Contingent breadwinners: Left-behind women and the translocal dynamics of migrant worker precarity

Abstract

Extant research on migrant worker household dynamics tends to focus on the changing gender roles of those left behind and the intra-household dynamics that emerge in the context of the extended absence of a key family member. As provocative and diverse as this literature is, both analytically and geographically, it has yet to fully engage with the challenges to transnational householding presented in cases of extreme migrant worker precarity, including situations of forced labour and human trafficking. This paper examines the contingent roles left-behind mothers and wives perform in the absence of a male migrant relative breadwinner. I argue that the financial and relational effects of migrant worker exploitation produce contingent breadwinning amongst left-behind women. I draw on data from a study of human trafficking and forced labour in the offshore fishing industry in the Philippines to make my arguments.

Introduction

For 20 months during 2018–2019, Darlene (pseudonyms are used to refer to all participants discussed in this paper) had no contact with her husband, Sonny, who had migrated for work as fishing crew on a Taiwanese vessel in late 2017. The emotional ruptures his absence brought to Darlene and the couple’s two children, were palpable. She related that she experienced intense anxiety centred on unanswered questions about whether he was injured, dead, stranded somewhere or had just abandoned his family. These fears were interwoven with concerns about the financial situation of Darlene and the children during this extended period, as only one small remittance of US$ 180 had been made to Darlene 1 month after her husband departed the Philippines. No other money was received after this. Rather than continuing to ‘wait and hope’, as she explained, she abandoned the thought that remittances would arrive eventually, or at all. She decided after several months with lack of income, depleted savings, borrowing from relatives and the sale of some of her jewellery to adopt a different approach to her situation – one that did not rest on hopeful waiting – but one that portended a new livelihood strategy.

Darlene’s situation is not an uncommon one at all amongst women who are left behind when their husbands, sons and fathers leave for precarious work opportunities on foreign-flagged fishing vessels. The unexplained disappearances and lack of remittances take an enormous financial toll on those family members who are reliant on the income of male migrant breadwinners within households in the Philippines and elsewhere is Southeast Asia where the recruitment of migrant fishing crew is commonplace.

There is now a substantial grey literature documenting the human and labour rights abuses of migrant fishing crew on board Taiwanese, South Korean and Chinese long-haul fishing vessels. This documentation compliments that which emerged in the early 2010s disclosing severe human rights abuses on Thai fishing vessels, primarily involving Burmese and Cambodian crew (Environmental Justice Foundation, 2014; Human Rights Watch, 2018; International Labour Organisation, 2009). The global fishing industry is currently experiencing a crisis of profitability due to rising fuel and other costs and declining fish stocks as the world’s oceans are increasingly impacted by climate change (Tickler et al., 2018). To maintain profitability at pre-crisis levels, low-valued and easily exploitable fishing crew have become a significant component of the operation of the industry. Thus, stints aboard foreign-flagged fishing vessels are commonly associated with several exploitative practices, including wage theft, contract fraud/substitution, lack of decent food, inadequate rest and heightened exposure to workplace injuries and illnesses. In recent years there have also been widely publicised media exposes of deaths at sea, primarily involving Indonesian fishing crew. Physical, sexual and psychological abuse of migrant fishing crew is also commonplace, with some deaths attributed to violence at sea (Yea and Stringer, 2021). Because fishing vessels often operate in open (non-territorial and non-exclusive economic zone) waters, and because they may carry the flag of a state with lax labour laws and regulatory mechanisms to protect fishing crew, detecting and assisting victims of forced labour and human trafficking on these vessels is exceedingly difficult (Nonnenmacher, 2014). Further adding to this difficulty is the fact that vessels often remain at sea for months or years without making port, with feeder vessels enabling catch (and sometimes crew) to be transhipped at sea. Although all fishing vessels carry ship-to-shore telecommunications, fishers are usually denied access to this means of communication. Even where fishers hold their own mobile phones, these only work when they are close to shore. Thus, unlike many other groups of precarious migrants who use digital technologies to keep in touch with families (Nedelcu and Soysuren, 2022), the vast ocean spaces where work takes place, combined with restrictions on use of workplace communication technologies work to solidify geographies of disconnection for migrant fishers. In the collective, these circumstances restrict the ability of migrant fishers to maintain communication with families left behind and makes it almost impossible for the fishers to extricate themselves from exploitative and precarious work situations on the vessels. There is, in other words, no way for migrant fishers in these situations to know whether remittances are sent or received, or for left-behind family members to alert the fishers to the non-payment of salary allotments.

Human trafficking and forced labour of migrant workers has become an important issue in the Philippines over the past two decades, since the UN Protocol to Supress, Prevent and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (2000; hereafter, the Trafficking Protocol) came into force internationally. Within Southeast Asia, the Philippines has developed one of the most comprehensive commitments to combatting these crimes, in line with the country’s broader commitment to protecting its migrant workers from abuse and exploitation abroad (British Institute of International and Comparative Law, 2022). Nonetheless, the discourse of anti-trafficking that has developed in the Philippines is strongly oriented to the protection of female bodies (Tigno, 2012). Exploitation itself remains undefined in the Trafficking Protocol and in Philippines legislation. This paper thus follows the understanding advanced by Skrivankova (2017) in which she suggests that in cases of human trafficking and forced labour associated with precarious work, a definition based on Marxist theory of the inequitable distribution of power between employer and employee is useful in understanding exploitation.

The circumstances of left-behind family members of victims of forced labour and human trafficking have, to date, not attracted significant scholarly attention, either for the Philippines or elsewhere. Most available literature focuses on migrant worker precarity, especially during and after the recent pandemic (e.g. Ansar, 2023; Foley and Piper, 2021; Piper, 2022). Yea (2019) documented the ‘secondary precarity’ families that trafficked migrant fishers from Cambodia experienced during the absence of their male relative on Taiwanese fishing vessels, documenting the deepening precarity of the situations of those left behind. The key finding of that study was that precarity of families was compounded and deepened, rather than ameliorated as a result of labour migration. Wives, children, ageing parents and younger siblings variously entered precarious forms of work and other livelihood strategies at home, including the withdrawing of minors from school in order to supplement family income by working or rubbish picking, Plan International also penned a report in 2021 on the topic of left-behind female relatives in the Philippines as part of their Safe Seas project for the protection of migrant fishers. Like the Cambodian paper, they found that these Filipino women had to put in place a range of ‘coping strategies’ in light of the forced labour of their male relatives working on foreign-flagged fishing vessels abroad (Plan International, 2021).

The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, I engage with extant literature on translocal precarity as it is embedded in migration geographies scholarship of left-behind families and transnational householding. Greiner and Sakdapolrak (2013: 373) define translocality as, ‘phenomena involving mobility, migration, circulation and spatial interconnectedness not necessarily limited to national boundaries’. Following this focus on interconnections that transcend national spaces, Green and Estes (2021) describe translocal precarity as ‘the fragility of social reproduction strategies that migrant households employ across space’ (p. 1726). I hope to make a specific contribution to this literature by examining the ways ‘transnational disconnections’ in migrants’ social fields, or the breakdown of communication and financialisation between family members across borders, produces contingent translocal livelihood adaptations amongst female household members left-behind. Second, and following this, I aim specifically to tease out the gendered dynamics of precarious work within these new arrangements of translocal householding under conditions of extreme precarity. Specifically, I ask how gendered household dynamics are transformed (or reified) in situations of migrant household precarity?

I commence my discussion with a brief conceptual orientation to the critical literature on translocal precarity and transnational householding, drawing out possibilities for further interventions on gender, livelihoods and social reproduction in contexts of extreme migrant worker exploitation involving wage theft. Here I advance a conceptualisation of adaptive livelihoods that foreground contingency. I then briefly introduce the study on which my analysis and arguments are drawn. Following this I explain the financial negotiations and arrangements (the financialisation) that inform household decisions around sending a family breadwinner for fishing crew work abroad. The main section of the paper discusses the renegotiations that occur at the scale of the household in the context of lack of remittances. Here I focus on the types of strategies female household members engage in to ensure the original terms of financialisation are met, to the extent possible. In the conclusion I reflect on the possibilities for future research in this field through the case study on the paper.

Translocal precarity, transnational householding and contingent breadwinners

Extent literature in geography on transnational householding and the relational unfolding of the social reproduction of households as some family members migrate for work whilst other stay behind makes several implicit assumptions which have informed the direction in which geographical research on this subject has proceeded. My analysis builds on, but also challenges some of these tenets. First, the ‘migration-development nexus’ is called into question. This term was first coined by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) to conceptualise the benefits labour migration could bring to migrant sending countries and households, particularly in the form of social and economic capital (see, e.g. IOM, 2003). To this end, the IOM, in cooperation with many national governments and international organisations has helped develop an infrastructure to manage and help facilitate international labour migration. The suggestion that the migration-development nexus is successfully fulfilled through (regular) migrant remittances which meet the livelihood strategies of migrant-sending households (Faist, 2008) still prevails amongst policy circles and within the mobility aspirations of many intending migrant households. This despite growing evidence across a range of different contexts that precarious labour migrations from/in the global South often do not achieve the socio-economic goals of families (for recent examples see, Floros and Jorgensen, 2020; Silvey and Parreñas, 2020; Strauss and McGrath, 2017). The consequences, as these and other studies document, include repeated out-migration, often under even more precarious conditions, and familial dissolution and household crises. This paper contributes to the critique of celebratory narratives of the migration-development nexus by focusing on how migrant workers’ precarity compromises, rather than fortifies household-scale financial security.

Second, most published studies assume one single family breadwinner exists (either male or female), which relegates left-behind family members to the status of remittance-receivers and household managers, whose agency is consequently limited to the realm of householding. In other words, the role and agency of those left-behind is described primarily in relation to social reproduction of the household through consumption and financing, rather than any contribution to the productive sphere. This assumption has yielded studies focusing on how changing gendered positions in the household – especially when women migrate and become the main breadwinners for the family – are negotiated within transnational families, including global householding (e.g. Hoang and Yeoh, 2011) and care arrangements (Bryceson, 2019), including for left-behind children (Ariza, 2014). The emotional ruptures the redistribution and management of care transnational families create, including feelings of guilt about left-behind children and longing for home have become an important thread under this focus on care (Hoang et al., 2015). There is a tendency to reify the nuclear family model with the single breadwinner as the ideal – or at least most common – household arrangement in the context of labour migration, leaving little analytical space to consider left-behind family members as active economic agents, whose incorporation into local labour markets at home is shaped by the work circumstances of their migrant breadwinner.

A focus on the transnational family through the ongoing ability to maintain connectedness and be embedded within different places (home and destination for the migrant) is an assumption that undergirds much recent literature on translocality. A recent example of this is Porst and Sakdapolrak’s (2018) study of Thai migrants, which assumes that a central element of translocality is, ‘connectedness of mobile and immobile actors across space, linking and reshaping places, transgressing their boundaries, and spanning a social field that encompasses multiple socio-spatial levels’. ‘Transnational disconnections’ (Yea, 2022a) are, in contrast, rarely taken as a means of understanding the ways households and family members in places of origin and destination relate to each other and are mutually constitutive, shaping the gendered and labouring subjectivities of family members left behind. The lack of communication, as Darlene’s situation in the opening vignette of the paper reveals, means that translocal householding takes on a different character than that ascribed in extant literature. What is notable about the cases of left-behind women considered below, is that the crafting of the household economy is still profoundly influenced by, and responsive to the migrant breadwinner abroad, even – and perhaps more so – in the absence of regular communication and in situations of migrant worker precarity.

Precarious migrant work has become a central feature of the organisation of labour relations in late modernity. Geographers have advanced critical analyses of the impacts of these relations on migrant worker precarity and unfreedom, examining the role of structural and situational factors leaving migrant workers vulnerable to abuse and exploitation during their sojourns and upon returning home. Although critical scholarship on transnational labour migration increasingly characterises these workers as a ‘hyper-precarious group’ (Lewis et al., 2013) analyses often neglect to tease out the ways the precarity ‘travels’ to the socio-economic and familial context of ‘home’. In this regard, as Green and Estes (2021) rightly point out, much of the extant scholarship on migrant worker precarity tends to, ‘assume that precarity arises mainly in the spaces of production’, paying relatively little attention to left-behind family members and households as important sites in which precarity is (relationally) produced. Silvey and Parreñas’s (2020) recent research with migrant domestic workers is a notable exception to this neglect of spaces beyond production. They conceptualise this relational unfolding of migrant domestic worker precarity within left-behind households as ‘precarity chains’, which they describe as, ‘forms of precarity at work at various stages of the migration cycle’ (p. 3457). The temporalities in labour migration that produce and accentuate precarity include at the recruitment stage (debt-financed migration), at work (limited rights) and in the future (the failure to meet migration goals). My analysis of migrant fishers presents many similarities to the situations of migrant domestic workers described by Silvey and Parrenas. But perhaps more importantly for discussion here is their recognition of the, ‘transfer of insecure jobs and insecure financial status (low wages, indebtedness) across migrants’ places (origins and destinations) and their family members’ (p. 3457, emphasis in original). Alipio (2019) similarly examines how Filipino migrant workers face challenges in supporting migrant families and developing translocal communities in situations of precarity, although further details of how left behind family members respond to these challenges is still largely lacking.

I build on Green and Estes (2021) call to direct further analytical attention to left-behind families as in this paper, examining the shifting dynamics of householding and livelihoods of families left-behind under conditions of migrant worker exploitation. I draw on the situations of the families of migrant fishing crew to develop my conceptualisation of contingent breadwinners and in doing so direct (renewed) attention towards the question of how left-behind family members express agency within the migrant-sending household.

In examining the relational expressions of precarity at home in migrant-sending households, I propose the term ‘contingent breadwinners’ to help in moving beyond current characterisations of those left ‘at home’ as exerting little agency. Contingent work has an important place in existing geographical literature on precarity and is often used interchangeably with the notion of precarious or flexible work to describe the heightened levels of job insecurity associated with casual employment and the conditions attached to it (Peck and Theodore, 2001). Lack of workplace benefits, such as medical or other types of leave, lack of contracts, unionisation and workplace entitlements, and uncertainty about work schedules all contribute to the shaping of a contingent workforce (Liu and Kolenda, 2012).

In sum then, there is now a vibrant geographical literature focusing on transnational communication and other means by which families are sustained and (re)configured across borders and the changing gendered and relational dynamics of transnational families, in which global householding is emphasised. The case study in this paper unsettles some of the key assumptions made by this literature, namely the migration-development nexus at the scale of the household, the dynamics of transnational communication and connectedness, and the lack of attention to the agency and circumstances of so-called left-behind families. Unsettling these assumptions enables new reflections on the ways communication, gender and householding are discussed within the field. In doing so I assert the importance of left-behind family members as breadwinners, exercising agency in the productive sphere and entering local labour markets in diverse and manifold ways. I challenge assumptions of remittance receiving, ongoing communication and negotiations over financialisaton and householding that rest on the successful migrant breadwinner trope.

About the study

Discussion in this paper draws on an ongoing study of human trafficking and forced labour (often dubbed seafood slavery) in the Indo-Pacific region. Seafood slavery is understood as a range of hyper-exploitative practices in the global offshore fishing industry that produce situations of forced labour, human trafficking and diminished health of migrant fishing crew. Within the Asia-Pacific Region, the main source countries for migrant fishing crew working in the industrial fisheries sector are Indonesia, the Philippines, Cambodia and Myanmar. The main fleet nations are Taiwan, China, South Korea and Thailand, and it is on these fleets that the vast majority of abuses of fishers have been documented (for recent examples see, Environmental Justice Foundation, 2024). Although reliable statistics are difficult to obtain as forced labour and human trafficking are largely hidden, especially at sea, some estimates suggest upwards of 100,000 migrant fishers are in situations of extreme labour exploitation on vessels operating in this sector at any one time (Greenpeace International, 2021). Further, survivors often remain beyond the purview of both researchers and support organisations, often returning home or remaining in transit states in situations of continued vulnerability.

The study involves three main groups of participants: migrant fishing crew who have left situations of exploitation, and either returned home or who are in transit or other sites of temporariness; left-behind family members, and; non-government and civil society stakeholders providing assistance to exploited fishers and their families. The second phase of fieldwork is currently being conducted, with a prior phase (in 2014–2015) involving in-depth interviews with migrant fishers from the Philippines (n = 28) and Cambodia (n = 22) and some left-behind family members of the fisher participants (Philippines n = 5 and Cambodia n = 12). The second phase of the study was delayed due to covid-related disruptions to travel for fieldwork. These delays also impacted the fishers, as many became effectively ‘stranded’ in fleet state ports or transit states. The exploitation of migrant workers during the recent pandemic has been discussed at length in published social science work on the topic. Of particular relevance to the case study for this paper was growing evidence of wage theft and employer abandonment of migrant workers during this period (Foley and Piper, 2021; Weeraratne, 2023). After the pandemic disruptions dissipated, a further 9 interviews were conducted with Filipino left-behind family members and another 20 with returned fishers, with fieldwork occurring in February 2022 and November 2024 respectively. Three of the fisher interviewees participated in both interview periods (2022 and 2024) and all others were new participants. In the 2022 interviews strict health and safety protocols in line with formal government requirements in the Philippines were followed, with interviews taking place in Manila to avoid community concerns about the spread of covid-19 from outsiders entering. The same questions were administered as with the first phase of fieldwork. Nonetheless, two topics were expanded on in the second phase of interviews; namely, the role of climate change as a driver for migration and how rural livelihoods and landholdings were impacted by the pawning and leasing of land to finance migration. The findings to emerge from this line of questioning are discussed elsewhere. The discussion in this paper draws primarily from the data gathered during the second phase of the study (2022 and 2024), focusing on the Philippines and the interviews with the female left-behind family members, with the prior phase of the study providing background. Seventy-five percent of the female participants in Phase 2 of the study were wives of migrant fishers, whilst the remaining 25% were mothers. There was little difference in the situations of exploited fishers and their families between the first and second phases of the study, with the key difference being evidence of the intensifying impact of the pandemic on the precarity of the fishers in the data collected during the second phase, as discussed above.

A local research coordinator with extensive experience working with victims of human trafficking and forced labour in the Philippines was employed, and assisted with all aspects of fieldwork, including translation where my level of Tagalog was not sufficient to convey meaning. The research co-ordinator is an independent researcher and consultant, with extensive experience working with survivors or human trafficking, including managing shelter-based protection service. His ethical and empathetic approach to the participants was reflected in his efforts to maintain ongoing connections with the participants to understand and assist where ongoing vulnerabilities were evident.

In both phases of the study NGO gatekeepers assisted with locating and inviting prospective participants. These organisations were involved in providing post-exploitation assistance to fishers and their families, including assistance returning home from abroad, provision of small sums of money to help restore the migrants’ immediate economic security and health interventions where needed. In the Philippines, the fishers and their relatives received only short term supports from seafarers’ missionaries and from legal advocates. These supports rarely provided the fishers and their families with longer term financial security and, in most cases, the relationship between these organisations and the fishers and their families did not extend beyond a few months unless a claim for unpaid salaries was made.

Conducting research with highly vulnerable and marginalised communities has become an increasing prominent subject of discussion amongst geographers and others concerned with the particular ethical challenges associated with these populations. Scott and Geddes (2016) correctly point out that standard ethics consent processes of many universities are not always appropriate to address the ethical nuances of researching victims of forced labour and human trafficking. This was true in the case of this study, as long, formal ethics consent forms tended to create suspicion in participants – many of whom confided that they looked like the types of (false) contracts they signed in order to migrate for fishing crew work. Many participants chose to provide verbal consent instead, and only on the conditions that voice recorded files would be deleted soon after the transcription of interviews. Both the fishers and women who participated in the Philippines were concerned about possible repercussions of their participation in the study, with their anxieties centred less around possible trauma of re-counting their experiences, and more about whether involvement in the study would compromise any salary claims they made or, for the male participants, negatively impact their prospects for re-migrating for fishing crew work. Therefore, significant time was spent reassuring the participants of their anonymity in the research. Lewis (2015) also recognised the importance of these challenges in ‘negotiating anonymity and informed consent’ and she, similarly, has emphasised the importance of spending time engaging in informal and colloquial discussions with prospective participants. Such discussions, she notes, also help identify suitable participants and ease anxieties around written consent forms.

I also struggled with another ethical challenge; namely, covering the costs of bringing participants to Manila for their interviews. On the one hand this was preferable to interviews conducted in their homes or communities because of concerns about bringing covid into the communities, and also because of the gossip my presence might invite within these communities. Many of the men and women in the study had not revealed the full extent of their situations to others in their locale, including extended family and friends. On the other hand, bringing participants to Manila also had ethical repercussions. Primarily, some of the men wished to use the opportunity of a free trip to Manila and a gratuity for their participation in the study, to seek out another fishing crew work stint abroad (or for two participants work abroad in a different sector). It was, admittedly, not a dilemma I managed to resolve as it would be wrong to interfere with migration/participation decisions. Both Warnock et al. (2022) and McKenzie (2024) discuss this ethical dilemma, with Warnock et al. (2022) suggesting that it is important to pay precariously situated research participants as an important principle in a research ethics of car. Although I embrace this view, in practice I laud the need for more published work in geography which critically examines the contextual and situational nuances of how the payment of gratuities interpolates with structures and relations of precarity. In the end, I chose to reiterate the potential risks of fishing crew work and to provide information to participants about organisations equipped to administer support and assistance to migrant fishers in distress.

There is also an ethics to researching the lives and experiences of victims of modern slavery that revolves around conscious reflection on the debilitating effects of representing victims as powerless and lacking agency, and where it is assumed that the totality of their lives can be understood through a ‘victim frame’ (Yea, 2015a). Molland (2019) has argued that, at least in Southeast Asia, the ‘master narrative’ of modern slavery has shifted in recent years from a preoccupation with victims of sexual slavery to an equally palpable preoccupation with ‘seafood slaves’. This has important ethical implications that invite reflexivity on the part of the researcher to contest this victim framing as unhelpful in disclosing the multidimensional lives and aspirations of migrants, including forced migrants (Collins and Carling, 2020). Relatedly, as an ‘outsider’ (non-Filipino citizen, markedly different social-economic position) my positionality invited reflection and active negotiation in the field. Rapport and trust with participants were developed through a conscious and explicit disclosure of other aspects of my identity which provided points to similitude, such as my marriage to a Filipino migrant worker, my knowledge of Tagalog, and the considerable time I have spent supporting both female and male migrant Filipinos in the context of my research (see also Yea, 2015b).

The financialisation of precarious migrant fishing work

In order to understand the push for left-behind women to engage in contingent breadwinning strategies, it is important first appreciate the recruitment and migration financing infrastructure for fishing crew in the Philippines. The recruitment of Filipino men onto foreign-flagged fishing vessels operating in distant waters is fraught with problems of contract fraud/substituted contracts and worsening living and working conditions.

In the Philippines the recruitment of migrant fishing crew utilises an upfront payments model, meaning fishers pay for all the costs associated with their migration upfront to the recruiter and/or agency. Filipino men in my study either sold or pawned assets, such as land or borrowed from informal moneylenders, often at usurious interest rates, or within their social networks. Each of these sources of finance carries its own risks; informal moneylenders are rarely flexible in their terms of repayment and meeting the steep interest burdens on top of the principal amount rests of the surety of regular salary and remittances whilst working abroad. Borrowing from within social networks often allows for more flexibility in repayments and interest may be lower or non-existent, but failure to pay can severely dilute social and kinship relationships and give debtors a bad reputation within their communities. For Filipino participants the brokers and agencies organising their migration as fishing crew stated the men would receive salaries of between US$ 350 and 500 per month. Agency and brokers fees, as well as documentation and costs of transportation ranged from between US$ 380 and 900 for the participants in my study. In some cases, these were paid to one person or organisation, and in others they were spread across several recipients. Families often received an initial payment from the Taiwanese manning agency, but henceforth no remittances were made.

Contract substitution once they had left their home country and were in transit for deployment of the vessel, was routine. The important role of contract substitution in rendering left-behind families financially vulnerable cannot be overestimated. All the participants in this study were coerced into signing substituted contracts which stipulated a lower salary that what had been written in their original contracts. In most cases this was significantly lower, averaging between a 25% and 50% reduction in wages. Further, the substituted contracts stipulated that a proportion of salary (usually around 30%) would be kept as ‘savings’ for the fisher to redeem once he completed his contract. This further reduced the remittances the families would ostensibly receive. But equally as important to emphasise here is the additional contract clause that stated a migrant fisher would forfeit this savings held by the company should he break his contract. Although this practice is illegal in the Philippines, it is commonly adopted by manning/recruitment agencies and fishing companies to gain further financial benefit from the fishers’ labour and as assurance they will not attempt to desert ship before their contract is completed (see Yea, 2022b).

Because the fishers were at sea and without means of sending salary remittances themselves, it was the international manning agency that was to take responsibility for remitting salary to a bank account in the fishers’ home country that could be accessed by or was in the name of a family member. For the Filipino participants it varied, with a Singaporean or Taiwanese-based agency adopting this role. Fishers recounted providing the agency with the bank account details for this purpose prior to their deployment on the fishing vessels. The agencies, in turn, received crews’ salaries from the vessel fleets themselves. In essence, the remittance process most commonly broke down for one of two reasons: either the manning agency kept the crew salaries sent by the vessel fleets as a form of ill-gotten profit, or the fleet businesses themselves did not send the crew salaries to the agencies.

Whilst in land-based sectors non-payment of salary for migrants and the failure to remit are easily detectable, for migrant fishing crew working in open waters with no means of communication with those back home, wage theft is not so easily detectable. Participants in my study recalled how, only once they landed at port and were able to contact their families, the lack of salary and remittances became known. Remoteness and isolation of offshore fishing crew work ensure transnational disconnections. In these circumstances the men are entirely unaware that their families are not receiving remittances. This is a shocking revelation for them once they are able to restore communications after exiting their situations on the vessels. It is to a discussion of the impacts these circumstances have on left-behind wives and mothers of fishers that I now turn.

The gendered work of contingent breadwinning

This part of the paper explores how the Filipino wives and mothers in my study experienced contingent breadwinning and how this can help extend our conceptualisations of how inequalities within labour markets are reproduced and extended. The case study also illustrates that contingent breadwinning – at least amongst the women in this study – is not only about entry into precarious work in local labour markets. This is just one of a number of strategies women adopt in an attempt to restore some degree of financial security in the household, suggesting that our conceptualisations of contingency go beyond labour market incorporation to a range of other practices which are often undertaken simultaneously with the collective goal of making up for the chasm created by loss of remittances.

Moving into vulnerability

Most of the women who are left behind when their male relatives migrate for work on fishing vessels overseas were either not working or working casually when their relative migrated. These women were to play the role of household manager, including the responsibility of managing household finances and, crucially, remittances. This household division of labour is a common one in Filipino migrant sending households, and rests on regular remittances to sustain the materials needs of those left behind, as well as the financing of debt repayments associated with migration and other loans. Thirty-two years old Cecile, for example, stated that she and her husband had discussed the management of the household at length when he was recruited for work on a Taiwanese fishing vessel. Although she had more formal education than her husband and had held a part-time position in a local primary school prior to his migration, she gave up the job in anticipation of his remittances. Her salary was paltry and both she and her husband agreed that she could establish a small carinderia (food stall) which would probably make as much money as her job at the school and give her more flexibility to look after their two children and manage the household in her husband’s absence. The carinderia, she and her husband imagined, could evolve into a longer-term livelihood strategy for the family into the future. Neither Cecile nor her husband wanted migration on a fishing vessel to be a long-term livelihood strategy for the family. Nonetheless, the planned business failed to materialise when regular remittances of his salary ceased after just 2 months since his departure.

Cecile’s situation was not an uncommon one amongst the women in the study. Five of the women moved from positions of main breadwinner or equal contributor to the household finances to positions of almost complete dependency on remittances. The remainder of the women were either unemployed or underemployed when their male relative left for fishing crew work. Rosel, for example, was not working when her husband migrated, so arguably her position did not significantly change upon his departure. Nonetheless, her precarity was significantly heightened because she and her young daughter moved in with her husband’s ageing mother in Manila. This, again, was a family strategy conceived considering the anticipated earnings from her husband’s migration. As she explained:

My mother-in-law is not well, and she doesn’t have anyone else to look after her. My husband is worried about when he leaves for overseas because he can’t visit her in Manila anymore. We decided it is better that we live with her while he is away. I can look after her and my daughter.

The strategy clearly unravelled when remittances failed to materialise. But making matters worse was the fact that she was now in Manila where everything was ‘so expensive’. Originally from a rural area in Isabella, Rosel’s move to Manila also meant the loss of support networks within her community and the opportunity to engage in growing vegetables on the small plot of land she and her husband had rented.

Land loss permeated the narratives of two-thirds of the women. Although Rosel lost land due to relocation, the others who experienced land loss had either sold or pawned this asset. This strategy is a common one adopted to finance labour migration overseas, both in the Philippines and elsewhere in Southeast Asia (Agra et al., 2010). Estudillo et al. (2022), for example, has examined this trend in detail in the Philippines, suggesting that rural transformations in rice-growing areas are occurring in part due to the changes in land ownership, including selling and pawning productive assets. Maria was one woman in this situation. She and her husband raised the funds to finance the costs of his deployment onto a Chinese fishing vessel by pawning their farm to a neighbour. Maria believed she would be able to pay off the sum gained through pawning within 6 months, according to her calculations of her husband’s remittances and household costs. Her husband’s contract listed his salary as US$ 450 per month. After her husband’s on-board allowance of US$ 50 per month is deducted and the company put half the remaining salary into ‘savings’ for access when he completed his contract, she calculated she would have US$ 200 a month remaining for her to use. The creditor for their land had given a clear timeframe of 12 months for repayments to be made in full. Such arrangements are commonplace in the Philippines and normally if the debtor does not repay the loan to regain their land within the timeframe, the land ownership falls to the creditor. In Maria’s case she had to plead for an extension of the repayment schedule, which was granted. However, at the time of her interview in late 2022, Maria and her husband had still not managed to redeem their land.

In sum, when remittances failed to materialise for these women, they were in situations where they were propelled into household financial crises because the family had crafted alternative household arrangements in anticipation of remittances. Because the lack of remittances was completely unexpected, household decision-making around livelihoods took on a frenetic modality. This modality and its implications for household resilience are examined in the following part of the paper.

Becoming contingent breadwinners

The strategies for making up for lack of remittances that were adopted by the left behind women in this study were various. They included growing and selling vegetables at market (and for subsistence), cooking and selling snacks such as pan de sal (the bread rolls normally consumed at breakfast) or noodles and washing clothes or cleaning for other households. For most of the women, they took on at least two or three of these types of work and doing it whenever the opportunity presented. As Maria explained:

I did washing for some other houses in our neighbourhood. They were mainly friends who felt sorry for me. Sometimes I minded their children too; the ones where the mother was working overseas as a domestic [helper]. I have to say that it was up and down, you know, with the money. Some weeks I would get quite a bit – like maybe averaging around PHP 500 or more a day. That was if I did lots of jobs. But it was exhausting and there was really no-one to take care of my own kids. No option though; if I didn’t do it, how else could I pay the instalments to get our land back?

Maria was indeed in quite a difficult situation precisely because, as explained above, she and her husband had pawned their land to finance his migration. She had no land to farm for the needs of her own family or for selling produce at market to earn an income. Maria’s livelihood strategy also illustrates the contingent and informal nature of the work many of the women took on. Therefore, these contingent livelihood strategies did not enable household financial security in the place of remittances. Maria’s own position on this was quite clear: ‘It all just goes to our daily living expenses and trying to repay our debt’. She, and others in the study, took work when and where they could, with little security and no assurity of how much they might be able to earn the following day or week.

The precarity of the fishers’ thus not only ‘travels’ to his family at home, but also reverberates in the contingent livelihood practices of the women left behind. Jolene was 22 when her husband migrated to work on a fishing vessel. She had no children to care for, and her parents were self-sufficient financially, so she only needed provide for herself in his absence. But she had borrowed the significant sum of PHP 25,000 to help finance her husband’s migration. She simply could not cover the interest or principal repayments on the loan, which was taken out to an informal creditor residing near her house. Residing in a small town with limited employment opportunities, she decided to leave for Batangas City in Southern Luzon in order to look for a secure job. She also admitted that she had wanted to, ‘get away from the constant visits by her creditor asking about the loan’. In Batangas she did find work as a cashier at a petrol station and worked long shifts for an extremely low wage. She chose Batangas rather than Manila because she was able to share a room with a friend, to whom she paid a small amount of weekly board. Whilst her job was arguably more secure than those of many of the other participants, she experienced constant harassment from her boss, who would only give her additional – and much needed – shifts in return for sexual favours. At the time of writing, she continued to hold the job, refusing additional shifts and all the while searching for a better employment opportunity. In short, her precarity was not ameliorated when she managed to secure a regular job. Rather, the financial pressures she was under impacted her personal and job security and, ostensibly, reduced her ability to earn and pay back the migration loan quickly.

Precarious work was not the only strategy employed by these women to reduce the insecurities they faced. Their attempts to shore up their financial positions were bolstered by practices of further borrowing, selling and pawning, as well as cutting back on basic needs. At the time her common-law spouse boarded a vessel to become a fisher, Angela was 25 years old. She is a college graduate (Bachelor of Science in Hotel and Tourism Management) and has been working as a regular employee in the Operations Department of a local branch of one of the country’s large supermarket chains. She and her partner, Arron, have two children. The children live and are being raised by Angela’s parents back home in the province, while she and her partner are renting a small room in Metro Manila, to work and earn a living. Angela is also the nineth in a family of 13 children. While she is not the sole provider for her family, she does regularly contribute an amount to help defray costs for her sibling’s education and other needs. Her parents, who were married at age 15 were farmers, her father also used to be a carpenter before retiring. Despite being the partner with a regular income even prior to her partner’s departure to become a fisher, Angela does not see herself as the breadwinner. Her partner’s significantly lesser income from a 3-days-a-week work, is the main family income. When Angela’s partner left to join the fishing vessel in August 2021, he told her to expect a portion of his salary to be sent to her on a monthly basis. Angela did not receive any since her partner left until February 2022. During the months that she did not hear from her husband, the months that she did not get any of the promised salary, Angelica provided for her family, alone. To save and make sure that she is able to send enough money for her children back home, Angelia survived in Metro Manila for months on a ration of instant noodles and eggs. She could barely provide with only her salary, so she ended up borrowing money from relatives. Given her status as a regular employee, Angelica was fortunate enough to also secure low interest loans from her employer, about PHP 40,000 (USD 680). At one point, she had to pawn off a jewellery item given to her by her sister as a graduation gift.

In sum, the strategies adopted under the rubric of contingent breadwinning and multifarious, malleable, and subject to constant re-evaluation. These strategies illustrate how labour exploitation of the main breadwinner of the household reverberates within the familial unit. In other words, labour exploitation of fishing vessel crew is causally connected to precarious work of left-behind wives, mothers and, sometimes, children. Whether the paid work these women perform takes place in the formal or informal sector, it does little to transform the financial position of the household. Understanding the reverberation of precarity in this way gives cause for critical reflection not only on the promise of the migration-develop nexus in building the economic resilience of poorer households in the Philippines and elsewhere, but on, ‘a reconfiguration of class processes, as the materialities and subjectivities of class are remade and as the meaning of work and the livelihoods different forms of labour can sustain are changing’ (Smith et al., 2008: 283). Although Smith et al. are writing about post-socialist economies in Europe, their arguments well apply to the situation in the Philippines described in this paper. Peck and Theodore (2001) made a similar point in their analysis of Chicago’s increasing pool of temp workers – another group of hyper-precarious workers – suggesting that, ‘the growth and polarization of temp employment has been associated with a “hardening” – and indeed “stretching” – of extant ethnic, gender and spatial inequalities’ (p. 471). As in the case study introduced in this paper, the reproduction and ‘stretching’ of gender inequalities in local labour markets in the Philippines, and the constrained choices that drive left-behind women to adopt and persist with contingent breadwinning strategies through flexible labour market positions are evident. The social reproduction of poor households, such as those of my interlocutors in this study, thus represent the ways migrant work is reconfiguring class relations in ways that create a new pool of contingent workers and new strategies by which these workers attempt to shore up the ever-compounding vulnerabilities of their households.

Conclusion

There is no doubting the intensely negative emotional, relational and financial effects of precarious migrant labour on both migrants themselves and, as is increasingly recognised, on families left-behind. This paper has engaged with the growing body of scholarly work in geography and cognate disciplines examining the livelihood implications for households and communities impacted by exploitative migrant work, particularly as it is conceptualised through frames of translocal precarity within broader discussions of transnational householding. The case study for this paper aimed to extend this work through a novel case study involving the ‘transnational disconnection’ of migrant fishing crew from their left-behind families, drawing on empirical data from an ongoing study of seafood slavery in the Indo-Pacific region. The experiences of migrant fishers and their families in the Philippines were analysed in making the arguments of this paper.

Based on the analysis in this paper, several avenues for further research on the subject of translocal livelihoods under conditions of precarious migration are offered here. Foremost, the trajectories of returned fishers present some marked departures from the ‘reintegration scenario’ legitimised by international and governmental organisations as the route to build resilience and protect returned exploited migrants. This scenario posits a comprehensive architecture of protection, in which safe return and reintegration of victims of forced labour and human trafficking figure as prominent elements (Bearup, 2016). Migrant fishing crew currently sit largely outside this anti-trafficking governance, at least in the Philippines. What this means is that interventions that may enable returned fishers and their families to reduce the serious tangible financial consequences of returning in this manner are not forthcoming. NGOs oriented to assisting seafarers and fishers provide stop-gap measures, such as small sums of money to enable the fishers to return home after arriving in the Philippines, or small payments to wives to ease the burden of providing the most urgent of household needs. It is in this context that marriage dissolution, serial circular migration under conditions of insecurity and continuing debt burdens remain key household stressors. Notwithstanding that there are significant shortcomings of anti-trafficking protections (Scarpa, 2020), simply understanding returned fishers’ and their family’s needs should be an important first step in any measures aimed at redressing the vulnerabilities associated with precarious migration.

Whilst discussion in the paper has concentrated on the micro-scale experiences of women left behind when their male relative migrates, it is recognised that the ‘wider context’ of ‘fluid connections between the state, society and economy, and the individual’ (Rigg et al., 2014: 368) play an important role in women’s – and their male relatives’ experiences. To this end, further research could well explore the complex interstices between migration policies in the Philippines that laud the migrant hero and the reality of exploitation many migrants experience. The Philippines state has an opportunity at present to reframe the policy context in which labour migration strategies are undertaken, with the formation of the new Department of Migrant Workers (DMW), under the Marcos Presidency (2022–current). Extending livelihood support for families of exploited migrant workers would require a recognition that migration for development strategies is not always successful and, on many occasions will require tempering to account for these cases. Societal attitudes towards migrant workers are also profoundly influenced by the migrant hero discourse, often to the point where failed migration can produce stigma and social exclusion for both the migrants themselves and their families left behind, as alluded to in the analysis in this paper (Yea, 2020). Networks of care and support within local communities could bolster the ability of families to become more resilient in these situations. Whilst some of the women spoke of these types of informal supports from others in their communities in the face of loss of household income, for the most part women spoke of shame and social exclusion.

The paper has not addressed the impacts of loss of family income on other members of the household, including children and aged parents. Elsewhere I alluded to the necessity for some Cambodian families in these situations putting their children to work (Yea, 2019). Four of the families in this study adopted this strategy primarily because their children were old enough to make this contribution to the household economy. The situations of these children warrant a separate discussion because the nature of the vulnerabilities they face when pressured to contribute to the household finances vary from other family members. Similarly, the effects of contingent breadwinning on aged parents have not been given detailed consideration herein, although they are also numerous. A further consideration of how the dynamics of the household economy as it impacts other family members could yield novel insights into the nexus between left-behind children and elderly household members in situations of precarity associated with failed migration.