Hiring in the Philippines: the honest version

You're reading this because someone raised the objection out loud, maybe a peer pastor, maybe a deacon who used the word "exploitative" in a hallway conversation, and you're not willing to bring this to your board until you have an answer better than "we treat our people well." Fair. That's a vague answer to a specific question, and this page exists to give you the specific one instead. It's one page in our guide to what church work you can outsource.

One thing up front: you're not wrong to ask. A US company paying someone in another country less than a US wage for the same work is a real pattern, and it deserves scrutiny every time, not a pass because the company says it means well.

This page walks through six specific things, in order: whether the pay is fair, what 13th month pay is and why it isn't optional, what the timezone commitment actually asks of a co-laborer, what happens operationally when someone leaves, what internet and power reliability really look like, and why we use the word "co-laborer" instead of the term you searched for. No section here is a redirect to "trust us." Each one is a fact you can repeat to your board without a footnote.

Is this exploiting a wage gap?

Here is the full answer, not a piece of it: we pay more than double the Philippine national average wage, we pay 13th month, and every co-laborer gets a 5% raise every year. That's the entire claim. We are not going to round it up to "triple" or attach a specific peso or dollar figure to make it sound more impressive, because the specific figure isn't the point and inflating it would make the claim harder to trust, not easier.

Say it plainly a second time, because it's the part most companies fudge: "more than double" is a floor, stated conservatively, not a rounded-up marketing number. If the honest figure were closer to some other multiple, we'd say that instead. The claim is deliberately modest so that it holds up to scrutiny rather than needing to be walked back later.

We also don't publish the exact rate. That is a deliberate choice, and it's the same choice most US employers make about individual compensation. Nobody expects a church to post a staff member's exact salary on the website, and the same discretion applies here. What we do publish, and stand behind, are the three facts above. They are checkable claims about pay relative to a wage floor, not a feeling we're asking you to trust.

The frame matters as much as the number. A co-laborer is doing skilled, full-time, dedicated work for one client, the same as any employee you'd hire locally. That's not a beneficiary of goodwill. It's a peer being paid fairly for real work, and the rest of this page is the mechanics behind that claim.

It also helps to be precise about what "exploiting a wage gap" would actually mean, because the phrase gets used loosely. Exploitation is paying someone below a fair local standard because you can get away with it, or treating a wage difference as license to demand more hours, less notice, or fewer protections than you'd extend to a US hire. Paying above the local average, on a fixed schedule, with the same annual raise every year regardless of how the relationship is going, is a different arrangement. The three facts in the substantiation line exist specifically to be checked against that distinction, not to sound generous.

What is 13th month pay, and why does it matter?

13th month pay is exactly what it sounds like: an extra month's pay, on top of the regular twelve, generally disbursed around December. In the Philippines, it is not a discretionary bonus a company can skip in a lean year. It is a legal requirement under Philippine labor law (Presidential Decree No. 851, enforced through the Department of Labor and Employment) and, separately from the legal floor, a deeply held cultural expectation tied to the year's end.

CoLabor pays it as policy, to every co-laborer, and absorbs the cost rather than itemizing it back to clients. It isn't a line item you'll see on an invoice, and it isn't optional on our end in a slow month. If a client relationship gets difficult or a quarter is tight, 13th month pay doesn't move. That's the point of calling it a standard instead of a perk.

Why it matters to name specifically: a US company unfamiliar with Philippine labor norms could reasonably not know this exists, and skip it, and never hear a complaint, because a contractor relationship rarely surfaces the gap the way a direct employment relationship would. Naming it here is the difference between a standard we hold ourselves to on purpose and a standard we'd only meet if someone happened to ask.

It's also worth saying what 13th month pay is not. It is not a Christmas bonus tied to performance, and it is not something CoLabor can trim in a year the company grows slower than planned. Treating it as a fixed cost of doing business, built into how CoLabor prices its own services rather than passed through as a client line item, is what keeps it a guarantee instead of a good intention.

What does the timezone actually require, day to day?

The honest version, not the reassuring one: the Philippines sits roughly 12 to 16 hours ahead of the continental United States depending on the time zone and the time of year, which means a co-laborer's normal daytime hours and a US church's normal business hours do not naturally line up.

CoLabor's answer to that is not "they work whenever they can." Every co-laborer works a fixed shift, and that shift is set to include a minimum of five hours of overlap with the client's business hours. In practice, that usually means a co-laborer's schedule starts earlier in their day than a typical Philippine workday, so that a real chunk of it lands during your staff's afternoon or your office's open hours. It's a real adjustment on their end, made on purpose, so that real-time collaboration during your workday is a scheduled fact, not a hope.

This is also the fair place to say what the commitment costs the co-laborer, not just what it buys you. A fixed shift built around a US church's business hours is, for most co-laborers, a schedule that runs against the grain of their own country's normal working day. That's a real accommodation, made deliberately, and it's part of why the pay and the raise structure exist as fixed policy rather than something renegotiated once the relationship is comfortable. The commitment runs in both directions.

What happens when a co-laborer quits or needs to be replaced?

Turnover happens in every staffing model, in-house or offshore, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. The operational answer is the replacement guarantee: the person can change, and the price does not. If a co-laborer leaves, CoLabor sources and places a replacement rather than handing you back a job posting and a search timeline.

Compare that to a solo offshore contractor found on a freelance marketplace: when that person leaves, you start over, alone, with whatever documentation you managed to keep. The managed structure exists specifically to absorb that risk instead of passing it back to your office.

It's worth saying plainly that this isn't a claim that co-laborers stay forever, or that turnover is rare here in a way it isn't everywhere else. People leave jobs for reasons that have nothing to do with pay or treatment: family, opportunity, a season of life ending. What CoLabor controls isn't whether that happens. It's what happens next, and the guarantee is built so the answer is a replacement, not a restart.

What about internet and power reliability?

This is a real, practical concern for anyone hiring in the Philippines, not a talking point to wave away. Internet outages and power interruptions happen there the way weather delays and outages happen anywhere, and pretending it's a non-issue would undercut everything else on this page.

What we can tell you plainly: reliable internet and a backup plan for power are a condition of the arrangement, checked as part of onboarding, not an afterthought discovered during an outage. What we won't do is hand you a specific generator wattage or bandwidth number that sounds precise but isn't something we've verified as a fixed standard. If that level of detail matters to your board, ask us directly on a call. We'd rather give you a straight answer in conversation than a confident-sounding figure on a page.

This is also where the fixed-shift structure earns its keep a second time. Because CoLabor manages the relationship rather than leaving it to a single unmanaged contractor, an outage that takes one co-laborer offline is a problem CoLabor is positioned to communicate and address quickly, not a problem you discover when a task simply doesn't get done and nobody tells you why.

Why "co-laborer," and not "virtual assistant"?

The industry calls this a virtual assistant. Here is why we do not, and here it's personal, not procedural: a virtual assistant is a category, sourced from a marketplace or a shared pool. A co-laborer is a name for a relationship, a person who labors alongside your church, full time, dedicated to your church alone, vetted by people who are themselves in ministry. CoLabor Staffing places full-time Christian co-laborers with churches and Christian-owned businesses. The word is doing real work in this page specifically: it's the frame that makes the pay, the schedule, and the replacement guarantee make sense as one coherent standard, rather than a set of concessions.

If you take one thing from this page back to your board, take this: every claim above is checkable, and none of it is contingent on the relationship going smoothly. The pay standard, the 13th month commitment, the fixed schedule, the replacement guarantee, all of it holds whether the first month is easy or hard. That consistency, more than any single number, is the honest answer to the question you came here with.

Common questions