Tender Labour

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 labour – 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 capitalist extraction of transnational labour. 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.