"Manila reflects values that once defined Barcelona" by Josep Maria Suris

What do you think Barcelona could learn from a city like Manila?  

Filipinos are dedicated and committed workers. They approach work positively, seeing it as a natural part of life.

I enter the Comptal café, located on Rambla de Catalunya and Gran Via in Barcelona, before going to the Philippine Consulate, which is on the corner opposite. The waiters are Filipinos; they greet everyone cheerfully and attend to every customer who comes in. It is the first day of one of the waitresses, but her more experienced colleague keeps explaining what she needs to do. Everything is done with complicity and a strong focus on customer service. We are already familiar with this willingness among Filipinos to carry out assigned tasks and always do so with a smile. It is a cultural trait in Manila, and it also appears in technical or administrative roles.

Manila is a city of skyscrapers surrounded by low-rise houses, and between them, through the malls, rivers of workers flow. It is a new middle class with access to bank credit and evening leisure—ultimately, to consumption. In this environment, the opportunity to prosper boosts the willingness to work. Work is seen as a means to progress, but also as a time to contribute, to share, and to enjoy. Understanding it in this way means living both work and life as something fundamentally positive.

In a country with this mindset—where work is seen as a gift rather than a burden—and which produces 700,000 new graduates each year, it is a country where ideas… and joy thrive.

How can we return to values such as initiative and hard work that were once so characteristic of Barcelona?

The positive value of work drives growth, as we now see in Manila and remember once happened in Barcelona. 

Barcelona has an ideal balance between the sea and the mountains, work and leisure, innovation and experience. That is why so many people choose it to work and live in. However, those of us who experienced it in the 1990s now feel a certain sense of disillusionment, linked to this lack of positivity towards work.

Nowadays, people look for shortcuts to work less, when freedom actually comes through work. Joy is sought only in leisure, forgetting to find it in the work itself. External culprits are blamed, when the only real answer is always internal.

There are countries that focus on glorifying their past. We are more about looking forward and focusing on becoming what we once were again. But to do so, we need to reassess our values and return to those that once made us shine.

Work and initiative are clearly very much our values. Self-complacency and justification can also be. History shows us how things have gone in the periods in which we have promoted one or the other of these sets of values.

Manila offers itself as a partner to work with Barcelona; here we have young people who are well prepared and eager to do so. Building bridges is part of our essence, and if we work together, its momentum will undoubtedly help us recover our own.

Read the full article here.

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