Re-Writing History from the Margins: Philippine Labour Migration to and Labour Organising in 1970s Denmark

When Filipinas began entering Denmark in unprecedented numbers from the mid-2000s, this group of migrants gained substantial political, scholarly, and media attention. This seemingly sudden inflow of workers from another continent – who at this point primarily entered through the so-called au pair visa – was treated as an isolated, contemporary, and unintelligible phenomenon, clouded in moral panic. However, the au pair migration was but the latest type of entry in a long history of labour migration from the Philippines to Denmark that commenced in the 1960s, a period marked by the development of guest worker programs in western and northern Europe and the emergence of state-brokered labour export in the Philippines. Though recruitment of Philippine labour for the service sector in Europe has been substantial since the 1960s, and though Filipinas came to play a significant role in the Danish hotel and restaurant workers union, they had fallen through the cracks of both labour and migration history. Through oral history and the collection of source material neglected by archival institutions, it became possible to restore the connections between these two fields, to create a Philippine history of Denmark, by tracing the lives of Filipinas recruited for hotel work, and by documenting and narrating the previously overlooked role played by the Philippine state.