The Cost of Protection: Rethinking the Philippine State and Its Regional 'Proactive' Labor Migrant Protection Standards in the Gulf (1974-2024)
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
6:00 pm to 7:30 pm
- Venue
- SOAS Gallery
- Room
- B103
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
When the 1970s oil boom emerged in the Gulf region, Asian labor- sending states strategically implemented labor export policies to exploit regional labor shortages and support long-term economic growth amid their financial crises.
Despite its centrality and implications, international relations (IR) and labor scholars have yet to historically recenter the Philippine state—a key Asian sending state across the Global South—and the regional impact of its ‘proactive’ labor protection on migrant workers in the Gulf. Drawing on primary and secondary sources, including archival research, content analysis of Philippine labor migration policies, and local newspapers and government agreements in both English and Filipino (1974-2024), I argue that the Philippine state's increasingly proactive labor migrant rights protections—embedded in both domestic and foreign policy processes—have paradoxically exposed Filipino migrant workers— specifically domestic workers—to labor exploitation and vulnerabilities (i.e., irregular migration routes, smuggling, absconding migrant domestic workers) in the Gulf. I demonstrate these paradoxical costs of protection by analyzing three cases of labor migrant protection policies by the Philippine state in the Gulf, specifically the minimum wage in Qatar (2012-2013), contract verification in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) (2014-2021), and welfare protection in Kuwait (2018-2020). These historical cases reveal that these proactive labor migrant rights protections have led to a series of interstate diplomatic impasses (i.e., labor deployment bans) and served as 'necessary evil' that enabled the Philippine state to secure unified domestic work standard-setting across the Gulf. Rather than framing the Philippine-Gulf migration corridor solely as an economic phenomenon, this study highlights decades of political resistance that have both positioned and contested the Philippine state’s global legitimacy as a key political actor in regional migration management within the Gulf and the broader Global South. Overall, the study highlights the paradoxical impacts of sending states’ regional labor migrant protection approach in shaping structural and everyday migrant vulnerabilities in the Gulf and across the Global South.
Contact
- Organiser: Philippine Studies at SOAS
- Contact: philippinestudies@soas.ac.uk
Header image credit: Pawel Szymczuk from Pixabay
About the speaker
Froilan T. Malit, Jr. is an ESRC-UBEL PhD candidate at SOAS University of London (Department of Politics & International Studies), researching Global South migration and diplomacy in the Asia–Middle East region. He is a Gulf-Asia migration specialist focusing on international relations, foreign policy, labor rights, and the political economy of migration in the Gulf. He is a visiting fellow at the American University in Dubai and an associate researcher at the Gulf Labour Markets, Migration, and Population (GLMM). Over the past decade, he has worked as a technical project manager and migration policy research consultant for organizations including the Abu Dhabi Dialogue, the International Labor Organization, and the International Organization for Migration, and has held research roles at the American University of Sharjah, Zayed University, and the Mohammed Bin Rashid School of Government. He has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and holds degrees from the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, and Cornell University, with additional postgraduate training at the European University Institute.
