NBS alumnus Gary Quemado ushers in social progress for contract workers in the Philippines

Many successful executives and entrepreneurs aspire for a life of luxury. However, that dream held little allure for Gabriel ‘Gary’ Quemado II, an NBS alumnus of our Berkeley-Nanyang Advanced Management Programme (BNAMP).  Instead, Gary has dedicated the past 15 years to usher in the biggest transition for thousands of low-skilled workers in the Philippines.  

Gary now heads two separate workers’ associations. He is President of the Asiapro Multipurpose Cooperative, a social enterprise of 43,000 marginalised workers in Manila. He is also the President of Tipon, a federation of nine multi-purpose cooperatives.

As President of these organisations, Gary has been spearheading their biggest transition from contract workers to managed labour services. Thousands of contract workers in the Philippines struggle daily with the vagaries of uncertain income. Gary has been working to reduce income uncertainty and inequality for these workers. 

“Low-skilled workers were traditionally hired for six months. Thereafter, their contracts were terminated as the hiring companies did not want to maintain them as regular employees with all the rights and privileges. These workers had to find alternative work and ­­­-­go through the same cycle time again,” explains Gary.

“It was a cycle of abuse and the workers were never going to have the social safety net of regular employment,” Gary shares. The challenge was to break the cycle of exploitation and provide these workers with a social safety net of regular employment. “I lost my job once, so I know what it feels like,” he adds.

The unique solution was to turn these low-skilled workers into owners of the workers’ co-operatives. “This was a win-win situation for the workers and companies. By making them owners of the cooperatives, they are no longer employees of private companies. The private companies can now engage the workers through the co-operative,” he explains.

The community at large faced even more challenges when COVID-19 erupted, with workers in the informal sector particularly at high risk of losing their livelihoods due to economic uncertainty. 

Making life sustainable

Gary making a presentation at a Asiapro’s Get Together event. 

Through his tenacious efforts, Gary has been helping the workers lead a life of dignity.

“As we have grown, we have been providing our workers with additional benefits that offer them financial stability,” he elaborates.

For the first time, these low-skilled workers could provide good education and healthcare to their families from the growing dividends received from the cooperatives each year. This has helped them by lifting their status from ill-treated workers to worker-owners with financial strength.

Serving the community at large

For Gary, social entrepreneurship means “building an enterprise for the marginalised, operating it sustainably and returning the surplus to all its owners, who are the workers.” Generating employment was not the only issue Gary resolved with his multipurpose cooperative initiative. To uplift his community, he also adopted a holistic approach.

He targeted support for the worker-owners’ families by giving them livelihood training, quality education, good health and wellbeing, productive employment, and decent work.

Furthermore, Gary realised that to change the status of the workers, fair education was needed. Therefore, the associations now support schools and their communities at large by providing students with books and computers.

“Social entrepreneurship means building an enterprise for the marginalised and operating it sustainably. We have built a mechanism that gives access to better healthcare and education.”

Today Gary is creating an impact on the lives and families of over 43,000 workers.

“It is a massive responsibility,” he admits. His inner drive, however, keeps him going. “I keep reminding myself that I have chosen to serve a higher purpose other than myself. It gives me courage during the ups and downs of starting something new and scaling it up,” he confides.

A journey of life-long learning

While he continues to work for the community, Gary is also an advocate of learning; he believes that learning is a life-long journey. That was why he chose to enroll in the BNAMP.

His objective was to obtain business insights from a Western as well as Asian standpoint. Gary was impressed by the value that he could draw from his professors and guest speakers at the Nanyang Business School, along with the rich peer connections that he developed during his time in the BNAMP.

“We not only learnt from our professors but gained as much, if not more, from our classmates who came from diverse professional backgrounds. It was all about people and we had to reach out and learn as much as we could, from our colleagues and our classmates. This is the essence of being human,” he concludes.