Abstract
In rural Manitoba, Canada, having been recruited by a small hotel, a group of temporary foreign workers from the Philippines wait. In the Philippines, so too do their non-migrant kin. For both groups, this waiting corresponds to the hoped for completion of the migration project; added to the routine waiting, they manage the physical distance and time differences that separate them. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic work conducted in Manitoba and the Philippines, this chapter argues that these forms of waiting produce particular forms of value for the hotel. Following the exploitative tendencies of guest worker programs globally and in Canada, but filtered through the unique opportunity for permanent residency offered by the province of Manitoba, the hotel manipulates the timelines to which its workers are subject through a strategic and adaptive use of two immigration programs, each with its own temporal characteristics and time-based objectives: the Manitoba Provincial Nominee Program, which offers permanency, and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, which facilitates the short-term recruitment of temporary migrant labor. Recruiting and retaining workers through these two programs, the hotel capitalizes on their distinct temporal logics, and as such on the manifold waiting of their migrant workers, and the depth of feeling and emotion these logics produce.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Aguilar, Filomeno V., Jr. 2014. Migration Revolution: Philippine Nationhood and Class Relations in a Globalized Age. Singapore: NUS Press.
Asis, Maruja Milagros B., Shirlena Huang, and Brenda S.A. Yeoh. 2004. When the Light of the Home Is Abroad: Unskilled Female Migration and the Filipino Family. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 25 (2): 198–215.
Barber, Pauline Gardiner. 2010. Cell Phones, Politics, and the Philippine Labor Diaspora. In Class, Contention, and a World in Motion, ed. W. Lem and P.G. Barber, 138–160. New York: Berghahn Books.
Binford, Leigh. 2013. Tomorrow We’re All Going to the Harvest: Temporary Foreign Worker Programs and Neoliberal Political Economy. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Carter, Tom, Margot Morrish, and Benjamin Amoyaw. 2008. Attracting Immigrants to Smaller Urban and Rural Communities: Lessons Learned from the Manitoba Provincial Nominee Program. Journal of International Migration and Integration/Revue de l’integration et de la migration internationale 9 (2): 161–183.
Chu, Julie Y. 2010. Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Dobrowolsky, Alexandra. 2011. The Intended and Unintended Effects of a New Immigration Strategy: Insights from Nova Scotia’s Provincial Nominee Program. Studies in Political Economy 87 (1): 109–141.
Foster, Jason. 2012. Making Temporary Permanent: The Silent Transformation of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Just Labor 19: 22–46.
Fudge, Judy, and Fiona MacPhail. 2009. The Temporary Foreign Worker Program in Canada: Low-Skilled Workers as an Extreme form of Flexible Labor. Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal 31: 101–139.
Goldring, Luin. 2010. Temporary Worker Programs and Precarious Status: Implications for Citizenship, Inclusion and Nation Building in Canada. Canadian Issues, Special Issue of Temporary Foreign Workers (Spring): 50–54.
Lenard, Patti Tamara, and Christine Straehle, eds. 2012. Legislated Inequality: Temporary Labor Migration in Canada. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP.
Nakache, Delphine, and Paula J. Kinoshita. 2010. The Canadian Temporary Foreign Worker Program: Do Short-Term Economic Needs Prevail Over Human Rights Concerns? IRPP.
O’Neill, Bruce. 2014. Cast Aside: Boredom, Downward Mobility, and Homelessness in Post-Communist Bucharest. Cultural Anthropology 29 (1): 8–31.
———. 2017. The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. 2005. Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Sassen, Saskia. 2000. Women’s Burden: Counter-Geographies of Globalization and the Feminization of Survival. Journal of International Affairs 53: 503–524.
Svendsen, Lars. 2005. A Philosophy of Boredom. London: Reaktion Books.
Turner, Victor Witter. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Vol. 101. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bryan, C. (2018). “Wait, and While You Wait, Work”: On the Reproduction of Precarious Labor in Liminal Spaces. In: Barber, P., Lem, W. (eds) Migration, Temporality, and Capitalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72781-3_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72781-3_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-72780-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-72781-3
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)