8 Marcos's transformation of the Philippines into a "labor brokerage state" was an effort to solve a number of intractable problems at once. While all of these occupations are gendered, domestic work remains the most disproportionately so with new hire female laborers outnumbering males 55 to 1. 7 Many of these Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) perform waged reproductive labor: the service work done by domestic helpers, child- and elder-caregivers, nurses, household workers, cooks, charworkers, cleaners, etc. 6 In so doing, Robyn Magalit Rodriguez argues, Marcos turned the "Philippine state's transnational migration apparatus" into "an 'export-processing zone'" for a singular commodity: workers. 5 Among the decree's three hundred articles, the policy explicitly states the intent to "insure careful selection of Filipino workers for overseas employment in order to protect the good name of the Philippines abroad" and formalize the "mandatory remittance of foreign exchange earnings" through the official conduits of the Philippine banking system. On May 1, 1974, International Worker's Day and almost two years into martial law, Ferdinand Marcos signed Presidential Decree 442 into law, inaugurating the Philippines' state-sponsored labor export policy. Her story actually began twenty years earlier in the gilded presidential halls of Malacañang Palace.
Sarah Balabagan's harrowing experience encapsulated the plight facing many overseas domestic laborers from the Philippines. 4 She returned to her family and a hero's welcome in the Philippines in 1996. 3 Responding to public pressure and mass political mobilizations, the Philippine government had Balabagan's sentence commuted to one hundred cane lashes, "blood money" restitution, and one year in an Emerati prison. When she was sentenced to death by firing squad, Filipinos sought political accountability from their government and implored it to intervene on behalf of Balabagan. Contracted to work as a maid, she boarded a plane bound to Dubai hoping to send remittances home: as she later stated in an interview, "I wanted to help lift my family out of poverty." 2 Following the execution of another overseas Filipina domestic worker, Flor Contemplacion, in Singapore earlier that year, Balabagan's legal trials in 1995 galvanized the Philippines. Only two months earlier, Balabagan had left her home in Mindanao as a minor with illegal documents falsifying her age. Having endured his relentless sexual harassment, she protected herself against attempted rape by stabbing him to death. On July 19 th, 1994, Sarah Balabagan, a fourteen-year-old overseas Filipina domestic worker in the United Arab Emirates, killed her employer, a sixty-seven-year-old widower, in self-defense.
The quietest, most docile worker could, behind her apron or her uniform, be sharpening a blade.
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