Disparate geographies of labour : the Philippines in times of globalisation

Abstract. Labour market issues give insight into the myriad ways in which people and politics respond to social and spatial tensions marking current transformations alongside globalisation. This paper explores the relations between the globalising Philippine labour market, spatially disparate development and the course of national economic policies.

Philippine State policies almost exclusively promote global-oriented Service and industry sectors and their predominantly urban locations.The agricultural sector, and thus most of the rural regions and inhabitants, is neglected by these policies. Many rural regions find themselves being pushed into the economic periphery. Their inhabitants appear caught in a spiral of increasing poverty, leading to heightened exodus as persons seek employment and better perspectives in urban centres. Persistent inequality of power relations, landownership, socio-political conflicts and slow decentral isation further exacerbate the Situation in the peripheries. At the same time, the urban centres struggle to absorb the migrants in the face of economic volatility through globalisation. Unemployment is high and the informal sector large. A strategy of the State government has been to export workforce surplus to global labour markets. In the long run, however, the Philippines, and particularly its peripheries, could loose their most productive human capital, and consequently, their basis for any endogenously driven development. Thus, it appears necessary for the government to provide their Citizens with a sustainable, socially and spatially more balanced inner labour market if it wishes to herald in a developmental turnabout.