“I Often Experience a Lack of Trust”: Filipino Migrant Nurses’ Experiences of Coping with Multiple Conflicting Workplace Demands

The global shortage of nurses highlights the critical role of migrant nurses, who face numerous barriers in host country labor markets despite their qualifications being in demand. This study explores the experiences of nurses from the Philippines working in the Icelandic healthcare sector, a sector facing attrition in the ranks of qualified medical staff, austerity measures, and labor disputes. We examine the processes of interpellation, the pressures and demands that the nurses face, and the options and limitations of their coping mechanisms. Phenomenological analysis of in-depth interviews illuminates how demands and interpellations from supervisors, coworkers, patients, and their relatives compound, conflict, and interact to create a working environment where racialized migrant nurses must navigate contradictions and tensions between conflicting demands and their transnational identity as Filipino nurse professionals. Performing the role of the ideal migrant, ideal worker, and ideal nurse, who works hard and never complains, is in conflict with the demands of the role of the supportive coworker who stands in solidarity with their fellow Icelandic nurses in the fight for improved wages and working conditions.