Immobilised by the pandemic: Filipino domestic workers and seafarers in the time of COVID-19

Abstract

This paper documents the experiences of two different groups of ‘essential’ Filipino migrant workers during the pandemic: female domestic workers and male seafarers, each confined in new ways in their work/home situations and spaces. These two categories of workers make up a large proportion of migrants within the Philippines' extensive export labour economy. For domestic workers, the Canadian government virtually stopped processing applications for permanent resident status. Held in limbo in their temporary work status, many domestic workers experienced increased employer control over their movements and their bodies. Seafarers have been no less immobilised, disallowed from leaving their workplace (their ship) when in port or within the normal and expected work period of 9 months at sea. Extended ‘shifts’ at sea for some seafarers have left other seafarers at home, waiting in the Philippines in precarious situations of loss of income and mounting debt. In the case of both domestic workers and seafarers, the pandemic and a range of state and international regulatory failures and/or gaps have placed temporary workers into new conditions of precarity and into intensified experiences of immobility. We also show how their immobilisation as precarious workers reverberates throughout their families, and across the globe.