Beyond Labor Mismatch: Moral Economies of Worth among Undocumented Filipino Workers

Abstract

Under conditions of legal precarity, the experience of underemployment is not simply a structural misallocation or a psychic strain, as it is often framed, but a lived moral condition. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 28 undocumented Filipino workers whose credentials exceed their job roles, I introduce the practice of virtúing to describe how workers ethically inhabit the constraints of labor mismatch by using culturally intelligible virtues to navigate their underemployment, and in part, to illustrate its explicitly moral dimensions and the moral nature of labor. The results identify three interrelated modes of virtúing. Performative virtúing reflects how workers create provisional forms of protection against exploitation through strategic displays of amenability or deference, which paradoxically also make their labor more exploitable. Conformative virtúing illustrates how workers transform devalued labor into ethically coherent practices by embracing the normative ideals of familial sacrifice or aspirational self-discipline, suggesting that they derive the dignity of their labor not through role alignment but from broader moral commitments. Subversive virtúing arises when workers have exhausted the avenues of action within the confines of their labor and respond by engaging in quiet acts of refusals, protective boundary work, or moral withdrawal as a form of ethical preservation.