From Pasay to Sihanoukville: A POGO Worker's Migration

I. The Building on Bradco Avenue

The man — call him Ramon — spent his last day of work in Pasay City in October 2024, in a building that no longer exists as a workplace.

The building itself is still there. It is a sixteen-story tower in the Bay City reclamation area, with a marble lobby and a roof-deck pool and a service entrance that opens onto Bradco Avenue. By 2026, the tower has been partially leased to a BPO consortium, a freight forwarding company, and a coworking space that has not quite found its footing in the post-POGO real estate market. But on October 28, 2024, the tower was still what it had been for the previous five years: the operational headquarters of a Philippine Offshore Gaming Operator that employed approximately 1,200 people across three shifts.

Ramon was one of the 280 Filipinos on the operator's local payroll. He worked the eight-hour day shift as a floor supervisor for the Mandarin-language customer support team, although his own Mandarin was limited. His function was administrative: coordinating between the Filipino floor and the predominantly Chinese-national management layer above him, handling shift schedules, managing the small disputes that arise when 200 people work in close proximity for ten hours a day, six days a week.

His monthly salary was PHP 42,000. This was substantially above the prevailing wage for a comparable BPO supervisor position, which would have paid in the range of PHP 28,000 to PHP 34,000 at the time. The premium was deliberate. POGO operators competed for Filipino supervisory talent against the established BPO industry, and they paid above market to attract and retain workers who could navigate the cultural distance between a Chinese-management operation and a Philippine labor environment.

On October 28, the operator's regional director called the senior Filipino staff into the third-floor conference room and explained, with the help of an English translator, that operations would cease on November 30. The Marcos administration's executive order had set a deadline, the licensee was not contesting the shutdown, and all 280 local employees would be paid through the end of December as part of the operator's voluntary wind-down package. There would be a recommendation letter for those who wanted one.

The room, Ramon would later say, was very quiet. Several people cried. One man asked, in halting English directed at the translator, what would happen to the Mandarin-language equipment — the headsets, the dual-script keyboards, the desktop displays that had been imported from Shenzhen. The translator did not answer, because the question was not really about the equipment.

II. The Sector That Wasn't There

Between November 2024 and the early months of 2025, Ramon did what most of his colleagues did. He applied to BPO companies. He filed for transitional unemployment benefits with the Department of Labor and Employment, which had announced a coordinated assistance program for displaced POGO workers. He took a one-week reskilling workshop offered through DOLE, sat for three BPO interviews, and was offered two positions.

Both BPO offers were at the team-leader level, with monthly salaries in the PHP 27,000 to PHP 31,000 range. He accepted the better of the two. The pay was 30% below his previous salary, but he had a wife, two children, and a mortgage on a townhouse in Cavite. The math did not allow for waiting for a better offer.

For four months, Ramon worked as a team leader for an inbound customer service program serving a US-based telecom carrier. The work was, in his words, "manageable." The salary was less than he was used to but adequate. The job had benefits and predictable hours. His children's school fees continued to be paid.

What he did not have was a future. Promotion to operations manager was at least two years away. The salary ceiling for an operations manager in this segment of the BPO industry was around PHP 55,000. Even with that promotion, he would not return to the PHP 42,000 baseline of his POGO years for at least another full year of grade increments after that. His mortgage payments and his children's school fees were sized for a salary structure that no longer existed.

The PIGO and e-Games sector that emerged from the POGO ashes — mapped in detail in our regulatory analysis — had absorbed some former POGO workers, particularly those with technical or language skills suited to the domestic market. But the sector was structurally smaller. The customer-support intensity per peso of revenue was substantially lower. The Mandarin-language capability was, in the new domestic-focused framework, largely irrelevant. Ramon's specific professional value — bridging Chinese management and Filipino floor — had no buyer in the new market.

III. The Recruiter from a Number He Didn't Recognize

The Viber message arrived in April 2025. It was from a number with the +855 prefix, which Ramon did not initially recognize as the country code for Cambodia. The message was in English. It greeted him by name. It mentioned, accurately, the operator he had previously worked for and the floor he had supervised. It said that a similar operation had reconstituted under a new corporate name in Sihanoukville and was actively recruiting senior Filipino staff. It offered a monthly base salary of USD 1,200, dormitory accommodation, two paid round-trip tickets to Manila per year, and what the message described as "Cambodian government tier-3 license certainty."

At the prevailing exchange rate, USD 1,200 was approximately PHP 67,000. This was 60% above his current BPO salary. With the included dormitory and benefits package, his effective compensation would have been higher still.

Ramon did not respond immediately. He spent two weeks researching. He read the news coverage of Cambodian gaming. He found the UN documentation on the trafficking-adjacent compounds in border zones. He searched for the new corporate name and discovered that, although it was difficult to verify directly, the operator did appear to hold a tier-3 license under the GCG framework, which placed it in the legitimate end of the Cambodian gaming spectrum — not the criminalized border-zone compound segment that dominated international press coverage.

He had two conversations that mattered. The first was with a former POGO colleague who had taken a similar offer in January 2025 and was now working in Cambodia. The colleague's report was largely positive: the work was familiar, the pay was real, the conditions were tolerable. The second was with a Department of Migrant Workers contact, who told him — off the record — that the official position was to discourage these moves but that the actual incidence of welfare cases involving Filipinos at GCG tier-3-licensed operators had been notably lower than the press coverage suggested.

Ramon's wife was opposed. His mother was opposed. The mortgage and the school fees were neutral, but the children needed shoes, and the youngest had developed a chronic respiratory condition that required medication not fully covered by the BPO's health insurance. He took the offer.

IV. Phnom Penh, Then West

The migration is not legally complicated, if it is done correctly. A Filipino citizen can enter Cambodia visa-free for thirty days, with extensions available at land borders and immigration offices. A work visa requires a sponsoring employer, a registered local entity, and a permit from the Cambodian Ministry of Labour and Vocational Training. For tier-3 licensed gaming operators, the process is, on paper, well-defined.

For Ramon, it was not visibly difficult. He flew into Phnom Penh on a Friday afternoon in late May 2025. A driver met him at the airport with a sign bearing his name. The driver took him to a serviced apartment building in the BKK1 district, where he stayed for three days while his work visa application was processed. He was given a phone, a SIM card, and a printed orientation packet in English. The packet included a copy of his employment contract, a description of the dormitory accommodation he would receive in Sihanoukville, and a list of emergency contacts including the Philippine Embassy.

On the fourth day, a different driver picked him up and drove him southwest. The road from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville covers approximately 230 kilometers and, on a good day, takes four hours. The driver took six, with stops at three checkpoints. At each checkpoint, the driver presented documents that Ramon could not read. At each checkpoint, the documents were sufficient.

They arrived in Sihanoukville after dark. The driver navigated through a part of the city that, in the daylight of subsequent weeks, Ramon would come to recognize as the "second city" — the still-half-finished construction projects, the brand-new condominium towers, the abandoned high-rise shells that the post-2019 crash had left and that the post-2024 recovery had not yet fully reclaimed. The compound where Ramon would live and work was located in a renovated mid-rise that had originally been built in 2018 as a casino-adjacent service block.

V. The Compound, In Daylight

In daylight, Sihanoukville is recognizable as a coastal city in transition. The casinos that had defined the 2017-2019 boom — many of them shuttered after the 2019 ban on offshore-targeted online gambling — have been progressively reopened or repurposed since 2024. The new operators have learned from the previous cycle. The signage is more discreet. The buildings present less aggressively to the street. The local-language pretensions have largely been dropped; the operations are openly online-international in their orientation, which is what their tier-3 license permits.

Ramon's specific work environment is, in his description, "professional." The compound is a single building with controlled entry, a cafeteria, a recreation room with three pool tables, and dormitory floors above the operational floors. He shares a room with one other Filipino supervisor. The room is approximately twelve square meters, with two beds, a small desk, a private bathroom, and a window facing the inland side of the city. He is paid in US dollars on the fifteenth of each month, via wire transfer to a local Cambodian bank account that he opened during his first week.

His work is, in the structural sense, the same as it was in Pasay. He supervises a floor of customer support agents handling Mandarin-language interactions for a player base that he understands is concentrated in Southeast Asia and the Chinese diaspora, although the operator does not provide him with detailed market data. He coordinates between Filipino staff and Chinese-national management. He handles shift schedules, small disputes, equipment requests.

What is different is the absence of context. In Pasay, he had a life outside the building. He could go home to Cavite at the end of his shift, see his children, attend Sunday mass with his mother. In Sihanoukville, the building is, for practical purposes, his entire physical environment. The compound is not a closed prison — he can leave on his off-days, take a tuk-tuk into the city center, go to the beach, eat at restaurants where the menus include Filipino dishes. But the rhythm of his life is now structured by the compound, and the people in the compound, and the work that the compound exists to perform.

VI. What His Family Sees

Ramon flies back to Manila in November 2025, for the first of his two annual paid trips. He stays for ten days. His wife meets him at NAIA. His children — aged nine and six — are visibly larger than he had expected. The younger one's respiratory condition has improved, in part because the consistent dollar-denominated salary has allowed for a better pediatric specialist and a more reliable supply of the relevant medication.

The mortgage is current. The school fees have been paid for the full year, including the supplementary tutoring program that his daughter's school recommends for sixth-grade entrance examinations. The townhouse has a new air conditioning unit. His wife, who initially opposed the move, has not changed her position on whether the move was the right one, but she does not raise the question during the November visit. Both of them understand that the conversation can wait.

His mother is more direct. She asks, several times during the visit, when he will come home for good. He tells her two years. He is not certain whether this is true. The financial picture suggests three or four. The emotional picture suggests sooner.

Two of his former Pasay colleagues, also now working in Cambodia, visit during his Manila trip. They meet for dinner at a restaurant in Greenhills. They do not, for the most part, discuss work. They discuss children, schools, real estate prices, the weather, the politics of the new Senate. They discuss work briefly, at the end of the meal, and the conversation is short because there is not much to say. The work is what it is. They are doing it.

VII. The Building That Is No Longer the Building

On the second-to-last day of his Manila visit, Ramon drives past the Bradco Avenue tower. He does this on a Sunday morning, alone, in his wife's car. He does not go inside. He sits in the car at the curb for approximately ten minutes, watching the morning light on the marble lobby.

The BPO consortium that now occupies floors three through eight has placed temporary signage near the lobby entrance. The freight forwarding company on the ground floor has its own branding. The coworking space on the eleventh floor has put a banner in the window advertising what looks like a startup pitch event scheduled for the following month. None of the signage acknowledges what the building had been before. The marble is the same. The doormen are different.

He drives away after ten minutes. He flies back to Phnom Penh two days later. He arrives in Sihanoukville in the evening. He resumes his shift on the following morning. He is, in the formal definition, a Filipino overseas worker, although the framework that classifies him as such was not built with this kind of work in mind.

VIII. The Larger Picture

Ramon's story is one of an estimated low-single-digit thousands of Filipino workers who followed POGO operators across the regional gaming map after the 2024 shutdown. The exact figure is not known. The Department of Migrant Workers does not maintain a registry. The Philippine Embassy in Phnom Penh tracks welfare cases but not the total population. The Cambodian government's Ministry of Labour reports aggregate foreign worker numbers but does not distinguish gaming-sector employees from other categories.

The aggregate facts that can be stated with confidence are these. Approximately 32,000 Filipinos worked in the legal POGO industry at its peak. The DOLE transition program reached about 18,000 of them. The PIGO and e-Games sector absorbed several thousand more, primarily in technical and language-support roles that translated to the domestic market. Some workers exited gaming entirely — into BPOs, into adjacent industries, into self-employment. And some, like Ramon, followed the operators abroad.

The policy questions this raises are not new. The Philippines has, for decades, exported labor to industries that the country itself does not always endorse. The OFW (Overseas Filipino Worker) framework is built around the assumption that earnings remitted home generate a public benefit that justifies the personal and social costs of the migration. The framework does not have an explicit category for "worker following operator to a less-regulated jurisdiction after the home country has banned the industry." But the framework has accommodated stranger arrangements before.

The broader geopolitical analysis — covered in our piece on why Cambodia absorbed the displaced POGO industry — suggests that the worker migration was a small but inevitable companion to the larger operator migration. Cambodia did not actively recruit Filipino labor; it was just that the operators who relocated brought their existing supervisory structures with them, and those structures included Filipinos.

IX. What Comes Next

Ramon will, by his own estimate, work in Sihanoukville for somewhere between two and four years. He has thought about whether he would relocate permanently to Cambodia. He has not seriously considered it. His Cambodian is functional but limited, his social network is overwhelmingly Filipino-expat, and his children are at ages where their education and social development require continuity in Manila. The compound is a workplace, not a home.

At some point, he will return. He does not know what he will do when he does. The PIGO and e-Games sector will look different in three years than it does now. The BPO industry will have continued its own evolution under the pressure of AI displacement. The gap that his POGO supervisory experience filled in the labor market will not have a successor in the same form. He will need to find something new.

This is, in the larger sense, the condition of Filipino labor in the early 21st century. The work is mobile. The worker is mobile. The institutional categories that try to track the work and the worker are perpetually one cycle behind. Ramon understands this in a way that the Department of Migrant Workers does not, because Ramon is living it and the Department is reporting on it.

The building on Bradco Avenue still stands. The marble is still the same. Sixteen stories above the street, somewhere on a renovated floor, a different set of workers performs a different kind of labor for a different employer. They do not know what was there before. They do not need to. The work continues, with different terms, in a different language, for a different reason. The building does not require continuity. Neither, in the end, does the labor market.

Maricel cleans a Manila Bay casino floor at 4 AM — that story is told elsewhere. Ramon supervises a Sihanoukville customer support floor at 9 AM. The space between them is, in the geography of regional gaming labor, both very small and very large.

This is the migration. It is largely complete. It will not be the last one.