#OFW: Filipino migrant workers brokering counter narratives of overseas life on TikTok

Over the past decades, government institutions and migration agencies have brokered the good life overseas among Filipinos through recruitment mechanisms. Additionally, they administer training and seminars to construct the ideal Filipino migrant who is culturally fit and deserving to benefit from partaking in a global market and society. In this paper, I critically explore the ways that Filipino migrants create and produce TikTok videos to broker counter narratives to the glossy portraiture of living and working overseas by formal migration channels. I deploy the digital brokering lens to capture and analyse the diverse digital mechanisms that Filipino migrants deploy to produce and circulate subversive contents designed to engage with a networked transnational public. The findings show that Filipino migrants expose hardships in the workplace, reveal self-responsibilisation of managing struggles, visibilise precarious resources, and call out abuse by capitalising on relatable contents, credibility building, and platform-specific and discursive styles. Ultimately, by applying a thematic and critical discourse analysis to examine 100 TikTok videos linked to the hashtag #OFW (Overseas Filipino Worker), this study sheds light on the subversive possibilities of digital brokerage among Filipino migrant workers that expose the hidden dangers and pitfalls of a life abroad operationalised in a neoliberal global economy.