Over the past decade, advancements in digital technologies have set the stage for corporations in the Global North to drive down their labour costs by outsourcing work to the Global South. This includes using digital labor platforms that attract digital workers from across age groups, geographic location, and professional or educational backgrounds. Burdened by employment woes such as infrastructural immobility and low wages, countless Filipino professionals are found to be migrating to online platform labor in exchange for autonomy, spatial flexibility, and the possibility for higher earnings. This chapter focuses on the rise of 'skill-makers', specialist coaches who attract and train platform workers into this labour market and the 'skill-making economy' which is playing a crucial role in the local popularity and viability of platform labour. [Chapter 10 in Digital Transactions in Asia (Athique, A. & Baulch, Em, Eds).] https://www.routledge.com/Digital-Transactions-in-Asia-Economic-Informational-and-Social-Exchanges/Athique-Baulch/p/book/9781138353961

Drawing from experience of platform labor in one of the largest labor supplying countries, the Philippines, the paper demonstrates the role of an emerging labor category – that of digital labor influencers – who promote the viability of platform labor locally amid its precarious and ambiguous conditions. Through participant observation in Facebook groups, analysis of YouTube channels and videos, and interviews with digital labor influencers and workers, we present insights into the interventions that these influencers use, anchoring their strategies on what we call performing “digital labor bayanihan”: (a)coachingworkers on the “possibilities” of the platform economy and on how to navigate its structural ambiguities, (b) by acting as “agencies”, they aid workers tospan boundariesand fluidly move across platforms and job types to mitigate labor arbitrage and labor seasonality; and (c)bridging geographically dispersed workers, which allow them to form a supportive space where opportunities for labor are exchanged and debated. We argue that these affective strategies attend to Filipino workers’ labor aspirations through a community-oriented strategy encapsulated in a distinct Filipino cultural value bayanihan, which then shapes the collective “anchoring” of platform workers to navigate a precarious market. We explore the transactional nature underlying this “producer-audience” relationship, the activation of trust and influence through personalized practices and mediated encounters, and the power dynamic underlying these engagements. The paper shows that these strategies also set norms and standards in this largely unregulated sector, playing a role in how labor mobility or precarity are organized locally amid “planetary labor markets”.

This article considers the rapidly expanding online market for English teaching. Drawing on interviews with 11 Filipino online English teachers and the first author's own experiences teaching English online, we examine how teachers feel under the conditions of precarity they experience in the gig economy for language teaching. In addressing the experiences of Filipino teachers, we introduce the notion of "discounted nativeness." Discounted nativeness describes Filipino teachers' ambivalent position within the online English teaching industry: platforms take advantage of Filipino teachers' high levels of English proficiency-up to and including passing them off as American teacherswhile the teachers experience discrimination from students and maltreatment by the platforms. The article concludes by discussing the need for sustained research into the burgeoning market for online language teaching.

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