Hiring in Huila: The Employment Commitments We Make in Public

A project that arrives in a rural area always brings the same promise with it, usually in the form of a number: jobs. It is the easiest thing to say and the hardest thing to be held to, because by the time anyone checks, the number has been quietly redefined — a week of day labour counted the same as a career.

So this article contains no number. Phoenix Initiative Colombia has not hired anyone. Not one contract has been signed, not one position filled, not one training place taken. Phoenix Oasis, the retreat centre being built at Rivera in Huila, will open on 30 June 2028, and the whole employment story is ahead of us.

What follows is the set of rules the project intends to hire by. They are being published early on purpose. Commitments made before there is any pressure to bend them are the only ones worth anything.

Why say it now rather than later

Every hiring decision looks reasonable at the moment it is made. It is only in aggregate, a year in, that a pattern becomes visible: the skilled roles all went to people who arrived with the project, the local jobs were all seasonal, the women were all in cleaning and the men were all in construction. Nobody decided that. It simply happened, one reasonable decision at a time.

The way to avoid it is to write the constraints down before the first decision, in a document that outlives the person making it.

The commitments

• Local first, and defined. Priority to people from Rivera and the surrounding municipalities of Huila, with "local" defined in writing rather than stretched to mean whoever is convenient.
• Formal employment. Written contracts under Colombian labour law, with the affiliations that go with them — health, pension and occupational risk cover. No informal cash arrangements, on the site or through intermediaries.
• No unpaid work. No unpaid internships, no unpaid trial periods, no volunteer roles that are jobs wearing another word.
• Equal pay for the same role, and pay bands recorded internally so the question can actually be answered.
• Women in every category, including the trades. Not a quota on the total headcount, but a refusal to accept a structure where women appear only in the lowest-paid categories.
• Training attached to hiring. Where a role needs a skill the area does not yet have in quantity, the default is to train rather than to import the skill permanently.
• Contractors bound by the same terms. A commitment that stops at the boundary of a subcontract is a loophole, not a commitment.

The construction phase is not the operation phase

These are two different labour markets and they should be spoken about separately, because conflating them is how projects inflate what they offer.

Construction work is intense, skilled and finite. It ends. Treating a building phase as if it were lasting local employment is a familiar sleight of hand, and the honest framing is the opposite: a construction phase is a chance to leave behind skills and certified experience that outlast the site. Guadua, wood and volcanic stone — the materials planned for the eco bungalows — sit inside a real Colombian building tradition, and working with them is a transferable craft, not a temporary task.

Operation is the longer story: hospitality, maintenance, kitchen, grounds, training. Different skills, different seasonality, and the phase where a project either becomes part of a local economy or remains a compound with a gate.

Who a place like this tends to leave out

Rural employment schemes have a predictable set of blind spots, and naming them in advance is cheaper than discovering them later.

Women with young children are excluded by shift patterns rather than by policy. People without transport are excluded by geography. Those without a formal work history are excluded by recruitment habits that reward paperwork over capability. Older workers are excluded by assumptions nobody says out loud.

The intention is to design against each of those: schedules planned around school hours where the role allows, transport considered part of the job design rather than the employee's private problem, and recruitment that tests what someone can do rather than what they can document.

What we will report

Not "jobs created." That phrase will not appear.

The plan is to report the number of people employed with their status — permanent, fixed-term, construction phase — the proportion who are from the municipality and the department, the distribution of women across pay categories rather than across the total, and how many people moved from a training place into a paid role. Uncomfortable distributions will be published as they are.

A test we will fail if we are careless

Here is the honest measure of whether any of this worked, and it will not be available for years: when someone leaves the project, do they leave with more than they arrived with? A certificate that means something elsewhere, a skill, a formal work history, a reference.

Phoenix Oasis will open on 30 June 2028. Every commitment above concerns a future that has not started yet, and each one is written in a form that can be checked against reality later. That is the point of publishing it now — the mission and its commitments are set out on the foundation page.