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

Chapter 8: Conclusion

204 Chapter 8 Conclusion The year 2007 was a good year for the Philippines’ overseas employment program. With more than one million workers deployed globally, the country celebrated being ranked fourth among developing countries for its global remittance flow of $14.4 billion (POEA 2008). The increase in the number of highly skilled professionals (nurses, information technology personnel, engineers) and the corresponding decrease in the number of domestic and construction workers deployed did well to fulfill the state’s project of “upgrading” its image as a labor provider of “high-value jobs.”The opening and expansion of new markets in Canada, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, and Taiwan following the “aggressive” marketing of Filipino workers continued to secure Filipinos’ employment opportunities. As POEA administrator Rosalinda Dimapilis-Baldoz explained, these accomplishments were a tribute to the “world’s number one worker, the Overseas Filipino Workers” (POEA 2008, 7). How these “number one workers,” these “great Filipino workers,” are produced is the focus of this book. In a globalized economy that is heavily sustained by the labor of immigrants, we are prompted to ask how certain places come to be defined as possessing “ideal” labor resources or how certain groups come to dominate a particular labor force. In this book I tackle these questions by using the Philippines as a case study. I have unraveled the social production and commodification of overseas Filipino workers as ideal labor commodities and the Philippines as the home of the Great Filipino Worker. I have described the institutional and cultural forces that enable this social imaginary through the process of labor brokering—a form of labor control and neoliberal capitalist discipline that sustains the country’s labor migration and brands Filipinos in ways that aims to transform them into a highly coveted workforce. It is a transnationally coordinated process that is carried out on multiple levels—that of the Philippine state, of employment agencies, and of workers—all working together to keep vibrant the country’s labor export economy. This book intervenes in the often essentialized explanation that designates economic logic as the primary factor driving “Third World” nations such as the Philippines, to explore such programs of development as overseas employment. That is, while the lack of economically viable employment may create a surplus of “ready-to-go” workers, how employers come to imagine Filipinos and how Filipinos come to perceive working abroad are defined through this brokering process. The Philippine labor export economy is unique certainly not because it is the only one that exists in the world but rather because of the coordinated and institutionalized processes that enable it to steadily send Filipinos to capture a sizeable portion of the global economy as a labor provider. To this end, this book has four goals. First, my intervention in migration discussions shows how labor migration is not a simple linear, bureaucratic process, as it is defined by scholars such as Tyner (1996, 2000) in their descriptions of how the Philippines carries out its labor recruitment process. The ideological and cultural dynamics of this process are integral mechanisms that give meaning to the creativity imbued in marketing Filipinos and overseas employment. Filipino workers themselves also define their migration pathways, as in the case of America-dreaming nurses who pursue alternate routes as stepping-stones to an eventual job in the United States. Second, this intervention provides a more complex picture of the driving force for Filipino migration that is not limited to an economic logic of supply and demand. In this scenario, the outflow of labor is merely the result of an impoverished country that cannot provide viable means of livelihood for its citizens and leads to a creation of a surplus of skilled workers that can readily address the needs of a globalizing economy. I agree with Choy’s (2003) contention of the presence of a culture of migration in the Philippines that supplements or deprivileges this economic logic. But extending Choy’s claims, I show how institutions such as the state and employment agencies act as social bodies that coalesce to generate ideologies and produce an ethos of labor migration unique to a contemporary period shaped by neoliberalism and a global division of gendered and racialized labor. Conclusion 205 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...