‘So They Remember Me When I’m Gone’:
Remittances, Fatherhood and Gender Relations of Filipino Migrant Men[1]
Steve McKay
Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Cruz
Abstract:
Scholarship on gender and Filipino labour migration has focused almost exclusively on women, highlighting the ‘feminization’ of migration from the Philippines since the 1970s. Yet few studies have focused on men, who always remained a high percentage of out-migrants and in 2007 surpassed the number of migrant women working abroad. The article addresses the gap in the gender and migration literature and the neglected issues of masculinity by focusing on the largest group of Filipino migrant men workers, merchant seafarers. Today, there are over 373,000 Filipino seafarers in the global labour market, 97 per cent of whom are men. As the only category of Filipino migrants that are still required by law to remit a certain percentage of their wages, merchant seafarers also send back over $3.4 billion each year to the Philippines. The article focuses on male seafarers and the role that their remittances and economic investments play in the construction of gender norms and relations in their families and communities, both during their time abroad and on their ‘visits’ home. The article draws on historical research on seafarer promotion and remittance policies since the 1970s, on ethnographic field research among male seafarers onboard three international ships, and interviews with seafarers in their home communities.
Key words: men migrants, masculinity, Philippines, shipping, seafarers, remittances, gender
Word count: 7,975
INTRODUCTION
The Philippines is one of the leading senders of migrant labour into the global economy, with over eight million Filipinos – equal to about ten per cent of the current Philippine population - working and residing in some 140 countries. These labour migrants, in turn, have played a pivotal role in supporting the struggling Philippine economy, remitting over $17.3 billion - or about 12 per cent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product - back to the Philippines in 2009 alone. As a recent Asian Development Bank paper recently noted, ‘Remittances have become the single most important source of foreign exchange to the economy and a significant source of income for recipient families’ (Ang, Sugiyarto, and Jha 2009: v.).
The sheer size of the Philippine labour diaspora and its development over the last forty years has spawned a number of important studies across a range of occupations - from nurses to domestics to entertainers – that have made important contributions to such key issues as the role of the state in gendering migrant streams (Tyner 2000), the gendering and racialization of particular occupations (Choy 2003, Guevarra 2010, Lan 2006), the rise of transnational families (Parrenas 2005), and the interplay between sexuality and workplace discipline (Constable 1997). Yet due in part to the feminization of Philippine out-migration in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, nearly all of these gender studies have centered on women. And while feminization reached a peak in 2004 when 74 per cent of all migrants were women, since 2007 men have actually out numbered women every year.[2] In order to help balance the scholarship on gender, migration and the Philippines, this study focuses on an important but understudied group of labouring men, merchant seafarers. Today, the Philippines dominates the global seafarer labour market: nearly one in three merchant sailors in the world is Filipino and over 373,000 Filipinos sail the world’s oceans, sending home over US$3.4 billion a year. Ninety seven per cent of Filipino seafarers are men, and in the Philippines, they have a reputation as ‘exemplars of masculinity’ due in large part to the nature of their precarious work, their stories of adventure and, most importantly, their high level of earnings and remittances to their families.
The case of Filipino seafarers provides a unique opportunity to contribute to important debates at the intersection of migration and gender studies. First, the study contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on masculinity, building on the notion of multiple masculinities but challenging Connell’s (1995, 1998) argument outlining a trend towards a singular, global hegemonic masculinity. Rather, the study demonstrates how masculinities, even when constructed transnationally, may still be based on and help reinforce locally-specific gender norms. The study of migrant men thus highlights the continued importance of context and place even among mobile labour, and how the constructions of masculinities continue to be situational (Gutmann 2007, Paap 2006). Second, the study helps address the scholarship on migration, gender and remittances, but does so from a relatively unexplored perspective: that of male migrants and the role that remittances and economic investments can play in the constructions of masculinity (Mahler and Pessar 2006, Rahman and Fee 2009). This paper will address the issues of remittances in terms of how they relate to seamen’s gender performances and relations within their families and communities, both while they are on periodic ‘visits’ home, but particularly, when they are at sea, or away from their families from six months to a year at a time. Finally, this paper will also contribute to the study of Filipino masculinity, both generally and how it relates to migration (Espana-Maram 2006, Pingol 2001). While there have been a large number of studies of gender and migration focusing on women, very few studies have address issues of migrating men (but see Margold 1995 and Parrenas 2008). Similarly, there remains a dearth of studies on Filipino masculinity, particularly as it differs from Western norms (Rubio and Green 2009). Overall, I argue that while men’s migratory work and their remittances may generally help reinforce local and national gender norms of Filipino masculinity – particularly in terms of providership, paradoxically the seamen’s strong position and recognition as adequate material providers also allows them to transcend some traditional household gender roles towards building closer emotional ties to their families and possibly expanding what it means to be a man in the Philippines.
OVERVIEW OF FILIPINO SEAFARERS AND REMITTANCE POLICIES
Filipino seafarers did not have a significant presence in contemporary international shipping until the 1970s. But a combination of the global oil crisis, the de-regulation of shipping and crewing, a colonial history of US involvement in Philippine maritime education, and the Philippine government’s own initiation of a labour export policy in the 1970s all contributed to entrance of Filipino seafarers into the global labour market. A 72 year-old captain and head of one of the main Philippine manning agency associations commented, ‘It was Greek ships that started recruiting Filipinos... word spread out in Europe that Filipinos were good and cheap… spread like fire because they were already short of seamen.’ Following the Greek ship owners’ lead, other European and Japanese ship owners also started hiring Filipinos. From only 2,000 Filipinos on foreign ships in the in the 1960s, by 1975 it had increased more than ten fold. By 1980, it doubled again to over 57,000 and by 2009, the official number reached over 373,000 (NSB 1982, POEA 2010). Seafarers represented 23 per cent of all Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) deployed in 2009, but less than 4 per cent of the entire stock estimate of 8.7 million Filipinos living and working outside the Philippines (POEA 2010, Asis 2008).
Yet despite making up only a small percentage of OFWs, seafarers none-the-less contribute a disproportionate amount of remittances back to the Philippines. So while overall, they represent only 3.8 per cent of all OFWs, in 2009 they remitted US$3.4 billion or over 19per cent of the total US$17.3 billion in remittances or over US$10,300 per seafarer per year (BSP 2010). The growth of seafarer remittances has also climbed steadily higher. From 2008 to 2009, remittances from seafarers grew 12 per cent, or four times the growth rate of land-based OFWs. As will be discussed in much more detail below, because total and average remittances among seafarers is so high, a greater percentage is often available and used for investment in both human and physical capital.
An important explanation for seafarers’ extraordinary levels of remittances is the Philippine government’s remittance policies and procedures particular to seafarers. Before the Philippines developed an explicit and institutionalized labour export policy, the government simply encouraged overseas workers, particularly from the United States, to send some of their earning back to the Philippines. However, as the government, under President Ferdinand Marcos, formalized the policy of labour export in the 1970s in response to domestic economic and political crises, seafarers were at the forefront of the mandatory remittance policy experiment. In 1974, the amendment to the new Labour Code made it mandatory for Filipino workers to remit ‘a portion’ of their foreign exchange earnings back to the Philippines through the Philippine banking system (APMMF n.d.). However, the law was not specific on the exact percentage of foreign earnings to be remitted as this was to be left to the Department of Labour and government agencies that regulated overseas workers, namely the National Seaman’s Board (NSB) and the Overseas Employment and Development Board. However, it was only the NSB that quickly established a mandatory remittance policy with a specific minimum percentage.
The NSB, established in 1974, was explicitly designed to promote and regulate Filipino seafarers and to generate foreign exchange (NSB 1976). The main force in crafting NSB policies was its Assistant Executive Director, Captain Benjamin Tanedo, a graduate of the US Merchant Marine Academy at King’s Point, New York, and a Captain in the Philippine Navy who was personally tapped by then-President Ferdinand Marcos as the highest agency official with direct experience in the maritime sector. In interviews, Captain Tanedo admitted that he created the mandatory remittance policy based on his own experience as a seafarer and with other seamen.
Interestingly, Tanedo’s conception of Filipino seafarers is deeply connected with their construction as ‘marginally masculine’ or hyper-masculine males that exhibit certain masculine qualities such as aggressiveness and strength, yet do not match the ‘ideal’ masculinity of mature and responsible Filipino males as providers, and thus are in need of protection, even from themselves (Rubio and Green 2009, discussed in greater detail below). Tanedo noted that at the time, many Filipino seafarers were known to exhaust all their earnings in port or on ‘blow outs’ upon return home, leaving no savings or support for their families. Other seafarers interviewed corroborated this view of the Filipino seafarer, at least at this earlier point in time. For example, one seafarer who had been sailing for thirty three years explained: ‘here, the concept of Filipinos about seamen is that of being ‘one-day millionaires’ – one day they come with lots of money and then the next, they spend everything in gambling and drinking. ... Perhaps they observed it before with seamen, but times are changing and this is no longer happening.’
Nevertheless, based in part on this image of the Filipino seafarers and in order to ‘protect’ the seamen and their families from the seamen’s own vices, Captain Tanedo proposed and created a mandatory remittance policy after 1976 in which 70 per cent of a seafarer’s base wages were to be remitted through a Philippine bank directly to an ‘allottee’ of the seafarer’s choice, usually an immediate family member such as a wife or mother. This provision for mandatory remittance was the first of its kind in the Philippines and the government hoped to replicate and extend such a policy to other, land-based overseas workers. So in 1982, Executive Order 857 was issued, which aimed at setting official mandatory foreign exchange remittance levels to go through official bank channels for all classifications of overseas workers. Provisions of the law were for mandatory remittances of between 50 and 70 per cent of wages, depending on occupation. EO 857, however, caused a firestorm of protest from overseas workers, particularly from those lower-wage workers residing abroad who did not earn enough in their jobs to necessarily remit such a high portion of the salaries. Overseas workers organizations, particularly in Hong Kong and the Middle East, were galvanized around the forced remittance issue and successfully mobilized against its implementation. Thus the implementing portion of the law was almost entirely rescinded in 1985 due to pressure for reform, and mandatory remittances eliminated for all occupations except for seafarers. In fact, the mandatory remittance levels for seafarers were raised just a year before, in early 1984 under Executive Order 924, to 80 per cent of base salary, which is still enforced today.
FILIPINO MASCULINITIES AND MIGRATION
As noted in the introduction, the gender scholarship on Filipino masculinity and migration remains both empirically and theoretically thin. To address this gap, it is necessary to draw on but also extent recent scholarship on masculinity more generally. Central to many contemporary studies and debates on men and gender is R.W. Connell’s notion of hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1995). Hegemonic masculinity is the normative ideal of what is ‘the currently most honored way of being a man’ in a particular society and its dominance over subordinate and marginal masculinities as well as women (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005: 832, Kimmel, Hearn, Connell 2005). With rising global economic inter-dependence and greater cross-border flows, some argue that a certain ‘transnational business masculinity’ is becoming hegemonic over the local (Connell and Wood 2005). However, while bringing a transnational lens adds an important dimension, a number of recent volumes point out that there continues to be a quite diverse range of masculinities among regions and countries, and that it remains crucial to specify the constraints, contexts and strategies in and through which such masculinities are formed (Gutmann 2007, Louie and Low 2003, Osella and Osella 2006).