Dr Roderick Galam

The Philippines is seen by other countries and international organizations as a model in terms of regulating international labour migration. Its policy, which has shifted from labour export to adopting a comprehensive rights-based framework, covers the entire migration process —from the regulation of recruitment agencies to the provision of predeparture training, insurance systems, consular assistance, overseas voting rights, support for family members of migrants, and programs for the reintegration of returned migrants. However, the mandate of the newly-created Department of Migrant Workers (DMW), the agency that hitherto administered the country’s international labour migration programme, centres on two conflicting primary functions. They are the promotion of maximum employment of Filipinos overseas, and the protection of their rights to fair and equitable labour practices. This tension has had negative consequences on the provision and protection of the welfare of Filipino migrant workers as demonstrated by the experiences of Filipino seafarers.

The Asia Pacific is now the global maritime industry’s most important region. Crucially, it is the biggest source of workers for the industry, which, since the 1970s, has undergone transformations with profound consequences for maritime labour. This editorial introduction discusses the impact of two of these most significant changes–the shift to the Flag of Convenience (FOC) system and the development of a single global labour market for seafarers–to have shaped the fortunes and conditions of maritime workers particularly around hierarchies, vulnerabilities, and (im)possibilities for solidarity. It also discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated these conditions. This discussion provides the background necessary to situate the articles in this special issue.

Background: The Philippines is the global maritime industry’s single biggest source of seafarers. This article examines how the Philippines protects the welfare of its seafarers working onboard ocean-going vessels.

Materials and methods: We employed a multi-method approach to better understand the POEA-SEC as a regulatory instrument. First, we analyzed Philippine legislation and regulations that are shaping the employment, welfare, and working conditions of Filipino seafarers. Second, we examined the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration Standard Employment Contract (POEA-SEC) which requires that minimum standards of employment for seafarers are met. We use legal analysis to examine three specific provisions that pertain to their well-being: duration of employment, monetary considerations, and working conditions in terms of hours of work and rest periods. Third, we analyzed interview and focus group data on the experiences of Filipino seafarers onboard ships in respect of the POEA-SEC’s efficacy in protecting their well-being.

Results: Analysis of the policy environment for Filipino seafarers shows how the interests of powerful actors have taken precedence over those of Filipino seafarers. Seafarers’ experiences suggest that they cannot be reached by the contract, whether symbolic or otherwise. The contract fails to address seafarer issues, such as security of tenure, excessive working hours resulting in fatigue, stress and anxiety.

Conclusions: The POEA-SEC falls short as a legal document to address occupational, health and safety issues, which contribute to the detriment of seafarers’ health and well-being. This indicates that the Philippine government cannot fully protect its seafarers.

Based on interviews, this article examines the Philippines as a sending state from the perspective of seafaring labour export. It analyses how the outsourcing of seafaring labour and global regulation of standards of seafarer education, training, and certification have broadened and deepened the involvement of international actors in Filipino seafaring labour. It situates these developments in two phases of seafaring labour migration, thereby clarifying the role of these international actors and their relationship with state and non-state actors. These international actors have influenced Philippine policy on seafaring labour and employment; are vitally involved in assembling Filipino seafaring labour through their investment in maritime education and training; and are determining Filipino seafarers’ employability through their inspection of Philippine compliance to the STCW Convention. Compliance to this international instrument mobilised the state to reshape the functioning of its agencies to revitalise its capacity as a sending state.

To get a job as a seafarer in the global maritime industry, thousands of male Filipino youths work for free as ‘utility men’ for manning agencies that supply seafarers to ship operators around the world. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and approached from a moral economy perspective, this article examines how manning agencies and utility men differentially rationalize this exploitative work (utility manning). Manning agencies use it as a technology of servitude that, through physical and verbal abuse and other techniques, enforces docility to prepare utility men for the harsher conditions on-board a ship. In contrast, utility men use it as a technology of imagination, gleaning from it a capacity to shape their future. Faced with few social possibilities in the Philippines, they deploy servitude as a strategy for attaining economic mobility and male adulthood.

This article examines how young Filipino men looking to work in international seafaring deploy servitude as a means of attaining education-to-work transition. It focuses on those applying to work for free as ‘utility men’ (gofer or flunkey) in Manila’s manning and crewing agencies that supply seafarers to ship operators around the world in exchange for the promise of boarding a ship. Based on participant observation and life history interviews, the article accounts for how they transform their servitude into diskarte – strategy by which they navigate the limited employment opportunities in the Philippines – by constructing their ‘utility manning’ as an informal and negotiated pathway to employment. The young Filipino men’s seeking and enduring servitude, geared towards gleaning better social possibilities, becomes a profoundly rational act of investing in and securing their future.

Research on the impact of male emigration on stay-behind wives shows that gossip, which transnational migration intensifies, surveils the women’s morality and constricts their mobility. Based on semi-structured interviews supplemented by field observations, this article examines the impact of gossip on the lives and experiences of stay-behind Filipino seafarer wives. First, it looks into how the women negotiated an environment in which their morality became dominated by the need to keep their reputation as faithful wives intact. As women whose husbands were away for long periods of time, they were seen as being ‘like parched earth in need of rain’ and therefore susceptible to temptation and seduction. Second, it examines how through dibersyon – activities that translated work into recreation – they counteracted the constricting effects of gossip on their mobility without compromising their perceived morality. The article concludes with a reflection on the contradiction the women’s negotiation of gossip creates: they inadvertently help to maintain gendered conceptions of morality and mobility while simultaneously working around the gender ideological and normative boundaries gossip enforces.

Research on mother- and daughter-in-law relationships has primarily focused on the conflict between the two. This article highlights the empowering potential of daughters-in-law of this problematic relationship by examining the struggle of Filipino seafarers' wives to exercise agency and achieve autonomy in the context of living with their mothers-in-law. Drawing on in-depth semi-structured interviews, it analyses the women's project for autonomy within kinship, that is, an autonomy deeply embedded in intersubjective relations through the conceptualisation of kinship as 'cultures of relatedness', which explicitly attends to the negative aspects of kinship. Three dimensions of their experiences are discussed: breaking their silence/talking back; becoming their husband's designated recipient of their remittances; and having their own house. Their experiences demonstrate the importance of retaining normativity in the conceptualisation of kinship as relatedness.

This article reflects on the epistemological, methodological, and ethical issues related to undertaking a cross-gender research (male researcher with female participants) in one's own community. It also examines issues of analysis and representation germane to taking a gendered perspective in this study of the lives and experiences of left-behind women. The article frames the discussion of these issues within four interrelated sites or levels of reflexivity: theoretical reflexivity, gender and fieldwork relations, positionality and the insider/outsider dynamic, and representation. The conclusion reflects on the ethical obligation a researcher conducting a study in one's own community bears and the consequences of this ethical burden on representation.

Discussions of a culture of migration in the Philippines present it to mean a predisposition to migrate and focus on the migrants. Through the prism of the experiences of seamen’s wives in an Ilocos town, experiences narrated through interviews, this article aims to cut a conceptual space in which to examine the relationship between left-behind women and the culture of migration. Examining the women’s persistent references to settlement migration to Hawaii against which their husband’s labor migration as seafarers is compared, this article provides a discussion of a culture of migration among Ilocanos that has been vitally shaped by the socio-economic possibilities brought about by Ilocano migration to Hawaii beginning in the early 20th century. Consequently, it offers historical and cultural specificity to scholarly discussions of the Philippines’ culture of migration, which remains pitched at the national level.

Seamen’s wives know absence very well. Their lives are striated by it. Based on interviews with seamen’s wives conducted in Ilocos Norte, this article investigates the communicative practices obtaining amid absence and separation, and the wives’ activities that bring their husbands home and bring “home” to their husbands. It examines how new communication technologies, particularly the cellphone, have engendered new ways of becoming present and intimate. For seamen’s families, cellphone-mediated intimacy creates a space of imagined communion, which becomes the locus of the reproduction of family and affective ties and is itself the result of these emotional and material activities.

Like many Ilokano writers, poet-fictionist Herman Garcia Tabin has never made his position on the Marcos dictatorship known. His works, which were written in the early 1980s and bound with the conditions produced by the regime, do not explicitly denounce Marcos's regime. However, they may be read as critiquing the social reality engendered by the dictatorship. Through a rhythmanalysis that implicates the constitutive role of the state and capital, this article examines depictions of life experiences of Metro Manila's impoverished people in Tabin's works. Tracing and following Tabin's moves and movements provide clues to that which he has neither publicly avowed nor disavowed.

Most theories of nation and state have excluded gender as an analytic category. This article will demonstrate how the nation and the state are gendered. It will examine how nation and gender are shaped by capitalist and patriarchal structures, two powerful ideologies that impact the state. Analyzing an Iluko novel which constructs in the context of urban squatting the nation as a social space, the article will detail how it is impacted by the state, by class and gender, and how people and identities as well as the social and political spaces they inhabit are classed and gendered. It will locate these classed and gendered identities and spaces in the class struggle for the nation as well as in the conflict that exists between the nation and state. The article therefore will illustrate how nation, state, class, and gender are inextricably bound up.

Nationalism has proven to be male-biased and this is evident in its tendency to image the nation as woman/mother in language, It has conveniently placed women where it is almost completely nowhere to be read, dismembered from the national body and denied agency and meaningful participation, When written of, women are assigned to the concepts of nation and mother as is the case of "Inang Bayan," In this nation, the citizen is male and the state masculine. Consequently, the experience of a nation in the context of colonialism and imperialism is semanticized as rape which further reinforces the gendering of the nation as woman, Through poetry, Hermilinda Ungbaoan-Bulong creates spaces for women in the narrative that is nationalism, In "Madre Abre" and "Baro a Kaputotan," Ungbaoan-Bulong's feminized territory represents ethnicity belonging to a wider community or territory, She encourages women to remember their own strength, their own capacity, their place in the pages of history and reminds them that they are daughters of freedom fighter Gabriela Silang in "Agtnangka, Babai," In reconstructing the family as a unit wherein there are no subordinates; she rescues the domesticity of women in the home where she rules a "queendom" bereft of power and authority, In "Maria Filipina," the commodified overseas contract workers (OCW) more popularly known as the Japayuki are "beings-for-others" responsible for saving the country from economic ruin on a regular basis, By locating women in specific historical, political, cultural, social and economic processes, Lingbaoan-Bulong elevates the nationalistically marginalized Filipino women to agents of social and national transformation.