Tender Labour: Migrant Care Work, Filipina/O Young People, and Family Life Across Borders

Description: Spotlights the lives of children whose mothers left their homes in the Philippines to work in Canada.

To meet demand in Canada, more and more women are migrating from the Philippines to become domestic workers. What happens to family left behind? Tender Labour investigates the experiences of young people as they navigate precarity in all its forms when their mothers work elsewhere.

Jennifer Shaw conducts nuanced research with youth who have been separated from and later reunited with their mothers in Canada, incorporating their own voices through poems, song lyrics, and photographs. She focuses on how their tender labor--the work they perform within their families--emerges not only from necessity but also from the stresses and dreams that tug at the threads of kinship.

The role of young people in familial migrations reveals the hard consequences of the capitalist extraction of transnational labor. Nonetheless, despite childhoods shaped by economic inequality and racialized disparity, Shaw discovers that these Filipina/o young people keep their hope of a good life.

Brief description: Jennifer E. Shaw is assistant professor of sociology and politics at Thompson Rivers University. Before entering academia, she was an award-winning youth settlement worker in the non-profit sector in Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia.

Review Quotes: "Shaw's notion of "tender labour" is a beautiful and generative articulation of the complexities of reproductive work, which is at once loving, limiting, useful, and unrecognized. Tender Labour provides rich insights into what it means to live in a transnational family in a highly unequal world."-- "Rachel Rosen, coauthor of Bordering Social Reproduction: Migrant Mothers and Children Making Lives in the Shadows"