Date of Award
2026
Document Type
Honors Thesis (Open Access)
Department
Colby College. Science, Technology and Society Program
Advisor(s)
Dr. Ashton Wesner
Abstract
The rise of the gig economy revolutionized global labor dynamics, and this is especially apparent in the Global South, where labor is cheap and plentiful. The Philippines is a major source of digital labor because of its globally competitive, highly-skilled, and highly-flexible workforce. This places Philippine labor in a long history of colonial labor relations that reduces workers’ agency and invisibilizes their work. To counter this, my project centers the lived experiences of Filipino Virtual Assistants (VAs)—broadly defined as remote workers hired by foreign companies, whose responsibilities can range from administrative and secretarial work, customer service, ESL teaching, and art commissions—and proposes a theoretical framework that details how workers experience and engage with precarity. In particular, I enumerate five types of specific precarities that contribute to the overall precarity experienced by my interviewees: namely, precarity of health; of finance/wealth; of stability and security; of self-fulfillment; and of relationship dynamics. Through ethnographic study consisting of interviews and participant-observation with VAs in the Philippine cities of Iloilo and Tacloban, I detail the ways in which workers’ specific circumstances and priorities inform how they balance the precarities they experience—that is, how they allow certain precarities in order to limit others. This study thus attempts to reframe engagement with precarities as a matter of balance rather than elimination. As part of this project, I wrote and illustrated three short comics to detail and emplace my interviewee’s work and experiences in their lived contexts, and collated them into a zine that can be read separate from this manuscript.
Keywords
Philippine studies, gig economy, Virtual Assistants, precarity, digital labor
Recommended Citation
Insigne, Ewemiz, "Examining The Philippine Gig Economy: Precarities Among Virtual Assistants (VAs) in the Philippines" (2026). Honors Theses. Paper 1559.https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses/1559
Comments
As part of the requirements for my STS Honors Thesis, I submitted a zine/anthology of comics alongside this thesis manuscript. The zine can be read independent from the manuscript.