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  • Labor Pioneers: Economy, Labor, and Migration in Filipino-Danish Relations, 1950–2015 by Nina Trige Andersen
  • Frank Caestecker
Labor Pioneers: Economy, Labor, and Migration in Filipino-Danish Relations, 1950–2015 Nina Trige Andersen Quezon City, PHL: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2019 xv + 435 pp., $26.00 (paper)

Filipino migration to Denmark (and Europe) can be split into two different flows: labor migration and marriage migration. Marriage migration has been a subject of considerable interest in the social sciences because it gives interesting insights into partner markets and is related to intimate decisions of individuals. Some social scientists regard partner migration as a proxy for the integration of migration communities in the host community or, especially in the case of Filipino women, as an expression of the unequal relations between the global North and the global South. Those topics are not dealt with in this book; rather, Nina Trige Anderson focuses on labor migration. The marriage migrant is only mentioned when these mostly female partners of Danish citizens become active on the labor market and interact with Filipino labor migrants. The latter are the focus of this book.

In 1969, six Filipinas were informally recruited as chambermaids for a hotel in Copenhagen (Denmark). In 1973, another hotel in the same town, recruited forty-nine Filipinas through a state agency. These are the pioneers to which the title refers. In 1975, the number of Filipinos in Denmark had reached five hundred. Labor migration from the Philippines did not resume until the late 1990s, under the cloak of cultural exchange. Au pairs were sent to Denmark to take care of children (and to manage the household). As with the chambermaids decades earlier, it was an example of state-brokered labor export. From the early 1970s onward, the Philippine state promoted labor export as a developmental strategy. The labor export program would alleviate unemployment, and their remittances would help the country to serve its foreign debt. The state's mediation of work opportunities abroad had to be paid for. Filipino workers abroad paid income tax in their country of immigration, but until 1997 they also paid a flat tax of 3 percent in the Philippines on their earnings abroad. When workers occasionally returned home to visit relatives, airport police checked these workers' tax records and collected any backlogs in taxes. Although the state initially had a monopoly on the recruitment of workers for abroad, neoliberal criticism of the state's capacity to manage the demand together with lobbying pressure by private companies eager to make profits in this growing business meant that in 1978 the state opened the market to private agencies. The labor export program became immensely successful. The Gulf states and Saudi Arabia were the main countries making ample use of the Filipino labor supply. Authorities in the Philippines had no interest in defending the rights of workers abroad, and there were numerous scandals of abuse and exploitation. The democratic Aquino government emphasized the [End Page 96] duty of Filipino officials to assist their citizens working abroad. It also wanted to steer their emigrant labor toward countries that had a record of respecting workers' rights. The au pair schemes, which are used every year by several thousand affluent families in Scandinavia and the Netherlands for Filipino domestic help, are an example of the limited power the Filipino authorities have in uplifting the labor conditions available to emigrants.

Andersen provides us with a local case study but has embedded it in the broad economic and political history of the last five decades. The author has read widely, and her interpretations of the lives of the Filipinos in Denmark are consistent with the latest research on labor migration. The empirical material is mainly based on oral sources. Danish union activists, Filipino labor officials and, most importantly, the labor migrants themselves have given Andersen ample information. The Filipino labor export policy also gets full attention in her analysis. Through the life stories of these few hundred workers, she documents in full detail how these labor migrants (in tandem with the Danish unions) fought for equal rights for foreign workers in the hotels in the 1970s. During the next decades, the organization of...

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