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

Chapter 7: Securing Their Added Export Value

178 Chapter 7 Securing Their Added Export Value You can call Filipinos anytime and they will work— even if they have not had any sleep. However, I maybe hardworking but it is also because I have a goal. I want to earn extra money. —Eureka Incognito, a nurse in Arizona On October 3, 2005, I received a startling voice mail message from Eureka Incognito, a nurse I had met in Arizona seven months earlier.“I am now in California,” she said in her usual upbeat and excited voice. She was staying temporarily at her father’s friend’s house as she looked for jobs in Los Angeles and San Diego. She spoke with a sense of hope and happiness that I had not heard in a long time and especially not in the past few months. Our usual conversations had revolved around her daily complaints about the unfair distribution of workload, in which she was at a disadvantage, and the inability of the employment agency managing her contract to intervene on her behalf or to entertain her persistent requests for a job transfer. This was coupled with the fact that she also felt terribly isolated from other Filipino nurses, as she was one of the few who had ended up in a hospital unit devoid of any other Filipinos. As her work situation worsened and it became increasingly clear that she was not going to get any relief from her agency, she decided to tap into her savings to buy out the remainder of her contract and pursue employment in California on her own. Eureka, like many nurses from the Philippines, possessed the nursing skill, education, and work ethic that are desired by any employer looking to benefit from the so-called added export value—the unique Filipino labor power—of Filipina nurses. However, she also behaved in ways that defied the expectations of her employers. Far from being “quiet,” she pointed out her higher patient load, compared with those of her colleagues , during her work shifts, which often rendered her unable to take breaks. She demanded assistance from her colleagues whenever she became overwhelmed with her patients. She once reported a technical error that her colleague had committed as a matter of procedure and patient protection, even though it meant suffering a backlash from other nurses. She asked her agency why her paychecks did not correspond to the amount of overtime hours she had put in, only to find out that this agency pocketed half of her overtime pay. Needless to say, Eureka is not the marketable ideal—docile—worker who is the dream of foreign employers. As a result, her supervisors wrote her up as being “combative ,”“unfriendly,” and“not a team player” while the employment agency that was supposed to also advocate for her frequently dismissed her complaints as a product of homesickness and suggested “personal counseling” as a remedy. In this chapter, I address Filipino nurses’ understanding and internalization of the quality of their work in ways that echo what agencies have been pitching as their added export value as nurses. That is, nurses also believe that they offer a unique form of labor power that they racially brand as distinctively Filipino. I highlight Eureka’s story because she is one of these nurses. But she is also an exception and behaved in ways that challenged the very ideals that she embraced that made Filipino nurses desirable—the capacity and willingness to assume multiple responsibilities, flexibility, and unrivaled loyalty and commitment to their employers. Therefore, her experiences also very importantly reveal the inherent vulnerabilities that Filipino nurses face as foreign contract workers who have very limited recourse to take action against their employers. In this chapter, I provide the rationale and motivation behind this internalization and the vulnerabilities that the nurses possess in ways that explain their own understanding of themselves as model workers or the readiness to embody this discursive construction even though it may consequently portray them as docile and passive. This simultaneous empowerment and disempowerment that they derive from internalizing the notion that Filipinos are “different” and “better” nurses may not necessarily ensure job security and may even undermine worker solidarity. But it provides them with some measure of self-satisfaction and pride. Securing Their Added Export Value 179 M a r k e t i n g D r e a m s , M a n u f ac t...