Global Justice and the Plight of Filipino Domestic Migrant Workers

Abstract

Recent labor migration from third-world countries can be symptomatic of an unjust global order. In a third-world country like the Philippines, this unjust global order can be exemplified in the plight of its overseas migrant workers. This paper specifically examines the case of Filipino domestic migrant workers vis-à-vis global justice in the light of Thomas Pogge’s institutional moral analysis. Its key claim is that the present global set-up is a determining cause of global injustice that engenders global poverty. As a result, scores of Filipinos, mostly women, are driven to engage in domestic labor abroad that exposes them to certain grave risks. It further argues that poverty in third-world countries like the Philippines cannot only be explained by domestic factors such as graft and corruption, unclean elections, increasing population, the moral probity and industriousness of the citizens, etc., but also in terms of how the underlying rules of the present global order are unjustly shaped by certain affluent and politically-influential countries. By applying Pogge’s institutional moral analysis, this study hopes to understand better the diaspora and plight of Filipino domestic migrant workers in a wider context and provide an alternative to the theory of domestic labor migration.