Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes: The Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Workers

Chapter 1: Home of the Great Filipino Worker

Chapter 1 Home of the Great Filipino Worker I know that our president and our leaders want us to believe that it is up to the individual Filipino to decide to work overseas. [But] she has to consider her financial status when making that decision. And her financial status says that you don’t have a status! So you have to leave. There are a lot of promises about giving us some opportunities to work here but nothing really happens and Filipinos just end up going overseas. —A former overseas Filipina nurse in Saudi Arabia While waiting in a cramped space of a recruitment agency’s reception area in Manila, a middle-aged woman sitting across from me asks, “Where are you going?” with the certainty that I was also a potential worker. She is one of the modern-day heroines of the Philippines who leave the country to join thousands of her compatriots in a crusade of hope and survival that they envision lie overseas.1 In her tired eyes and exasperated voice, she characterizes life in the Philippines as eternally hopeless and one to which she was returning unwillingly after a three-year terminal contract as a seamstress in Taiwan. “Life has become too hard here in the Philippines and I would have rather stayed in Taiwan, even if it meant becoming a janitor,” she tells me as she finds herself in this agency applying for a similar job. Her next destination: the Marshall Islands. In retrospect, her question jarred me, not so much because she assumed that I was there to seek overseas employment but because it aptly served as a type of tagline, befitting a country whose citizens are on the move—those who willingly reconfigure their careers, their families, 1 and their emotional beings in order to leave.They imagine (and are made to imagine) their future and their economic salvation to exist outside the Philippines. A walk through the streets of Manila alone reinforces this desire and confirms the possibility of escape. First, there are the ubiquitous recruitment agencies clustering on street corners, offering “dream jobs,” “a new life,” or opportunities to become a “millionaire,” all of which are backed by the agency’s unsurpassed “fast deployment” guarantees. Readers of the country’s major newspapers are bombarded by the same promises, which take up more than 90 percent of the classified ads every Sunday. Conveniently located around these agencies are the businesses that also profit from this industry —the travel agencies that advertise “special rates for OFWs” (overseas Filipino workers), the banks that promote themselves as official OFW Remittance Centers, the shops fashioning the latest and most costeffective telecommunication services to“bring OFWs closer to home,” or the state-accredited medical clinics that specifically cater to conducting the required medical exams for OFWs. Radio and television programs are occasionally interrupted by announcements of upcoming job fairs held by foreign employers, often conducted in fancy hotel ballrooms and facilitated by exemplary Filipinos living and working overseas who seek to show their compatriots that they, too, can become a success story. Second, there is the state, steadfast in its claim that it does not promote overseas employment yet participating in overseas “marketing missions ,” parading its citizens as the hottest global labor commodity, whose education, English-language fluency, and “tender loving care” attitude are their “comparative advantage” over others. Even the Department of Tourism’sWeb site interestingly includes Filipino workers along with the country’s “more than usual” natural wonders and tourist attractions, referring to them as “workers of worth.” It features examples of trustworthy Filipinos employed at the airport, a resort, or a coffee shop, who stumbled upon and returned large sums of money or valuables to their rightful owners. These same workers of worth are also the Filipinos whom labor brokers depict as always ready to go, members of a steady stream of applicants for overseas work. Joining them are those who pursue the unimaginable, such as teachers and nurses working as domestic workers and doctors retraining as nurses, seeking quick tickets out of the country. It is no wonder that the M a r k e t i n g D r e a m s , M a n u f ac t u r i n g H e r o e s 2 woman who mistook me for an applicant asked, after realizing...