effective plans to bring ofws back home research paper

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

We're Hiring!
Help Center

A Journey Back Home: Lived Experience of the Returning Overseas Filipinos in a 14-Day Quarantine Facility

2021, International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

Using a descriptive-quantitative research design, this study aimed to examine the health conditions of adolescents left behind by OFW-parents, and to determine how their health is influenced by their personal and lifestyle characteristics and their use of protective mechanisms. A total of 400 adolescents left behind (ages 13-17) by OFW-parents were selected via multi-stage area sampling and were surveyed by using a guided group-administered questionnaire. Descriptive statistics and multivariate ordinal logistic regression were performed to analyze the data Results show that adolescents left behind by migrant parent/s perceived themselves as healthy, that is –overall, they have good health condition. Health domains show that their physical and psychological health conditions are very healthy, their emotional condition is good or healthy, and their social and spiritual health conditions as moderately healthy. This study also found strong significant association of their overall health condition with their personal characteristics, lifestyle pattern, and with their use of protective mechanisms. Univariate analyses show that 6 out of the 20 independent variables examined were significant, and that sex is the strongest predictor of their overall health condition with the female respondents having more likely to perceive their health condition as good or healthy most of the time compared to male respondents. Different health domains show varied significant predictors. Their physical health condition is strongly predicted by their good personal hygiene practices. The sex of the main care provider predicts their psychological health condition, that is those with female care provider are less psychologically healthy compared to those with male care provider. Their emotional health is predicted the strongest by their personal interests, that is those who engage in unhealthy lifestyle are less likely to be emotionally healthy compared to those who engage themselves in healthy lifestyle. Their social health is predicted the strongest by their pattern of communication with the parent-away, that is those who do not have an open and regular pattern of communication with the parent away are less likely to be socially healthy compared to those who have an open and regular communication with the parent away. Lastly, their spiritual health condition is predicted the strongest by the absence of the mother, that is those respondents with OFW mother tends to lacking on their spiritual base compared to those who have non-OFW mothers. Findings of the study hope to enhance the understanding of the health conditions of adolescents left behind by migrant parents and associated factors for programmatic action.

Related Papers

B. Moreno Bragas

In this paper, the PSA definition of child sexual abuse (CSA) is employed and applied in domestic settings (DCSA). However, it does not deal with DCSA per se but about what counts as a good execution for the restoration and well-being of child victims in handling DCSA cases. It laid down the threefold chord motivating principle of the execution. Actual procedures are reported to exhaust a common practice synthesized in the data provided by key informants. As a preliminary research, it ends inconclusively with further recommendations.

International Journal Of Advance Research And Innovative Ideas In Education

Jhoselle Tus

As undoubtedly heard, being a single parent was already a handful. Then what more if that single parent who is raising her child is a part of the LGBTQ+ community? Many people will probably judge and give them a look of disgust for being a parent and, society might be shocked and perplexed on why homosexual parents have a kid. There is a high tendency that these homosexual parents will be doubted in parenting their child. An extensive amount of the bigger world tells us that an average family consists of a straight mother and father. However, these LGBTQ+ families are also considered brave, tough, and independent warriors for raising their children in this critical society. Those flexible characteristics of homosexual parents can be a rich and robust foundation for raising a child. On the other hand, it can also bring additional difficulties and hindrances than to those heterosexual single parent, especially in our society who thinks that this kind of situation does not fit in our norms. This study aims to describe the lived experiences of the lesbian parents. Moreover, the implications of the study were discussed, and recommendations were suggested.

Asia Pacific Social Science Review

Carlos Piocos

The study examines the experiences, coping strategies, and responses of Filipino migrant domestic workers (FMDW) to inequalities amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The collected narratives of migrant leaders from Italy, the U.K., and Hong Kong reveal that FMDWs employ their notions, ethics, and practices of care/care work in coping with the structural and social inequalities caused by the pandemic. We argue that the labor of care exhibited by FMDWs goes beyond the dichotomies of paid work and unpaid obligations of social reproduction. A "community of care" is manifested, which fosters community-building and solidarity in response to social exclusion and inequalities brought about by the COVID-19 crisis. The narratives also indicate a dynamic realignment of care circulation, with FMDWs becoming agents of multidirectional care.

Donnies Bendicio

The current research sought to explore the lived experience of fifteen (15)Filipino seafarers using a phenomenological approach. Instruments include participants’ accomplished autobiography and career temperament, and semi-structured interview. The current research utilized Hycner’s (1999) explicitation process. It is found out that participants whose ages are twenty-six (26) up to sixty-one (61) are observed to be located from Luzon and Visayas regions, and are likely to have marital relationship, received tertiary education, are likely to render service as seafarerat a minimum of six (6) up to thirty (30) years length of service from deck, engineering, stewardship, and electro-technical departments. The current research found four (4) superordinate themes, namely, “Love Attachment”, “Work Related Problems", “Resilience and Flexibility”, and “Interpersonal Relationship.”

Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics

Christopher Ryan Maboloc

The Covid-19 Pandemic manifests the important role of moral leadership in managing a crisis. In the light of the big disruptions to both public life and private enterprise, the need for an ethics of virtue becomes apparent. Most governments usually look into the consequences to the economy but disregard the meaningful role of moral character in making sound judgment. This article is an attempt to look into local experiences and values in contrast to institutional approaches in the West when it comes to the response to the Covid-19 public health emergency in the Philippines and elsewhere.

Ma. Katrina B Mamparair

This is a study about how Filipino “househusbands” practice role reversals in their homes in the context of wives working overseas. The objectives of this research are (1) To provide a background profile of Filipino “househusbands” and their families (2) To identify the gender role reversal practices of the Filipino families with “househusband” fathers, and, (3) To analyze how Filipino “househusbands” practice role reversals in the home with wives working overseas using Theory of Practice by Pierre Bourdieu. There were 4 Filipino “househusbands” that go through qualitative in-depth interview and narrative inquiry. Among the findings are: “househusbands” learned to perform the new role: housekeeper-nurturer within the domestic setting. They carry out domestic house works by doing the laundry, cooking, marketing/ going to grocery, budgeting, cleaning the house and child rearing. By being the housekeepers they were able to spend more time and be close to the children. They were the decision-makers on household concerns (day-to-day basis) and wives are being consulted if there are minor issues such as health problems while on big and/or major issues the couples shares the decision-making. Due to their aspiration for a quality and better life for their families, especially children, they have dared to challenge the norm of traditional gender roles in the Filipino society and created a new disposition that these roles are interchangeable in respond to the internal (family) and external (society) needs. These families mark the new disposition of Filipino families which is having a mindset of accepting the trend of gender role reversals.

Beaujorne A Ramirez

Social Ethics Society Journal of Applied Philosophy

Menelito Mansueto

In this brief philosophical exposé, I will narrate the events as well as my personal and ecospiritual reflections pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic which began in Wuhan, China sometime in November 2019 and have spread sporadically across countries and continents wreaking havoc medically, politically, and individually, as it claimed more than three hundred thousand lives and had virally infected more than four million of the global population. This phenomenon had led us to confront inevitable eschatological questions: Is this a sign of the end times? Will this efface the vulnerable human race? Will this disrupt the global economy as capitalism had collapsed worldwide? Do these events signal a new political era, perhaps the dawn of socialism and communism, as countries worldwide are led to confront its own deficiencies and inadequacies? Which social and political systems and worldviews are efficient particularly in this age of globalization? What are our chances for human survival? These apocalyptic questions had led me to my reflections on Enrique Dussel’s philosophy of liberation, particularly on his concept of Christian ethics and the moral theology of liberation. In so doing, the paper incorporates a holistic outlook on the pandemic trying to look at the bigger picture in a global scale and considers an all-inclusive interpretation on the pandemic that ranges from the environmental, civic, cultural, political, and socioeconomic concerns. I shall try to sew and patch the pieces together into a much wider, integrated, and comprehensive outlook that includes both the global and the peripheral human experiences.

Justine Grace Abrugena , Patrick Pintor Pintor

This research study discusses labor migration and working conditions of Filipino women HSWs in Italy. Statistical data from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration showed that household service workers comprise the majority of the Philippines’ labor emigrants. Additionally, statistics from the United Nations showed that today’s migration is highly feminized. Female household service workers are often depicted as abused and at the mercy of their foreign employers. Given the prevalent notion of HSWs as the most vulnerable and abused group of migrants compounded by the negative and derogatory perceptions associated with them, this study was conducted to determine how the rights of HSWs, specifically the rights defined by the Convention Concerning Decent Work for Domestic Workers (ILO C189), affect the working conditions and experiences of Filipino women household service workers in Italy. Additionally, it furthers deepened the understanding of the situation of Filipino women HSWs and the Philippine diaspora. The data gathered and analyzed in this research study was from the narratives of ten (10) Filipino women HSWs in Italy. The study was anchored on the Human Development-Mobility Framework (HDMF) of Heine de Haas (2010). From the narratives, the researchers identified and discussed nine (9) emerging and predominant themes such as: 1) positive general treatment of employers; 2) discrimination; 3) satisfactory social protection, benefits and mechanisms; 4) reasonable working time and pay; 5) choice to pursue further education or training; 6) awareness of rights; 7) migrant support system; 8) desire to return; and 9) development. Overall, the study revealed that the reality of the working conditions of Filipino HSWs has been at par with what the laws and policies dictate. This has led to positive experiences and the HSWs felt development in personal, social and economic aspects. Further studies on this topic are highly encouraged. Future researchers should revise the methodology by utilizing methods such as: focus group discussions, key expert interviews, and content analysis, aside from narrative inquiries. An empirical study on the topic would also further enrich the available literature in the field of labor migration.

International Journal of Advance Research and Innovative Ideas in Education

The song "Sirena" by Gloc-9 has become widely popular and controversial in the Philippines, especially to gays, the song's primary subject matter. This song depicts the experiences of gay individuals starting from childhood up to adulthood by portraying an image of how gays deal with their sexual preferences and how society established its perception in viewing gays. Thus, Filipino setting of a family raised conservatively and traditionally, religious affiliations, cultural norms, and family expectations are the dominating elements that influence gay individuals in dealing with their sexuality. Further, this study utilizes Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to describe the respondents' lived experiences, challenges, and coping mechanisms. Moreover, the implications of the study were discussed, and recommendations were suggested.

RELATED PAPERS

Philippine Studies Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints 68(3-4)

Kusaka Wataru

Madeleine Denopra

Roselyn Gaac , Dustin Flores

Jyr Angelo Sudario , Summer Paige Manzon , Ezekiel Garcitos , Sean Derick Medrano

Amihan Ceres Ruiz

Marlon Viejo

Sheelah Aguila

Mariam Jayne M . Agonos

Undergraduate thesis for the Ateneo de Manila University Development Studies Program

Raya Ashaunti H . Barreiro

Abigeil Carlos

Noemi Mejia

Angelo Bill Cabonce

RD Deo , Abraham Deogracias

Frederick Edward Fabella

Almond Aguila

Sukran Sevimli

International Journal of Research in Business and Social Science

Renz Louis Montano

Gerardo B . Lisbe, Jr

Chester Cabalza

Choices and Chances: A Comparative Study on the Role of Localized Reproductive Healthcare in the Welfare of Filipino Women

Patricia Leane Saguiped

Jennylyn B Gancayco

Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics, Eubios Ethics Institute

Dr jahid S I R A Z Chowdhury

Malaysian Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities

Nicha Tovankasame

Myla Arcinas

International Journal of Human Rights in Healthcare

Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics EJAIBVol. 30 (8) October 2020

Dr jahid S I R A Z Chowdhury , haris abd wahab

Overseas Filipino workers and the COVID-19 pandemic: Exploring the emotional labor of persistence

Without a doubt, the precarity of an overseas Filipino worker's (OFW) life is augmented by the COVID-19 pandemic, primarily through the economic and political consequences that such public health crises engender. However, while primarily seen in terms of their economic and political dimensions, these consequences also affectively disrupt the life of OFWs. In this paper, I trace the various conflicting ways that OFWs, who were terminated from their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic, have dealt with their emotions while still in their respective host countries, and, trying to find a way to return home. Drawing from Arlie Hochschild (1983) concept of emotional labor, I argue that the OFWs perform what I am provisionally calling the emotional labor of persistence. This type of emotion work, though tied to, and enabled by the precarious conditions in which the respondents live, is a resistive and agential kind of emotional labor. It allows the OFWs to endure precarity, and in the process, find ways to elude, confront, or question the modes of thinking and feeling in which they are constantly circumscribed by the demands of their overseas work and overall precarious situation.

Rebecca Solnit (2020, para. 6) was right when she noted that “the first lesson a disaster teaches is that everything is connected.” Referring to the COVID-19 pandemic, Solnit illuminates how structures of power that maintain a world of inequality and inequity are in fact deeply connected, if not responsible, for the collapse of our interrelated lives: “At moments of immense change, we see with new clarity the systems – political, economic, social, ecological – in which we are immersed as they change around us. We see what's strong, what's weak, what's corrupt, what matters and what doesn't” ( Solnit, 2020 , para. 6). Likewise, writing about the situation in the United Kingdom (UK), Davoudi and Ormerod (2021) begin by locating the discourse of our despair and survival amidst these trying times in the World Health Organization (WHO) slogan, “we're in this together.” They point out that this slogan is problematic because it

suggest[s] that the virus does not discriminate and can affect porters and cleaners as well as princes and prime ministers. However, this narrative overlooks the profoundly unequal health, social and economic impacts of the pandemic. ( Davoudi and Ormerod, 2021 , p. 1 , p. 1)

What these authors lay bare are the multiple interconnected vulnerabilities and oppressions most people endure in everyday life, only thrown into stark relief by the COVID-19 pandemic. As Solnit (2020, para. 31) reiterates: “ordinary life before the pandemic was already a catastrophe of desperation and exclusion for too many human beings, an environmental and climate catastrophe, an obscenity of inequality.” For overseas Filipino workers, who are the focus of this paper, one of the manifestations of this reality during the COVID-19 pandemic has been the massive termination of jobs. Emerging literature on the displacement of OFWs because of these abrupt terminations continue to document and analyze the effects of the pandemic on the economy and the lives it has disrupted. For example, Galam ( 2020b , para.3) writes that, “[t]he global economic and labour market devastation caused by the pandemic has led to the mass retrenchment and displacement of more than 400,000 overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) whose remittances the Philippines has depended on to keep its economy afloat.” Although the Philippine government has made efforts to repatriate OFWs, it is proving to be an inadequate response to the overall structural shifts in employment during the pandemic. Fernandez et al. ( 2020 , para. 11) report that,

the prospects for returning OFs [overseas Filipinos] are not any better at home. During the first few weeks of community quarantine, 3 million left the labor force and an additional 5 million became unemployed based on the April 2020 Labor Force Survey. As the community quarantine dragged on, its economic impact became worse.

Regardless of the pandemic, the OFW's life is indeed precarious. By tracing the emergence of this precarity, Paret and Gleeson ( 2016 , p. 280) explain that it has become the analytical concept by which recent scholarship on migration is framed because

the migrant existence is often precarious in multiple, and reinforcing ways, combining vulnerability to deportation and state violence, exclusion from public services and basic state protections, insecure employment and exploitation at work, insecure livelihood, and everyday discrimination or isolation

This precarity is rooted in the movements of many historical, political, and economic forces. The precarity of the OFW's life is made more precarious by the COVID-19 pandemic. Though it is clear how the precarity of an OFW's life prior to the pandemic hinges on social, political, and economic disruptions, the consequences of a public health crises in general, the COVID-19 pandemic, and their affective and emotional disruptions to OFW's lives is less apparent. Aguilar ( 2020 , p. 290) has used the term “covidscapes” to refer to the reality of the present pandemic, and he has described this reality as “profoundly perspectival. It is the physical, experiential, affective, and epistemological terrain constituted by the congealing yet shifting confluence of the Covid-19 disease” and is therefore “uneven across the world and also within the same country, with different social groups and entities experiencing it and responding to it in markedly different ways.“. In this paper, I explore the intersections and particular forms of precarity, migration, and emotion, that are lived by overseas Filipino workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Other scholars have also begun examining these intersections in light of the recent deluge of global-scale catastrophes. For example, Katharina Wuropulos (2020, p. 3) writes that

the mere hearing of words such as disease, pandemic, emergency, or crisis can bring up imaginations of how affected people must feel. Consternation, panic, fear, and sadness are examples of usually negative emotions which are discursively connected to the named phenomena.

In contrast to these emotions, Galam (2020a) has shown how solidarity and care figure in the experiences of Filipinos in the UK. Pointing out the focus on migration and emotion of these recent works is important in light of a review of studies on migration and emotion by Boccagni and Baldassar (2015, p. 74) where they claimed that “ the emotional side of the migrant condition seems still relatively understudied. This is partly to be explained by the dominance of economic and political analyses of migration”.

Using emotions as a lens to understand the life of the migrant worker is valuable because “migration invariably affects emotions as both (corporeally) embodied and (societally) embedded” ( Boccagni and Baldassar, 2015 , p. 75). Boccagni and Baldassar (2015, p. 79) further emphasize that “investigating migrants' emotional experience sheds light on the shifting material, relational and spatial bases of emotions more broadly”. In examining how the COVID-19 pandemic affects overseas Filipino workers, I proceed from the assumption that overseas work and public health crises are states of precarity also characterized by their affective dimension.

I interviewed three OFWs, Chona, Kakay, and Ben, (not their real names), who were terminated from their jobs in Abu Dhabi (Chona), Dubai (Kakay), and Doha (Ben) during the COVID-19 pandemic. I conducted the in-depth, semi-structured interviews separately via Zoom. Aware that three life stories might present a limitation in finding a basis to explore the interrelatedness of emotion, labor, and migration, I locate the respondents' lives in the many discourses of overseas labor that also inform the realities of many OFWs. To this end, my conversations with Chona, Kakay, and Ben included stories about their time as OFWs prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, which spanned 14–15 years each. We began by talking about the reasons and circumstances that pushed them to find work abroad, shuttling back and forth between their lives in the host and home countries, as they tell me about the ways they came to terms with the termination of their employment.

1. Early return

Chona, Kakay, and Ben's time abroad spans from 1997 until 2020. Kakay and Chona both migrated abroad for the first time to work in 2006, while Ben first migrated in 1997. Prior to the termination of their employment, they all worked in the Middle East. It was a long journey before they reached their last job abroad. In this section I trace the kind of lives and emotion work that Chona, Kakay, and Ben have performed – and that have been disrupted and altered by the COVID-19 pandemic. These lifecourse stories inform the way they persist during their attempt to return to the Philippines.

As a graduate of civil engineering in the Philippines, Chona found her first job in Qatar, where she was a quantity surveyor for eight years. Chona came to Qatar with a tourist visa and no employer. She recalled that, “when I arrived in Qatar, my focus was to find a job. I faxed my resume nonstop. You know the yellow pages, like the one by PLDT [Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company] that we have here in the Philippines? I faxed my resume to all the listings there that had to do with construction”. In 2015, she went to Abu Dhabi and was also employed as a quantity surveyor for another company. When I asked her if she can recall the moment when she finally decided to work overseas, she told me that making the decision was difficult for her as a mother. Chona recounted the guilt and worry that absent mothers feel ( Asis et al., 2004 ; Fresnoza-Flot, 2009 ) as she contemplated leaving her five-year-old son to work abroad. Then, she told me about a particular episode vividly:

I am a single mom. My aim was to raise my child by myself. When my son was around two or three years old, I rushed him to the hospital because of a severe asthma attack. I was carrying him in my arms. He couldn't breathe. I had no money and I had to rely on my mother. I will never forget being turned away at the hospital because we had no money. I thought my heart would crumble. So I said to myself, ‘Alright, I need go abroad and I need to find a job for my son’. When I was finally in the plane, I couldn't think of work. All I could think about was my son. I was crying the entire flight. When I landed in Qatar, my eyes were so swollen.

Chona only took a one-month vacation in the Philippines every year, until 2020, when she was dismissed from her job and forced to go home. Chona's resolve and determination to work abroad also resonates with Kakay's and Ben's stories.

When Ben left the Philippines in 1997, he went to Taiwan to work for a year, then he was in Saudi Arabia for two and a half years, and then in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for six months. His three kids were left at home, with his wife, who was also working full-time. In 2001, Ben returned to the Philippines because, as he told me, he was a young father who had kids at home, and life abroad was simply too difficult. He stayed in the Philippines for nine years, jumping from one job to another, sometimes working multiple jobs to make ends meet. Although Ben had no intention of working overseas again, a former colleague who was also Filipino emailed him in 2010 and informed him about a job opportunity in Qatar. In this job and location, he eventually became a technical manager and quality control engineer (he told me that he performed the job of three people because of the company's poor policy and management). At first, the manager in the company did not want to hire Ben because he was already 43 years old. But the friendships and social networks Ben had built in Taiwan helped him secure the position. Among the friends he had made there were fellow OFWs who were also linked to the company in Qatar. They told the manager that they had worked with Ben before, and that Ben was fit for the job. Having had an idea of what life abroad was like, Ben said that the decision to leave once more was difficult. He did not want to be separated from his family again. Ben added, in a resigned tone, that work abroad has no “direction” (“walang plano doon”). This phrasing means that, to Ben, working overseas often feels like an endless labor that leads to nowhere, where money is not enough to improve one's situation, and in which it feels rather like a band-aid solution to a large and deep problem. This time around, Ben said he was offered an adequate salary that might have a different outcome. Ben told me, “I did it for my children, so they can have a better life”.

Kakay's migration story also took many paths like Ben's, and similarly began out of necessity too. What finally pushed Kakay to find work elsewhere was losing her job in the Philippines around the same time that her husband also lost his. This event happened as their two children were about to go to high school. Kakay told me,

My children then were young. We didn't have a lot of savings. Everything was breakeven. We put all of our money towards our children's education and a future home we can call our own. Then the company I was working for closed. When my husband also lost his job, we bought a van that he could drive as a means of public transportation . 1 But that didn't last long. We would always get caught by the police because we couldn't register the van properly for public transport. We just end up using the money we earn to pay for the fines.

Like Ben and Chona, who had an idea of what happens abroad, informed by stories of difficulty and danger that OFWs experience, Kakay also initially refused to go, but stated that she had no choice. She wanted her husband to go first, but was told by a distant relative who was already working overseas that it would be better for Kakay to leave first because “it is easier for women to get jobs abroad”, signaling the feminization of labor migration ( Yoshimura, 2007 ; Parreñas, 2000 ; Piper, 2003 ). Kakay arrived in Dubai with a tourist visa. She worked as a cleaner and a part-time waitress. She said “it was so difficult to be the first one to go. I knew no one. In my job, we cleaned small hotel hallways and the cafeteria of the hotel staff. We also cleaned the surroundings of the building”. After working 1 year as a cleaner, Kakay borrowed money to cover the cost of visas and flight tickets to fly her husband to Dubai as well. Kakay remembers her first year abroad with a mix of relief and pain:

About six days before I spent one year as a cleaner, one of the friends I had made in the place I stayed at sent me a job vacancy, among the many she found that day because between the two of us, she was the one who sent her CV every day to every place she could find.

It was an arduous process for Kakay, whose previous company held her passport to prevent her from switching jobs: “When I resigned from my job as a cleaner, they withheld my passport. That's illegal, but they do it”. Eventually, Kakay would be hired as an office assistant at the company she would end up working for until 2020, when she was let go because of the pandemic.

Out of necessity, Chona, Kakay and Ben, as OFWs, navigated the tensions between their emotions and material reality. The three dealt with a complex set of emotions as early as their departure from the home country, a process wherein they reconcile their love for their families and the need to be away from them in order to sustain this love ( McKay, 2007 ). This process was also responsible for how Chona, Kakay, and Ben were able to push themselves to leave the country despite the inadequacy of the Philippine state in handling labor migration ( Rodriguez, 2002 ; Solomon, 2009 ; Tigno, 2014 ). That the respondents started out with tourist visas and informal social networks pointed to the reality of the state's history of absence in ensuring the welfare of OFWs and securing their employment abroad, despite its reliance on OFW remittances that help the Filipino economy.

Chona, Kakay, and Ben's stories show that a messiness and difficulty of emotional experience goes hand in hand with migration. One way in which these emotions are managed is simply by adapting: as Chona put it, “you get used to your life abroad” (“sanay ka na”). It is a management and regulation of emotion that helps them do their job because, put frankly, money must be sent home every month. As OFWs, they are valued by the state chiefly for their remittance, and, in this regard, their emotions exist only as an excess that is displaced and spills onto conversations with fellow OFWs. The work that being sanay requires includes drawing artificial boundaries between life (family, love) and labor (survival, remittance). In this sense, such circumstances produce a way to dissociate the emotional complexity that overseas work entails from the emotional stagnation that overseas work demands. During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, when they lost their jobs, Chona, Kakay, and Ben performed a different kind of emotion management, one that is tied to their life abroad, but that now meant dealing with the slew of pandemic-related problems, including difficulties of returning home jobless and needing to recuperate the self lost during years spent “conditioning” themselves (to be sanay ).

In the following sections, I trace the varied and conflicting ways the respondents dealt with these emotions while still in their respective host countries, and as they tried to find ways to return home. I begin by examining how they manage fear; I then proceed to look at other emotions that co-existed with this fear. Finally, I make sense of the ways the respondents managed their emotions and the implications for their precarity. Drawing from Arlie Hochschild (1983) concept of emotional labor, I argue that all respondents performed what I am calling the emotional labor of persistence. This emotion work is tied to and enabled by the precarious conditions of the respondents' labor and life abroad, but it is also a resistive and agential kind of emotional labor that allowed them to endure this state of precarity. In enduring they found ways to elude, confront, or question the modes of thinking and feeling circumscribed by the demands of their overseas work and precarity.

2. Living with/beyond fear

For Chona, Kakay, and Ben, the fear of contracting the disease was inextricably tied to the threat of “destabilizing” the precarious state that they had long endured by “getting used to” life abroad by taking away their jobs. Kakay admitted that even before she was informed of the company's decision to let her go, she already had worried and feared that she would be fired because she was not “essential”: “I was worried about being fired from my job because I couldn't do anything from home, but I was getting paid. They had no use for me. And we didn't know until when the pandemic would last”. The state of precarity that the pandemic has created intensified the disposability of certain lives and certain forms of labor ( Pratt et al., 2017 ). In a time of heightened panic and emotions, Kakay's account manifests a crucial aspect of fear during the pandemic: metrics of performance, wage, and necessity. Such economic rubrics of labor value anything but an OFW's life.

But this fear must be managed, felt but not expressed, faced but not dispelled. In Chona's case, her fear of losing her job coincided with her fear of losing her mother. During the pandemic, Chona's mother was hospitalized, which made it doubly hard to decide whether to go home or stay abroad and earn the money needed to finance the hospitalization:

When my mother was admitted to the hospital in April, I started performing poorly in my job. Then the pandemic happened. People were laid off and I was one of them because I did not perform well. I was always absent. My priority was my mother who was in a critical state. Your employer doesn't understand that.

Chona added that “you constantly have to set your feelings aside when you are abroad”. Despite Chona's emotional work, she was fired anyway. Here, the fear of losing one's life and the fear of losing one's job are not separate from each other but intertwined so that ending one means effectively terminating the other.

Fear during the COVID-19 pandemic and other emergencies and crises are well-documented ( Carney and Bennett, 2014 ; Degerman et al., 2020 ; Schimmenti et al., 2020 ; Wuropulos, 2020 ). In this case, while Chona, Kakay, and Ben were all afraid of contracting the disease, they feared the situation specifically because they are in their respective host countries and not in their homeland. For instance, Ben asked: “If I test positive for the virus, how will I go to the hospital? Where will I get my food? I worry about all those kinds of things because I am by myself”. Chona even went as far as to say that if being infected is inevitable, she hopes that it will at least happen once she lands in Manila: “It is difficult to die in the host country. No one will be able to see you, you will just get cremated right away.” Kakay also questioned, “what if something happens to you, who will bring you to the hospital? If you die, who will arrange your funeral?”

With the articulation of the respondents' fears surfaced the loneliness and alienation from their home and diasporic communities. All respondents agreed that one of the most unbearable effects of fear during the pandemic is the realization (and fact) that they are practically by themselves and would have difficulty relying on somebody else should things take a turn for the worse. Here, diaspora communities that foster a sense of belongingness do not seem to offer much solace. In fact, though Chona and Ben noted that they were part of different communities, such ties did not figure in our conversations about dealing with the pandemic-related fear. However, even though such connections were not made during or due to the COVID-19 pandemic, these communities did play a role, based on the respondents' accounts, in maintaining a sense of sanity and safety for OFWs like Ben and Chona. Under “normal” circumstances, affective friendships provided presence and support in the host country ( Tsujimoto, 2016 ). That such bonds weakened rather than strengthened during the pandemic was interesting. Fear, it seemed, obscured this sense of belonging and reoriented the respondents' perspective towards home rather that diasporic support networks. For Brian Massumi ( 2010 , p. 54), “fear is the anticipatory reality in the present of a threatening future. It is the felt reality of the nonexistent, loomingly present as the affective fact of the matter”. The “futurity” of fear, as Sianne Ngai (2005) has called it, helps explain the way fear during a pandemic isolates the OFW from their social networks and diverts their attention to forms of security that would ensure their future selves a stable ‘disposition’”.

The respondents' accounts suggest that emotions were a site where the consequences of political and economic forces of migration were worked out as much as the same emotions were a force for migrating. Of these emotions, it is fear that arose from the specific contexts of being an OFW during a pandemic and that governed the respondents' emotional state and their emotion work. The respondents highlighted the tension between living in fear and persisting to gather oneself and return home.

Much has been said about the way fear works in politics to justify racist logics of the state ( Ahmed, 2004 ) to organize everyday life and regulate (and dominate) human behavior ( Massumi, 1993 ), and, most recently to effectively implement pandemic response under the right governance ( Degerman et al., 2020 ). In Chona, Kakay, and Ben's stories, managing and keeping fear at bay was an unavoidable consequence of their situation. This management of fear goes back to the beginning of their journeys as OFWs. In the beginning, they were simultaneously fearful of what lay beyond their country's borders and the possibility of not surviving the precarious conditions within its borders, which is what pushed them abroad in the first place. What these accounts show is that as OFWs, Chona, Kakay, and Ben's lives have been spent (so far) living and laboring in, and through, fear in their attempt to persist beyond it. In the next section, I discuss how fear has also been met with competing and reinforcing feelings, primarily because of the different forms of pandemic response in the host and home countries.

3. Feelings for/of home

Despite the prevalence of the respondents' fear and their work to manage this, other emotions came into play both in the host countries and in their attempts to return home. For instance, Chona details that her fear of the pandemic and of losing her job during her time in Abu Dhabi was compounded by confusion. Censorship of news was still rampant in Abu Dhabi. Thus, guidelines and protocols in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which she did not quite understand at the time, made her panic at first. According to Lynn Maalouf (2020, para. 4) of Amnesty International (2020) , “the GCC states have failed to justify how these measures are necessary and proportionate for the protection of public health”. Chona says that it was only through her Facebook community, predominantly comprised of fellow Filipinos, that she finally understood the pandemic.

All respondents agreed, however, that the pandemic response in their respective host countries was better than the management of the pandemic in the Philippines. But even an efficient pandemic response in the host countries cannot compete with persistent feelings for their families. According to Ben, “it's different when you are with your family during this pandemic”. Kakay echoed this concern when she talked about the need to be physically present in the Philippines to make sure her family is safe and healthy; she also noted that:

You worry that your family in the Philippines gets infected by the virus. You always tell them to be careful. But you constantly worry about it, and it's very stressful. In Dubai, yes, you worry about getting infected, but hospitalization is free. You become afraid, though, of being in a critical state. But in the Philippines, you worry about how expensive it will be if you contract the disease. You don't want your family in the Philippines to get infected.

Similarly, family is of utmost importance to Chona: “Now, my priority is my family, my parents, especially, because they are both senior citizens and no one watches over them.” It is at this juncture in our conversations that the respondents were able to draw comparisons between the host countries and the Philippines, bringing to the surface their feelings about their homeland, including its inadequate pandemic response. For Ben, “it's a mix of emotions. There's frustration, anger, annoyance, sadness, because you can't do anything. You hope that it could have been the same for the Philippines”. These feeling also led him to reflect, admitting that the COVID-19 pandemic has deeply altered his emotional state: “I became more worrisome, sadder, especially during the lockdown when you were just in your house. In the times that we did go to work, they made us work shorter hours. So more hours were spent at home where you felt more homesick”. Kakay shared the same frustration and anger towards the Philippines, pointing out that it is the government that must be blamed:

Of course, you become angry at our government here in the Philippines. Everything leads back to them. Our problem is our government … If I could have done something not to go home, I wouldn't have gone home. But that's what you expect when you return to the Philippines— you're on your own (bahala ka sa buhay mo).

Chona, Kakay, and Ben distinguished their feelings of attachment and love for their families from their feelings of anger and disappointment towards the state. Their feelings about their families allowed them to push through and let them suspend the emotional work of managing fear (for the thought of being with one's family gives comfort and reassurance). However, feelings about the state only required the same kind of laborious effort of managing one's emotions. Returning jobless, the respondents knew that the state offered limited prospects for employment. A poor pandemic response was expected of a country that, for several decades, has failed to develop adequate institutional support for OFWs like them. All respondents were only able to obtain plane tickets to Manila by negotiating with their companies, using social networks, and finding their own way, without any help from the inadequate repatriation process of the Philippine state ( Liao, 2020 ). In this case, the struggle to return home was driven by feelings for the family. Despite the challenges posed upon the obduracy of familial ties among transnational families ( Asis, 1994 ), these feelings override the anger towards, fear of, and disappointment with the state. What makes the persistence of this love so laborious is not just the precarious condition of the OFWs, but the complicity of the Philippine state in reproducing structures of precarity as well through an exploitative scheme of labor migration ( Lindio-McGovern, 2004 ; Tigno, 2014 , 1990 ).

Kakay's statement, “bahala ka sa buhay mo”, which loosely translates to “you're on your own”, captures how the Philippine state abandoned and neglected its citizens, especially during the pandemic, when the state response is an extreme form of militarization, rather than scientifically backed policies and regulations ( Hapal, 2021 ). While bahala ka sa buhay mo is a common phrase in Filipino, the meaning of which ranges from “whatever” to “you're on your own”, here Kakay articulated the weight that the phrase has accumulated in the past months because of the pandemic, her situation as an OFW, and the Philippine state's role in this situation. “Bahala ka sa buhay mo,” in this time and context, confronts the criminal negligence of the state in preserving life ( buhay ) through means that precede and co-exist with the pandemic. Kakay highlighted the urgency and reality of fending for one's life within the host country (as an OFW) and within the home country that threatens the lives of its citizens. In crossing borders, an act that requires state help but for which they were not able to receive any help, Kakay, Chona, and Ben navigated these dangers, and their journeys to return and reunite with their families become a preservation and assertion of life. There is a kind of emotional work here that persists and insists on continuing, pushing through conditions of precarity and danger. It is a complex confluence of emotions that submits to techniques of management and suppression and, more importantly, heeds the call of family, life, and love. The work that the OFWs perform here, which I am calling the emotional labor of persistence, is the subject of the next section.

4. Feeling of persistence/persistence of feeling

The intersecting discourses of labor, migration, and emotions have a long history. Migration is a disruption of established personal ties and other forms of social attachment in the homeland that are reconfigured but not eroded when family members are separated by national borders. Separation affects intimacy, which Yeoh et al. (2005) have argued influence the lived everyday experiences of family back home and those overseas too. McKay (2007) case study of a Filipino family illustrates this dual effect. She shows how a Filipino migrant worker's acquisition of an emotional grammar – used in their everyday labor overseas – is crucial in negotiating feelings of love and attachment with the family back home and in navigating one's way through the host society. The class and gender dimensions of this reality have been teased out by Parreñas (2001) in her study of Filipina mothers who must “mother from a distance” and bear the emotional burden that gender norms and class structures enforce in these contexts.

I build on this scholarship to highlight the lived everyday experiences of OFWs under the precarious conditions of labor migration. In contending with the economic and sociopolitical forces of migration and navigating, sustaining, and reconfiguring transnational ties, an emotional form of labor ensues. According to Hochschild (1983, p.7), emotional labor, which she synonymously uses with “emotion work” and “emotion management” “calls for a coordination of mind and feeling, and it sometimes draws on a source of self that we honor as deep and integral to our individuality”.

Additionally, she says emotional labor is “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display; emotional labor is sold for a wage and therefore has exchange value” ( Hochschild, 1983 , p. 7). For Hochschild, emotional labor is labor done to fulfill the demands of the job and to follow the cultural and social scripts that come with it. This suppression and repression of emotions that are the result of the job and of the situation it creates for the individual are not that different from the kind of “setting aside” and “management” I have thus far discussed in this paper. Indeed, that the respondents have needed to regulate their emotions because of the need to work overseas, has been necessitated by structures that (re)produce precarity. However, what distinguishes the emotional work performed by the respondents in this paper are the ends that such emotion work also serve – that is, to survive conditions in the host country and return home during a public health crisis.

Framed within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the emotional labor performed by Chona, Kakay, and Ben has been attributed to the sheer messiness and complexity of the pandemic. While emotions such as fear, anger, loneliness, sadness, and even frustration, confusion, disappointment, comfort, solace, and homesickness shape the way the respondents navigated their situations, it is their awareness of how these emotions materialized, and how they were managed, that suggested that the OFWs were not entirely subject to the conditions that gave rise to these emotions. Though it may seem like their endurance of such realities is an acquiescence to structures of power and inequality that put them in such a position, the respondents' awareness of the ways they manage their emotions, evidenced by their stories, and of the conditions that push them to endure suggests that this endurance is a way of persisting beyond this catastrophe, signified by their return to their families and achieved through the monumental efforts it takes to manage one's emotions under such trying times.

At the end of our conversation, Chona told me:

I thanked Dulce 2 because somebody was doing interviews about those who have lost their jobs during the pandemic. This was an opportunity to voice what I feel. I didn't have anyone to talk to in the host country. At home, I also can't talk to anyone because I am taking care of my mother. I wasn't able to talk about my feelings until this interview.

I take Chona's words as evidence that a working through of the emotions enabled her to recuperate a sense of self that had lived in fear, and been alienated by conditions abroad. This self was contained in the emotional labor of being “used to” ( sanay ) one's life overseas. What I have explored as the “emotional labor of persistence” is what the OFWs routinely perform. It recognizes and encompasses precarious conditions and salvages the self from the consequences of a life lived in precarity. Ben highlighted the kind of consciousness that was present in this emotional labor when he said that “whether there's COVID or not, you can't understand the life of an OFW until you become one. No story, TV show, film, or news coverage [can capture it]. You won't be able to understand it until you become one”. The “emotional labor of persistence” that all respondents performed functioned as a means of disentangling – by themselves and for themselves – the ways by which their emotions have been repressed, suppressed, and even silenced by their precarious positions.

In my conversation with Chona, I was struck by how the necessity to persist was inextricably intertwined with her faith. When she received news that her mother's condition was improving within the same week that she lost her job, Chona recounted the experience to me by saying: “when I lost my job, I thought, ‘Thank you, Lord. If this is the trade-off—that I lose my job in exchange for my mother's health, I would gladly accept it, because I know, Lord, that you will take care of me till the end”. This kind of faith was also evident in the stories and circumstances surrounding all the respondents' decision to work abroad in the first place. Tadiar ( 2004 , p.244) captures the risks associated with finding a means to persist elsewhere in pakikipagsapalaran or pagbabakasakali , which she characterized as “an acting in faith”. Here, she talked of faith as sampalataya or the force that “incarnates the unarticulated relations among people—feelings, respect, hope and belief” (p. 244). Informed by the various discourses of faith, survival, and familial love, Chona, Kakay, and Ben performed a kind of emotional labor that did not serve to stifle feelings of fear, anger, helplessness, or aloneness, but that recognised, reconfigured, and resisted the intimacy by which structures that reproduce precarity forced them to persist.

I have framed Chona's, Kakay's, and Ben's stories as narratives of persistence to challenge dominant discourses of resiliency and heroism that obscure the dangerous and precarious realities that OFWs like them endure. Attention to their emotional labor manifests in their very experiences. In the national political discourse that constructs the image of the OFW, the state of precarity is rendered acceptable if not invisible by the rhetoric of “bagong bayani” or modern-day hero. What began as a way of saving the collapse of the country's economy during President Ferdinand Marcos' term, labor export in the Philippines, according to Encinas-Franco ( 2013 , p. 97), came to be narrativized as stories of modern-day heroism under the term bagong bayani during the administration of President Corazon Aquino: “[H]enceforth, the nation's overseas workers were anointed as self-sacrificing ‘modern-day heroes’, evoking images of hard work amid loneliness abroad”. This discursive move by the state was necessary because it “legitimize [d] and normalize [d] the risks of migrating for work abroad and downplay [ed] the huge role of the state in labor export promotion” ( Encinas-Franco, 2015 , p. 57).

Chona, Kakay, and Ben were subjected to the logic of the bagong bayani narrative, which transformed their endurance and struggle as a story of sheer bravery and strength. While Chona, Kakay, and Ben indeed possessed the strength and courage to journey back home in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was crucial that their labor through this hardship was rendered visible. In this regard, a narrative of persistence and emotional labor highlights the continuation of life for the OFWs without concealing the precarious state of life and labor from which they recuperate themselves.

5. Conclusion

The mass displacement of OFWs caused by the COVID-19 pandemic showed unique problems and highlighted enduring issues of labor migration in the Philippine context. OFWs had to suddenly deal with the termination of their employment and a return home, in the face of limited job prospects, a failed pandemic response, and entrenched conditions of precarity that forced them to work overseas in the first place. Through the stories of Chona, Kakay, and Ben, in this paper, I have endeavored to trace the emotional labor required in journeying back to the home country under dangerous and precarious conditions. Although three life stories are admittedly a limited sample with which to explore the emotional labor of persistence, I have weaved their lives to enduring realities and issues that inform the experiences of many OFWs like them, and to which they are intimately connected. In articulating a critique of the conditions that put OFWs in precarious positions and underscoring the role of emotions in laboring to survive such conditions, I am guided by the words of Paret and Gleeson (2016, p. 278), who have noted that such ethnographies “hone in on the micro-mechanisms that generate and solidify broader patterns of precarity”. Like many other OFWs, Chona, Kakay, and Ben's stories began out of the necessity to survive. Their stories of overseas labor were cut short because of the pandemic, prompting an early return. This paper shows that in the 14–15 years they have spent overseas up until their return to the home country, they have performed various kinds of emotion work to survive life abroad. This emotional labor included getting used to ( sanay ) life overseas, compounded by the work needed to labor through the fear triggered by, but not limited to, the COVID-19 pandemic, feelings of love and attachment to the family, anger and disappointment towards the home country, and the necessity to persist beyond the present circumstances of a public health crisis and, once again, return home.

While various accounts of the emotional labor performed by OFWs and transnational families have provided ways for understanding the cruciality of emotions in labor migration, in this paper I have focused on the emotional labor required to survive unprecedented circumstances in a life already shaped by a constant state of risk and danger. Informed by the assumption that migration and the COVID-19 pandemic have far-reaching emotional consequences, I have explored how OFWs who suffer such consequences persist beyond conditions of risk and precarity. In doing so, I highlight the emotional component and aspects of disposability that characterize migrant labor, which dominant narratives of labor export in the Philippines tend to obscure. Most importantly, a focus on emotional labor is a hopeful aspiration to account for the possibilities of agency and resistance that persist in the debilitating reality of overseas work. Chona's words of gratitude about this type of ethnographic work revealed to me how emotional labor can delineate the limits of the forces that condition one's precarity and the spaces of lived experience that such forces cannot reach.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to Chona, Kakay, and Ben for their time, trust, and willingness to have these conversations. This paper would also not have been possible without the help of Dulce, Adge, Daryll, and Professor Noel Moratilla of the UP Diliman Asian Center.

1 SUVs and vans are a mode of public transportation in the Philippines.

2 Dulce is also an OFW in America and Chona's friend. She is the one who connected me to Chona.

Aguilar F. Covidscapes: the pandemic in the Philippines. Philippine Stud.: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints. 2020; 68 (3–4):287–299. [ Google Scholar ]
Ahmed S. Edinburgh University Press; 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. [ Google Scholar ]
Amnesty International . Amnesty International; 2020. GCC: Flawed Laws Exploited in Pandemic to Further Crush Freedom of Expression. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/10/gcc-flawed-laws-exploited-in-pandemic-to-further-crush-freedom-of-expression/ Accessed. [ Google Scholar ]
Asis M.M.B. Family ties in a world without. Philippine Socio. Rev. 1994; 42 (1/4):16–26. [ Google Scholar ]
Asis M.M.B., Huang S., Yeoh B.S.A. When the light of the home is abroad: unskilled female migration and the Filipino family. Singapore J. Trop. Geogr. 2004; 25 (2):198–215. doi: 10.1111/j.0129-7619.2004.00182.x. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Boccagni P., Baldassar L. Emotions on the move: mapping the emergent field of emotion and migration. Emotion, Space and Society. 2015; 16 :73–80. doi: 10.1016/j.emospa.2015.06.009. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Carney T., Bennett B. Framing pandemic management: new governance, science or culture? Health Sociol. Rev. 2014; 23 (2):136–147. doi: 10.1080/14461242.2014.11081968. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Davoudi S., Ormerod E. Hope and despair at the time of pandemic. Town Plan. Rev. 2021; 92 doi: 10.3828/tpr.2020.77. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Degerman D., Flinders M., Johnson M.T. In defence of fear: COVID-19, crises and democracy. Crit. Rev. Int. Soc. Polit. Philos. 2020; 11 (3):1–22. doi: 10.1080/13698230.2020.1834744. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Encinas-Franco J. The language of labor export in political discourse: “Modern-day heroism” and constructions of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) Philippine Political Science Journal. 2013; 34 (1):97–112. doi: 10.1080/01154451.2013.789162. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Encinas-Franco J. Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) as heroes: discursive origins of the “Bagong Bayani” in the era of labor export. Humanit. Diliman. 2015; 12 (2):56–78. [ Google Scholar ]
Fernandez I., Muyot J., Pangilinan A., Quijano N. London School of Economics and Political Science; 2020. A Hero's Welcome? Repatriated Overseas Filipino Workers and COVID-19. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/seac/2020/10/08/a-heros-welcome-repatriated-overseas-filipino-workers-and-covid-19/ Retrieved from. [ Google Scholar ]
Fresnoza-Flot A. Migration status and transnational mothering: the case of Filipino migrants in France. Global Network. 2009; 9 (2):252–270. doi: 10.1111/j.1471-0374.2009.00253.x. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Galam R. Care and solidarity in the time of Covid-19: the pandemic experiences of Filipinos in the UK. Philippine Stud.: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints. 2020; 68 (3–4):443–466. doi: 10.1353/phs.2020.0028. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Galam R. The London School of Economics and Political Science; 2020. Futures on Hold: the Covid-19 Pandemic, International Seafaring and the Immobility of Aspiring Filipino Seafarers. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/seac/2020/09/22/futures-on-hold/ [ Google Scholar ]
Hapal K. The Philippines' COVID-19 response. J. Curr. Southeast Asian Aff. 2021:1–21. doi: 10.1177/1868103421994261. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Hochschild A. University of California Press; 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. [ Google Scholar ]
Liao K.A.S. Operation ‘Bring Them Home’: learning from the large-scale repatriation of overseas Filipino workers in times of crisis. Asian Popul. Stud. 2020; 16 (3):310–330. doi: 10.1080/17441730.2020.1811511. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Lindio-McGovern L. Alienation and labor export in the context of globalization. Crit. Asian Stud. 2004; 36 (2):217–238. doi: 10.1080/14672710410001676043. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Massumi B. University of Minnesota Press; 1993. The Politics of Everyday Fear. [ Google Scholar ]
Massumi B. In: The Affect Theory Reader. Gregg M., Seigworth G.J., editors. Duke University Press; 2010. The future birth of the affective fact: the political ontology of threat; pp. 52–70. [ Google Scholar ]
McKay D. ‘Sending dollars shows feeling’ – emotions and economies in Filipino migration. Mobilities. 2007; 2 (2):175–194. doi: 10.1080/17450100701381532. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Ngai Sianne. Harvard University Press; 2005. Ugly Feelings. [ Google Scholar ]
Paret M., Gleeson S. Precarity and agency through a migration lens. Citizen. Stud. 2016; 20 (3–4):277–294. doi: 10.1080/13621025.2016.1158356. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Parreñas R.S. Migrant Filipina domestic workers and the international division of reproductive labor. Gend. Soc. 2000; 14 (4):560–580. [ Google Scholar ]
Parreñas R.S. Mothering from a distance: emotions, gender, and intergenerational relations in Filipino transnational families. Fem. Stud. 2001; 27 (2):361–390. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3178765 [ Google Scholar ]
Piper N. Feminization of labor migration as violence against women. Violence Against Women. 2003; 9 (6):723–745. doi: 10.1177/1077801203009006006. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Pratt G., Johnston C., Banta V. Lifetimes of disposability and surplus entrepreneurs in bagong barrio, Manila. Antipode. 2017; 49 (1):1–24. doi: 10.1111/anti.12249. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Rodriguez R.M. Migrant heroes: nationalism, citizenship and the politics of Filipino migrant labor. Citizen. Stud. 2002; 6 (3):341–356. doi: 10.1080/1362102022000011658. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Schimmenti A., Billieux J., Starcevic V. The four horsemen of fear: an integrated model of understanding fear experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Clinical Neuropsychiatry. 2020; 17 (2):41–45. doi: 10.36131/CN20200202. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Solnit R. The Guardian; 2020. “The Impossible Has Already Happened”: what Coronavirus Can Teach Us about Hope. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/07/what-coronavirus-can-teach-us-about-hope-rebecca-solnit [ Google Scholar ]
Solomon M.S. State-led migration, democratic legitimacy, and deterritorialization: the Philippines' labour export model. Eur. J. East Asian Stud. 2009; 8 (2):275–300. doi: 10.1163/156805809X12553326569759. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Tadiar N.X.M. Hong Kong University Press; 2004. Fantasy-production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order. [ Google Scholar ]
Tigno J.V. International migration as state policy: the Philippine experience as model and myth. Kasarinlan Philipp. J. Third World Stud. 1990; 6 (1):73–78. [ Google Scholar ]
Tigno J.V. At the mercy of the market?: state-enabled, market-oriented labor migration and women migrants from the Philippines. Philippine Political Science Journal. 2014; 35 (1):19–36. doi: 10.1080/01154451.2014.914999. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Tsujimoto T. Affective friendship that constructs globally spanning transnationalism: the onward migration of Filipino workers from South Korea to Canada. Mobilities. 2016; 11 (2):323–341. doi: 10.1080/17450101.2014.922362. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Wuropulos K. Emotions, emergencies and disasters: sociological and anthropological perspectives on the COVID-19 pandemic. Global Aff. 2020:1–7. doi: 10.1080/23340460.2020.1846997. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Yeoh B.S.A., Huang S., Lam T. Transnationalizing the ‘Asian’ family: imaginaries, intimacies and strategic intents. Global Network. 2005; 5 (4):307–315. doi: 10.1111/j.1471-0374.2005.00121.x. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Yoshimura M. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd; Oxford, UK: 2007. Feminization of labor migration. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]

Content Search

Philippines + 1 more

Migration Research Series No. 63 - Repatriating Filipino migrant workers in the time of the pandemic

Attachments.

Introduction

Migration is one of the most important global opportunities and challenges of the 21st century. Since the 1970s, generations of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) have faced one form of crisis or another that interrupted their employment, endangered their lives and forced some of them to return home. Conflicts, economic downturns, natural disasters and health scares in destination countries or regions where OFWs are present have prompted the Philippine Government to craft policies and action plans to protect and, if needed, repatriate OFWs. The evacuation of OFWs to safety and the repatriation of close to 30,000 during the 1990–1991 Gulf War was the first and most massive such effort that the Philippines had undertaken (Asis, 2013), until COVID-19 occurred.

The Gulf War experience alerted the Philippine Government of the need to develop a response to assist OFWs in crisis situations. Since then, foreign employers and companies employing OFWs have been required to submit a contingency plan outlining how OFWs will be protected and repatriated to the Philippines, if needed. The extension of support and repatriation assistance to OFWs was further codified in the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act of 1995 (Republic Act No. 8042, as amended by Republic Act No. 10022 in 2010). Section 15 of the law provides for the repatriation of OFWs, the allocation of emergency repatriation funds, and the designation of the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) as the lead agency in the repatriation of OFWs. The law also mandates Philippine embassies and consulates to adopt the One Country Team Approach, with the ambassador as the lead, in coordinating efforts to respond to crisis situations (Section 28). In 2015, the Departments of Foreign Affairs, Labor and Employment, Social Welfare and Development, and Health, as well as the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) and OWWA, developed the Joint Manual of Operations in Providing Assistance to Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos. The manual aims to provide a “unified contingency plan that will safeguard overseas Filipinos in case of crises and other imminent danger” (DOLE, 2015). Through the various crises and emergencies, Filipino communities proved to be important partners of Philippine foreign missions in providing information and extending support to Filipino migrants. On the home front, OWWA is the lead agency for repatriation efforts, operating a hotline to respond to queries from families of OFWs, coordinating and responding to the needs of OFW arrivals, and facilitating the transfer of OFWs to their origin provinces (Asis, 2013). Thus, informed by experience, the Philippines has established a framework in responding to crisis situations.

Although OFWs have been exposed to several epidemics in the past – SARS, Ebola, MERS-CoV – the impacts were contained or limited. None of these previous health crises resulted in massive job losses, displacements, or OFWs being thrust into stranded situations. With the downturn in the global economy, employment prospects at home and overseas are bleak. The pandemic is not just a health crisis, but is also an economic, social, political and even a humanitarian crisis. Given the distribution of large numbers of overseas Filipinos throughout the world – 5.4 million, according to the stock estimate of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, or 10 million according to the Philippine Government – the Philippines is faced with the daunting challenge of attending to the needs of Filipino nationals outside the country. This paper provides an overview of the repatriation of OFWs under this current and continuing pandemic, noting the challenges encountered and highlighting emerging good practices.

DSWD protects women, kids displaced by armed conflict in Albay town

La oms hace un llamado a la acción para defender el derecho a la salud en medio de la inacción, la injusticia y las crisis, philippines: typhoon rai (odette) - emergency appeal no. mdrph045 - final report.

World + 14 more

Policy Brief on the Security Council’s Consideration of the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict (2019 - 2023)

Privacy Notice
Authors Database
AV Materials
Partner-Institutions
Site Statistics
Events and Announcements
Socioeconomic Issue on Spotlight
Featured Researcher
Featured Partner Institution
About SERP-P
Objectives of SERP-P
Terms and License Statement
How to become a partner institutiion?

A Typology of OFWs Returning Home: A Survey Study on the Return and Reintegration of OFWs

This publication has been cited time(s).

In other Publication

Since Aug 31, 2021

Download Publication

Please let us know your reason for downloading this publication. May we also ask you to provide additional information that will help us serve you better? Rest assured that your answers will not be shared with any outside parties. It will take you only two minutes to complete the survey. Thank you.

effective plans to bring ofws back home research paper

Partner Login

By providing an email address. I agree to the Terms of Use and acknowledge that I have read the Privacy Policy .

‘How do we convince OFWs to return home?’

MANILA, Philippines — As government persuade thousands of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in the Middle east to return home, lawmakers had one recurrent question: how do we convince them to return home?

At the hearing of the House committee on overseas workers affairs, committee chair TUCP party list Rep. Raymond Mendoza grilled Department of Labor and Employment Secretary Silvestre Bello III on the government’s plans for the OFWs who would be leaving behind their jobs abroad.

Mendoza posed the question after Special Envoy to Middle East Roy Cimatu told the committee that that he had received reports that the situation in Baghdad in Iraq is “deteriorating,” highlighting the need for the immediate repatriation of OFWs there.

“How do we now bring them home kung ayaw nila (if they do not want to)? How do we entice them to get out of that country considering there is already war?” said Mendoza.

Bello III claimed returning OFWs may find re-employment in under various government programs, such as the Build, Build, Build program. Bello said the DOLE is also looking into re-deployment of OFWs to other “alternative markets” such as Canada, Russia, Germany, and China should an OFW wish to be re-deployed overseas.

Livelihood assistance and scholarship grants for their immediate family also await returning OFWs, he said.

“We just have to convince them either personally or through their families. The idea of a re-deployment would be a good motivation for them to consider repatriation,” he said.

Bello said the priority of the government is to be able to provide jobs for Filipinos here.

“The final call of our President is to bring them (OFWs) all back. That is the real vision of our President—that is why we have this Build, Build, Build infrastructure programs so that there are job opportunities,” the labor secretary said in Filipino and English.

But for several House lawmakers, a specific and concrete plan is needed to convince Filipinos to return home.

“Do we have a real plan for them to get a real job? Otherwise, we’re stuck. The cash grants et cetera do not entice them to come home. It is actually jobs,” Mendoza said.

Bello said that in the case of 15 OFWs who returned home from Iraq, they will be profiled as soon as possible and the government will assist them in finding alternative employment for them.

Refuse to return home

President Rodrigo Duterte earlier ordered the military to prepare its air and naval assets for the possible repatriation of OFWs in the Middle East after the U.S. launched an airstrike in Baghdad, Iraq, that killed Iran’s top general, Qasem Soleimani.

The Philippine government had repeatedly said that it is ready to repatriate Filipinos in the Middle East amid the crisis in the region.

DFA Undersecretary for Migrant Workers’ Affairs Sarah Lou Arriola said Alert Level 4 is currently raised over several countries in the Middle East such as Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya.

If Alert Level 4 is raised over a country, the Philippine government orders the mandatory repatriation of Filipinos.

Despite this, Arriola said some OFWs insist on staying, saying jobs are not available for them in the Philippines.

For instance in Iraq, only 15 of the 1,640 Filipinos there have opted to return home amid the crisis.

“They (OFWs) are saying that they have no jobs here but the mandatory repatriation is like we’re just making ourselves available to any Filipino who wants to return because we cannot also force them to leave the country,” Arriola said.

“But our instructions from [Foreign] Secretary [Teodoro] Locsin is never to leave the post so long as there’s one Filipino in the ground so we will stay in our post,” she added.

Subscribe to our daily newsletter

Arriola said there are 2.2 million Filipinos who are working or residing in the Middle East—of whom 2 million are in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Kuwait.

Disclaimer: Comments do not represent the views of INQUIRER.net. We reserve the right to exclude comments which are inconsistent with our editorial standards. FULL DISCLAIMER

We use cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. By continuing, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. To find out more, please click this link.

Subscribe Now

The silent struggle of returning OFWs

Already have Rappler+? Sign in to listen to groundbreaking journalism.

This is AI generated summarization, which may have errors. For context, always refer to the full article.

LeAnne Jazul

MANILA, Philippines – Rustico Lacostales heaved a heavy sigh of relief when he arrived home for the very first time after two decades of undocumented stay in Saudi Arabia.

Lacostales, 60, said he left the Philippines in 1990 following his wife’s suggestion. A lot of their neighbors were flying out for work abroad so even if he had a decent job here, his wife asked him to look for better opportunities as well.

Everything was well and good since he was able to regularly send money he earned by working as a mechanic. But that lasted for only 6 years.

The shop where he worked eventually closed and his employer cum sponsor fled with his passport. He never renewed it since and instead resorted to hiding in alleys whenever Saudi Jawazat – the authorities responsible for checking immigrants’ documents – came close.

Then very desperate, Lacostales survived by working in between casual jobs and relying on the goodwill of other OFWs there.

The Institute for Labor Studies (ILS) in 2016 noted that OFWs have a low level of return preparedness, both financially and socially.

“Sa Saudi, wala akong ginawa kundi umiyak talaga. Parang nawalan na ako ng pag-asa na makapiling ang pamilya ko. Nawalan na ako ng pag-asa, ang dinanas ko, napakahirap talaga,” he said. (All I did in Saudi was to cry. It was like I already lost hope to be with my family again. I already lost hope with all that I went through. It was really tough.)

His face displayed a hint of exasperation when he recalled how tough it was trying to go home. Several times, he had to walk to the Philippine embassy under the humid heat of Saudi to apply for repatriation, only to be rejected.

It was only through the amnesty program initiated by the Saudi government in 2017 that Lacostales was given the chance to see his family again. He was among the thousands of illegally staying OFWs sent home to the Philippines before the government started its crackdown.

But his struggle continued even after setting foot on their doorstep on June 17. He didn’t realize that re-connecting with his family after 25 years of separation – without constant communication – would be equally challenging.

“During my first month here, I felt that my children and wife were emotionally distant from me. They were saying different resentments towards me. But I just let it pass because I just want a new life, to be with them,” he said.

Coupled with the cold treatment was the regret that he missed out on parenthood and seeing his children grow up.

“Mga anak ko dinadaan-daanan lang ako, hindi ako kinikibo,” he said. “Iniwanan ko iyong mga anak ko maliliit pa, hindi ko naman nakasama mula’t sapul…Pinapakiramdaman ko bawa’t isa kung ano ang mga ugali nila.”

(My children and I saw each other but they didn’t talk to me. I left them when they were just kids. I had never been with them since…. Now, I’m trying to figure out their personalities.)

Lacostales took on every household chore day and night to win his family back in the simplest ways he could.

“Ginagawa ko lahat ng panunuyo… Ang asawa ko paggising pinagluluto ko ng babaunin niya. Pag-uwi sa hapon, pinagtitimpla ko ng kape.”

(I am doing everything so they would warm up to me. I prepare my wife’s packed lunch for work and when she goes home every afternoon, I make her coffee.)

His wife and children are slowly warming up to him. He’s unsure how the situation will completely turn around but giving up on rebuilding life with his family would be the last thing he would want to do. (READ: How Duterte gov’t plans to bring OFWs back home )

Psychological reintegration

Labor migration has been part and parcel of the lives of Filipinos. The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) estimates that there were a total of 2.2 million OFWs in 2016.

Several policies, programs, and institutions try to address the demand to work abroad. Philippine civil society, meanwhile, is conscious about the social cost of oversea parenting – thanks to a number of studies that link labor migration and its psychological effects on children and spouses.

On the other side of the migration spectrum is return and reintegration – discussed only in a limited manner in the economic or financial aspects of the issue. It entails access to jobs and livelihood after a worker’s stint abroad.

Resources often do not capture the reality that homecoming also impacts on a worker’s psychological state – the uncertainty of leaving a high-paying job or the anxiety over missed parenthood.

‘Mga anak ko dinadaan-daanan lang ako, hindi ako kinikibo… Iniwanan ko iyong mga anak ko maliliit pa, hindi ko naman nakasama mula’t sapul.’

A study by the Department of Labor and Employment’s (DOLE) policy arm, the Institute for Labor Studies (ILS), in 2016 noted that OFWs have a low level of return preparedness, both financially and socially. (READ: Changing the narrative on OFW reintegration )

“Return may only refer to the physical return of a migrant to their country of origin while reintegration is a process to which the migrant is re-introduced and re-inserted to the community under 3 identified dimensions: economic stability, social networks and psycho-social,” said the ILS policy paper.

Ronnie Abeto, a former migrant worker and an OFW rights advocate, had prepared himself on both fronts even before he went back home in 2014 after 20 long years in Saudi Arabia.

His story is not as depressing as Lacostales’ but the adjustment was inevitably challenging. Abeto took a year before finally getting comfortable again with the old but seemingly new environment he found himself in.

Among the obstacles he had to go through in his reintegration process was facing relatives and friends without the pasalubong or gifts they have been used to in the past.

“When I arrived here, the first thing I dealt with was my social life. When you are a balikbayan here, you are used to giving presents to relatives and friends you meet. I felt I can’t face them without the gifts,” shared Abeto in Filipino.

He and his wife also had to go through some psychological hurdles in reviving their relationship, which for the longest time had been kept alive via phone calls 3 or 4 times a day. He described it as being akin to getting back together after a break-up.

Since both of them were used to being independent, living under one roof again stirred conflict in their daily lives. In addition, they’ve had to catch up on the years spent living apart.

TOGETHER. Ronnie Abeto worked for 25 years in Saudi Arabia. Photo by LeAnne Jazul/Rappler

“[I had] to make up for those good old days that you had but lost (because you left)… Parang nagkagalit kayo at nag-mend ways… Manunuyo ka at iiwasan mo muna na huwag masaktan,” he said. (It’s like you went through a rough patch and mended ways. You have to woo her again and keep her from feeling hurt.)

Letting it pass

Although these may seem superficial, these are real concerns among OFWs. Carlos Lagaya of non-governmental organization UGAT Foundation said that these are the top problems returning migrants they work with tell them about. UGAT Foundation has been hosting several counselling programs for the sector since 2008.

“Common problem they encounter is that they do not know each other. Kids do not know who their fathers are… and fathers do not realize that their children have all grown up; that the kids they left are now teenagers who have their own social kids, social groups,” said Lagaya.

When it comes to the financial aspect, he said that some OFWs fail to handle the pressure as a result of their friends’ and family’s perception of their social status.

“Lumiliit na iyong mundo nila. Dati nakakasama sa gathering, dati kapag may family reunion sumasama. Pero hindi na sila nakakasama kasi iyong feedback, di nila matanggap…. Tayo kasi sa Pilipinas, ang expectation natin sobrang taas [na] ang daming pera nito, ang daming pasalubong,” he added.

‘[I had] to make up for those good old days that you had but lost (because you left)… Parang nagkagalit kayo at nag-mend ways… Manunuyo ka at iiwasan mo muna na huwag masaktan .’

(They don’t attend gatherings or family reunions like they used to. They can’t accept the feedback. Because people here in the Philippines have so many expectations of OFWs – that they have a lot of money and gifts.)

The worse part is, they go through it alone, in despair.

The ILS study found that 1% of returning migrants avail of government’s basic counselling services. Perhaps awareness could be behind this low utility since a little over half of the returnees are aware of the programs available to them. But findings also showed that only 2.3% believe that psycho-social intervention is something they need.

Lagaya thinks it is because of the stigma associated with psychological treatment. It was difficult getting participants for their activities. But families reach out to them when their situation becomes severe.

UGAT Foundation hosts the program called Kapiling Muli (Together Again) specifically for OFWs having trouble reconnecting with their families. They allow their participants to air their sentiments in a free space since parents are separated from their children.

Afterwards, they gather them in one session where they help them process their emotions and thoughts to talk their issues through. Depending on the case, the group provides individual counseling to the family. Their services are free of charge but a donation of any amount is appreciated.

“Kapag nabasa mo iyong mga letter, maiiyak ka kasi may nababasa ako doon na ‘buti pa iyong lupa nadadalaw mo, buti pa iyong puno, halaman. Invest kayo nang invest pero hindi kami naaalagaan,’” he said. (When you read the letters, you’ll want to cry because I’ve read letters that say, ‘You can visit your property, your farm, you keep on investing, but you fail to take care of us.)

“Ang maganda lang kapag talagang nasosolusyunan, una, nagkakasundo ang pamilya kaya alam na nila ano’ng dynamics. Pangalawa, ayaw na nilang maulit ang nangyari… [may mga anak] ayaw na nilang mag-abroad, ayaw na nilang mangyari iyon,” he added.

(The good thing about solving this is, first, the family members get to understand each other, they now know the dynamics. Second, they realize that they do not want this to happen again…there are kids who don’t want to work abroad because they don’t want to have the same fate.)

The government, through the Department of Social Welfare and Development, also offers psychological intervention both for families left behind by OFWs and workers who have already returned to the Philippines.

Raising awareness about these available services is as important as helping OFWs realize the other side of the reintegration process. – Rappler.com

Add a comment

Please abide by Rappler's commenting guidelines .

There are no comments yet. Add your comment to start the conversation.

How does this make you feel?

Patty Pasion

Recommended stories, {{ item.sitename }}, {{ item.title }}.

Checking your Rappler+ subscription...

Upgrade to Rappler+ for exclusive content and unlimited access.

Why is it important to subscribe? Learn more

You are subscribed to Rappler+

IMAGES

Carlson Labs
News from home: Another NAIA power outage, more Sudan OFWs home
How Duterte gov’t plans to bring OFWs back home
How Duterte gov.docx
shows the journey of the OFWs and the issues and challenges they face,...
Proposal example for research paper by Hill Jane

VIDEO

DIY IKEA BOOKSHELF

COMMENTS

PDF Reintegrating Returning Overseas Filipino Workers through Entrepreneurship
This paper seeks: (1) to examine return migrant entrepreneurship as a development policy by government; (2) to determine factors that facilitate and impede return migrant entrepreneurship; and (3) recommend other possible government interventions to reintegrate returning OFWs who venture into becoming entrepreneurs. Evaluation of reports and other
PDF The Lived Experience Of Former Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW
Despite these challenges, many former OFWs are being resilient and resourceful, using their experiences abroad and small savings to build small businesses and also receives support from the government of their home country. This study generated four themes namely: 1. For the Future, 2. Challenges, 3. Motivation, and 4.
(PDF) POST-PANDEMIC REINTEGRATION EFFORTS FOR OVERSEAS ...
OFWs from the Social Security System and the Home Development Mutual Fund. Sources of data: 1 - Entrepreneurial credit came from Landbank of the Philippines, Small Business Corp., th e Overseas ...
A Journey Back Home: Lived Experience of the Returning Overseas
In outbreak prevention and infection control amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Philippine government mandated the returning Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) to undergo a 14-day quarantine and ...
Returning broke and broken? Return migration, reintegration and
Kidjie Saguin is a PhD Candidate at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. Broadly, he is interested in comparative public policy, social policy and governance. His research is primarily concerned with understanding the factors and processes that underlie the ability to design and implement effective policies in emerging economies.
A Journey Back Home: Lived Experience of the Returning Overseas
The COVID-19 pandemic is a global health crisis that restructured the borders of movement and communication. Overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), whose regular remittances sustain not only their ...
PDF Remigration or Reintegration: What Explains the Intentions of Overseas
2020, the government organized !ights to bring home OFWs. In the case of cruise line personnel, the government allowed cruise ships to dock in Manila Bay so that displaced OFWs, who otherwise could not disembark, can make the return journey.]$ The government continues to facilitate the return of OFWs and cover the airfare of OFWs, as needed.
A Journey Back Home: Lived Experience of the Returning Overseas
OFWs returning home need to comply with the strict protocols set by the Inter-Agency Task Force on the management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-EID). OFWs need to subject themselves to mandatory reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests and a fourteen-day quarantine in any government-approved facilities.
Saving the Philippines' overseas workers
While 323,537 OFWs lost their jobs from February to May 2020, this number is estimated to reach over one million by the end of 2021. Over 200,000 OFWs had already returned home by August 2020 — 102,652 land-based repatriates and 101,048 sea-based — and this figure may reach 400,000 by the end of 2020.. For the Filipino labour migrants who remain abroad, many of them suffer from income loss ...
Overseas Filipino workers and the COVID-19 pandemic: Exploring the
However, while primarily seen in terms of their economic and political dimensions, these consequences also affectively disrupt the life of OFWs. In this paper, I trace the various conflicting ways that OFWs, who were terminated from their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic, have dealt with their emotions while still in their respective host ...
Anxious, Apart, and Attentive
disruptions in plans and family relationships, and (3) monitoring and caring from a distance. From these findings, it could be ... selves and for their families back home. In 2019, remittances from OFWs reached a record high of more than 200 billion ... and establishing effective transnational family arrangements (Graham & Jordan, 2011; Reyes ...
A Typology of OFWs Returning Home: A Survey Study on the Return and
We see far fewer OFWs end up on the path to becoming a business owner or entrepreneur. Based on these major profile and key findings we created a typology of returning OFWs: M1 - Struggling to be reintegrated M2 - Disengaged to be reintegrated M3 - Uncertain to be reintegrated M4 - Engaged to be reintegrated *M0 - Undocumented workers.
The Lived Experience of Former Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW ...
The Lived Experience of Former Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW) Returning to Their Home - Free download as PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read online for free. Roland Lasin, Jehan Dumiar, Raida Limbuna, Ohara Mandar, Farhanah Dalao, Geraldine Dela Torre, Rosemika Mohammad, Jodimer Mato, (2023). The Lived Experience of Former Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW) Returning to their Home ...
Migration Research Series No. 63
This paper provides an overview of the repatriation of OFWs under this current and continuing pandemic, noting the challenges encountered and highlighting emerging good practices. Report details ...
SERP-P: Socioeconomic Research Portal for the Philippines
The profiles of returning OFWs indicate that majority have a low level of return preparedness in terms of accumulated resources (financial and social). Most returning OFWs are also still in their productive age, especially our returning women household service workers, but to the lower wage and their limited skills upon return, they opt to ...
How Duterte gov't plans to bring OFWs back home
Here's how the government plans to bring OFWs back home. Dutertenomics to generate jobs. To bring them home means to provide them jobs that would earn them enough to sustain their families ...
How best to reintegrate OFWs back into society
1] Undertake a major revamp of the ongoing P2-billion OFW reintegration program, ideally after getting inputs from OFWs with finance and entrepreneurship backgrounds. Launched in June 2011, the P2-billion OFW fund reintegration program seems to have vanished into thin air! 2] Put in place mentorship support to raise the rate of success of first ...
'How do we convince OFWs to return home?'
Refuse to return home. President Rodrigo Duterte earlier ordered the military to prepare its air and naval assets for the possible repatriation of OFWs in the Middle East after the U.S. launched ...
(PDF) Life Challenges of Overseas Filipino Workers
The 330 or 39% of the total number of respo ndents have a monthl y salary of. 20,001 - 40,000 pesos, followed by Overseas Filipino Workers who have a salary. of 0 - 20,000 pesos which represents ...
OFWs adopt best practices of host country when they return home
Entitled "A Peek into Socio-Economic and Cultural Transfers (A Study on Cultural Transmission by OFWs from Host-to-Home Country)," the survey also learned that even if they brought in cultural changes back to their home, the OFWs "remain Filipino in heart and in mind and, in some instances, become even more than fiercely Pinoy in spirit than before they left."
The silent struggle of returning OFWs
The Institute for Labor Studies (ILS) in 2016 noted that OFWs have a low level of return preparedness, both financially and socially. "Sa Saudi, wala akong ginawa kundi umiyak talaga. Parang ...
(PDF) Saving and Spending Habits of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs
This study on spending and savings pattern of Overseas Filipino Families (OFWs) and their left behind families is an attempt to understand the social and economic context of Filipino migration.
Back home
In 2020, our unemployment rate hit a record high of 10.3 percent. Just last September 2021, the government reported an 8.9 percent unemployment rate. This is bad news for our returning OFWs and the IOM study confirmed this. It said that an "alarming 83 percent of OFWs were still unemployed three months after their return to the Philippines.".