Yasmin Ortiga and Karen Anne S. Liao conducted research supported by the SSRC on the dramatic disruptions that Filipino labor migrants experienced as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the support (or lack thereof) of their plight by the Filipino state. Arguing that labor as well as commodity supply chains have been thrown in upheaval, the authors describe the limits of the Philippines’ labor export strategy. In particular, they focus on two sets of labor migrants—nurses unable to take jobs abroad, and repatriated cruise ship workers—for whom dignified work at home was unavailable. Ortiga and Liao conclude that treating labor as a commodity has deep human and social costs.
Yasmin Y. Ortiga
Yasmin Y. Ortiga is an assistant professor of sociology at Singapore Management University. She studies how the social construction of “skill” shapes people’s migration trajectories, changing institutions within both the countries that send migrants, as well as those that receive them. In 2019, she received the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. She published Emigration, Employability, and Higher Education in the Philippines (Routledge, 2019). Her work has also been published in Global Networks, Social Science and Medicine, and Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.