In the early Philippines, however, while society had advanced enough to support specialised industries, the scale of society meant that a lower level of surplus was required of them. This meant that agricultural and industrial workers had to produce significant surplus.

Spain’s capacity-and ambition-for circumnavigating the world relied on a relatively advanced economic system, in which vast resources were channeled into highly specialised pursuits. When the Spanish set about colonizing the Philippines, it was likely a clash in notions of work that lead the conquistadores to view their victims as lazy. And while it soon became widely adopted by people of all religions, this socio-cultural background shouldn’t be overlooked. It’s a fairly recent view in the grand scheme of history, its rise often attributed to the Reformation movement. While most people use it to refer broadly to attitudes toward work, properly speaking, work ethic refers to the idea that work has intrinsic moral value and, therefore, ought to be pursued largely as an end in itself. There’s one more thing to consider before going further: the idea of work ethic. Positioned at the intersection of these views, Juan Tamad provides a means to examine more deeply the Philippines’ attitudes toward work and creativity, as well as the various factors that have shaped and continue to shape them. Others, however, view him as a demeaning caricature drawn by exploitative taskmasters-and his, ahem, innovations thus appear as clever subversion of authority. Some, especially frustrated employers, see him as an accurate representation of their errant charges. No one in their house has any dinner that night. Too lazy to carry them back in a bucket, however, he decides to release the crabs and have them scurry on home ahead of him. In one story, he is tasked by his mother to bring some crabs home for dinner. Juan, whose moniker is Filipino for ‘lazy,’ is a young man who tends to get in trouble for corner-cutting ploys. One of the more infamous characters in Philippine literature is the Picaresque Juan Tamad.

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