Introduction-A “Global Enterprise” of Labor
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. business- people to hire Philippine workers to fill their employment needs in the territorial United States and beyond. When American coloniz- ers 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 presi- dent 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
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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 sought- after commodity worldwide: “highly skilled, well-educated, English- speaking” 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 insti- tutional 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 remit- tances 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 Philip- pine state engages in nothing more than “legal human trafficking.”2
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Figure 1. Brochure produced by the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration.
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xii Introduction
If, as many scholars have argued, global capital demands “flexible” labor, Philippine migrants are uniquely “flexible” as short-term, con- tractual, and incredibly mobile workers. Employers of Philippine workers need not “race to the bottom” by relocating to the Philip- pines 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 capac- ity 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-sending country.3 According to the most recent (2008) statistics from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) one of the key institutions in the Philippine government’s transnational migration apparatus, 1,236,013 Filipino and Filipina workers were deployed in some 200 countries and territories around the globe. These workers joined the millions of Philippine migrants already employed overseas to total an estimated 8,233,172.4 With a population of over 80 million people, that means that nearly 10 percent of the Philippine population is working abroad.
Among newly deployed migrants, the top occupations in which Philippine migrants are employed are the following (in order): household service workers; waiters, cleaners, and related workers; charworkers, cleaners, and related workers; nurses, professional; care- givers and caretakers; laborers/helpers, general; plumbers and pipe fitters; electrical wiremen; welders and flame-cutters; building care- takers.5 Both men and women leave the country although in the past decade women’s out-migration has outpaced the out-migration of men. However, statistics collected from April to September 2008 indicate that 51.6 percent of migrants were men while 48.4 per- cent were women. One in four migrants were between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine, and one-third were unskilled.6
Philippine migrants’ global mobility occurs in the face of increas- ing immigration restrictiveness around the world. Many countries
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Introduction xiii
are strengthening their borders, especially against those hoping to immigrate and settle with their families.7 In spite of this trend, out- migration from the Philippines continues to increase. The Philippine state has been central to the globalization of Filipina and Filipino workers. While people from the Philippines actively seek out oppor- tunities to live and work overseas for a variety of reasons, ultimately the countries they imagine as possible sites for temporary sojourns as well as the jobs they apply for are determined in large part by the Philippine state’s labor brokerage strategy.8
President Arroyo, for example, played a vital role in securing new jobs for Philippine workers in the Middle East to support U.S. military operations. After meeting U.S. businessmen, she met U.S. govern- ment officials to discuss the two countries’ shared interests in the global “war on terror” and, it can be assumed, transfers of Philip- pine labor, for not long after her brief stint in the United States, Iraq was added to the ever-growing list of Philippine migrants’ coun- tries of destination. Moreover, according to a report by the POEA published shortly after President Arroyo’s U.S. visit, ten thousand to fifteen thousand jobs were expected to open even beyond Iraq in countries including Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar because of expected “billion dollar infrastructure development projects in the Middle East (gas, electricity, water, finance, communications, engineering design, retail, health services, construction, IT, hotel/tourism),” attributed “to the presence of US forces.”9
If the Philippine state facilitates the out-migration of its citizens, just as importantly it attempts to shape its overseas citizens’ eco- nomic and political connections to the Philippines. The Philippines’ “profitability” as a “global enterprise” hinges on its ability to main- tain its overseas citizens’ relations to the homeland. Labor brokerage requires a particular set of relations between state and citizen. Under a migration regime of labor brokerage, Philippine citizens are to leave their families behind in the Philippines while giving themselves over to employers in faraway destinations. At the same time, they are to continue being linked to the homeland, especially through their remittances, as the foreign exchange generated by migrants’ over- seas wages has become vital to the Philippine economy. In 2008
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xiv Introduction
Product Earnings
Electronic products $1.915 billion Remittances $1.494 billion Articles of apparel and clothing accessories $125 million Coconut oil $80 million
Figure 2. Earnings from the three top export products compared with remittances for the month of July 2009. Sources: POEA, National Statistics Office (NSO).
alone, migrants remitted over U.S.$16 billion through official bank- ing channels.10 It is true that the very structure of the migrant labor system functions in such a way that individuals working overseas nec- essarily remit their earnings to their dependents left behind in the Philippines.11 Still, the state invests heavily in channeling migrants’ remittances back to the Philippines, with special emphasis on secur- ing their remittances through official banking channels as well as state-sponsored development projects.
The Philippine state’s transnational migration apparatus has be- come something of an “export-processing zone” that assembles and mobilizes and exports a commodity, workers, that actually rivals other export commodities in terms of profitability. A comparison of earnings from the Philippines’ top three highest earning export products with remittances in the month of July 2009 indicates that remittances from migrants are second only to electronic products (Figure 2). In other words, in the Philippines the export of people can be more profitable than the export of clothing.
It is because Philippine migrants are short-term employees that labor-receiving countries source their workers from the Philippines. The Philippine state’s future deployments of migrants (and ulti- mately remittances), therefore, depend on its ensuring that migrants are compliant with the terms of their employment contracts. In other words, the Philippine government requires that migrants return home to the Philippines immediately upon the completion of their work. The Philippine state’s investments in its relations to its citizen-workers globally are crucial for accomplishing that task.
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Introduction xv
This book examines how and why the Philippine state has emerged as a “global enterprise” of labor. It uses a case study of the Philippines to understand contemporary processes of neoliberal globalization. As Neferti Tadiar argues, “The Philippines is, as a supplier of global labour, a constitutive part of the world-system.”12 A key objective here is to map what Saskia Sassen calls a “countergeography of glob- alization,” that is, a form of globalization “either not represented or seen as connected to globalization,” yet is “deeply imbricated in some of the major dynamics constitutive of globalization.”13
My findings draw on qualitative methods including ethnographic research of the government’s migration bureaucracy, interviews with state officials and migrants, and archival work of government docu- ments conducted over the course of the last decade.14 I examine the mechanisms by which the Philippine state mobilizes, exports, and reg- ulates migrant labor to meet worldwide gendered and racialized labor demand. At the same time, I examine how the state has reconfigured Philippine citizenship and produced novel invocations of Philippine nationalism to normalize its citizens’ out-migration while simultane- ously fostering their ties to the Philippines. Though I begin with a quote from the Philippine president, this book is fundamentally about the quotidian institutional and discursive practices of the state.15
To get at why the Philippines has become a global broker of labor and the kind of functions it performs in the contemporary global order, however, requires first an understanding of how neoliberal globalization has reshaped the role of states more broadly and an understanding of the new forms of labor demand engendered by contemporary globalization. I turn to a discussion of the existing scholarship on the state and globalization and international migration in the sections that immediately follow.
Brokering Labor as a Neoliberal Strategy
Neoliberalism, “Development,” and the Nation-State
Under conditions of neoliberal globalization, the forms and func- tions of the nation-state have been shifting quite dramatically. While
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xvi Introduction
many scholars have lamented the eclipse of the state by the forces of global capital, many others suggest that what we are apprehend- ing is in fact its reconfiguration. Rather than being hollowed out, the state has created new apparatuses by which to actually facilitate neoliberalism. As David Harvey argues, the neoliberal state seeks out “internal reorganizations and new institutional arrangements that improve its competitive position as an entity vis-à-vis other states in the global market.”16 In her critique of Harvey Aihwa Ong suggests, first, that neoliberalism, although hegemonic globally, should not be understood as having common, universalized consequences. She fur- ther argues that “rather than taking neoliberalism as a tidal wave of market-driven phenomena that sweeps from dominant countries to smaller ones, we could more fruitfully break neoliberalism down into various technologies.”17
Neoliberal orthodoxy consequently takes different shapes in dif- ferent states. Moreover, it requires that states develop an arsenal of strategies to meet its imperatives. In the Philippines, for instance, the state has introduced numerous measures to create “new institu- tional arrangements” necessary to neoliberal globalization. Like other developing countries, it has complied with the mandates of what critics of neoliberalism have called the “Washington Consensus,” which involves privatization, deregulation, and liberalization among other sets of economic reforms or “structural adjustments.”18 But unlike other states in the global South, the Philippines has crafted a strategy of labor brokerage by which it mobilizes and deploys labor for export to profit from migrants’ remittances. Remittances from migrants’ overseas employment has strengthened the government’s foreign exchange reserves, helping the Philippines pay off the oner- ous debts it has incurred from lenders like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, along with a host of private banks, as a consequence of structural adjustment programs.
The Philippine state is not, however, simply a passive actor in the global order as elites at its helm have enthusiastically implemented policies compliant with the neoliberal Washington Consensus. Devel- oping countries “are undertaking restructuring and serve the needs of transnational capital not simply because they are ‘powerless’ in the
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Introduction xvii
face of globalization, but because a particular historical constellation of social forces now exists that present an organic social base for this global restructuring of capitalism.”19
Neoliberalism in the Philippines and other formerly colonized areas needs to be understood within the context of legacies of imperi- alism. For the Philippines neoliberal strategies of the state have long been shaped by its status as a neocolony of the United States. One can argue that neoliberalism in the formerly colonized global South is a contemporary form of coloniality.20
In a neocolonial, neoliberal state like the Philippines, labor broker- age functions to address the failures of so-called “development.”21 It is a peculiar kind of “trickle up” development as individual migrants’ earnings abroad become a source of foreign capital for the Philippine state. The Philippine state remains committed to drawing direct investments from foreign capital through neoliberal economic reforms; however, it also heavily draws on “investments” from its very own citizens. The strategy of labor brokerage merely “perpetuates the conditions this policy claims to ameliorate and reinforces the IMF structural adjustment policies’ grip on Philip- pine underdevelopment since remittances mainly go to debt servicing rather than to generating new local employment projects,” as Ligaya McGovern suggests.22 It is still a cornerstone of Philippine neoliberal “development” today. As E. San Juan acerbically, though accurately, puts it, the globalization of Philippine workers “is primarily due to economic coercion and disenfranchisement under the retrogressive regime of comprador-bureaucratic (not welfare-state) capitalism.”23
Neoliberal Governmentality Though neoliberalism is characterized by a set of economic rational- ities, as distilled in the Washington Consensus, neoliberalism is also a technology of governmentality. Aihwa Ong, drawing from Fou- cauldian understandings, suggests that neoliberalism is a mode of governing populations. She argues that the “neoliberal politics of ‘shrinking’ the state are accompanied by a proliferation of tech- niques to remake the social and citizen-subjects.”24 By brokering labor, the Philippine state attempts to contain the multiple social
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xviii Introduction
dislocations that are the consequence of its aggressive implemen- tation of neoliberal economic policies. It represents employment abroad and remittances as the fulfillment of a new form of national- ism. Contemporary Philippine citizenship has become a modality of governmentality.
The consequences of the neoliberal Washington Consensus have been disastrous for ordinary people in the Philippines, as they have been for most people throughout the world as they face increasingly precarious conditions of employment (if they are employed at all) and the elimination of state services.25 In the Philippines, structural adjustment has resulted in currency devaluation (meant to be an enticement for foreign investors), which has reduced real incomes in the Philippines, making it difficult for people to cope with the rising costs of living, which include the burden of having to pay for what were once state-subsidized public services. As the already small middle class tries to maintain its tenuous status, the difficulty of everyday life for the working classes and the poor compel many to join up with militant leftist movements, both legal and underground, to contest the state’s neoliberal orientation.26 Economic and political elites in the Philippines are all too familiar with the sorts of explosive upheavals these tensions can give rise to.
When the state’s neoliberal policies are coupled with charges of graft and corruption, as was the case for President Joseph Estrada in 2001, mass protests can bring an administration down. Overseas jobs address Philippine citizens’ dire need for livable wages and arguably contain social unrest to some extent.27 Under conditions of globaliza- tion, elites have to deal with “the contradictory pressures of (global) accumulation and (national) legitimation. This enduring contradic- tion is being managed by a restructuring of the capitalist state and a realignment of internal power relations within national state appara- tuses.”28 Successive Philippine presidents have offered up the promise of employment (albeit overseas) during the bleakest economic crises to calm citizens’ growing anxieties about job prospects, and in the Philippines labor brokerage is an important legitimization scheme for the state.
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