Endo: Precarious Work and the End of Politics
Endo presents a world where politics has become impossible. We must imagine and build a world where the precariat can become citizens again.
Published on May 1, 2026
PETA has recently revived the story of Endo, Jade Castro's award-winning Cinemalaya film featuring the romance story between Leo and Tanya, two members of a new, emerging precariat class. The precariat is a term coined by Guy Standing, who combined the words "precarious" and "proletariat." This is a class that engages in informal, unstable, part-time work in the "gig" economy.
They often take several jobs at a time to make ends meet. While the work is more flexible and adjustable, the pay is often not enough. Their contracts last either per project or for a short term of 5 months, sometimes shorter.
The precarious half is clear. However, the proletariat half seems misleading or undeveloped. The term "proletariat" is often used to mean the "poor, exploited lower classes." A class also implies a consciousness and the capacity to organize and act collectively. Can the precariat protest, or are they the perpetual victims of the capitalist system?
PETA's Endo rightfully updates the material with today's gig economy. Endo's characters represent a larger section of society and may resemble more of the theatergoing audience. Insider PH estimates 10 million workers, or 20% of the country's workforce, operate in the gig economy. The movie features Leo and Tanya as shoe salespeople, which is evocative of the traditional image of lower-class labor, even poverty. On the stage, they take a larger variety of work. Leo works as a luggage courier, delivery rider, pick-up rider, traffic enforcer, and massage therapist. Tanya works as a "promodizer," nurse, BPO worker, Filipino tutor, and online seller. The characters on stage are more skilled, more educated, and busier than their movie versions. Rather than obviously lower class, the new Endo economy includes large sections of the middle class.
Esteban Mara, who plays Leo alongside Royce Cabrera, admits he is familiar with many people, even some friends, in the gig economy when preparing for his role. His castmate, Rissy Reyes-Robinson, who plays Tanya alternately with Jasmine Curtis-Smith, admits she herself is a freelancer and reveals that many actors do many gigs besides their work in the Endo production. Marketing and audiences tag Endo as political for being a commentary on the oppressive economic system. While true, it portrays a world where workers are too busy for politics, a world with the absence of politics. The precarity makes politics impossible.
The label of politics is often overextended to mean commenting on power relations, inequality, and public affairs. Politics, according to Aristotle, is where citizens negotiate and discuss the conditions of public life. In Aristotle's Greece, citizenship was reserved for the heads of households, as they had time to discuss, draft, and vote on legislation for their city. The workers and slaves were too preoccupied with their manual work to participate in politics. Hannah Arendt, in her book The Human Condition, makes the sharp distinction between work and action. Work or labor are processes that make products necessary for life. It is often repetitive and reproductive of already existing things and conditions. In contrast, action is the production of "new" things, and where Arendt locates true human freedom, even political freedom. Action is the capacity to create societal change and correct the conditions that oppress them.
The characters in the world of Endo are incapable of pursuing action or becoming collectives, as they lack the time and resources to process and protest their conditions. Both the movie and the stage play accurately and vividly portray the instability and dehumanizing quality of precarious work. They also stop short of imagining how a new society can be born out of the precarious gig economy. How can new solidarities be built in such conditions? Members of the ensemble can be seen in the background protesting against low wages and the rising prices of oil in topical fashion.
They remain ornamental rather than a substantive part of the narrative. The characters also manage their various jobs through digital apps, which replace their employer's power over their job with direct relations with the customer. They can lose their jobs based on bad reviews or cancelled bookings due to force majeure or even the arbitrary whims of customers. Ordinary people then have power over the precariat workers and may become, to an extent, their oppressors. The technology that grants gig workers more flexibility in their work from their phones and tablets makes that flexibility more fragile and precarious. The same technology that connects us also alienates us from one another.
The main storyline remains limited to private relationships and personal empowerment. Both Leo and Tanya are forced apart because of the gap between their capabilities and their courage to overcome their circumstances. The play's resolution focuses on individual empowerment rather than contriving the couple reconciling and living happily ever after. But their arc remains individual, almost isolated, and therefore incomplete.
This is not a flaw but an opportunity for audiences to reflect on the questions posed by the story. Throughout the play, Tanya often imagines hope in going to Germany and becoming an Overseas Filipino Worker. Is physically escaping the Philippines the only way to overcome the Endo economy?
The director, Melvin Lee, said it is important to watch plays that mirror our circumstances for us to see ourselves and the lives of the ordinary Filipino objectively and seek to change them. The award-winning playwright, Liza Magtoto, admits she wished she could have explored the material more deeply but asserts that theater is necessary to see hope from our society's conditions. They gesture towards older solutions like stronger security of tenure laws or a culture of more empathic treatment of workers. Segments of the workforce already organize themselves politically at the cost of their remaining time and energy. The adaptation shows that the problem has evolved, and therefore the solutions must evolve as well.
From the movie, the characters evolve and resemble the middle-class audiences, us. Despite this evolution, they suffer the same problems of precarious work 20 years later. Their problems are becoming our problems. Their problems are our problems. The characters may no longer have time for politics, but we may still have time to think, act, and evolve against the equally evolving Endo economy. Endo presents a world where politics has become impossible. We must imagine and build a world where the precariat can become citizens again.
Endo is showing until May 10 at the PETA Theater, Quezon City. You can get your tickets at Ticket2me
Matthew Ordoñez is a university lecturer at De LA Salle University-Manila. He teaches courses in Citizenship and Governance, Development Economics, and Cinema and Politics. He is a member of the Society of Filipino Film Reviewers and writes film reviews for Asian Movie Pulse.