00:00:02

Duncan McCargo

This is the Nordic Asia podcast.

Thank you for joining the Nordic podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. I'm Duncan McCargo, director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and a professor of political science here at the University of Copenhagen. With me today is the Danish journalist and author, Nina Trige Andersen. We'll be talking about her book, Labor Pioneers: Economy, Labor, and Migration in Filipino-Danish Relations, 1950-2015, which was published by Ateneo Manila University Press in 2019. Nina, welcome to the Nordic Asia podcast.

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00:00:38

Nina Trige Andersen

Thank you so much.

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00:00:39

Duncan McCargo

So Labor Pioneers examines the role of Filipino migrant workers performed in the Danish economy during the post-war period, with a particular emphasis on female workers who came to Copenhagen to be employed in the burgeoning hotel industry during the 60s and 70s. It's based on incredibly meticulous archival and interview research. It's a book about pioneering labor, which is itself an example of pioneering work. And I was immediately struck by the incredible rigor of the project, which really reads like a book based on a very well supervised Ph.D. thesis from a major research university. But it's actually a piece of independent scholarship. I think we better start learning that you're not an academic by training, but you've written what's actually a fantastic academic book. And how did that happen exactly?

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00:01:22

Nina Trige Andersen

Well, I was trained originally in both journalism and history. Double major from the University of Roskilde. So I've always been with a foot in both worlds, I guess. Working as a journalist mainly, but also working as a historian. Yeah. So I've had research and networks of more traditional academics along the way. So I participate in conferences and stuff with the historians and labor historians and migration researchers. And I guess I decided to write the book outside of the institutional academic world to give myself the liberty to follow whatever trace I found worth to follow. So to be restricted by, you know, time limits, research grants and things like that, because I really wanted to just follow all the traces that I found necessary to follow. And I could combine that with my journalism work because I went to the Philippines several times along the years to do more traditional journalism. But then I could also go to the archives and trace people that were kind of hard to find so many years later.

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00:02:26

Duncan McCargo

Right. Maybe you could say a little bit about that – the journalistic work that you've been doing and you say you went to the Philippines to write stories about what was going on there. So what kind of journalistic work were you doing on the trips to the Philippines?

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00:02:38

Nina Trige Andersen

Well, in my first trips there, I was writing actually mostly about the Mindanao conflict in southern Philippines. And I was writing also about the colonial heritage and how it was still alive in several different contemporary issues and about Urban-Rural relations and things like that. But then that was also a time in history when the migration from the Philippines to Denmark reignited, but in a different way. So that was in the years when the au pair migration really took off. So a lot of Filipinos came to Denmark – like several thousands a year, suddenly, and naturally that caught the eye of the media. And I started also reporting about that. But then I came across this group of women that were recruited in seventy three, and they became my entrance to understanding that there was actually a very long recruitment history of Filipino workers through the Danish economy that went back to the guest worker era, which even though I had also worked with the labor migration as a historian, kind of a little bit surprising to me, because what you usually hear about that era, is that it was male workers recruited to an industry and they came from countries such as Turkey and Pakistan and things like that. So this was a group of workers recruited in a period that falling between the cracks of history. And I really wanted to know more about that also as a way to kind of explain better these new forms of migration that people were treating as something that was like super sudden and very surprising. And it was a way to contextualize that. So I actually still wrote journalism about the newer forms of migration, but I started taking much more interest in the backdrop of that migration. So digging into that history.

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00:04:18

Duncan McCargo

Yeah. So you made a somewhat unusual transition of wanting to dig out the back story in more depth than is usually possible in the journalistic context.

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00:04:28

Nina Trige Andersen

Yes, exactly.

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00:04:30

Duncan McCargo

Nina Trige Andersen

So perhaps you could say something for the benefit of our listeners who don't know much about this. And I certainly knew very little about it until I started reading your book. What was the significance of Filipino migrant workers coming into Denmark, particularly in the – I guess the heart of your book is this period, the 60s and 70s and the hotel business – so can you tell us something about the importance of that phenomenon?

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Yes. Well, the first group of migrants from the period that I started interviewing was the ones who came to call themselves the 49ers. And they call themselves that because they were forty nine women recruited at the same moment for a particular hotel in Copenhagen, and that was the hotel Scandinavia, which was at that time it was built by the Scandinavian Airlines in collaboration with the American hotel chain West Inn. And it was a really big hotel at that moment, like the biggest in modern Europe. I mean, now there’s full of big hotels everywhere in Europe, including in Copenhagen. But at that time, it was a very new phenomenon in the cityscape of Copenhagen with these huge hotels. And naturally, when such a big hotel opened, they needed a lot of workers and they needed them right now. So what they said is that they couldn't find sufficient labor in Denmark who wanted to take that kind of workers, for instance, chambermaids. And as it happened, the CEO of the hotel Scandinavia at the time, an American, he had worked with a colleague in a Singaporean hotel, the Shangri-La, and that was his Singaporean colleague was like, well, in our neighboring country, the Philippines, you can recruit as many workers as you need, basically. And he went as the one who interviewed these women in Manila to recruit them. But actually, that group was only, you could say, like the last big batch that came in that period because very shortly after, like 21 days after they arrived, Denmark adopted this so-called immigration stop. So most of the of the generation that call themselves the Filipino pioneers that came in the 60s and 70s, they arrived before the Forty Niners and it was through the forty Niners that I came to meet some of the earlier migrants.

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00:06:31

Nina Trige Andersen

And they were very central in the whole quest of Copenhagen to become this more global metropolis. It was quite a provincial little town at the time, and the 60s and 70s was really changing the city. Like with these, for example, the big hotels was it was a major driver of a lot of economic development and bringing like the world to Copenhagen. And the Filipino workers were a very significant part of the labor force in these hotels from their opening when they were built in the 60s and 70s.

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00:07:01

Duncan McCargo

Right. I mean, even though things have moved on, it's still an iconic hotel. The hotel you're talking about, that's the one that's now the SAS Radisson, which we see from Tivoli and looking down across the bridge, over the water. So it still looms over us as a kind of statement of modernity. And what your book provides is a context for how that modernity was filled out in the early 70s.

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00:07:21

Nina Trige Andersen

Certainly, yeah. It's still very iconic in the cityscape and so were a lot of the other hotels that some of them – SAS – also built other hotels. And yes, like the Royal Hotel near the Central Station. And then there's the Sheraton that is near the lake, which was also super iconic. And you can read from newspapers from the time you know the newspapers, they are describing how habitants of Copenhagen are looking with awe of these huge buildings. And I am afraid that they're going to fall over if it gets too windy. And, you know, at the time, there was not really tall buildings in Copenhagen. So these are a huge symbol of modernity and globalization in this part of the world. And actually also the workers work because they also recruited Filipinos, not only because it was an easy and cheap form of labor to recruit, but also because they had some particular skills that was needed in the hotels that was not about what their formal function was. I mean, not just about cleaning, but also the fact that they spoke English, for example, which not many Danish people did at the time. And it was very convenient for the hotel to have an English speaking labor force now that they wanted to recruit a lot of tourism and corporate conferences and stuff from, for example, the US and other parts of the world. So there were also this kind of internationalization of Denmark and making it more attractive to the world.

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00:08:36

Duncan McCargo

Right. So it's very interesting that the Scandinavian region, in its attempts to modernize and internationalize and make itself more cosmopolitan, then ends up being a bunch of people from Southeast Asia to play a central role in that process. There are so many layers of irony in the story that you're telling in this book.

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00:08:55

Nina Trige Andersen

Yes. And some of the Filipinos who came in that period was also recalling, you know, how they felt coming to this strange little little city in the north. You know, that everything was super old fashioned and people were wearing really strange clothes and not really showering that often. In the Philippines they were used to like American fashion. And Manila was obviously already at the time, was a huge city and had a much different dynamic than this little capital in Denmark so they were a little bit wondering about what's with this, you know, capital of Denmark. It's it's like a little town in rural Philippines.

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00:09:33

Duncan McCargo

Nina Trige Andersen

Right, you've already started referring to the group of people who perhaps it would be accurate to say they form the core or the heart of your story, the Forty Niners, this group of women who arrived, as you say, just before this this magic cutoff date in 73 at a time, of course, when things were quite tumultuous all over the place, including in the Philippines itself, it is quite a moment. So what kind of women were this group who arrived at this very important moment in 1973 to work in that hotel? What sort of backgrounds did they have, what education and what hopes and dreams?

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Well, they were quite a diverse group, actually, both in terms of age and also in terms of where in the Philippines they came from. Like a lot of them came from the provinces surrounding Manila, but not from Manila. But some of them also came from further south. So they were quite diverse and most of them didn't know each other when they were recruited. Some of them had relatives in Denmark that were already working there. So they have been referred by their relatives when when their relatives found out that this new hotel is opening, they need a lot of workers, they would send recommendations to their relatives and say, you know, there is going to be this job interview in Manila. You should apply for it. So they came from different parts of the Philippines. Some of them were very young and some of them maybe in their thirties when they were recruited. And they also had quite different backgrounds in terms of education. But one thing that was that was common for most of them was that they did have education and not education within the hotel and restaurant business. It was one was an accountant, one was a teacher. In the Philippines it would usually be education that you would take in the university. In Denmark occupations were not necessarily university educations yet. But they had, you know, what would what would amount to like, let's say, a bachelor's degree in nowadays in a Danish context, within various fields of disciplines. And most of them were not really eager to be chambermaids as such, they had a lot of different motivations for going to Denmark for a job that was different and below their educational qualifications. So some like one of them, one of the main characters of the book. For her, it was a way of getting getting like a year away from her very authoritarian father.

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00:11:48

Nina Trige Andersen

And for another, it was because she wanted to join her younger sister who had just migrated there. And for a third of them, it was because she was the youngest of her siblings and her father was very sick and they couldn't afford the medication. So she was kind of collectively tasked with the job of going to secure finances for her father's treatment. And another one came from a province south of Manila, like a fisher village. And she had migrated to Manila first to try to work there. And that was very difficult for her because she was a rural girl and she really couldn't manage in the in the huge city dynamics and her and her cousin got scammed and all that. So she was like, well, it wasn't, you know, that much harder to migrate to the other part of the world and to migrate to Manila. It was already a very big difference between the rural part of the Philippines and then the city. So they had all kinds of different motivations for going there. And most of them thought it was going to be temporary, the recruitment was a one year contract. So they were like, well, let's try this for a year and then, you know, they had many different plans. Some wanted to migrate onto the US or Canada. Some wanted to go back and build a life in the Philippines. And then for many different reasons, like life happens and things you didn't expect happens. And then a lot of them actually ended up staying in Denmark, at least until now. So building a life there instead of going for for one year of work.

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00:13:09

Duncan McCargo

Right. So the themes that come through of, first of all, of an extremely talented and as you say, often very overqualified group of people who clearly could be doing something at a much higher level than this relatively menial hotel work that they've been recruited for. And then the transition between thinking that you're going somewhere for a year and ending up very often there for the rest of your life or for many decades came upon them. I mean, I've made a number of visits to the Philippines and I'm always struck by the very large proportion of people who either have spent time working overseas or are planning to spend time working overseas or whose family or friends are working overseas. There's an incredibly strong tradition, if that's the right term in the Philippines of this overseas working. And yet from the outside, it looks like a rather curious policy for any government to be pursuing because it amounts to a kind of deliberate brain drain, sending a lot of the most capable people that you have out of the country. This is a persistent problem that the Philippines has suffered from for decades and continues to suffer from to this day. So could you explain a bit about the context for why would the Philippine state and government agencies be deeply involved in this process of exporting people when exporting people in many ways would seem to be counter to the national interest?

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Yeah, well, that's a very complex story. And there were a lot of different interests involved in this whole process. And the whole brain drain problem was something that Philippine state officials and researchers was very aware of from from way back also before the 70s. It would drain all parts of the economy also, for example people skilled within rural production. So it was like actually all sectors of the economy that was suffering from this strain of skilled labor. There was it was a very complex process that led up to this, that they people that deal with migration in the Philippines today, known as the Labor Code of 74, which was what like instituted what we know today as the Philippines State Agency for Labor migration, like the POEA, the Philippine Overseas Government Administration. The predecessor of that was instituted in 74, but the practices of Filipino labor officials being involved in this goes way back, of course. I mean, it has roots in colonial times, but also after the Philippines became an independent state, there was pre work done that was establishing the structures that came into place in 74, they were in the making already from the from the late 1960s. That's also what I'm trying to elaborate in my book, because a lot of the research on this is a little bit superficial. It's like you state that there was this labor code of seventy four, that kind of started it all, which is of course not true because nothing just starts suddenly. There's always a process that goes before. So that's why I started also chasing both people and archival material that could explain the story of how that came to be, because it is such an interesting phenomenon, like how did the state become so involved in this? And if you look at it from the state bureaucracy perspective, there was a very powerful minister on the Marcos government, the Labor minister, and he was given the liberty to completely reorganize the Labor Department.

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00:16:18

Nina Trige Andersen

And he had like a lot of ideas about how to do that. So he basically got rid of a huge part of the bureaucrats in the Labor Department when he started. And then he recruited a lot of young people straight from university to kind of make an entirely new department. And the idea for making like a state managed labor export was influenced from many places. One of them, you could say it was part of a more general export orientation of the economy, which was on the advice of international institutions like the IMF, the ILO recommending this as a way to stabilize the Philippine economy. And I mean, when they were talking about export orientation, they, of course, talking about export of all kinds of goods, but actually, labor was also mentioned in some of these recommendations from international institutions like that could be an interesting thing to look at. And then some of the labor officials were recruited to be part of implementing this program, saw it also as a way to kind of that's also a narrative you hear today, you know, like a temporary relief of the unemployment rate.

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This decade’s long temporary policy.

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00:17:21

Nina Trige Andersen

Exactly. And of course, it wasn't temporary. It became very permanent. And what was even known to the Labor Department already from the beginning is that it wasn't the unemployed that went abroad, primarily because you needed some form of resources to actually make that travel. So it would usually be people who actually had jobs already who would then be able to mobilize the resources to go for looking for better opportunities abroad. So, yeah, it wasn't the unemployment that was exported. It was just workers and many of them skilled. Then there were also the labor minister is generally seen as one of the more leftist forces of the Marcos government was also very inspired by Scandinavian social democracy, which also has a very authoritarian streak, the Scandinavian social democratic tradition. So not so foreign for that kind of government that was in the Philippines at the time. But some of the officials who were recruited for the Labor Department were… some had even been involved in the anti-Marcos movement before they were recruited for the labor ministry. And some of them came with the idea that they could help their fellow Filipinos migrate under safer conditions and more fair conditions, because at that time, there was already a huge private market of agencies that were offering opportunities abroad. And a lot of people also just went on their own in undocumented ways and got into trouble. So the idea from the beginning was to make a statement openly of labor migration. So to completely outmanoeuvre the private agencies, they were also banned for a period, at least officially, when they started this state export. So to monopolize it within the state structures, this whole business of people going abroad for work as a way to give some kind of security to the workers. But of course, that's not always how it happened. And also the private agencies before the end of the 70s were let back in because, well, for many reasons, partly lobbying, of course, from the from the private agencies who were not ready to give up their very lucrative business, but also because the demand for Filipino labor just

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00:19:21

Nina Trige Andersen

really exploded worldwide, also in the oil producing Arab states. So the state agency couldn't actually follow the pace of the kind of the private recruitment agencies. And a lot of the people who were involved of the labor officials, I thought looked into the the archival material that does exist. There's a lot of holes in the archives, in the archives of the Labor Department and the and the OEDB. But there is some material. But I've also interviewed several of the labor officials who work there in the early 70s, both to know what did you do like specifically in this period, but also to know what do you think about it now, 50 years later, now that you know how things developed? What do you think about it now? And well, one of them is also reflecting about that in the book and saying that she still thinks it was the right thing to do, that the state went in there and tried to get some order. But she also can see that it became like the perfect distraction for the Philippine state to avoid dealing with the domestic problems of the economy. So you could export your financial problems, but you could also exploit political discontent, because that was also actually something the Labor minister said completely straight up. He was like, well, if you don't like it here, are free to migrate, don't make trouble at home.

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00:20:33

Duncan McCargo

Nina Trige Andersen

Right. Right. There's a lot that we could talk about in that respect. That's a very interesting idea. How did you go about doing the field work for this project? Clearly, you got to know some of these informants, particularly the Forty Niners, as you call them, quite well. What sort of a process did you go through? I know that you were engaged in the research for this book for quite a number of years, so you must have really immersed yourself in that community.

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Yes, I was. And I still am. I mean, just the other week I went to have lunch in the kolonihave, which is a Danish tradition of having a little plot of land within the city where you can grow vegetables. One of the Forty Niners has a kolonihave and I went there to have lunch with her just last week. So I still speak with a lot of the people that are in the book. But the 49ers were the first of the pioneers that I met and I met them through the daughter of one of them – they were on an art project together. And she showed me this picture that also appears in the book of the before departure from Manila, this group photo of the Forty Niners. So they were like my entry into this whole community and all of these stories and four of them, they have been recurring narrators, both in the English book, but also that there was a Danish book that came before that. It was through them and through some of the Filipino organizations and some of the second generation Filipinos in Denmark that I started getting to know, like a lot of the other pioneers, those who came before the Forty Niners and also those that came after, because, of course, now we were talking in the beginning about this so-called migration stop in ‘73-‘74. But that obviously didn't stop migration, I mean migration just continued under other conditions. So there's also generations arriving after them who entered on other legal forms, but who became very central in the trade unionising movement in the hotels in Copenhagen. So it was kind of like going from one person to the next and between the archives and the people to put together the pieces of this puzzle. And then it was while I was looking at this history of what came before the seventy four labor code, I was reading a lot of the old annual reports from the Labor Department and from the early reports of the OEDB.

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00:22:41

Nina Trige Andersen

I was like mapping the names of the people who appeared, you know, in the first page to be employed with the agency. And then I tried to see, like, who can I find of them? I mean, some of them must still be alive. And I did find some of them to interview them about the things to kind of fill out all the holes that were in the archive. So it's been like a constant search for people and papers and photos because a lot of it is not included in any official archive. That's also why it was such a big advantage that I actually worked with this for almost a decade. So I had time to, you know, search and search for things that were supposedly lost. But a lot of the things that were supposedly lost actually did appear along the way, both papers and people.

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00:23:24

Duncan McCargo

I mean, the book is a great testament to the value of doing long term research and really digging deeply and not – clearly you didn't often take no for an answer and I know that comes through very strongly in the book. And the other thing, I suppose, may reflect your journalistic training. But as you say, picking out certainly the English book, these four informants, I think Pinay, Letti, Christina, Josie, and in part two, they get their own short chapters and tell their stories so that you have a lot of very rich, illustrative anecdotes about the kinds of experiences that these women have that really bring the story to life. That's very powerful.

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00:24:02

Nina Trige Andersen

And one of the things I also wanted to do with that, because, I mean, it's a little bit untraditional to have such elaborated life stories in a book of this type, but I really thought they were important life stories and their relations to their reflections about their own lives also and the relations that they made and the ones they lost and stuff, because a lot of research on migration is very informed by this whole, you know, cost-benefit idea. So do the benefits outweigh the costs or not? And I've always found that to be a very strange question. I mean, the answer always seems wrong, you know, but that's one of the things that I also conclude in the book – that the reason why the answer to the question is always wrong is because it's the question that's wrong. I mean, you can look at migration in that framework. It just doesn't make sense because the things that people gain and the things that they lose and, you know, the way that their lives unfold is just much more complicated than whether the benefits outweigh the costs – I mean that could be answered in a million different ways, if you look at it individually, collectively, structurally, so it's much more useful to look at it from a completely different angle.

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00:25:10

Duncan McCargo

Nina Trige Andersen

Right. I mean, you make a strong case for what we might call a humanistic approach to doing research, as opposed to one that's purely driven by economic data or indices and things of that kind. I guess the other side of it, I'm obviously particularly interested in the Philippines and the Philippines side of things. But as the Nordic Asia podcast, we’re very interested in the Nordic region too. What kind of impact did the presence of these migrants, these women have on Denmark, on labor relations in Denmark? And what did Danish people make of them?

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Well, one thing is that they were part of bringing the world to Denmark, as we've been talking about in the beginning. So they were, you know, like this exotic and exciting part of the new Copenhagen. And a lot of them made friends with Danish people like their colleagues and colleagues of those colleagues. And and there was this whole community between the people who work in the big hotels and the people who work in the airport where a lot of Philippinos also work. So there was this whole social dimension of it, and a lot of them made lasting relationships with Danish friends and colleagues. And then there was, of course, the response from the Danish trade union that was organizing workers in the hotels and the restaurants and the airport. That was a different union. But the Danish trade unions have a history of being a little bit I mean, of course, they have this whole, you know, international solidarity approach. But when things start getting difficult, if, for example, you know, the unemployment start rising, right, they adopt this default attitude, then it’s the foreign born workers who have to go.

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Yeah, right. Not only in Denmark.

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Yeah, not only in Denmark, that's a very universal phenomenon. So, yeah. So, of course, there was this dilemma for the Danish unions in this period, because when when the pioneers came, it was in a period of the late 60s and early 70s when the economy was expanding super rapidly both in Denmark and in Western Europe. But then came the oil crisis that set in motion a lot of economic events that then unemployment started rising and then the trade union of the hotel and restaurant workers were not so excited about these new colleagues. And actually, they had been welcoming them in a way, but in a very distant way.

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00:27:20

Nina Trige Andersen  

And the pioneers and the Forty Niners cannot recall most of them ever having been approached by the union, even though they were actually, most of them, members from the beginning, because at that time in Danish history, most of the foreign workers who came, they became members of the union immediately. I mean, a lot of workplaces also simply did not allow unorganized workers work there. And they saw they were, in effect, members of a union, but that the union kept talking about them in third person, you know, not addressing them as actual members and also not at all communicating in other languages than Danish, which was a huge problem for the recruitment and and the mobilizing of foreign born workers for the first many decades, like from the 60s until the 90s, because the Danish unions were like, well, if you don't learn the language, you shouldn't be here. So we're not going to speak anything else, right. But that kind of changed from the 80s and 90s, especially when the hotel and restaurant workers acted, because that was a sector that from the early 70s had a majority of workers from outside of Denmark, especially in the Copenhagen area, of course. So it was actually one of the first unions in the Danish landscape of trade unions that started adopting other positions on how to relate to members that had a foreign background and communicating in other languages. But it was also under a lot of pressure from particularly the Filipino chambermaids that were in the forefront of a lot of struggles that took place in the from the late 80s and into the 90s in the hotel sector, about a lot of stuff that happened with the restructuring of that sector, in particular in that decade – new companies coming to buy up old companies and international chains coming in and completely reorganizing workers' conditions.

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00:29:03

Nina Trige Andersen

And all these chains of subcontracting. And the Filipino chambermaids were very central in, you could say, like tuning up the Danish hotel and restaurant workers union to deal with this situation. And they were on the picket lines of most of the hotels in Copenhagen during the 90s, fighting for their own rights and fighting against this development of subcontracting and actually the recruitment of Filipino chambermaids who then recruited other Filipino chambermaids, actually doubled the membership of the Copenhagen branch in this period. So they played quite an important role in the whole transformation of the Danish trade union, like the way they dealt with the migration and with the mobilization with how to actually do labor struggle in a new economy, because it was also quite an awakening for the Danish Trade Union movement, because it had been such a calm social democratic compromise for many years. And then suddenly, you know, the tone just shifted from one day. Well, not from one day to the next, but it kind of felt like that I think for the Union. And they were very dispersed and confused about how to deal with this new form of labor relations.

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00:30:11

Duncan McCargo

Yeah, we're hoping very much that inspired by this podcast, lots of our listeners will be able to find time to read the whole book. But for the benefit of those who might not find that time, what would you say are the most important takeaways from your book?

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00:30:27

Nina Trige Andersen

Wow, that's a hard question. I think there are so many important things that I learned along the way, so so I'm really not quite sure. I mean, I think some of the things that we've already talked about, you know, the importance of actually – well you can do that when you deal with contemporary history, of course, you can’t do the same if you're dealing with, you know, 17th century history – but the importance of actually speaking to the people who were involved and the importance of digging behind established narratives, because the book questions a lot of very established narratives about both who came to work in during this period, why and where, and, you know, it kind of inserts a whole different group of workers into the center of this narrative and also the whole idea about how the Philippines ventured into state labor export. It also complicates that narrative quite a lot. So I think it's really important that we as historians and whatever other disciplines we have, that when something has been very established as a narrative about how something came to be, you can usually complicate that narrative substantially, because there are always people who fall between the cracks. And of course, those things are not coincidental. It's not coincidental that it's women from the Philippines working in the service sector that just didn't get a place in the history until way later.

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00:31:48

Duncan McCargo

Yes. I mean, the book really emphasizes the importance of telling the stories of those whose stories have been left less told – the hidden figures, if you like, of the narratives and the the importance of nuance, depth and complexity, where very often we find oversimplifications and misrepresentations that are convenient, but not really at all accurate.

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00:32:10

Nina Trige Andersen

And also daring to let people emerge as interpreters of their own story. I mean, that's also something I try to do with with the very extensive life story, is to actually enable people to also interpret their own story like in hindsight to say like, so I did these individual choices, but they were also parts that were out of my hands. And how did I then try to deal with those things and how do I evaluate my life choices now that I'm retired? Looking back at when I was 21 and took this, you know, completely life changing decision…

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00:32:45

Duncan McCargo

Yes. No, that's something that, as we've said, comes through very strongly from the book. Where do you go with this from here Nina? Are you still doing related work on these groups of people in these issues?

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00:32:57

Nina Trige Andersen

Well, one of the things I'm still working on is to make available some of these resources that I have been collecting along the way, you know, all of this material that really wasn't to be found in any formal archives. So I'm working on uploading that to a website. It's called Filippinernes Danmarks Historie, Philippine History of Denmark. It's a website where I'm trying to upload some of these materials that I have collected along the way with permission from te owners of texts of course, so that more people can also look into this, because there are a ton of more things you could write, obviously, about this part of the Danish-Philippine history and also for people to kind of be able to reclaim their own history. The people who were involved in this part of history. And then there's a lot of other things that I still want to dig in deeper to, which some of it is the whole union history, like the role that Philipinos played in the union, because that's something that the Danish unions are still struggling with; understanding what a huge resource migrant workers are in the whole labor struggle instead of viewing it as a problem and as something that's difficult and actually seeing that when you provide the opportunities for migrant workers to fight their own battles, they can become a huge resource for them.

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00:34:08

Duncan McCargo

Right.

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00:34:08

Nina Trige Andersen

So I'm going to keep working on some of these aspects also.

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00:34:12

Duncan McCargo

Great. Well, thank you Nina, for taking the time to discuss your fascinating book, The Labor Pioneers, with us.

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00:34:18

Nina Trige Andersen

It was a pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me.

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00:34:21

Duncan McCargo

Thanks very much. I'm Duncan McCargo. I'm the director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. And I've been in conversation with the journalist Nina Trige Andersen about her groundbreaking book, Labor Pioneers; Economy, Labor and Migration in Filipino-Danish Relations 1950-2015, which is published by Ateneo University Press in 2019. Thank you for joining the Nordic Asia podcast, showcasing Nordic collaboration in studying Asia.

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