Abstract
Anyone who walks through the central districts of Ermita and Malate in Manila will notice hundreds of Filipinos lined up outside private recruitment agencies in search of work abroad. The job postings on the windows reveal the global reach of Filipino labor migration: babysitters and domestic helpers are ‘urgently needed’ in Abu Dhabi; ‘lady drivers’ and Muslim beauticians are ‘top urgent for KSA’ (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia); block factory foremen and hydraulic mechanics are sought for work in Qatar; assistant nurses are being recruited for carework in Kuwait.
Labor migration is big business, and in a Philippine context, the billions of dollars in remittances sent by overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) serve a vital role in the nation’s economy. As we learn in Robyn Magalit Rodriguez’s book, Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World, nearly 10% of the Philippine population is employed abroad, an estimated 8 million (more recent reports estimate 12 million OFWs). The historical constellations that shape this transnational phenomenon are the focus of Rodriguez’s book, which addresses the difficult and fundamental questions of ‘how and why citizens from the Philippines have come to be the most globalized workforce on the planet’ (p. 141).
According to Rodriguez, the answers are to be found in the essential role occupied by the Philippine state in the systematic management of migrants. Her qualitative study examines the emergence of the ‘labor brokerage state’, meaning the ‘mechanisms by which the Philippine state mobilizes, exports, and regulates migrant labor to meet worldwide gendered and racialized labor demand’ (p. xv). Rodriguez also draws out some implications for a global understanding of state actions in migrant struggles.
The opening chapter provides a detailed discussion of the historical, institutional, and structural conditions that give rise to the labor brokerage state in the Philippines. Rodriguez traces its origins to the US colonial labor system and its concomitant political and economic structures, and she proceeds to examine the emergence of formal, state-sponsored training and education programs that prepared citizens for overseas work (one of the earliest formations was the training of nurses, which foreshadowed the mass export of careworkers to the US). This is followed by a discussion of labor recruiters, who are influenced by broader market logics but whose actions are ultimately constrained by the immigration laws, state policies, and visa requirements of labor-receiving countries. To address market forces and legal constraints, the Philippine state steps in to engage in diplomatic relations with receiving countries to help regulate migrant labor flows. Refined over several decades, neocolonial Philippine state policy has developed a well-oiled bureaucratic apparatus that systematically manages and disciplines millions of OFWs. The rest of the book focuses on this apparatus.
Some conceptual framing of the labor brokerage system is found in Chapter 2. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘authorization’, Rodriguez shows how government agencies actively facilitate the mass out-migration of Filipinos to nearly 200 countries by exercising power through routine bureaucratic practices. First, state agencies such as the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) and the International Labor Affairs Service (ILAS) conduct market research to identify labor trends and visa requirements of receiving countries, and then pass information about immigration policy openings and closures to prospective migrants and agencies in the form of ‘market updates’. Second, the labor brokerage state invests in skills training and certification programs through the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA). Third, the transnational migration bureaucracy processes migrants’ legal documents to verify that workers meet formal requirements established by host countries. The discussion of the often mundane nature of the state’s bureaucratic document processing is surprisingly exciting, as Rodriguez describes how migrants navigate the halls of the POEA building in Manila, which processes nearly 3000 OFWs each day. The spaces are highly policed, and Rodriguez notes: ‘the monitoring that takes place in the Philippine migration agencies serves as a rehearsal for what is likely to be even more stringent examination at international borders’ (p. 42).
Chapter 3 examines how the state cultivates labor markets abroad by drawing upon racialized and gendered discourses to promote its migrant workers to foreign counties. Rather than just responding to labor demands, as discussed in the previous chapter, the labor brokerage state develops promotional materials akin to commercial advertising, and then engages in diplomatic formal and informal negotiations with labor-receiving states to open up additional markets to OFWs. POEA brochures used in these negotiations claim that Filipinos possess certain skills and cultural attitudes that make them more desirable and competitive in the global labor market. Some migrants interviewed by Rodriguez echo these sentiments and report feelings of pride in their ‘distinction’ as Filipino workers – as more patient or masipag (hardworking). Rodriguez contends that these ‘cultural nationalist ideas can serve to reproduce racialized differences in the workplace and therefore undermine worker solidarity’ (p. 64).
Chapter 4 is probably the most conceptually useful section of the book, because it offers an examination of the tensions that emerge in state–citizen relations. Here, Rodriguez introduces the notion of migrant citizenship as a set of rights and responsibilities that facilitates the out-migration of Filipinos while fostering their ties to the nation. In other words, ‘membership in the Philippines is increasingly construed as actually requiring employment overseas’ (p. 79). This complex state–citizen relation is shaped by duties such as sending remittances (often formally defined in labor contracts), but also through emergent nationalist discourses that frame migrants as ‘new national heroes’. Rituals and commemorative ceremonies celebrate migrant returns, and these events function to reconfigure notions of citizenship and belonging; some officials cited in the text even describe this new heroism as ‘a voluntary act of self-sacrificing individuals living in a democratic society’ (p. 84). Here, Rodriguez examines how the state fosters migrants’ links to the homeland (so that they send remittances home, and so that they eventually return). These links are cultivated by shaping the migrants’ ‘ sense of membership before they even leave’ (p. 78) and by invoking familial and nationalist discourses.
The next chapter underscores how the export of labor has been characterized by gendered tensions, a thread that is also carefully woven throughout the book. The author examines the middle-class anxieties produced by the shifting role of Filipina women in society: that is, the simultaneous ‘hypervisibility of Filipinas abroad as domestic workers and their invisibility at “home” ’ (p. 95). In other words, conflicting discourses circulate with regard to gender, as some argue that the absence of women destabilizes Filipino families, while others suggest that remittances from women help stabilize the nation. We learn earlier in the book that migrants, who since the 1990s have been mostly women, are formally trained with specific skills that are demanded of their overseas employment (such as learning to operate basic household appliances and to cook local cuisines). As a result of legislation that aimed to protect the rights and well-being of migrant workers, this training now includes obligatory ‘gender sensitive’ Pre-Departure Orientation Seminars (PDOS). In one PDOS that Rodriguez observed, trainers used ‘values-formation sessions’ and ‘confidence building exercises’ which sought to instill ‘certain kinds of family values’ among migrant women (pp. 105–107). Drawing on notions of governmentality, Rodriguez notes: ‘observations of the programmatic measures … reveal how initiatives meant to “protect” women workers are a means of disciplining them to perform specific familial and nationalist obligations’ (p. 106). In short, these exercises function as ‘neoliberal techniques of self-government and regulation’ (p. 108).
Overseas workers are not always docile in the migration process, as Rodriguez shows in her account of a wildcat strike by Filipino migrant workers in Brunei. In analyzing the way the state handled this conflict over wages and work conditions, Rodriguez examines the limits of migrant citizenship and the ways in which the labor brokerage state is caught between protecting and disciplining its migrant citizens. She documents efforts by migration officials to mandate minimum wages, ensure acceptable working and living conditions, create grievance systems that allow workers to file monetary claims against employers during contractual disputes, and repatriate workers who are embroiled in legal conflicts. Despite a few instances of the Philippine state intervening on behalf of its migrant citizens, Rodriguez concludes that the Philippine state, in its brokering of settlements, tends to side with the interests of foreign employers and governments. In the case of Brunei, which Rodriguez presents as exemplary in this regard, ‘the Philippine state participated in negotiating away the rights of Filipino workers’ (p. 130).
The concluding chapter discusses the implications of her findings for scholarship on international migration and the state. Rodriguez makes a persuasive case that labor brokerage is the necessary structural outcome of neoliberal restructuring. She concludes: Systems of labor brokerage may, in fact, be a necessary institutional form in this contemporary moment as a mode of organizing labor under conditions of neoliberal globalization. It offers a kind of ‘fix’ for global capital and other neoliberalizing labor-importing states that demand temporary workers who will not make claims for membership and will return to their countries of origin once their jobs are done. (p. 143)
The final chapter also includes a short discussion of efforts by activist organizations like Migrante International, which the author describes as a form of ‘counter-hegemonic (trans)nationalism’ (p. 152). While Migrante is linked to other progressive and militant movements (like BAYAN or the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan, New Patriotic Alliance) that resist neoliberalism, readers are left without a critique of power within the group (for example, the internal racial, ethnic, or gendered dynamics) or commentary on the ways in which group or movement activities may have been shaped by the same structural conditions that constrained and enabled the neoliberal state migration apparatus. Similarly, I wondered about Migrante’s relation to militant feminist groups like Gabriela, which has also been active in mobilizing on behalf of OFWs, but which is only briefly mentioned in the book.
Readers encounter a few short glimpses of migrant experiences as they maneuver through Rodriguez’s accounts of state bureaucracy, but we do not hear too much about their daily lives. It is clear, however, that Rodriguez had different goals in mind; she sought to conduct an ethnography of the state and the often mundane bureaucratic procedures that shape the experiences and opportunities of migrant workers. As migrants go through these bureaucratic procedures, readers can see how these workers are treated as commodities to be disciplined, mobilized, and exported.
This book offers a rich, innovative account of the state and its governing of international migration. Rodriguez conducted her fieldwork in 2000–2001, but her account remains relevant for understanding current developments in Philippine labor politics. As I write this review in late 2012, POEA officials have announced that they have considered reducing, or even phasing out completely, the export of domestic workers over the next five years. In response, many labor-receiving states have fussed about potential labor shortages. The proposed reforms, and the diplomatic negotiations that will likely follow, affirm the continued importance of Rodriguez’s book for examining how the state functions as a labor broker in the mass migration of Filipino workers.