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

Chapter 3: Governing and (Dis)Empowering Filipino Migrants

50 Chapter 3 Governing and (Dis)Empowering Filipino Migrants We are proud of our overseas Filipino workers as our new heroes. They bravely chart international paths many of us have not dared venture in. They forge new courses of friendship and amity for the Philippines. They strengthen our economy and in many ways allow us to enjoy the fruits of their collective behavior. —Former senator Leticia Ramos Shahani, RA 8042: Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act of 1995 In a room filled with about thirty-five women, an impassioned woman stands proud, shouting,“You are not yet heroes.You are just soldiers right now!”This woman is MildredYamzon, cofounder of theWomen in Development Foundation (WIDF), an NGO authorized by the Philippine state to provide pre-departure orientation seminars (PDOSs) to prospective domestic workers headed overseas. Alternating between the personas of a preacher delivering a sermon to her congregation and an army commander explaining survival tactics to her battalion, Yamzon powerfully transforms these sessions into something more than simply a place where prospective workers can receive guidance on travel to their destination.Rather,it becomes a space where women workers,whom some view as an endangered species, are made clearly and bluntly aware of the potential dangers they face overseas.1 In partnership with the state, NGOs such as WIDF supply information to the women that is supposed to prepare and empower them, this information all narrated within the framework of giving meaning and tribute to their sacrifice in the name of their families and nation.Yamzon and her colleagues define their work as meeting the state’s so-called gender-sensitive criteria by empowering the women to see their “comparative advantage” as Filipino workers and to view themselves as more than workers, to see themselves as professionals, heroes, ambassadors of goodwill, and investors.2 Promoting empowerment to support the vulnerabilities of all Filipino workers and elevate their social value in fact leads to their commodi fication. The state’s framework for “managing labor migration” is built on this ideology of empowerment, which accords with the state’s neoliberal ethos of governing Filipino workers by fusing together Filipino “moral” values of family and nationalism with Westernized notions of economic competitiveness.3 The Philippine state’s management of labor migration through the art of government is a means of ruling a population by influencing its conduct (Foucault 1991; Rose 1999; Rose and Miller 1992). It is a strategy that reflects a state that derives power and legitimacy from appearing less concerned about dominating its population than about empowering its citizens to self-govern.While claiming not to promote labor migration but instead supporting the choices of its citizens, it governs from a distance by defining and enabling the very choices it purports to support. This form of empowerment derives fromWestern values of freedom, individualism, rationality, and self-accountability, combined with the neoliberal market rationality of economic competitiveness and entrepreneurship . All these values contribute to the production of a marketoriented citizenship and the formation of a gendered and racialized moral economy of the Filipino migrant based on what the state and its labor-brokering partners determine should be the obligations of migrants to their families and nation (Guevarra 2003). Ong (2006, 199) similarly discusses the “moral economy of the female migrant” to describe the system of “unequal relationships of exchange based on a morality of reciprocity, mutual obligation, and protection” and foregrounds the role of NGOs in this process. My conceptualization of the moral economy of the Filipino migrant not only highlights its gendered dynamic but also identifies its racialized aspects whereby its formation is influenced by norms both of femininity and masculinity and of particular Filipino cultural and social values. While this moral economy is about the actual value systems that inform Filipino migrants’ actions and the web of exploitative situations in which they are entangled, it is also about the disciplinary power of the state and Governing and (Dis)Empowering Migrants 51 its partners, which seek to define their social conduct and sense of belonging to the nation.The gendered and racialized moral economy of the Filipino migrant underscores the cultural logic that governs how overseas Filipino workers are supposed to behave, as model Filipinos who can embody an ethic of responsibility toward their families, nation, and the representation of the Great Filipino Worker, while maintaining their commodification and submission...