In 1974, in the midst of a stagnant economy, the Philippine government established a policy framework to stimulate Filipinos to work abroad. Known as the Labor Code, this was the origin of the Philippine state's long-running effort to encourage migration as a means to strengthen the economy. 

In this presentation, we ask: what is the state of Philippine labor migration fifty years after the 1974 Labor Code? We look at the goals of the Labor Code under President Marcos; the reforms that came under Cory Aquino; the crises that engulfed the nation with the human rights violations of workers abroad; and the subsequent responses of different governments to these challenging conditions.

Kazue Takamura is Senior Faculty Lecturer in the Institute for the Study of International Development at McGill University. She is also Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Global Humanities and Social Sciences at Nagasaki University. Her research focuses on Asian migration, gendered labor vulnerability, immigration detention, international migrant rights, and the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. Takamura is the recipient of several teaching awards at McGill, including the Principal's Prize for Excellence in Teaching, as well as grants and fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Fonds de recherche du Québec, and the Toyota Foundation. She received her PhD from Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.

Erik Martinez Kuhonta is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University. In 2024-25, he is the John H. McArthur Research Fellow of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. He is author of The Institutional
Imperative: The Politics of Equitable Development in Southeast Asia (Stanford Press, 2011), which was short-listed for the Canadian Political Science Association Prize in Comparative Politics. He is co-editor of Party System Institutionalization in Asia: Democracies, Autocracies, and the Shadow of the Past (Cambridge Press, 2015) and Southeast Asia in Political Science: Theory, Region, and Qualitative Analysis (Stanford Press, 2008). Kuhonta has held visiting fellowships at Stanford University, the National University of Singapore, the East-West Center (Honolulu), and Kyoto University. He received his PhD from Princeton University.