Remote carework is a seeming contradiction in terms, as carework was an occupation that necessitated the migration of women from the Global South. But remote eldercare is an emerging healthcare industry, where teams of “coaches” based in the Philippines and Mexico monitor elderly, US-based clients via computer tablets, all while hidden behind animated pet avatars.

How do internet and communications technologies (ICTs) expand care chains that previously required migration? Drawing from Marxist feminism and social reproduction theory, I argue that ICTs facilitate the transnational distribution of carework to the Global North without migration, thus expanding what sociologist Rhacel Parrenas (2015) has called the international division of reproductive labor. In addition to new divisions of labor, I further argue that ICT-enabled modes of labor extraction illustrate how the platform economy pulls into a global arbitrage Filipina reproductive labor, generating not just convenience but also surplus time for people in the Global North. I build on Neferti Tadiar's concept of “remaindered lives” to give narrative form to these processes of value extraction. 

By building on the work of Parrenas and Tadiar, this paper contributes Filipina feminist perspectives to historicize forms of digital labor in the Philippines as part of longer genealogies of extraction by drawing from ethnographic research and from the cultural production (e.g., vlogs, social media) of digital workers. Centering their situated knowledge also illuminates the vibrant solidarities and socialities crafted by workers, who assert the affective complexity of their care labor, and use digital tools to organize and thrive amidst ICT-enabled forms of labor extraction. 

(200 words)

Works Cited

Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. 2015. Servants of Globalization. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Tadiar, Nefirti Xina M. 2022. Remaindered Life. Durham: Duke University Press