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Overseas Filipino workers and the COVID-19 pandemic: Exploring the emotional labor of persistence

Without a doubt, the precarity of an overseas Filipino worker's (OFW) life is augmented by the COVID-19 pandemic, primarily through the economic and political consequences that such public health crises engender. However, while primarily seen in terms of their economic and political dimensions,...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: de Borja, Jean Aaron
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Elsevier Ltd. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8596095/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34804202
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2021.100838
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author_facet de Borja, Jean Aaron
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description Without a doubt, the precarity of an overseas Filipino worker's (OFW) life is augmented by the COVID-19 pandemic, primarily through the economic and political consequences that such public health crises engender. However, while primarily seen in terms of their economic and political dimensions, these consequences also affectively disrupt the life of OFWs. In this paper, I trace the various conflicting ways that OFWs, who were terminated from their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic, have dealt with their emotions while still in their respective host countries, and, trying to find a way to return home. Drawing from Arlie Hochschild (1983) concept of emotional labor, I argue that the OFWs perform what I am provisionally calling the emotional labor of persistence. This type of emotion work, though tied to, and enabled by the precarious conditions in which the respondents live, is a resistive and agential kind of emotional labor. It allows the OFWs to endure precarity, and in the process, find ways to elude, confront, or question the modes of thinking and feeling in which they are constantly circumscribed by the demands of their overseas work and overall precarious situation.
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spelling pubmed-85960952021-11-17 Overseas Filipino workers and the COVID-19 pandemic: Exploring the emotional labor of persistence de Borja, Jean Aaron Emot Space Soc Article Without a doubt, the precarity of an overseas Filipino worker's (OFW) life is augmented by the COVID-19 pandemic, primarily through the economic and political consequences that such public health crises engender. However, while primarily seen in terms of their economic and political dimensions, these consequences also affectively disrupt the life of OFWs. In this paper, I trace the various conflicting ways that OFWs, who were terminated from their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic, have dealt with their emotions while still in their respective host countries, and, trying to find a way to return home. Drawing from Arlie Hochschild (1983) concept of emotional labor, I argue that the OFWs perform what I am provisionally calling the emotional labor of persistence. This type of emotion work, though tied to, and enabled by the precarious conditions in which the respondents live, is a resistive and agential kind of emotional labor. It allows the OFWs to endure precarity, and in the process, find ways to elude, confront, or question the modes of thinking and feeling in which they are constantly circumscribed by the demands of their overseas work and overall precarious situation. Elsevier Ltd. 2021-11 2021-08-26 /pmc/articles/PMC8596095/ /pubmed/34804202 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2021.100838 Text en © 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.
spellingShingle Article
de Borja, Jean Aaron
Overseas Filipino workers and the COVID-19 pandemic: Exploring the emotional labor of persistence
title Overseas Filipino workers and the COVID-19 pandemic: Exploring the emotional labor of persistence
title_full Overseas Filipino workers and the COVID-19 pandemic: Exploring the emotional labor of persistence
title_fullStr Overseas Filipino workers and the COVID-19 pandemic: Exploring the emotional labor of persistence
title_full_unstemmed Overseas Filipino workers and the COVID-19 pandemic: Exploring the emotional labor of persistence
title_short Overseas Filipino workers and the COVID-19 pandemic: Exploring the emotional labor of persistence
title_sort overseas filipino workers and the covid-19 pandemic: exploring the emotional labor of persistence
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8596095/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34804202
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2021.100838
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