The Profile of a Seasonal Worker

From the first look, he did not seem all that welcoming.  Long nails, unwashed hair, dark skin that is perhaps a bit too dark to be considered purely natural, crooked teeth...he was not the ideal guide, or for that matter, a good example of an ordinary citizen in a cosmopolitan tourist town.  Yet, somehow, as the author spent more and more time with the diminutive 27-year-old man who was his two-day guide in Siem Reap and the Temple of Angkor, his life experiences and stories became, in many ways, the most interesting portion of his trip, much more so than imposing stone temples or fantastic local food.

He was a seasonal worker like many other, straddling in the formal industries of foreigner-frequented hotels and cookeries and street-side shops of the local community, hidden from the sights and meddling of cleanliness-conscious foreign tourists and an image-conscious Cambodian government.  When the high tourist season arrives, he silently ferries around gawky picture-takers on his motorcycle-pulled wooden carriage (called a "tuk-tuk") all day, and when the low season hits, he sleeps all day, search for the few contract jobs available, and worry about his future.

During those lean low-season times, he does live from day to day, meal to meal.  He speaks of the high rent and general inflation in Siem Reap, brought about by an incessant influx of tourist money.  He notes that he cannot bring his young wife and kid for fear of running out of the little savings he managed to accumulate in the high season.  Yet, he is not without dreams: he loftily speaks of ambitions to acquire his own $500 second-hand motorcycle (he currently uses his boss' bike) and starting his own tourist agency with it.  When he does, his Buddhist-trained calmness exhibits unusual signs of enthusiasm and beaming shine.

Back in Manila, the author has been able to observe another set of such seasonal workers, toiling in a different industry but with much of the same concerns and attitudes.  Lazada is in a warehouse-move season, and she is arming herself with a temporary boost in headcount by hiring temporary workers (a.k.a the "temps").  Like the tourist guide in Siem Reap, there are not the most welcoming-looking bunch.  Uncouth, dark, with old, ill-fitting clothing to cover themselves, they seldom spoke, fearing communication in an English language that they did not properly acquire in few years of formal education.

Some of them genuinely seemed to be too old to do the hard manual labor of carrying boxes laden with inventory items through the gigantic 1.5ha warehouse.  But none complained.  When given instructions to carry more, they simply answers "Yes, sir" and go about their business.  Occasionally, with an apologetic smile, they signal that a certain box is too heavy for one person to carry, or that they need a quick 20-second break from their area to grab a cup of water, but otherwise, they toil.  Non-stop, from 7am to 7pm, they would work, only with an one-hour lunch break and a 20-minute afternoon break.  

They do not complain, and they do not stop to pick out just the easy tasks.  Perhaps work is really hard to come by, in a degree that the author cannot simply imagine.  It pains physically the author to supervise them for those 12-hour days in sauna-like temperatures for 7 days a week.  But it pains the author, even more, at an emotional level, to see them carry heavy boxes for the same number of hours and days.  They occasionally grimace at the weight of the items on their shoulders, occasionally forces a smile to their supervisors, but mostly go about their business with a blank but tough expression.

For the young tour guide in Siem Reap, or the day laborers in the Lazada warehouse, the blankness of their expression, at least in the author's opinion, is a weathered expression of firsthand experiences in dealing with in-the-face visual representations of inequality, and the fact that they, for years and years without an end, is receiving the short end of it.  It is an expression not of anger, but of completely dismayed acceptance of reality for what it is.  They feel awed by the foreigners, educated in elite universities and speaking fluent English, but simultaneously realize that it is not intelligence, but simple luck, that they became that way.

Indeed, for them, to dream of a different life is more than pointless.  And most do not have time to.  They need the little money they can find to raise their kids healthy and strong, so that they can take over their weights (sometimes literally) of main breadwinners of the family when they themselves have become too old to drive around a tuk tuk all day or lift those heavy boxes in a warehouse.  Time is against them; they have no time to rest or complain.  They have no time to choose what jobs or tasks are easy.  They just need to finish whatever that come their way.