An exercise in futurity: servitude as pathway to young Filipino men’s education- to-work transition

ABSTRACT

This article examines how young Filipino men looking to work in international seafaring deploy servitude as a means of attaining education-to-work transition. It focuses on those applying to work for free as ‘utility men’ (gofer or flunkey) in Manila’s manning and crewing agencies that supply seafarers to ship operators around the world in exchange for the promise of boarding a ship. Based on participant observation and life history interviews, the article accounts for how they transform their servitude into diskarte – strategy by which they navigate the limited employment opportunities in the Philippines – by constructing their ‘utility manning’ as an informal and negotiated pathway to employment. The young Filipino men’s seeking and enduring servitude, geared towards gleaning better social possibilities, becomes a profoundly rational act of investing in and securing their future.

KEYWORDS:

• Education-to-work transition
• maritime education
• masculine adulthood
• Philippines
• utility manning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. I follow Republic Act 8044 or the Youth in Nation Building Act (1995) of the Philippines, which considers those aged 15–30 as youth.

2. For example, based on interviews, as early as the early 1990s, Filipino nurses unable to find work volunteered in hospitals. Later on, volunteers paid hospitals a fee to ‘hire’ them in order to get the necessary hospital work experience required by foreign employers.

3. All names used are pseudonyms to protect the identity and privacy of participants.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [grant number GA 2241/1-1].