A shroud of corporate confidentiality is cloaking the misery of a growing number of young Filipinos who find themselves without jobs, or prospects of finding work, at the onset of the holiday season. Together with their last paychecks and perhaps whatever benefits they have accrued, young men and women, the story goes, have been asked to sign confidentiality agreements forever shrouding in secrecy the circumstances surrounding their dismissal.

The stories, passed along by word of mouth in huddled groups of friends but barred from ever reaching the media, goes this way: One day, you show up for work, only to discover your access card to enter the office doesn?t work. You ask the guard. He says you are no longer employed. The human resources department later calls you at home to arrange the paperwork formalizing your dismissal.

Or you enter the office, sit at your workstation, only to find out that you can?t log into the system. Your access has been denied?permanently, it turns out. You are then called in by your supervisor and given your walking papers.

It isn?t just you who ended up out of work and out of luck that day. Dozens, scores, hundreds of you, have been fired, too. Your call center employer has gone bust, or is radically downsizing to keep from going bust. The company that hired you as a technical writer, a programmer, encoder, and so forth, has major clients that have gone bankrupt, and so everyone associated with the work they subcontracted to the firm has become redundant, and teams must be reconfigured, reengineered. So you are fired, sometimes under circumstances that prevent you from even just commiserating with each other over your sudden loss of work.

For those who are told the bad news, the stories are all the same because they can only telegraph the barest details about the inner turmoil, the personal devastation that each firing represents. One person stumbles out of the office and onto the staircase or sidewalk or pocket park where in happier days people congregated to exchange office and personal gossip.

There, groups are huddled together, hands on shoulders, some embracing, some with faces contorted in rage, others with blank expressions. Others sit, or crouch, alone. Some sob, others gasp, many whisper, occasionally a few?usually the loners?clutch themselves and let out what can only be described as a primal scream.

The working hours may have been weird: working hours that brought the risk of late-night or early-morning rape for some women, difficulties adjusting to days where day is night and night is day for most. There was also the accumulation of vices to pass the time or fat from living off junk food. But those hours and those jobs brought material rewards aplenty, starting salaries that often matched the wages of workers much older and much more experienced in the corporate world. But whether higher or lower, the wages were still good, and they made possible a measure of financial freedom to help the family and leave something for fun and the outward signs of prosperity. You could earn a foreign salary without having to leave the country.

And it was dazzling, in a way, while it lasted: you were plugged into the global economy, working for foreign firms, with foreign bosses. It was never easy, but in its way, it was fun. You could buy stuff and do stuff and in a sense you knew what it was like to live a modern life with modern things. And now: it?s all gone. And not even a Merry Christmas!

The stories continue. It would have been less painful if they only showed they cared, if they only showed some regret over losing us, if only they showed some sign that they know it sucks to be out of a job without any notice and just as Christmastime is here. But no such luck, no such caring, no such concern. Office friends are left consoling each other in brief, post-firing reunions marked by tears and sighs, and drinking, promises of eternal friendship and then? who knows?

To be sure, there was a mounting sense of dread as the economy unraveled in the United States, which wasn?t helped by rumors that the impending election of Barack Obama would unleash US government policies unfriendly to the business process outsourcing industry. But no one expected it would start unfolding so quickly, and in many ways, so thoroughly. The firings, the reduced teams, the rearrangement of supervisors and managers, the counting of heads to see who is left, the calculating of odds to see whether one will survive the next round of firings? because it will surely happen.

I can only paint in bold, and essentially superficial, strokes the devastating experiences of so many young people, because their former employers don?t want the bad publicity that necessarily accompanies mass layoffs. But then perhaps the broader picture will suffice, because surely you know someone who has told you similar things, who experienced the gutting of holiday happiness by suddenly being fired.

?We are prepared to give up some of our freedoms in order to move this country forward.? Do you remember that saying, and how there seemed, for a time, for too many, wisdom in it because things seemed to be going up and up and all the concerns about mere politics seemed so pedestrian, so insular, so old world and un-modern? I know many young people for whom the stubborn stupidities and ferocity of our political and social reality had become so irrelevant, so bothersome, and felt that old-fashioned notions of community and country were better left to old people to fight over because they were no longer worth fighting for.

And they continue to have a point, because, for all the noisy declarations of the politically aware and involved about their being for the people, here we have a growing number of young people suddenly facing a dead end. And no one has any solutions, or answers. Happy holidays, indeed.