Suffering that Counts: The Politics of Sacrifice in Philippine Labor Migration

Abstract

Sacrifice is a fraught concept that both describes and prescribes the fateplaying ventures of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs). Suffering on behalf of loved ones promises a better life in return; it is also used to serve very different discursive ends: as a state strategy to promote overseas work or as a rhetorical tactic to condemn the government’s labor export policy. This paper tracks the trope of sacrifice in the state’s and migrant activists’ rhetoric and looks at how OFWs receive these meanings and respond to these discourses. The paper then examines Migrante International’s campaign, Zero Remittance Day, as a complex political act of withholding that defies the state’s remittance-centred strategy of migration-for-development.