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

Chapter 5: Selling Filipinas’ Added Export Value

Chapter 5 Selling Filipinas’ Added Export Value Filipinos are easy to [teach]. All they need is a little bit of training and they already know what to do. [Foreign employers] save on training costs. With very little time, they could easily adjust. There are not too many problems teaching Filipinos. Sometimes, even when the skills required for the job do not match the capability of the Filipinos hired for that job, they make it a point to deliver the kind of work and service that employers want. —A labor broker from Holodeck, a nursing employment agency A bright spotlight illuminates a tiny room equipped with a television monitor and video camera. The videographer, Marco, directs a job applicant dressed in a maid’s uniform to the back of the room to stand with her back against a white wall. Marco asks her to put her feet together and her heels against the wall. He gives her a cardboard sign that reads, “File #345: Maria Reyes,” and tells her exactly how to hold the sign up against her chest, keeping it steady at all times. Marco views her on camera, and dissatisfied with how she looks, fixes the collar of her dress. Meanwhile, Maria observes herself on a television monitor that is connected Marco’s camera, which directly faces her. “I am too fat,” she says. Observing this, I find myself trying to console her, assuring her that she “looks great.” Marco laughs and tells her to “get ready” and to give him that ngiti ng mayaman (wealthy person’s smile). He encourages her to stand still as he attempts to capture her complete “body shot” while she holds her cardboard sign for about five seconds. Then, with his right hand, he motions her to come forward, to take two 123 steps away from the wall, and then signals her to stop at the yellow line on the floor. He zooms the camera to focus on her face and, with fingers of one hand, silently counts to three; on the third count, he points to her. Maria begins reciting a scripted speech that Marco had given her the week before in which she tries to persuade her prospective employer why she would be their ideal maid (field notes, March 7, 2002). This scene captures a typical session in the recruitment process of the agency Starfleet as it generates video representations of prospective domestic workers for Hong Kong–based employers. Employers will scrutinize these videos and from them they select a maid for their household .While this videography process is unique to domestic work recruitment , it fundamentally symbolizes the spirit of the labor export industry. Given the level of competition among labor brokers, the success of any agency in crafting a reputable and credible identity depends on its ability not only to promote a unique service, but also, and more important, to deliver workers who have the requisite skills and knowledge to perform a given job. The meticulous process through which domestic workers’ videos are produced is emblematic of the process through which these ideal workers are manufactured for global industries that are determined to find a cost-effective workforce. Besides providing jobs to Filipinos, brokers also groom them to increase their marketability. Marco’s calculated orchestration of applicants’ appearance on screen mirrors a key element within the larger set of disciplinary techniques that brokers deploy to project Filipinos’ comparative advantage. Labor brokers in nursing and domestic work industries endeavor to market this “advantage” through specific ideological constructions of their marked value as global labor commodities. The construction of Filipinos as ideal nurses and domestic workers relies on the “trope of productive femininity” (Salzinger 2003, 2004) that shapes how Third World women come to be imagined as suitable laboring subjects. Although labor brokers are keenly aware of men’s participation as nurses and domestic workers overseas, this trope of productive femininity guides how they inhere women with an assumed predisposition and suitability for performing nursing or domestic work. However, it is also a racialized and locally specific construct. Alongside the popular political economic discourse that holds that the Philippines has a surplus of highly skilled labor is a naturalized view 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 124 that Filipinos are cost-effective workers...