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.

Jennifer E. Shaw is an assistant professor of sociology and politics at Thompson Rivers University. She holds a PhD in anthropology. Her writing has been featured in Children & Society, Global Studies of Childhood, and the Anthropology of Work Review. Before entering academia, she was an award-winning youth settlement worker in the non-profit sector in Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia.