Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World

Introduction: Neoliberalism and the Philippine Labor Brokerage State

Introduction Neoliberalism and the Philippine Labor Brokerage State Not only am I the head of state responsible for a nation of 80 million people. I’m also the CEO of a global Philippine enterprise of 8 million Filipinos who live and work abroad and generate billions of dollars a year in revenue for our country. — President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, May 2003 A “Global Enterprise” of Labor During a state visit to the United States in 2003, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo aggressively encouraged U.S. businesspeople to hire Philippine workers to fill their employment needs in the territorial United States and beyond. When American colonizers encountered Filipinos in 1898, they considered them a backward and savage lot who were, nevertheless, sufficiently educable. The United States proceeded to violently conquer the Filipino people and then, with a policy of “benevolent assimilation,” schooled them into being proper colonial subjects who could labor for the nascent empire. Arroyo assures her audience that American colonial education adequately served its purpose and even exceeded it.1 Today, Arroyo suggests, the Filipino is a thoroughly modern and civilized global worker who can labor anywhere and under any set of circumstances for American as well as other employers. The president insists that Philippine workers can be relied upon to labor for the contemporary U.S. empire, pledging that Philippine workers will “play a role in helping rebuild the land for the people of Iraq.” No ix x Introduction matter how difficult or dangerous a place of employment may be, Filipinos and Filipinas are ever-willing workers. Employers can even be spared the expense of training workers because it is a task done in the Philippines, one that the Philippine government has “worked hard to support.” Though not stated explicitly by the president, her speech does suggest that employers can save on labor costs because Philippine workers are a temporary workforce ostensibly less able or willing to demand wage increases or better benefits over time. In short, the promise of the Philippine worker is not merely the promise of a worker of good quality, but ultimately one who is cheap. According to Arroyo, she is not merely president but also the “CEO” of a profitable “global enterprise” that generates revenues by successfully assembling together and exporting a much soughtafter commodity worldwide: “highly skilled, well-educated, Englishspeaking ” as well as “productive” and “efficient” workers. By calling herself a “CEO” Arroyo represents herself not as a head of state but as an entrepreneur, the ideal neoliberal subject, who rationally maximizes her country’s competitive advantage in the global market. I suggest that the Philippines, especially when it comes to migrants, is a labor brokerage state. Labor brokerage is a neoliberal strategy that is comprised of institutional and discursive practices through which the Philippine state mobilizes its citizens and sends them abroad to work for employers throughout the world while generating a “profit” from the remittances that migrants send back to their families and loved ones remaining in the Philippines. The Philippine state negotiates with labor-receiving states to formalize outflows of migrant workers and thereby enables employers around the globe to avail themselves of temporary workers who can be summoned to work for finite periods of time and then returned to their homeland at the conclusion of their employment contracts. As Antonio Tujan of IBON (a nonprofit research-education-information development institution), a longtime critic of the government’s labor export program, puts it, the Philippine state engages in nothing more than “legal human trafficking.”2 Figure 1. Brochure produced by the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration. xii Introduction If, as many scholars have argued, global capital demands “flexible” labor, Philippine migrants are uniquely “flexible” as short-term, contractual , and incredibly mobile workers. Employers of Philippine workers need not “race to the bottom” by relocating to the Philippines but can actually stay in place as Philippine workers can be conveyed directly to them. The Philippines offers a reserve army of labor to be deployed for capital across the planet. The Philippine state, in fact, distinguishes itself in its capacity to facilitate the out-migration of its population to destinations spanning the planet. It is undeniably the world’s premier “global enterprise” of labor as the Philippine migrant worker has become practically ubiquitous around the globe. The worldwide distribution of Philippine migrants is staggering and perhaps unmatched by any other labor...