3       Discussion and Summary of Themes

            Based on the foregoing results from the survey and the interview, several common or shared insights and opinions have emerged, identified and grouped into themes. This section gathers them and discusses each, as follows:

Theme 1:        Among the many skills in project management, communication figures as the most important in a multicultural environment, though all the other major skills are not far in importance.  

            This confirms what Baume et al (2002) considers as a multi-disciplinary undertaking in bringing about change and what  Modesto and Tichapondwa (2010) described has having both a micro and macro level perspective that requires communication skills for the project to succeed. The respondents have clearly understood this concept which is further elaborated in the second question that ranked the relative importance of the various variables in communication skills where managing cultural diversity and recognizing the need for English as a second language occupied the top two rankings. as indicated by 60% of the respondents.  Row (2010) pointed to communication as reducing misunderstanding among project stakeholders and team members while fostering teamwork which is basically the same sentiments expounded in the interviews as being the most important abilities of a project manager. 

Theme 2:        A second language such as English is a must among project managers in a multicultural setting. 

            The globalization of industries has spurred the need to have a common language and in the multicultural setting of the UAE where projects have such a dimension, English has helped to foster understanding and teamwork among project members.  It may not always be English and project managers will need to know the cultural background of their constituent members to determine the best second language to use. As Orrill (2010) essayed in his study on the Jumeirah project, a team trained on a second language that can be understood by the majority of multi-ethnic groups in a project team provides an advantage to the company and the survey results clearly echoed this sentiment.   The second language is often English which is already being studied by locals as it is the most understood among overseas workers from China, the Philippines,  India, and most other nationalities, apart from professionals from the UK and the US that typically get involved in UAE projects.  But other languages can be used as well and this depends on the composition of the project team.  The French language may be the second language if there are more nationals in the team who speak and understand the language.

Theme 3:        Understanding a second language in a casual verbal interaction is one thing, but reading documents required in the project is another.  

            Misinterpretations are often countered when project managers assume that because a second language such as English is used often in verbal communication, reading English documents would not be a problem.  From the interviews, this theme emerged and confirms what Nunan and Brown has identified as multilevel competence in ESL where reading comprehension skills is the next higher dimension in communicative competence along with the more basic listening skills.  Overlooking this aspect of communication can be problematic to a project when, for instance, a document spelling out what needs to be done or specifying materials for a projects are misinterpreted and the work is done wrongly and will need to be reworked later on.

Theme 4:        Teamwork is important in a project management undertaking and this is often difficult to achieve without interactive communication. 

            This gets more heightened in a multicultural project where several overseas nationals with disparate cultures, psychologies and frames of references need to have a common understanding tow work as a team.  The interview results had been most emphatic on this regard which only confirms what Orrill (2010) reported about communication barriers that have led to conflicts in the Jumeirah project, something that would not have occurred had teamwork been vigorously pursued from the start.   Smith & Imbrie (2005) argued for team development and with cultural diversity thrown into the picture, understanding the dynamics of interpersonal relationships becomes even more critical.  Towards this end, activities like teambuilding exercises already supported and undertaken by HR in many companies to improve office and departmental productivity, has been raised in the interviews as a solution to teamwork shortfalls and needs to be incorporated into the project management plan as part of its knowledge leveling exercises among team members prior to starting the project work.

5        Conclusion

5.1       Answering the Research Questions

           The survey showed that most of the sampled project managers have bi-lingual communication skills, mostly in English, which is not surprising considering that English is pervasively taught in schools and in nearly all colleges and universities where basic proficiency in the language is a criterion for campus admissions.  This skill is further honed with training programs for second language proficiency which are provided by the companies the sampled project managers work with.  This proficiency was identified in the survey as an invaluable tool in seamlessly paving the way for projects to succeed with the least communication and cooperation problems. With an open disposition to English and other foreign languages that may be needed to address the communication challenges in a multicultural project, nearly all the sampled project managers were confident that the country’s Vision 2021 can be achieved. 

           The study started out with the hypothesis that communication skills provide a vital management tool in handling cultural diversity in implementing projects. The above answers to the question provide convincing qualitative confirmation that the hypothesis is correct, establishing a positive empirical correlation between communicative competence that puts people and culture management in its focus a and a harmonious working relationship in a multicultural project setting.

5.2       Implications

            The survey revealed several other dimensions of multicultural project managements and communication skills that can be topic for further research. One is the perception that some overseas nationals are more problematic than others and a research in this area can indeed verify or shed some enlightenment on what aspects of culture can create problems for the host country or its constituent companies or with fellow workers in the project culture mix. The issue may have more than social implication and could possibly have repercussion in the diplomatic dimensions of the country that has global relations with the countries involved.

            In the area of communications, the levels of competence need to be explored further.  Listening skills have been considered as being basic to learning a second language and further research into this area can provide a more complete picture on how this communicative skill makes a difference in managing multicultural projects.  On a higher level,  the survey showed that it is not enough to have conversational oracy that enables team members to verbally communicate with each other, but the ability to read and write proper documents related to the project is equally essential.  A research on this area of communication skills can provide HR with more insights on improving the content of their language training programs.

5.3       Recommendations

            Based on the foregoing discussion on the emergent themes in the survey, this paper presents a few recommendations that companies can adopt in embarking on multicultural projects that has become inevitable towards the pursuit of the country’s Vision 2021. 

            5.3.1    Incorporate Bi-Lingual Personnel as Part of Project teams

            The interview results further showed the need for a second language which most of the project managers in the survey already revealed to possess. But not all have this ability and some companies though supporting the concept, frequently engage the services of 3^rd party consultants and interpreters to help in the communication aspect of their projects. Language experts, consultants or advisers have their place in a major multicultural project and can be harnessed in translating technical documents or helping project managers create more readable and effective  project reports for consumption by high level management stakeholders, but having one’s own team of project management staff with bi-lingual abilities should be adopted.  Almost all universities in the country already require a respectable English proficiency as part of their admission criteria, but enhancing a company engaged in multicultural projects can further enhance this advantage with language training as part of its human capital development programs.

5.3.2    Incorporate Team Building Activities before Starting a Project

            The survey theme on team building is most instructive and creates the opportunity for project management to effectively preclude potential social and cultural conflicts right from the start of a project engagement.  Several interview responses called for a strong team building exercise in multicultural projects right at the start which can be done within different levels of management and ranks or across both. Team building has often been a key HR tool in developing human capital as it is instrumental in creating the esprit de corps that is essential when a common objective needs to be achieved by various groups or individuals that need to work together. Team building also creates opportunities for various nationalities in a team to interact and foster cultural awareness among each other.  The activities often called for in a team building exercise also creates pre-project opportunities to test and explore potential areas of conflict and address them before they are likely to occur during the project implementation.   Orrill (2010) in his report about the Jumeirah project also recommended teambuilding exercises at the project onset to bring the disparate nationals to know each other and create the cultural awareness needed in a multicultural project undertaking. Incorporating activities that foster teamwork provides a smooth transition period significantly prior to commencing the project proper.

5.4       Conclusion

            This paper concludes with a confirmed hypothesis and a satisfactory answer to the research questions.  There  is no doubt that communicative competence enhanced to handle cultural diversity in a multicultural project management is key to further improving the managerial competence of UAE project managers as local companies embark on achieving the country’s modernization efforts.  Perhaps, just as significant is that the research opened up questions that can be settled with future research such as discussed in the section on implications.  One of the most important that have emerged from the interview results is to look into the behavior of overseas workers and expatriates and confirm the fears and biases of certain companies who have shown preferences to employ some foreign nationals over others.  Not only would such a study settle a social conflict issue in managing cultural diversity, but it has the potential to guide project planners in ensuring that any conflict does not spill out or develop into a diplomatic or political issue that can compromise the country’s international relations.

            The paper puts forth a couple of recommendations that can help project managers in a seamless transition to achieving the objectives of the project through a more strengthened teamwork and communication skill. While bi-lingual abilities with English or other languages are widely recognized as highly expedient in operationalizing a multicultural project management undertaking, the paper reinforces this conviction with a recommendation to further strengthen this ability among project managers. As revealed in the study, there are still loopholes through which misunderstandings can occur even with a bi-lingual staff and more communication training is required in the areas of reading, writing and listening skills.

            Lastly, while some companies do engage in teambuilding programs for their staff and project members, this is one effective tool that can benefit every company engaged in multicultural projects.  It is the position of this paper that project management can be likened to a group sports endeavor and that the whole country benefits if every social element actively involved in nation building works as a team toward this direction.  Every effort should be made to develop teamwork and interactive communication skills in every project engagement to ensure not just meeting project objectives, but that the engagement can serve as an inspiring model for cultural diversity to go beyond differences and act like a unified sports team where differences are cast aside in the interest of cooperative team spirit which, if multiplied on a regional and global scale, can be considered seminal to a more harmonious and productive co-existence among nations. 

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Internet Article Writing on its last days?

The Winds of Change at work again in a profession

The buzzword in marketing over the last couple of years  is video marketing.  Ad gurus and market-savvy professionals have been going gaga over video sharing sites like YouTube, which now ranks next to Google as the most widely visited site serving up as a search engine.  I have read an article several years back predicting that YouTube will be the next  search engine with a more forward-looking trend towards visual search engines.  That's right.  Imagine taking a cellphone snapshot of a new car you just saw, upload it to a site from your smartphone, and it returns with the technical features and specs of the car along with the price. Then just have it charged to your credit card and the following day, the new car in the color you want  is delivered to your house.

Oh well, back to 2012, go ahead and make a search about any topic under the sun on the YouTube home page and you’ll get search results instantly like in Google.  The first time I read it I immediately did some searching on YouTube and true enough, just about every search I made resulted in several result pages of this or that video.  That was in 2006, if I recall right.

Video marketing has also come to be known as YouTube marketing. SEO professionals have long recognized that video as a more powerful marketing tool than articles or words.  People generally prefer to watch a video than read an article and if your website is in that video or any product therein is related to your website, a single video can launch more organic visits to your site than a dozen articles or ad placements could.  The Forrester research conducted in 2009 revealed that your site is 53x more likely to land in Google search if you have a video about your website. 

Readers may want to verify this with a little research of their own if the trend is really catching on. So will video marketing replace article marketing?  Eventually, there’s a high probability it will.  But not anytime soon.  Or maybe I am just overly protective of my bread and butter.  Time to start learning how to make a video about a topic.  At YouTube quality, I don’t see the need yet for High Definition camera, though that helps a lot.  Some smartphones already sport this feature so I guess it’s time to upgrade.

 Let me see, how can I make a video about male enhancement products or breast augmentation in women – SEO topics I have written about many times in the past?  That would be interesting. 

How to screw an internet writer

A new industry utilizing home-bound freelance writers has made its way to the local employment landscape with clients overseas.  It’s not as big as call centers but it is part of the BPO trend in the Philippines and India. Clients like SEO marketers need tons of articles to bring high online visibility to a company’s web presence or create reputation management profiles online.  There are also many lazy students in the post graduate careers who prefer to just pay off writers to do their thesis and dissertations.  It’s a great alternative or additional source of income for the lowly paid employee or the unemployed. 

But because the profession is largely unregulated in the country, all sorts of labor injustices can be heard.  The people who perpetuate the injustice are mostly the middlemen who taken in the writing jobs from overseas clients like web developers, SEO marketers and students.  They are taken in bulk and spread to a stable of writers they recruit.  You won’t hear writers complain. Afterall, why bother when there are other middlemen offering the same income source online without the encumbrance of local taxes and other mandated deductions.

It’s bad enough to be underpaid (see post below), many times, you don’t even get paid.  That’s what Filipino middlemen in the internet writing profession does with their fellow Filipino writers.  Not all for sure.  But the bad eggs easily flourish because the trade is unregulated.  In general, work at home is unregulated. And writers don’t mind being screwed since they welcome the writing opportunity for additional funds from their equally low paying day jobs, regardless of the injustices.

So how are local internet writers screwed?  Here are some:

• On the pretext that a client is not happy with the writing job, the writer loses his right to claim payment or is penalized.  I know of one who penalized an English UP professor for a reputation management article which according to the middleman, falls below client expectation.  That’s because the task is a 30-aritcle task and not paying the poor professor created a hefty savings on his part.   How will the poor writer know that his work has been rejected?  If he knows where the articles are headed, he can always check the site.  In my case, I checked a games review site where the articles are posted and the instances  when the middleman claimed my work was below par and cannot be paid, I visited the site and the article was there. Otherwise, the writer has little choice but to accept what the middleman said about his or her work, hook line and sinker.  

• Many middlemen will impose penalties on wrong grammar, punctuation, diction or not following rules even when the articles you did were already accepted.  I found that out on an SEO fashion article I did when the site where the articles where uploaded still contained the errors I had corrected and for which I was penalized a hefty 30% of my due payment on the task. 

• Then there’s the “Ooops excuse” where accounting records get fouled up so you end up not getting paid or missing a significant amount of what you had expected to be deposited in your bank.  That’s easy to do and you’ll never know if the middleman deliberated on the oversight or was an honest mistake.  When it happens more than once, it becomes a trademark and you need to look for another middleman.

• There’s this one company I worked for which requires its writers to have an account with Copyscape to ensure that no three words in sequence appear on my article that appeared elsewhere. Did you get that, no three words in sequence.  Tell me since when is plagiarism based on three words?  That’s a $0.05 fee you pay every time you check your own work with Copyscape checker. The company claims they do not have the staff to check the article themselves. And yet, they will get back to the writer to revise the article because they found Copyscape 3-word duplicates. Gotcha.

• One company even makes a 10% tax deductions on your pay each time.  But you won’t get any year-end W2 form or other documents proving such tax deductions were made.  that’s because they’re not even registered with the local SEC and it is doubtful they even have a business permit. 

Web Article Writers Get Screwed

Gone are the days when writers are a respected lot.  Publishing houses, the academe, print media and the entertainment business have high regard for them.  Today, with the demand surge in internet article writing to satisfy the never-ending quest for that search-optimized website using keyword-optimized articles, writers are a dime a dozen. 

Students and educated people in their spare time can write.  In fact, many of them have blogs where writing styles are often frowned at by the academe as something below their dignity.  Wonder why eHow.com won’t even allow its writers to use blogs as their reference sources?  It’s interesting to note that even blogs by professors and noted academicians don’t generally get accepted into the circle of source materials, even if their topics are brilliantly written.

But enough said about that.  The bottomline is that internet article writers who come from these group and not having a journalism or mass com degree, a doctorate or a Pulitzer prize to show for their writing skills occupy the lowest position in the totem pole in the writers club.   

First off, they get screwed by the middlemen who employ them.   These are businessmen who take in writing jobs in bulk and spread to a stable of telecommuting freelance writers. Here in the Philippines there are several with some that are affiliates of larger writing companies based overseas.  Like they say, they are may ways to skin a cat.  And there are many ways for middlemen to screw their writers.

That may be excusable if you’re employed by a writing company in Bratislava or Bangalore, but here in the Philippines where most of the writers are preferred by internet marketers in the US and the UK, you have several local middlemen screwing their own fellow nationals. No wonder why this country will never prosper.  Koreans do not screw their own people.  Here, Filipinos do.

Local internet writers get paid ridiculously low rates like $1.5 for every 500 word article when the going rate from SEO clients and e-marketers are in excess of $5.   That’s a lucrative 300% profit margin.  And if the writer happens to work on an eHow.com article which the middleman can easily aggregate, the margins are even better. 

The eHow rate is $15 per 400 word article which the middleman pockets while his poor  writer gets paid proportionately less than $1.50.  In the country, this is called “tubong lugaw” to those who understand.  It gets worst when the middleman subcontracts academic research writing where the rates are just as high but can go to 50 pages in one task. Each page is only 300 words doubled spaced with point 12 Times Roman.  The poor writer gets paid for 15,000 words or $45 when the task is paid at $9 per page or $450.  Nice and easy 1,000% profit margin, right?