Migrante, the story of a Filipino fisherman, one of thousands in the Taiwan fleet, paints a stark picture of the reality facing the migrant workers of the world - people who exist outside the public eye.

The migrants must leave the forest, but the journey proves to be a dangerous battle of love and loss.

Migration and Decent Work: Challenges for the Global South takes a journey through nine countries in the global South—from Mexico to India to Argentina to Turkey—to explore the relationship between migration and work from a human rights perspective. Labor insertion is one of the most effective forms of integration because it allows migrants and refugees to enjoy more dignified living conditions, to contribute to the development of host communities, and to build relationships with the local population. But ensuring the right to work is a challenge for countries in the global South that have weak or developing economies and problems with job creation, which can force many people—not just migrants—to engage in precarious work and put themselves at risk of labor exploitation. Under these circumstances, advocating for migrants’ and refugees’ right to work is more urgent than ever. The recognition of decent work as a human right means that states may not pursue economic growth at the expense of the exploitation of migrants and refugees, but instead must seek to ensure opportunities and prosperity for all. In this regard, it is critical to foster discussions, such as the ones featured in this book, that facilitate the sharing of experiences and lessons learned on the labor conditions of migrants and refugees. The authors of the nine chapters in Migration and Decent Work are activists, academics, and members of civil society who have worked on the issue of migration from different angles and who address the challenge of migrants’ labor inclusion from an interdisciplinary and rights-based perspective. Their contributions offer an overview of migrants’ and refugees’ right to work in a range of countries in the global South based on an analysis of local contexts, public policies, and the everyday realities faced by these workers. In addition to offering local and global recommendations for ensuring the right to decent work for migrants and refugees, this book seeks to strengthen the human rights movement through collaboration and the sharing of experiences. The diversity of voices featured here offers a look at migration based on and intended for the global South. La diversidad de voces que reúne ofrece una mirada de la migración desde y para el Sur Global

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume examines how gender shapes the varying and intersecting dynamics of informal/precarious worker struggles in two gender-typed sectors - domestic work and construction. Drawing upon cases across the global North and South, it explores how gender is intertwined into collective organizing efforts, why gender is addressed and to what end.

Moving beyond polemical debates on globalization, this study considers complex intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality and class within the field of globalized labor. As a significant contribution to the on-going debate on the role of neoliberal states in reproducing gender-race-class inequality in the global political economy, the volume examines the aggressive implementation of neoliberal policies of globalization in the Philippines, and how labor export has become a contradictory feature of the country's international political economy while being contested from below. Lindio-McGovern presents theoretical and ethnographic insights from observational and interview data gathered during fieldwork in various global cities—Hong Kong, Taipei, Rome, Vancouver, Chicago and Metro-Manila. The result is a compelling weave of theory and experience of exploitation and resistance, an important development in discourses and literature on globalization and social movements seeking to influence regimes that exploit migrant women as cheap labor to sustain gendered global capitalism. Globalization, Labor Export and Resistance: A Study of Filipino Migrant Domestic Workers in Global Cities, is an invaluable resource for scholars, researchers, policy makers, non-governmental organizations, community organizers, students of globalization, trade and labor politics. It will be useful in the fields of women/gender studies, labor studies, transnational social movements, political economy, development, international migration, international studies, international fieldwork and qualitative/feminist research.

Read an interview with Robyn Rodriguez. Filipino American Transnational Activism: Diasporic Politics among the Second Generation offers an account of how Filipinos born or raised in the United States often defy the multiple assimilationist agendas that attempt to shape their understandings of themselves. Despite conditions that might lead them to reject any kind of relationship to the Philippines in favor of a deep rootedness in the United States, many forge linkages to the “homeland” and are actively engaged in activism and social movements transnationally. Though it may well be true that most Filipino Americans have an ambivalent relationship to the Philippines, many of the chapters of this book show that other possibilities for belonging and imaginaries of “home” are being crafted and pursued.