The Force of Domesticity

Filipina Migrants and Globalization

Rhacel Salazar Parrenas

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780814767894
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios asiaticoamericanos

Taking as her subjects migrant Filipina domestic workers in Rome and Los Angeles, transnational migrant families in the Philippines, and Filipina migrant entertainers in Tokyo, Parreñas documents the social, cultural, and political pressures that maintain women's domesticity in migration, as well as the ways migrant women and their children negotiate these adversities.

Parreñas examines the underlying constructions of gender in neoliberal state regimes, export-oriented economies such as that of the Philippines, protective migration laws, and the actions and decisions of migrant Filipino women in maintaining families and communities, raising questions about gender relations, the status of women in globalization, and the meanings of greater consumptive power that migration garners for women. The Force of Domesticity starkly illustrates how the operation of globalization enforces notions of women's domesticity and creates contradictory messages about women's place in society, simultaneously pushing women inside and outside the home.

CHAPTER 1
Gender Ideologies in the Philippines

The Philippines sends mixed messages to women. It tells women to work outside the home, but at the same time it maintains the belief that women’s proper place is inside the home.¹ This paradoxical relationship of women to the home underlies the entrance of the Philippines to the global economy. The work of women as migrant workers and as electronics manufacturing workers provides the Philippines with its two largest sources of foreign currency, suggesting that Filipino women have achieved tremendous economic power in society. Although women have always worked,² they did not have as much income earning power in the past as they do today. Testament to this newly gained status is the reference to them as “breadwinners of the nation” (Mission, 1998) and “new economic heroes” (Rafael, 1997). Yet, a close look at the work of Filipino women shows a limit to the reconstitution of gender in their labor market participation, as their labor often retains the ideology of women’s domesticity—as nimble-fingered electronics production workers or as domestic workers or nurses or some other form of care worker. Such jobs retain the assumption of women’s natural aptitude for caring and nurturing.

In this chapter, I establish the gender ideological clash that underlies the modernization-building project of the Philippines. I show how the law maintains the ideology of women’s domesticity even as the economy promotes the labor market participation of women. How do we make sense of this ideological clash regarding gender? To address this question, I begin by illustrating this clash, first with a discussion of the law and then a discussion of the export-oriented economy. I show how the law, specifically under the 1987 Family Code of the Republic of the Philippines, promotes the domesticity of women and how the export-oriented economy, not completely disagreeing with the law, promotes the labor of women, but only in jobs that maintain their domesticity. Still, the economy pushes the paid labor of women, thus intrinsically contradicting the push for women’s domesticity. Then, I explain the ideological chasm that defines the labor market participation of women, after which I address the social consequences of such a chasm to the status of women. I end by addressing the meanings of gender in the macro-structure of the export-oriented economy of the Philippines. I explain how the contradictory views of gender that underlie the labor market participation of Filipino women are central to the marketability of the feminized nation of the Philippines in the global economy, because maintaining the notion of Filipino women’s domesticity guarantees that the Philippines remains a secure source of cheap labor for masculine nations (read: wealthier) in search of the most affordable and docile manufacturing and service workers in the global economy.

Women, the Family, and the Law

Illustrating the ideological belief that women’s rightful place is in the home, headlines on May 26, 1995, from two of the largest circulating newspapers in the Philippines read, “Overseas Employment a Threat to Filipino Families” and “Ramos Says Pinay OCWs [Overseas Contract Workers] Threaten Filipino Families.”³ In a speech delivered to the Department of Social Welfare the day prior to the release of these newspaper reports, the president of the Philippines, Fidel Ramos, had called for initiatives to keep migrant mothers at home. As President Ramos stated, “We are not against overseas employment of Filipino women. We are against overseas employment at the cost of family solidarity” (Agence France Presse, 1995a). By calling for the return migration of mothers, President Ramos did not necessarily disregard the increasing economic dependency of the Philippines on the foreign remittances of its mostly female migrant workers. However, he did make clear that only single and childless women have the moral right to pursue labor migration.

The law, specifically under the 1986 Constitution and the 1987 Family Code of the Republic of the Philippines, upholds this moral stance. These two legal documents were instituted soon after the dictator President Ferdinand Marcos was ousted from office and forced to flee the country, on February 25, 1986, by mass cries and rallies throughout the nation. The newly elected government of President Corazon Aquino instituted the new Constitution to restore democracy and freedom in the Philippines. Ratified by an overwhelming majority of the people, the 1986 Constitution did not only limit presidential power and reinstate the legislative branch of the Philippine government. It also unequivocally declared the “Filipino family” the foundation of the nation: “The State recognizes the Filipino family as the foundation of the nation. Accordingly, it shall strengthen its solidarity and actively promote its total development” (Article XV, Section 1, Constitution). Reflecting the significance of the family to national identity, almost ten years after the ratification of the Constitution, President Ramos himself turned to the discourse of family solidarity to justify his call for the return migration of women.

The 1987 Family Code repeatedly reinforces conventional notions of women’s maternity, thus providing the basis for President Ramos to argue against the attempted reconstitution of mothering by women in labor migration. For instance, article 213 of the Family Code declares that “no child under seven years of age shall be separated from the mother.” Such a provision sets the stage for the construction of women’s citizenship as defined by good or bad motherhood. Under the law, a child below the age of seven can be separated from the mother only if “the court finds compelling reasons to do otherwise [i.e., circumvent the Constitution]” (Article 213). Financial reasons do not fall within the range of what is compelling under the law. Instead, compelling reasons are determined solely by the moral values of a mother. Bad mothers are explicitly defined as those who maintain “a common law relationship with another man” or exhibit “moral laxity and the habit of flirting from one man to another” (Article 213, Comment). Following traditional Catholic ideological views on sex and reproduction, the law sees sexual purity as a measure of women’s good morals.

Transnational families, particularly female-headed transnational families, threaten the civic duty of women’s maternity. Geographic separation from the family, for instance, places women’s purity at risk. As such, a government-mandated training workshop for outgoing female overseas contract workers warned participants not to fall into the temptation of the “brother of homesickness . . . home-sex-ness” to assuage the loneliness brought by geographic separation from their husbands (Meerman, 2000). The call for women’s sexual reservation reinforces the cultural construction of women as those who should be without any interests outside the family, as one of their primary duties to the state, according to the Constitution is to reproduce the family and nation.⁴ After all, as Filipino feminists have long argued, women have long been constructed in society as nothing more than “dutiful daughters” and “suffering mothers” whose sacrifice to the family exalts them as heroines and role models (Roces, 1998). This ideological belief abides by Catholic notions of purity, which is measured by the loyalty and obedience of women to the kin group (Mananzan, 1998).

Under the modernization-building project of the Philippines, a strong family begins with a solid marriage, which starts with the obligation of cohabitation.⁵ As article 68 declares, “The husband and wife are obliged to live together, observe mutual love, respect, and fidelity, and render mutual help, and support.” In this scenario, the geographical distance that characterizes transnational families inherently prevents such households from fulfilling the categorical definition of a good “Filipino” marriage.⁶ With marriage and cohabitation as its core, the “Filipino family” follows the script of the modern nuclear family.⁷ By defining the “Filipino family” as nuclear, the Code not only establishes this arrangement as the norm but also defines it as the embodiment of the right kind of family in the Philippines. This kind of family does reflect the dominant household pattern in Philippine society. Rapid industrialization over the past twenty years has brought significant changes to the “Filipino family” In the Philippines, the dominant household pattern is that of the dual-wage-earning nuclear family (Medina et al., 1996).⁸ As the “proper” household arrangement in the Code reflects those of plenty of families in the Philippines, one could conceivably consider the Code and its moral constructions to apply to the interests of the people. Yet, the allocation of morals, whether they are negative or positive, through the construction of “a right kind of family” in the Code fails to recognize the plausibility of good morals emerging from other kinds of family arrangements, including single-parent, transnational, and polygamous households in the Muslim region of the south.

If the nuclear family does indeed signify moral order, then other kinds of families represent moral decay. One such family is the transnational family. The Family Code makes special mention of this type of household, which indicates its growing presence in contemporary Philippine society. One provision establishes that the transnational family can be considered an exemption to the obligation of cohabitation as long as separation does not cost undue stress to the “solidarity of the family” As article 69 reads:

The court may exempt one spouse from living with the other if the latter should live abroad or there are other valid and compelling reasons for the exemption. However, such exemption shall not apply if the same is not compatible with the solidarity of the family.

What conditions would threaten the “solidarity of the family”? Morals define the strength of the family. As such, only bad morals can justify the separation of family members.

In the Family Code, the few legal grounds for separation include immorality, such as perversion and the corruption of children; criminality, such as drug addiction and crimes worthy of six years of imprisonment; sexual deviancy as constructed by the law, including bigamy, homosexuality, and infidelity; domestic violence; and abandonment of more than one year (Article 55). Abandonment as grounds for legal separation raises a red flag regarding transnational families. Abandonment is the central trope that signifies moral decay in transnational families. But why did President Ramos call for the return migration of only mothers and not fathers, whose living abroad would also constitute abandonment and thus threaten “the solidarity of the family” as Ramos said of the transnational families with migrant mothers? Under the Code, women are still constructed as the primary caretakers of children and other dependents in the family.⁹ Thus, abandonment, particularly the abandonment of one’s proper duties in the moral order of the nation, applies only to women in transnational and split-household units.

The Economic Dependence of the Philippines on the Labor of Women

Although the law maintains the ideology of female domesticity, the economy depends on the work of women not only outside the home but also outside the nation. On July 23, 2001, a headline in the Philippine Daily Inquirer read, “OFWs [Overseas Filipino Workers] Told: Stay Abroad” (Agence France Presse, 2001). The article recaps a recent open forum with President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in which she conceded that the Philippine economy depends heavily on the remittances of overseas Filipino workers as a main source of its foreign currency. As she stated, “Jobs here [in the Philippines] are difficult to find and we are depending on the people outside the country. If you can find work there, and send money to your relatives here, then perhaps you should stay there” The president continued, “For now, sad to say, that’s about it. The reality is that for now and many years to come, OFWs will still be a major part of the economy.” Accounting for the economic dependence of the Philippines on migrant remittances, the journalist Gina Mission says, “In the past decade, the number of overseas workers has risen beyond everyone’s expectations to become an essential part of the economy. Between twenty-two and thirty-five million Filipinos—34 to 53 percent of the total population—are directly dependent on remittance from migrant workers” (1998: 15A). Yet, it is not just overseas workers per se but women overseas workers upon whom the nation has come to increasingly rely as a valuable source of foreign currency. In the Philippines, the number of annually deployed women workers has surpassed the number of men working overseas since 1995 (Kanlungan Center Foundation, 2000). Moreover, the Philippines has witnessed a steady increase in the number of migrant women, who constituted 54 percent of deployed workers in 1997, 61 percent in 1998, and 64 percent in 1999 (Kanlungan Center Foundation, 2000).

By encouraging migrant workers to stay abroad, the Philippine state relies on the growing need in rich nations for the low-wage services of women from poorer nations as a way for it to meet its need for foreign currency. The Philippine government promotes the deployment of women workers to help it pay the interest it owes on loans from multilateral institutions such as the Asian Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. Loans saddle the Philippines with annual interest payments of approximately $2.5 billion.¹⁰ From 1970 to 1998, the Philippines paid $77.6 billion in interest and principal to foreign creditors (Diokno-Pascual, 2001). The debt of the Philippines has not decreased; to the contrary. Since the country incurred its first debt, in 1962, its foreign debt has steadily grown, reaching more than $52 billion by 2000 (Diokno-Pascual, 2001; Guzman, 2001).

To pay for these loans, the country has had to borrow additional funds from the same lending agencies (IBON, 1997).¹¹ And to be able to borrow more money to pay for its loans, the Philippines has had to secure the seal of approval of the International Monetary Fund and abide by its recommendation that the Philippines implement an export-oriented economy. The Philippines has to follow three basic policy elements: “(1) the rapid expansion of exports (rather than control of imports); (2) free international trade (rather than protectionist policies); and (3) open door for foreign companies” (IBON, 1998). Essentially, the emphasis on export-oriented industrialization has pushed the Philippine economy to produce goods for export, and which goods are produced is dictated by the needs of foreign direct investors from richer countries such as the United States and Japan.

Export-oriented industrialization means that there is a need for the labor of women, who dominate the labor force in the two industries that generate the most foreign currency for the Philippines: export-manufacturing production and migrant employment. Targeted for their presumed patience, docility, and natural orientation to detail, women constitute 74 percent of electronics industry workers. Most of these women, nearly 78 percent of them, are younger than thirty years of age (Chant and McIlwaine, 1995; McKay 2006: 213). The largest source of foreign currency for the Philippines is the production of electronics and semiconductors by electronic firms, which account for more than 70 percent of Philippine exports, employ more than 315,000 workers, and generate approximately $27 billion per annum (McKay, 2001, 2004). Likewise, migrant employment provides a secure source of foreign currency for the Philippines, which nets at least $10 billion per annum from migrant remittances. These remittances come from the labor of both men and women, arguably more from the labor of men/¹² but a substantial proportion of the remittances depends on the work of women, who constitute most of the land-based migrant workers from the Philippines.

One could speculate that the massive departure of the female labor force and women’s expanded participation in the domestic labor market would reduce the supply and consequently increase the bargaining power of the employable women left in the Philippines. With the increase in women’s labor market participation in the local economy from 34 percent in 1970 to 45 percent in 1996 (Cheng, 1999), women’s labor migration should facilitate women’s access to more rewarding employment. Unfortunately, the high unemployment rate and the unstable labor market impede this process. For instance, the outflow of nurses to other countries has not resulted in a greater demand for nursing skills in the domestic labor market. A third of the nurses left in the country are still underemployed or unemployed (Cheng, 1999). Moreover, the instability of the labor market and the priority placed by the government on the payment of foreign debts over the provision of welfare services has meant that the departure of nurses has resulted not only in unemployment but in an increase of the ratio of nurses per ten thousand persons from 8.8 in 1965 to 2.4 in 1984 (Cheng, 1999).

Teachers face a similar plight. Recognizing the declining educational system in the Philippines, the government has recently called for initiatives to lure back the many teachers who have sought the higher wages of domestic work in other countries (Agence France Presse, 2001). At present, it is estimated that the Philippines faces a shortage of twenty-nine thousand teachers (IBON, 2000a). This shortage has not created better working conditions for the teachers who have chosen to remain in the Philippines. Average class sizes have increased, and the teacher-student ratio has reached 1:65 in poorer districts in urban areas (IBON, 2000a). While the workload of teachers has increased, their salaries have not been augmented at a rate equivalent to the increase in the cost of living in the Philippines. In 1999, former president Joseph Estrada even excluded teachers, the only government sector dominated by women, from receiving salary increases automatically granted to government employees. It was only after strong protests that the government granted these mostly women professionals their 10 percent raises (IBON, 2000a).

As illustrated by the case of nurses and teachers, the mass exodus of working-age women has not benefited working women left in the Philippines. First, Filipino women still face a highly segregated labor market. Women are concentrated in sales, service, manufacturing, and clerical po sitions, where hiring on a contractual basis is on the rise (IBON, 2000b). Without job security, women become more expendable than are men. This expendability makes it more profitable for foreign companies in export-processing zones, where most workers earn less than the average minimum daily wage in surrounding communities, to hire them (IBON, 2000b). Export-processing zones prefer the labor of women, who can be found in the lowest-paying occupations of assembly, postassembly, and finishing work (Chant and McIlwaine, 1995). This means that women’s higher rate of labor market participation i...