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The art of not being caught: Temporal strategies for disciplining unfree labour in Singapore’s contract migration
Abstract
Adopting a case study approach, this paper examines unfree labour amongst labour migrants from a temporal perspective. I draw on the notion of temporality specifically to refer to the spontaneous and arbitrary imposition of strategies by employers as a response to situations in which workers attempt to bargain to ameliorate exploitation in the workplace or in response to workplace injuries. Although there is a significant literature discussing employer tactics to control and discipline workers, very little of this specifically addresses migrant workers or proceeds through a thick description of individual company strategies. I suggest that strategies to discipline migrant workers are often embedded in the broader migration regimes and state laws that underwrite migrant workers’ positions, and should be attributed equal weight in understanding how unfree labour is produced and maintained in practice. The case studies are taken from experiences of South Asian male migrant workers in four different small-medium enterprises (SMEs) that are subcontracting companies (sub-cons) in the construction and shipyard sectors in Singapore, and one man who suffered serious injury as a result of his work. Through these five case studies I hope to develop a characterization of migrant worker unfreedom that goes beyond descriptions of broad structural factors that discipline migrant workers, or characterisations of migrant worker conditions, to an examination of the micro-dynamics of workplace discipline. In this understanding I extend current conceptualisations of unfree labour by arguing that unfreedom must, in part, be understood as the inability to contest exploitation, including the strategies companies impose on workers at specific times to enable this.
... These developments are especially pronounced in the logistics of migration control where security approaches have not only restricted labour mobility across borders, but also increased racialized and gendered divisions in the labour market (Anderson, 2010;Davidson, 2015;Khalili, 2023;Strauss, 2017). In examining the micro dynamics of migrant unfreedom, more recent theorising has also highlighted how these developments allowed for labour intermediaries (Yea, 2017) and accommodation systems (Pun and Smith, 2007;Schling, 2017) to shape interlocking forms of dependence of migrants on employers (Anderson, 2010;Briken and Taylor, 2018;Mezzadri, 2016Mezzadri, , 2019. Thus, these forms of labour unfreedom increasingly encapsulate the daily reproduction of workers to deepen labour control in both wage and non-wage time. ...
... In this regard, the image of trafficking as a threat to national security is reinforced, and the deportation of the victim of trafficking along with stricter migration policies are considered solutions to this problem (Ausserer, 2007: 114). Molland (2019: 777) affirms that framing anti-trafficking as a humanitarian emergency stands at a politic of rescue, -that is valorised in terms of immediateness and moralityand tends to overlook the degree of unfreedom, the inhumane treatment, the objectification, the commodification of people or the meaning that they give to their situation (Walters, 2020;Yea, 2017). Central to this, the inclusion of humanitarian agencies that act as formal and informal labour intermediaries and their different responsibilities and business agendas create pressures that further expand market-related immediacy (Dines, 2018;McGrath and Mieres, 2022). ...
... Venezuelans were constantly harassed and experienced verbal threats and patronage in narratives of aid and emotional debt, so workers were expected to fully 'repay' the job opportunities they were offered by accepting abuse, further exploitation, and multiple violations of their rights. With easy access to a pool of workers in Roraima from the Welcome Operation, employers constantly threatened to replace the Venezuelan drivers and use this pool to keep the system of oppression invisible to the public (Yea, 2017). Thus, the same logistics that shaped the incorporation of Venezuelans into the labour market have also served to constrain workers on a daily basis. ...
This article examines the trafficking of Venezuelan truck drivers for labour exploitation in Brazil. The remilitarisation of politics is increasingly a hallmark of elite-driven strategies to manage the circulation of labour and goods from extractive zones. This article introduces the notion of logistics of unfreedom to explain the growing imbrication between techniques of control by the state and corporations that confine the reproduction of migrants within the realm of logistics processes. The analysis focuses on data from participatory observations and the narratives of 22 Venezuelan refugees who were trafficked from a militarised humanitarian zone in Brazil's Amazon to work for a freight road transport company in Southern Brazil. Findings show that a concerted logistic approach to refugee employment channelled mobility, constrained statutory protection and shaped the ethno-political differentiation of Venezuelans in the labour market. This forced Venezuelans to live in trucks where both productive and socially reproductive aspects of their daily lives were overdetermined by the rhythms of goods distribution. The article concludes that this logistic rationale has converged towards a self-contained regime of labour unfreedom that facilitates the labour trafficking of Venezuelan refugees.
... The provision of housing for workers by employers has a long history, stretching from the pre-industrial era to the emergence of cotton villages, company towns, and other forms of industrial hostels and worker housing from the 18th century onwards (for reviews, see Pun and Smith, 2007;Smith, 2003). Modern incarnations include mining work camps in South Africa (Crush and James, 1991), bunkhouses for migrant agriculture workers in North America (Horgan and Liinamaa, 2017), mega-dormitories for migrant construction workers in Singapore (Yea, 2017;Yeoh et al., 2017), and hostels for migrant factory workers in the Middle East (Azmeh, 2014), Europe (Andrijasevic and Sacchetto, 2016), and China (Pun, 2012;Smith, 2003;Smith and Pun, 2006). ...
... However, the complexities of these dynamics have yet to be explored. For example, although Siu (2017) and Yea (2017) examine 'forced labour' and 'unfree labour', respectively, in the dormitory labour regime and provide insight on how migrant workers are controlled, there is little attempt to question these fundamental assumptions and interrogate such practices beyond binary conceptualizations. To achieve this, researchers must focus more explicitly on workers' experiences of freedom and unfreedom in hostels, and locate this in a deep understanding of their work, home, and community lives. ...
... Our findings also suggest that claims in the literature that hostels are sites of 'forced labour' and 'slave-like' conditions (e.g. Siu, 2017;Smith, 2003;Yea, 2017) need more careful examination. It is not that such practices do not exist, but that the experience of women workers often evades easy categorization. ...
Worker hostels or dormitories are common in labour-intensive industries staffed largely by migrant labour and have long been associated with exploitative practices. More recently, hostels have come under scrutiny due to accusations that they are used to restrict workers’ freedom in ways that are tantamount to modern slavery. Drawing on a qualitative study of a garment hub in South India where such claims have frequently arisen, we explore the conditions of freedom and unfreedom in worker hostels and how suppliers who run such hostels respond to competing expectations about worker freedom. Our findings show that hostels perform three interrelated functions: restriction, protection, and liberation, which together constitute a complex mix of freedom and unfreedom for migrant women workers that we term hybrid (un)freedom. As a result, we problematise the binary understandings of freedom and unfreedom that predominate in the modern slavery literature. We also develop a new way forward for examining freedom in the context of hostels that considers the system of relationships, traditions, and socio-economic arrangements that workers and employers are locked into and which prevent meaningful improvements in the freedom of women workers.
... COVID-19 outbreaks in spaces housing migrant workers are compounded by the erasure of worker voices from discursive registers in ways that matter (Dutta, 2020a(Dutta, , 2021. For instance, in Singapore, an authoritarian state organized as a destination of neoliberal capital and a "model" of extreme neoliberalism, low-wage migrant workers are not allowed to unionize, depend on their employers for their work passes, face ongoing threats of deportation and/or incarceration if they speak up and are not guaranteed access to health care because of their immigration status (Dutta, 2017a(Dutta, , 2017b(Dutta, , 2020c(Dutta, , 2021Yea, 2017;Yea and Chok, 2018). Moreover, the absence of the human right to health among low-wage migrant workers is reflected in the poor working conditions, experiences of food insecurity and poor conditions of living (Dutta, 2017(Dutta, , 2020a(Dutta, , 2020b(Dutta, , 2020cYea, 2017;Yea and Chok, 2018). ...
... For instance, in Singapore, an authoritarian state organized as a destination of neoliberal capital and a "model" of extreme neoliberalism, low-wage migrant workers are not allowed to unionize, depend on their employers for their work passes, face ongoing threats of deportation and/or incarceration if they speak up and are not guaranteed access to health care because of their immigration status (Dutta, 2017a(Dutta, , 2017b(Dutta, , 2020c(Dutta, , 2021Yea, 2017;Yea and Chok, 2018). Moreover, the absence of the human right to health among low-wage migrant workers is reflected in the poor working conditions, experiences of food insecurity and poor conditions of living (Dutta, 2017(Dutta, , 2020a(Dutta, , 2020b(Dutta, , 2020cYea, 2017;Yea and Chok, 2018). This combination of exploitation and repression of migrant workers forms the backdrop on which COVID-19-related outbreak inequalities play out (Kaur-Gill, 2020). ...
... Low-wage migrant workers negotiate their health amidst processes of capitalist extraction that are legitimized through neoliberal narratives of upward mobility (Dutta, 2017a(Dutta, , 2017b. Often working in "dirty, dangerous and difficult" jobs, supported on short-term work permits the power over which are held by employers, without labor protections and the pathways of mobility into citizenship, low-wage migrant workers negotiate their health and well-being amidst hyper-precarity (Baey and Yeoh, 2015;Bal, 2015;Dutta, 2017aDutta, , 2017bYea, 2017;Yea and Chok, 2018). The lack of labor rights of lowwage contract-based migrant workers in Singapore constitutes the precarious nature of the work, with "limited social benefits and statutory entitlements, job insecurity, low wages and high risks of ill health" (Vosko, 2006, p. 4). ...
Purpose
The purpose of this manuscript is to examine the negotiations of health among low-wage migrant workers in Singapore amidst the COVID-19 outbreaks in dormitories housing them. In doing so, the manuscript attends to the ways in which human rights are constituted amidst labor and communicative rights, constituting the backdrop against which the pandemic outbreaks take place and the pandemic response is negotiated.
Design/methodology/approach
The study is part of a long-term culture-centered ethnography conducted with low-wage migrant workers in Singapore, seeking to build communicative infrastructures for rights-based advocacy and interventions.
Findings
The findings articulate the ways in which the outbreaks in dormitories housing low-wage migrant workers are constituted amidst structural contexts of organizing migrant work in Singapore. These structural contexts of extreme neoliberalism work catalyze capitalist accumulation through the exploitation of low-wage migrant workers. The poor living conditions that constitute the outbreak are situated in relationship to the absence of labor and communicative rights in Singapore. The absence of communicative rights and dignity to livelihood constitutes the context within which the COVID-19 outbreak emerges and the ways in which it is negotiated among low-wage migrant workers in Singapore.
Originality/value
This manuscript foregrounds the interplays of labor and communicative rights in the context of the health experiences of low-wage migrant workers amidst the pandemic. Even as COVID-19 has made visible the deeply unequal societies we inhabit, the manuscript suggests the relevance of turning to communicative rights as the basis for addressing these inequalities. It contributes to the extant literature on the culture-centered approach by depicting the ways in which a pandemic as a health crisis exacerbates the challenges to health and well-being among precarious workers.
... The everyday exploitation of low-wage migrant workers in capitalist systems is legitimised through neoliberal narratives of upward mobility, and this forms the context within which migrant health is negotiated (Dutta, 2017a(Dutta, , 2017b(Dutta, , 2020a(Dutta, , 2020b(Dutta, , 2020c. The nature of migrant work is 'dirty, dangerous and difficult', without labour protections and protections of citizenship (Dutta, 2017a(Dutta, , 2017bYea, 2017;Yea & Chok, 2018). The precarity of migrant work, therefore, is deeply intertwined with the structural limits of citizenship. ...
... The struggles for migrant health are constituted amidst the lack of labour protections and the absence of pathways of mobility into citizenship. These hyper-precarious conditions that define migrant work are constituted amidst the interplay of capitalist forces of exploitation and authoritarian state structures (Baey & Yeoh, 2015;Bal, 2015;Dutta, 2017aDutta, , 2017bYea, 2017;Yea & Chok, 2018). The hyper-precarity of migrant work is marked by the lack of labour rights, with 'limited social benefits and statutory entitlements, job insecurity, low wages, and high risks of ill health' (Vosko 2006, p. 4). ...
... These debts manifest in forms of bondage that hold low-wage migrant workers to the job, in spite of the poor work conditions. The condition of 'unfreedom' in low-wage migrant work in Singapore (Yea, 2017;Yea & Chok, 2018) is similar to the conditions of unprotected work evident in the construction and similar dirty industries in India. Low-wage migrant workers negotiate the vast power inequalities at worksites, in interplay with the structures of majoritarianism, caste oppression and stigma (Dutta & Kaur-Gill, 2018). ...
Drawing on a digital ethnography and in-depth interviews conducted with low-wage migrant workers in hyper-precarious working conditions amidst ongoing neoliberal transformations in India and Singapore, this manuscript offers a comparative framework for examining the limits of pandemic communication. Interrogating the ideology of behaviourism that forms the dominant approach, the narratives point to the organizing role of structures as sites of labour exploitation. The exploitative labour conditions constitute the backdrop amidst which the migrant workers negotiate their health and well-being.
... Singapore's "smart" governance assembles a collection of laws, surveillance technologies, controls over institutions and civil society, and police interventions aimed at repression while simultaneously "rolling back" the welfare-based role of the state. At the heart of the "smart city" infrastructure of Singapore is the exploited labor of low-wage migrant workers, accompanied by the strategic deployment of a range of tactics of violence to erase migrant worker voices and invisibilize migrant worker bodies (see for instance Kaur et al., 2016;Yea, 2017). ...
... Migrating from Bangladesh, India, Thailand, Malaysia, and China, low-wage migrant workers labor in precarious positions in Singapore, building the infrastructures of Singapore's neoliberal economy. Toiling in transient conditions without access to pathways of citizenship, without labor rights, and without the access to communication infrastructures for voicing the challenges to their health and well-being, low-wage migrant workers live in a climate of fear, amidst systemic threats to their employment, health, and well-being (Dutta, 2017a,b;Yea, 2017;Yea and Chok, 2018). The everyday struggles for migrant health in Singapore are constituted amidst a climate of authoritarian state management that produces worker precarity to facilitate capitalist extraction. ...
... Building on a growing line of existing research that connects health to the precarity of work in global processes of labor flow (Dutta and Jamil, 2013;Kaur et al., 2016;Dutta, 2017a,b;Yea, 2017), the CCA suggests that the structural contexts of immigrant health are rooted in the erasure of migrant voices. Voices of low-wage migrants at the margins of neoliberal economies foregrounds meanings amid these structures, suggesting strategies for health communication that responds to these overarching structures of health and migration. ...
Drawing upon an ongoing ethnography with low-wage migrant workers in Singapore, this article builds on the theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach (CCA) to explore the experiences of the workers amid COVID-19 outbreaks in dormitories housing them. The CCA foregrounds the interplays of communicative and material inequalities, suggesting that the erasure of infrastructures of voices among the margins reproduces and circulates unhealthy structures that threaten the health and well-being of the working classes. The voices of the low-wage migrant workers who participated in this study document the challenges with poor housing, poor sanitation, and food insecurity that are compounded with the absence of information and voice infrastructures. Amid the everyday threats to health and well-being that are generated by neoliberal reforms across the globe, the hyper-precarious conditions of migrant work rendered visible by the trajectories of COVID-19 call for structurally transformative futures that are anchored in the voices of workers at the margins of neoliberal economies.
... In exploring these debts and their consequences this work draws attention to the intersection of migration, debt, and space, building on a rich literature highlighting the spatial consequences of debt among migrant workers. Indebtedness has been identified as causing migrants to move into exploitive work (Yea, 2016), inhibiting return in times of crisis (Bylander, 2017;Rajan and Naryana, 2012); making it more difficult for migrants to leave exploitive or poor working situations (Yea, 2016), incentivizing re-migration after deportation (Rus and Rus, 2014;Schuster and Majidi 2013), increasing the likelihood of forced labor (UNIAP, 2011), and causing migrants to run away from employment contracts, leading them to lose legal status within their host country (Lindquist, 2010). However this while this scholarship centers the spatial consequences of debt, it less frequently interrogates the spatial nature of debts itself; how debts are constituted through and within space. ...
... In exploring these debts and their consequences this work draws attention to the intersection of migration, debt, and space, building on a rich literature highlighting the spatial consequences of debt among migrant workers. Indebtedness has been identified as causing migrants to move into exploitive work (Yea, 2016), inhibiting return in times of crisis (Bylander, 2017;Rajan and Naryana, 2012); making it more difficult for migrants to leave exploitive or poor working situations (Yea, 2016), incentivizing re-migration after deportation (Rus and Rus, 2014;Schuster and Majidi 2013), increasing the likelihood of forced labor (UNIAP, 2011), and causing migrants to run away from employment contracts, leading them to lose legal status within their host country (Lindquist, 2010). However this while this scholarship centers the spatial consequences of debt, it less frequently interrogates the spatial nature of debts itself; how debts are constituted through and within space. ...
... The past decade has seen growing interest in the relationships between debt and migration, with scholars pointing to a range of ways that debt finances, compels, and shapes migration. Broadly speaking this literature can be organized into three overlapping thematic areas: scholarship pointing to the growth of distress migration related to overindebtedness (Bylander, 2014(Bylander, , 2015Heidbrink, 2019;Johnson and Woodhouse, 2018;Stoll, 2013); examinations and critiques of the growing use of debt to finance migration (Goh et al., 2016;Hoang and Yeoh, 2015;Lindquist, 2010;Moniruzzaman and Walton-Roberts, 2018;O'Connell Davidson, 2013;Platt et al., 2016;Rahman, 2015;Sobieszczyk, 2002); and the consequences of debt on migrant experiences (Baey and Yeoh, 2015;Goh et al., 2016;Yea, 2016). The latter concern is often discussed as it relates to one or both of the former trends, to point to the various ways by debt can produce, enhance, and extend vulnerability among migrant workers. ...
An established body of research now documents the ways that debt both motivates and shapes migration processes. Yet little scholarship examines the debts migrants incur after arriving in their destinations. Drawing on qualitative interviews with Cambodians living and working in Thailand, this paper explores debts imposed upon and taken by migrants after they have arrived in their destination. In Thailand, migrants take on debts in an attempt to obtain documents, to move into better paying jobs, and to start entrepreneurial projects. Often, these loans are translocal; taken by proxy borrowers in Cambodia, and sent across the border in what might be described as a ‘reverse remittance’ financed by debt. By exploring these debts and their consequences, this work elaborates the spatial nature of debt and draws attention to its capacity to engender spatially diffuse vulnerabilities.
... This increased relevance of the phenomenon of immigration and its socioeconomic effects have intensified in recent times the concerns of policy-makers and local populations on the issue of the integration of immigrants in the socioeconomic context of the host countries and specifically in their labour market (Longhi et al. 2010b). In this respect, prior research documents that, in several price-competitive sectors with highly wavering demand, employers, willing to violate immigration and labour regulations, resort to undeclared immigrant workers and their exploitation to minimize labour costs (Maroukis et al. 2011;Theodore et al. 2018;Yea 2017). Indeed, the scarce employment options due to their restricted or absent labour rights, the lack of information about their rights, the limited language skills, the nonrecognition of qualifications and work experiences achieved in other countries, as well as other forms of discrimination may lead immigrants to accept substandard employment within the informal economy or more precarious, insecure and illegal working conditions, especially in sectors characterized by low-skilled jobs, mostly unattractive to nationals (Annisette and Trivedi 2013;Cappelen and Muriaas 2018;Lewis et al. 2015;Strauss and McGrath 2017). ...
... Despite the current social relevance of the above issues, empirical studies, aiming to unveil the effects of immigration and its regulation on labour market practices starting from data at microeconomic level, are relatively scarce (Borjas 2017;Di Porto et al. 2018;Monras et al. 2018;Yea 2017). Hence, to address this research gap, in this paper we aim to assess whether the geographic concentration of non-EU immigrants 1 in the various Italian provinces significantly influences the labour tax avoidance (LTAV) practices adopted by firms located not only in the same provinces, but also in the neighbouring provinces, because of the presence of spatial spillover effects. ...
... Previous studies document the tendency of immigrants to be underemployed in the informal economy of the host countries, using case studies, interviews, surveys, and macroeconomic statistics (Bohn and Owens 2012;Borjas 2017;Cappelen and Muriaas 2018;Pajnik 2016;Theodore et al. 2018;Yea 2017). In this research context, our study is, to our knowledge, the first attempt to provide empirical evidence of the impact of immigration on LTAV, the logical effect of UDW and other labour exploitative practice, by starting from firm-level accounting information to carry out a spatial econometric analysis. ...
We investigate whether the geographic concentration of non-EU immigrants in the various Italian provinces affects labour tax avoidance (LTAV) practices adopted by firms located in the same provinces, as well as in the neighbouring provinces, and operating in construction and agriculture industries that mostly employ immigrants in Italy. For this purpose, we develop a LTAV proxy based on the financial accounting information of a sample of 993,606 firm-years, disseminated throughout the 108 Italian provinces, over the period 2008–2016. Our results, based on a Spatial Durbin Model panel regression, reveal a statistically significant positive association between the concentration of non-EU immigrants and LTAV at province level, as well as the presence of spillover effects among neighbouring provinces. Our findings are robust to several additional analyses, including instrumental variable estimations. Our study provides empirical support to previous structuralist or marginalization theories holding that socioeconomically marginalized groups, such as non-EU immigrants, are more likely to be involved in labour exploitation practices, which could underlie our LTAV outcomes. Furthermore, it supports the need for tax authorities to strengthen labour inspections, coordinated at national level, especially in those contexts where non-EU immigrants are mostly employed. On the other hand, a greater social integration, assistance, and recognition of rights of immigrants may help to alleviate their situation of weakness that makes them more vulnerable to LTAV practices. Finally, tackling LTAV, associated with the underemployment of immigrants, may prevent its negative effects for society arising from the reduction of public resources to sustain the social welfare and finance public goods and services.
... Recently, however, researchers have argued that the geographies of trafficking are no longer so acutely under-researched, pointing both to growing scholarly attention within geography and a broader multi-/inter-disciplinary critical literature on trafficking and anti-trafficking McGrath & Watson, 2018;Yea, 2021). Although it remains a fairly marginal subject in geographyespecially in comparison to other aspects of migration and/or labour market dynamicsthere is certainly increased recognition of trafficking's fundamental spatiality and thus the benefits of geographical perspectives and geospatial/spatiotemporal analyses Laurie & Richardson, 2021;McGrath & Watson, 2018;Yea, 2017Yea, , 2021. As McGrath and Watson (2018) stress, critical engagement from geographers is all the more important now that trafficking is increasingly framed not just as a criminal justice issue but a matter of and for development. ...
... Boyden & Howard, 2013;Esson, 2020;Izcara Palacios & Yamamoto, 2017;McGrath, 2013;Yea, 2012Yea, , 2016. Such work typically draws on in-depth interviews, 2 For a discussion of the conceptual overlaps and distinctions between the related concepts of human trafficking, 'modern slavery', forced labour and unfree labour, see, e.g., O'Connell Davidson (2015), McGrath and Watson (2018) and Yea (2017). ethnographic fieldwork and/or analysis of documentary material: usually open-source material like emblematic anti-trafficking texts (Choi, 2014;McGrath & Watson, 2018;Vandergeest & Marschke, 2020) and media coverage (Vandergeest & Marschke, 2020;Yea, 2020a, pp. ...
There is relatively little empirical research into the geographies of human trafficking, despite its inherent spatiality and the clear benefits of geographical perspectives. An emerging but vibrant body of qualitative work explores different aspects of trafficking's spatiality and spatio-temporality in depth and nuance, but equivalent quantitative analyses are notably lacking. What exists is largely limited to crude maps and broad-brushed assessments of patterns and trends. Yet, rigorous quantitative work is also vital in advancing understanding, informing responses and increasing accountability. In this paper, we present a novel, empirically-substantiated examination of methodological challenges in mapping trafficking. We draw on analysis of data extracted from the case files of 450 formally identified labour trafficking victims (accessed via the UK's National Crime Agency). We identify and illustrate five characteristics of the data creating particular challenges for geospatial analysis: data integrity (regarding completeness, accuracy and consistency); geographical uncertainty (regarding spatial accuracy and specificity); managing multiple geographies (trafficking is a complex process with various stages, each potentially involving numerous locations); diversity and disaggregation (important geographical variations can be masked in aggregated analysis); and unclear journeys (analysing trafficking routes proved particularly complicated). We also consider possible solutions and explore implications for future research, policy and practice.
... The health of low-wage migrant workers in Singapore is shaped by its extreme neoliberalism, marked by structural inaccessibility to fundamental labor rights and communicative erasures of claims to labor rights. Low-wage migrant workers often work in "dirty, dangerous, and difficult" jobs without labor protections, and they are supported on short-term work permits, the power over which are held by employers (Baey & Yeoh, 2015;Bal, 2015;Dutta, 2017aDutta, , 2017bYea, 2017;Yea & Chok, 2018). Singapore criminalizes migrant worker collectivization, with both incarceration and repatriation serving as key tools of control. ...
... Low-wage migrant work in Singapore is governed by restrictive migration laws that promote temporariness and preclude pathways of mobility into citizenship (Baey & Yeoh, 2015Dutta, 2020aDutta, , 2020bDutta, , 2020cLindquist et al., 2012;Yea, 2017;Yea & Chok, 2018). This temporariness of low-wage migrant work is further rendered vulnerable by complex and interconnected webs of brokerage (Baey & Yeoh, 2015Lindquist et al., 2012). ...
I draw on the key tenets of the culture-centered approach to co-construct the everyday negotiations of COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) among low-wage male Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore. The culture-centered approach foregrounds voices infrastructures at the margins as the basis for theorizing health. Based on 87 hours of participant observations of digital spaces and 47 in-depth interviews, I attend to the exploitative conditions of migrant work that constitute the COVID-19 outbreak in the dormitories housing low-wage migrant workers. These exploitative conditions are intertwined with authoritarian techniques of repression deployed by the state that criminalize worker collectivization and erase worker voices. The principle of academic–worker–activist solidarity offers a register for alternative imaginaries of health that intervene directly in Singapore’s extreme neoliberalism.
... Labor geography has contributed to guestworker scholarship by identifying how immigration policies interact with labor policy to create the precarity of the guestworker experience (Buckley et al., 2017;Strauss & McGrath, 2017). Focusing on the idea of unfree labor relations, labor geography highlights how labor arrangements do not need to meet the legal or popular definition of slavery to create an immobile and vulnerable workforce (Strauss & McGrath, 2017;Yea, 2017). This is especially true for the H-2A visa, which brings migrant agricultural guestworkers to work on farms for contracts ranging from six weeks to ten months. ...
This paper uses the qualitative results of a survey of 285 H-2A workers in Ohio to explore questions of care, social reproduction, and agency within agricultural guestwork. Drawing on frameworks developed in labor and feminist geography, it examines how H-2A workers create community and develop skills of social reproduction during their time in the United States. Countering the common narratives of H-2A worker as victims or stoic, long suffering laborers, the research draws attention to the relational and emotional lives of the men who do this work. By highlighting affective and social dimensions of the guestworker experience, it argues for an approach to questions of agricultural labor that emphasizes the agency, range of experiences, and humanity of the people who participate in the H-2A program.
... However, scholarship on the relationship between debt and migration is clear that debt compounds the precarity migrants experience abroad (Baey and Yeoh 2018;IOM 2019). Research has established that debt can limit migrants from contesting or exiting exploitive employment situations (Yea and Chok 2018;Baey and Yeoh 2018;Platt et al. 2017;Yea 2017;Gardner 2010); create involuntary immobility (Bylander 2018); complicate the potential to earn and/or remit while abroad (Platt et al. 2017;Bylander 2022), generate stress and anxiety (Yea 2019); create cycles of indebtedness and incentivize less secure migration routes (Heidbrink 2019); generate illegality (Lindquist, 2010); compel the migration of additional family members (Bylander 2014); and transmit the risk migrants experience abroad to their families back home via collateralised debt-obligations (Bylander 2022;Yea 2019;Green and Estes 2019;Bylander 2014). While formalising migration debts may reshape some of these risks, it does not eliminate them. ...
... For example, results show that, relative to workers who remained in secure employment, self-reported morbidity was higher among workers reporting insecurity in their jobs [62]. As suggested by the ecological model, such behaviors that make migrants indulge in precarious work activities will need specific health behavior interventions in order to promote their health and wellbeing [42,45,47,[63][64][65]. ...
Unlike international labour migration, there is a lack of substantive evidence of precarious work conditions and their associated poor health outcomes among rural-urban migrant labour workers. A lacuna that this paper attempts to fill in one of Ghana’s urban slums, Agbogbloshie. We employed a sequential explanatory mixed methods design. In the absence of any sampling frame, simple random sampling was used to select 113 migrant household heads, while purposive sampling was used to select 12 in-depth interviews (IDI) and (8) key informant interviews (KII). The paper leans on the Harris-Todaro (1970) model and the ecological model. We found various precarious work activities, mostly dirty, demeaning, dangerous, and unrewarding. Logistic regression was performed on whether or not the type of work undertaken by the migrants resulted in ill-health. Using motor riders as reference, it indicates that electronic waste dealers’ odds of ill-health (OR=1.0 [95%CI: 0.09–10.17]; P=1.0). Scraps dealers (OR=0.69[95%CI: 0.10–4.72]; P=0.71). Head porters (OR=0.25[95%CI: 0.22–6.97]; P=0.80. Street hawkers (OR= 0.5[95%CI: 0.03–7.45]; P=0.62). Truck pushers (0.83[95%CI: 0.05–13.63]; P=0.90). However, the association between precarious work and ill-health was insignificant across all work activities (P > 0.05). We found a slow pace in the government’s response to addressing precarious work activities. We recommend work acceleration.
... The condition of low-wage migrant labour in Singapore is hyper-precarious, which in turn is shaped by the interplays of power and control written into the work permit (Chan et al. 2021;Yea 2017;Yea and Chok 2018). Tied to the employer, the work permit must be renewed after 1 or 2 years. ...
This essay draws upon a digital ethnography and in-depth interviews with Bangladeshi low-wage migrant workers in Singapore to theorize the COVID-19 outbreak in dormitories housing the workers as a crisis of the consuming city. Building on the concept of extreme neoliberalism, we examine the ways in which the erasure of worker voice as a technique of smart governmentality coded into the “Singapore model” underlies
the pandemic outbreak. The in-depth interviews document the ways in which the poor infrastructures for migrant living are already always in crisis because of their exploitative design that maximizes profits while undermining the health, wellbeing, and dignity of workers. In this backdrop, the workers narrate strategies of resistance, enacted in articulations that resist and disrupt the smart propaganda crafted by the authoritarian state.
... Previous studies provide insight into the role of national and local authorities in producing unfree conditions for migrant workers across the global north and south. However, less has been written about the impact of institutional factors to regulate migrant workers in the semiconductor industry (Seo and Skelton, 2017;Strauss and McGrath, 2017;Yea, 2017). ...
This article aims at developing a conceptual framework of the migrant labour regime (MLR) to better understand the agency of migrants in the semiconductor industry and illustrates this by the example of Filipino migrant workers in the Taiwanese semiconductor industry. Based on semi-structured interviews with key persons in the semiconductor industry, the study demonstrates the different roles of actors and connections within the global production network (GPN). With regard to the theoretical contribution, this article develops a conceptual framework of the MLR and addresses three central actors in multi-scalar networks, that is, state, firms, and LMI. The framework proposed in this article offers more analytical clarity to the primary empirical contribution. Therefore, the article identifies three key factors of dynamics in GPNs. First, it emphasises the importance of the state and firms in shaping the MLR. Regulatory institutions at the national level hinder upward mobility of migrant workers and long-term employment relationships because working contracts do not allow employees to change job tasks or employers freely. Second, the coordination between contract manufacturers and lead firms in the GPN leads to a transformation of the workplace, for example, intensification and increased flexibility. Third, LMIs play a role in facilitating and mediating migrant labour in the transnational labour market.
... This allows for almost complete authority over workers. On the one hand, employers take advantage of such asymmetries to manipulate employment documents and distort accounts during mediation, threatening repatriation to prevent contestation of precarious work situations (Bal, 2015;Yea, 2017). On the other hand, employers adopt personal paternalistic care towards female domestic workers and arguably to male workers too, enacting thus the control of 'soft violence' (Parren˜as et al., 2021). ...
How best to integrate migrant workers in host societies has been a longstanding question in the study of migration and globalisation. Scholars have been conceptualising new modes of transnational mobilities that point to the politics of differential inclusion to address encounters between migrants and locals in Asian global cities. This article uses an instructive case study of temporary, low-wage male migrant workers in Singapore and the issue of their recreational spaces to show that the politics of inclusion/exclusion are layered onto the question of integration/segregation. We take integration to mean the incorporation of migrants into local society to give full access to social institutions of protection and care, and inclusion to refer to the acceptance of migrants into social relationships that define urban life. Segregation and exclusion are their respective corollaries. We focus on state-provisioned recreation centres sited near the dormitories, which were expanded to function as segregating spaces to keep migrant workers away from the city after the Little India riot in 2013. We show that they have instead become contact zones producing accidental diversities of urban encounters between migrants, locals and state-linked agents. We discuss how these contact zones have developed differently across the centres built before and after the riot, the transformation of the accidental diversities in the recreational centres by state-linked agents into a new migrant grassroots sector and the ongoing intensification of this during the COVID-19 pandemic. The new relationalities offer the promise of transcending the layered binaries of integration/segregation and inclusion/exclusion.
... Our point here is that the COVID-19 situation brings into view the vulnerable nature of the employment situation for low-status international workers, where institutionalized neglect is common (Fillinger et al. 2017), issues of precarious work and unfree labor are ignored (Yea 2017), and choice appears to be a luxury few possess. Looking forward, at least a short way, we foresee a future in which management and organizations may very well adapt to a steady decline in the number of elite international workers moving around the world-while, correspondingly, the number of low-status internationally mobile workers may increase. ...
This article argues that the view of international mobility in the management and organization literature has been too restrictive in focusing only on high-status workers. This view needs to be widened to an all-encompassing perspective that is not limited or restricted in terms of the number, types or status of people engaged in working internationally. In particular, it argues that there are millions of low-status international workers that, with some few exceptions, we have largely ignored. Not only does it mean that scholars are failing to explore the complete picture, it adds to the research-practice gap between those scholars and the practitioners who have to manage workers of all status levels. The article points out the areas where our knowledge is lacking and suggests a “road-map” for future research to overcome these critical gaps.
... 1 This points to a widespread condition of unfree labour, that is, labour extracted through various forms of coercion and compulsion, including economic coercion, that deprive workers of "the type of 'free' choice they are believed to exercise in 'normal' labour markets." (McGrath, 2017: 1). 2 A broad body of literature highlights the importance of the state in creating conditions for unfree labour through policies limiting labour mobility, deregulating the labour market and empowering employers (LeBaron and Phillips, 2019;Strauss and McGrath, 2017;Yea, 2017). As Nicholas De Genova (2013) argued, the spectacle of militarized border enforcement is geared towards immigrants' subordinated inclusion. ...
In spite of much emphasis on a “migration crisis” and studies on the “refugeeization” of the agricultural workforce in Italy, there is still little research on the impact of the NATO war on Libya and the militarization of EU borders in the Mediterranean on the development of labour exploitation and unfree labour in the sector. Focusing on the period between the 2007/8 global economic crisis, the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, until 2018, this article analyses the links between the system of neo-colonial extraction of Libyan resources that imposed itself after the war and the expansion of the reserve army of labour of Italian capital. We show that the militarization of EU borders further empowered militias involved in fuel, weapon and human smuggling, boosting a brutal system of detention, extortion and forced labour that both traps immigrants in Libya and pushes them towards Europe. Agri-business and retail corporations operating in Italy have benefitted from the continuing importation of energy and of vulnerable workers from Libya. The substitution of workers with immigrants with a status of asylum-seekers helps explain the diffusion of unfree labour in Italian agriculture over the last ten years. But immigrants’ experiences in Libya have also encouraged them to mobilize and reclaim their collective rights.
... In the aftermath of what became known as Singapore's Little India riot of December 2013 which involved 300 migrant workers, scholars discussed how the area -which is both a historic district showcasing Singapore's Indian ancestral culture and a 'weekend enclave' for low-waged migrant workers from South Asia -became zoned as a space of exception featuring a ban on alcohol sales and increased police surveillance (Hamid, 2015;Yeoh et al., 2017a). Apart from the imposition of extraordinary measures of bodily control at the site of the enclave, mega-dormitories to house migrant workers were also built at peripheral areas as 'spaces of enclosure' in order to constrain the movement of migrant bodies and divert them from more centrally located co-ethnic enclaves (Yea, 2017;Yeoh et al., 2017a). In other words, when it comes to bodily control, the excesses of enclavement are more effectively regulated by strategies of enclosure. ...
In the context of the Asia-Pacific, the corporeal geographies of migration are inflected by temporariness. The flexibilization of life and labor has led to low-waged migrants taking on the brunt of socially devalued work, particularly jobs which require demanding physical labor or the intimate care of others’ bodies. By centering corporeal geographies as an analytical lens, this chapter shows how understanding bodies as analytic and scale, destabilizes binary ways of thinking, uncovers power operating at various scales, and foregrounds migrants’ experiences and desires. It reviews poststructuralist, feminist, and critical race approaches to corporeality, as well as conceptual work on emotional geographies and the “mobilities turn”. It then turns to three broad themes to draw out the major contributions that corporeal geographies have made to our understandings of migration.
... Compulsion is understood as multidimensional, involving various types of violence and controls imposed upon workers that limit their autonomy to choose the buyer of their labor power in the market (McGrath, 2013a(McGrath, : 33, 2013bBernards, 2018). The characteristic of compulsion "destabilizes any notion that 'slavery-like' conditions are exceptional" (Yea, 2017: 2), particularly when politically-assisted market rule and labor deregulation tendencies adopted by many countries were positively associated with forced labor and human trafficking (Peksen et al., 2017: 7). Therefore, conceptualizing unfree labor as an embedded characteristic helps explain why victims of trafficking or slavery remain unfree even after the resolution of rescue missions. ...
Employing the concept of unfree labor, this article explores the role of the state in reinforcing victims’ vulnerability and shaping the political economy of trafficking practices. Based on a case study of trafficking victims in Benjina and Ambon, Maluku Province, Indonesia, I argue that Indonesian authorities’ intervention was driven not by humanitarian interest, nor by the concern for the protection of migrant workers’ rights, but rather by the intent to advance a political and economic agenda against the Thai fishing industry. Consequently, the intervention ignored the exploitative relations of production that underpinned the vulnerability of victims, despite being conducted in the name of victim-protection and improving livelihoods.
... Taking on hazardous and low paying jobs that citizens of the receiving countries are unwilling to take (the "3-D" jobsdangerous, dirty, degrading (Benach et al. (2011)) such as mining, agriculture, construction, and domestic work, low SES migrant workers are restricted from giving voice to any health or workplace safety concerns due to fear of deportation (International Organization for Migration, 2018). Exacerbating the effects of poor healthcare and insurance usually reserved for those with citizenship status (Strauss & McGrath, 2017;Yea, 2017), communicative marginalization works to silence the dialog required to improve health services and outcomes for this precariously positioned community. Dutta-Bergman (2004a, 2004b and Dutta (2008Dutta ( , 2011) see such health inequities as symptoms of a lack of coconstructive engagement with migrant labor voices which are ritually subject to expert prescriptions of healthy practices within the mainstream discourse. ...
Increasingly, health scholars are paying attention to the health experiences of immigrant communities, particularly in the backdrop of the global flows of goods, services, and people across borders. In spite of the increasing public health emphasis on health outcomes of immigrants within the Middle Eastern (ME) countries, immigrant communities are often constructed as monoliths and the voices of immigrant communities are traditionally absent from mainstream health policy and program discourses. The health experiences of immigrants, their access to resources, and the health trajectories through the life-course followed by them and their descendants influence the deep-seated patterns of ethnic health disparities documented in the ME. Based on the culture-centered approach, we engaged in in-depth face-to-face interviews, and focus groups discussions with a total of 44 research participants, to understand how low-income Bangladeshi migrant workers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), who live at the borders of mainstream Arab society, define, construct, and negotiate health issues. Participants articulate in their narratives their nuanced cultural understanding of good health as a complex, holistic practice, the achievement of which is obstructed by barriers such as immigration and insurance structures. Further, they enact their agency in resource impoverished circumstances to protect their mental health and physical well-being through daily strategies and acts of resistance.
... Employers' strategies rely on spatial tactics making it difficult for unions and civil society organizations to access the workplace and provide support to workers. For example, in her study on migrant workers in Singapore, Yea (2017) shows that workers are segregated to designated dormitory accommodation in remote areas where civil society organizations cannot reach them. Dormitories are therefore discussed as 'the cornerstone of the social control of workers in the workplace' (Azmeh, 2014) and often analyzed as total institutions (Lucas et al., 2013). ...
Scholars, mainly focusing on Asia, consistently describe the im/mobility of workers living at work as orchestrated from above. This article bring to the forefront forms of workers’ mobility that take place outside of the established and often policed tracks. Focusing on Europe, the article shows that the mobility of workers is the outcome of the interplay of both employers’ strategies and workers’ agency. Based on extensive fieldwork among migrant workers in Europe – Chinese migrants in the Italian fashion industry, and Eastern European migrant workers at the Foxconn electronics plants in the Czech Republic – the article offers a new approach. Instead of focusing on the single workplace at a certain point in time, it adopts a perspective that considers the multiplicity of accommodations at work for workers across Europe along the time dimension. By extending the study of the dormitory regime to the European Union, the article highlights the way the growing frequency of factories cum dormitories to a certain extent empowers the workers as their horizons extend to other sites within Europe and are not limited to a single firm.
... The focus enables researchers to explore synergies across seemingly differentiated and unrelated empirical settings and will drive forward changes in conceptualisation, which will aid punishment to be considered in new ways. References to 'free' work places as 'jail', workers as 'slaves' (Padmanabhan, 2012: 980), complaints of management not caring for staff and workers being 'treated like robots' (Shildrick et al., 2012: 134) and the control strategies of employers towards unfree migrant workers (Yea, 2017) are prominent within accounts of workplaces, both considered along the spectrum of 'free' and 'unfree' labour. Yet framing these experiences and acts as structural constraints does not articulate the punitive realities of such practice. ...
This paper brings together carceral and labour geographies to highlight new research avenues and empirical gaps. Despite valuable engagements with unfree and precarious work by labour geographers and substantial developments within carceral geography around carceral circuitry and intimate economies of detention, punitive aspects of work remain largely under-theorised within labour geography, while the political economy of carceral labour is relatively side-lined within carceral geography. The paper calls for two interrelated research agendas – the first a punitive labour geographies agenda, and the second a more sustained political economy lens applied to carceral geography in the context of labour and work.
... 'Coolie' labour arrangements varied from casual labour to formal contracts, but even contracted labourers were prone to exploitation, legal insecurity and violence, not least due to the power inequalities inherent to colonial indenture, and racialised models of labour organisation (Aso 2018;Sturman 2014;Tappe 2016). They appear to be prototypes for Southeast Asian translocal labour Southeast Asian Trajectories of Labour Mobility 5 mobility today, especially in the case of (state or non-state) organised contract labour: the realisation of contracted relations is often similarly subjected to power hierarchies (see, for example, Huong 2010;|Killias 2010|Killias , 2018Yea 2017). In particular, weak legal protection and citizenship rights tend to translate into arbitrary violence, racial discrimination, and sexual harassment. ...
Within and across Southeast Asian national borders, there has been a growing circulation of labour, capital, people, and goods. Meanwhile, urbanisation, agrarian changes, and liberal economic restructuring have been drawing a large section of the rural population into mobile economies and trade networks. This special issue explores the linkage between mobility and the growing precaritisation of labour resulting from neoliberalised development policies, nationalist citizenship regimes, and discourses, and arbitrary state power. Arguably, the consequent insecurity and uncertainty have profound implications for the social and economic life of migrant labourers. Although these conditions engender dangers and risks, they also hold possibilities for crafting translocal livelihoods and social relations. In this introduction, we investigate the diverse trajectories of labour migration in Southeast Asia through a critical discussion on the concept of ‘precarity’ that underscores the resilience of labour migrants despite the precarious conditions of their lives. The special issue suggests that, while precarious labour has long been part of regimes of control and exploitation in the region, precarity today is shaped by the blurry boundaries between the legal and the illegal, between local and global lives, and between different worlds of belonging.
... While scholars do not embrace a single definition of modern slavery in the context of business, they continue to turn to international organizations and conventions, including the ILO (New, 2015;Simmons & Stringer, 2014;Thomas & Purvis, 2016;Yea, 2017), Anti-Slavery International (Crane, 2013), and the Bellagio-Harvard Guidelines (Gold et al., 2015;Phung, 2018), which have significant similarities in their conceptualizations. Based on our review of the commonalities amongst the conceptualizations of modern slavery in the context of business, including the 'workplace' (Crane, 2013), 'organizational settings' (Phung, 2018), 'global economy' (Bales, 2000;Kara, 2011), and 'supply chain' Gold et al., 2015;New, 2015), we embrace an omnibus definition that embodies the criteria that Crane (2013: 51) sets for 'modern slavery as a management practice' and that we described above: ...
This chapter offers a review of the current literature that addresses the business side of modern slavery (‘the business of modern slavery’), and identifies avenues for future research on modern slavery within management and organizational studies. We begin by reviewing how scholars define modern slavery as a construct when it is studied in the context of business. We then review the key findings, arguments and contributions of past work related to the business of modern slavery. From there, we discuss avenues for advancing research on the business of modern slavery, first discussing empirical and theoretical approaches to research, then offering suggested avenues for future research that can contribute to our empirical and theoretical understanding of the business of modern slavery, as well as how modern slavery can be situated within and used to contribute to broader business and management theory.
... A study of the structures that create and perpetuate precarity would be incomplete without engaging with the acts of agency that migrants use to navigate structures of exploitation and inequality. There is longstanding body of work on forms of agency that are beyond an industrial setting (see for example Buckley, McPhee, and Rogaly 2017;Seo and Skelton 2017;Yea 2017;Baey and Yeoh 2018). Labour geographers including, Coe andJordhus-Lier (2011), andCarswell andDe Neve (2013) have highlighted the importance of a holistic understanding of worker positionality and agency beyond the workplace. ...
This case study offers insights into the fragile position of seasonal workers, who occupy the most precarious roles
in the production chain, even in advanced and prosperous agricultural systems, such as in the autonomous
province of South Tyrol, the focus of this study. Social innovation research approaches in this case functioned as
a catalyst of social change (Moulaert et al., 2017) by connecting and activating local stakeholders around labor
exploitation prevention. The action research project FARm involved stakeholders from major public, private, and
third-sector organizations related to agricultural labor, in four territories of Northern Italy with the goal of
strengthening preventive measures against labor exploitation. Among protective factors, this case study shows
that small farms embedded in rural communities appear protective against labor exploitation. Their survival is
facilitated by generous public investment and collaborative structures. However, cross-border seasonal workers
still face challenges of geographic, social, cultural and linguistic isolation, that enhances the risk of exploitative
conditions being undetected, also due to inaccessibility of reporting channels and transnational recruitment
processes. Moreover, the short length of stay and the widespread informality in labor relations result in undeclared
or partially declared work, which reduces employer accountability. Social innovation research approaches
facilitated dialogue between organizations with different interests, which resulted in a joint declaration of intent,
and in implemented synergic strategies to reinforce labor exploitation prevention.
Foreign medical personnel are needed to overcome the challenges of a shortage of medical personnel. However, the current issue lies in the ineffective regulations governing foreign medical personnel in Indonesia, which hinder the country's ability to enhance its health services. This research aims to conduct a comparative study with Singapore, which has superior health services, to examine the use of foreign medical personnel in improving the quality of health services in Indonesia. This research uses normative juridical research, employing a conceptual, statutory, and comparative approach. The research results show that, first, the utilization of foreign medical personnel in Indonesia has not been able to improve the quality of health services in Indonesia due to weaknesses in legal structure in the supervision and licensing process, the substance of regulations that do not yet provide legal protection and the condition of the Indonesian people who are not yet able to use such personnel foreign medical. Second, the Singapore government's mechanism for utilizing foreign medical personnel is easy and successful. Singapore strategically utilization foreign medical personnel to meet its healthcare needs. In addition, foreign medical personnel have several rights, including a basic salary and monthly allowances, health insurance, and income tax, which are not deducted from their pay. Therefore, Indonesia needs to adopt a policy system that is not limited to lex generalis but also becomes a guide that provides certainty in law enforcement and is not just a reference or boundary line for derivative regulations.
Foreign workers are needed to overcome the challenge of a shortage of professional workers. However, the ineffectiveness of foreign worker licensing regulations in Indonesia hampers the supply of qualified foreign workers and impacts regional levy revenues. This research aims to structure the rules for the fair use of foreign workers. This is normative juridical research with conceptual, statutory, and comparative approaches. The results of a comparison of foreign worker regulations in Indonesia and Singapore are used to develop a regulatory concept that is more responsive to the use of foreign workers, especially in the health sector. The idea of licensing law and justice theory is used for analysis. The research results show that the regulations on using foreign workers in Indonesia are not yet comprehensive regarding the rules for qualifying foreign workers as a condition for issuing permits and justifying good public services. The issuance of permits to use foreign workers has been hampered because several regions do not yet have implementing regulations that impact the collection of regional levies. Second, setting up mechanisms for utilizing foreign workers in Singapore is relatively easy and successful with strict digital-based permit requirements. Thus, Indonesia needs to adopt a foreign labor policy system with strict requirements for issuing permits that are accessible in terms of bureaucracy, changes to laws, implementation of regulations, and drafting of regional regulations.
Time has been gaining migration scholars’ attention as a lens that
complements the focus on spatiality that characterizes migration studies.
The role of temporal dynamics in limiting the agency of migrant labour
is an underdeveloped research issue. Particularly referring to migrants
with legal status insecurity, not having acquired long-term residence
permits in hosting countries. This contribution aims to reflect on time
dynamics in relation to migrant temporary labour regimes in the
agricultural field. In fact, time management in conditions of extreme
power asymmetries, may generate precarity, shrink labour agency and
enable exploitation towards migrant agricultural workers. The study
draws from current literature and document analysis, presenting a case
study, in which owners and managers of a berry farm have been charged
with labour exploitation. The contribution uses this extreme situation
available in detail through legal proceedings documentation, to analyse
the time pressures as they intersect with other factors to reduce labour
agency of asylum seekers and expose them to greater risk of labour
exploitation.
This article contributes to the literature at the intersection of migration and global production networks (GPNs) by examining the role of labour market intermediaries (LMIs) for migrant workers. It demonstrates mediation processes by LMIs and elaborates on migration networks in the global labour market through qualitative and quantitative data. It examines the role of LMIs in responding to mechanisms in GPN, including zero inventory and just‐in‐time production, and the impact of private employment agents on migrant workers, particularly on their career paths. The article found that LMIs play an active role in the mediation and cooperation between migrant labour and firms and in shaping structural conditions for migrant workers in response to global competitive pressures. However, LMIs play a controversial role in social upgrading. Private LMIs are identified as having a negative impact on career paths of migrant workers.
This chapter examines Singapore’s service hubs for foreign workers who have deserted their workplace in search for voluntary care services. It does so by focusing on their social background in an authoritarian political context and in relation to the inner-city built environment. The objective is to dig in deeper on the social and spatial dimensions of urban disorder, how this set functions in the workers’ geographies of survival, and how these are co-opted as well as contested by the government. As such, this chapter is interested in how these spaces are ambivalently regulated, used and negotiated. This provides an insight on how these inner-city areas operate not only as a place of refuge but also a counterweight to Singapore’s highly ‘sanitized’ urban space.
Migration and Health: Critical Perspectives offers a radical rethinking of the field by unsettling conventional ideas of mobility and borders to highlight the ways in which they produce health inequalities. Covering a wide range of topics, the text provides insight through a critical lens, and proposes areas for intervention along with an added emphasis on the need for future research to address the health inequities that affect migrants. It illustrates how a critical perspective can deepen our understanding of the relationship between migration and health, which remains a defining global issue of our century. The text employs a critical approach to examine the structural conditions of inequality and larger historical and political processes, recognizing that exclusionary bordering practices increasingly occur away from physical points of entry. It posits the concept of migration as complex, tangled and multi-directional and underscores how migrant vulnerability can shape the lives of people in wider communities. Furthermore, it acknowledges diverse and intersectional standpoints, as well as shifting spatial and temporal influences. Chapters include coverage of health in transit; healthcare access and utilization; clinical encounters; communicable disease; labor and occupational health; gender and sexuality; immigration enforcement, detention, deportation; and the effects of forced displacement on refugee and asylum-seeker health. The text is useful for students and scholars of migration or health disparities seeking to understand how the two issues can be approached in a more holistic and critical way. It is further aimed at practitioners and policymakers who are interested in gaining familiarity with the structural conditions of inequality along with the larger historical and political processes that influence contemporary migration patterns.
The recruitment and deployment of migrant fishers in distant waters (DW) fisheries has emerged as a significant site for the production of unfree labor relations. We trace the recruitment and deployment geographies of migrant fishers from the Philippines to the vessel, conceptualizing the time-spaces of the journey as a significant site for producing unfree labor. We argue that labor brokerage not only establishes the conditions of the labor contract and financialization of migration in the migrants’ home country but is also an ongoing process that intensifies unfreedom through the journey to deployment across multiple sites and temporalities. We conceptualize this movement into exploitative laboring situations as “funnels of unfreedom.” The production of unfreedom through the geographies of recruitment, harboring, and transportation to the destination is one strategy by which DW fleets can reduce costs. The relevance of this discussion extends to other sectors where complex labor brokerage geographies constrain migrant worker choices and fortify unfreedom in labor relations.
This paper explores the question of what traceability systems mean for the labour situation of fishworkers; for whom and in what respects is traceability effective, and what impact do these systems have? The limited social criteria in fishery governance is a core reason for recurrent problems of extreme abuse of fishworkers around the world, including trafficking, forced labour and so called modern slavery. New traceability systems, thus, now include social criteria to advance sustainable fisheries globally. Drawing from a Thai fisheries reform case study, we analyse how the new labour traceability system emerges and is perceived by migrant fishworkers. We base our analysis on interviews, documents and two periods of fieldwork in Thailand. We argue that labour traceability is a double-edged sword. While fishworkers have seen major improvement in limiting extreme abuse, labour traceability has a downsides of state surveillance and costs passed onto workers. Moreover, traceability does not solve underlying problems regarding the complex formalization of migrant workers, working conditions on fishing boats, freedom to change employer or the everyday vulnerability of being a migrant worker. Thus, while labour traceability has promising policy relevance for the integration of labour rights into fisheries governance, it requires contextual underpinning in migrant circumstances.
Serious workplace injuries and fatalities amongst migrant workers are an increasingly documented concern in critical literature on precarious migrant labour. Explanations vary as to why migrant workers experience a disproportionally high incidence of workplace accidents, with existing literature identifying risk factors such as dangerous and demanding working conditions and lack of adherence to safety standards, as well as socio-cultural and political barriers negatively affecting migrants' health-seeking behaviour. This paper aims to extend these discussions through a closer examination of the role of two inter-related factors emanating from the political economy of Singapore's migrant labour regime in creating a context of heightened vulnerability and risk. These are: the organisation of migration (including fees/debts and deportability), and contract fraud and deceptive recruitment (including wrongful deployment and substandard living conditions). To frame discussion in the paper, I introduce the concept of the ‘produced injured’, which refers to those whose vulnerability to injury results from processes related to the political economy of migrant labour.
This paper examines the entanglement of mobility, immobility, labour control, and immigration control in Washington State in the US. I analyse two cases: first, one where aggressive immigration enforcement has destabilized a local labour regime, impacting workers’ im/mobilities in ways that employers felt made their businesses vulnerable. In this case, employers responded with a politics of protection that involved cooperation with immigrant rights groups, but not in ways that challenge immigrant marginalization. Next, I analyse the H2A visa programme, a temporary foreign worker programme that concentrates power over labour’s mobility with the employer in ways that have made workers vulnerable to unfree work conditions. Together, these cases demonstrate how state control of im/mobilities can do different kinds of work in the context of the struggle between employers and workers. I apply this lens to reimagining labour solidarity that centres the freedom to move rather than the protection of workers’ marginality.
Much of intra‐Asian labour migration is regulated on the basis of governing tools that aim at managing cross‐border movement of workers on a strictly temporary, employer‐tied basis. The key elements involved in the operationalization of strictly temporary migration are recruitment, remittances and return; these three ‘Rs’ are also central to global policy discussions around the migration‐development nexus. The core premise of this paper is that this strict framework results in a particular form of migrant precarity which in turn shapes migrant transnationality, leaving migrants with severely circumscribed labour agency. This leads to the argument that temporary migration paradigm as practiced in much of Asia constitutes involuntary transnationalism. The paper ends by arguing that based on proactive migrant rights activism, the involuntary character of transnationalism is being challenged by bringing a different set of ‘Rs’ into the discussion derived from global social policy and global justice perspectives: regulation, redistribution and rights.
This paper explores the ways exploitative labour migration arrangements leading to ‘failed migration’ can extend discussions of transnationalism. Specifically, failed migration produces different sorts of engagements in transnational social fields to those commonly discussed in the literature and in relation to migrants who are considered successful. These departures allow for reflection on key assumptions about the practices of connection and engagement across borders between migrants and non-migrants that typify the operation of transnational social fields, including the ways constructions of gender shape these practices. The paper draws on a case study of Bangladeshi low-waged, transient migrant workers in Singapore. I examine three registers of diluted connection, namely: protecting the family from anxiety; distress for migrants through imposition of censure and suspicion; and the shame associated with exploitation. Moral–cultural frames that inscribe particular economic and social expectations on migrants and, in this case, values associated with ‘being a man’ transferred from home provide a lens through which to understand the reconfiguration of transnational social fields in the context of failed migration.
This chapter aims to summarize the main findings in the field of agri-food studies and labour mobility by singling out four streams within the debate: (1) food supply-chain restructuring; (2) migration regimes and the recruitment of a transnational workforce in agriculture; (3) current transformations in rural areas; (4) farmworkers’ collective organization and mobilization. Within this lively debate, the agency of unorganized migrant farmworkers has remained so far largely overlooked. This book aims to fill this gap by studying, through an extensive ethnography, the labour process dynamics and the workplace struggles in the biggest greenhouse area in South-eastern Sicily (Italy), known widely as the Transformed Littoral Strip (TLS).
Under the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Health Regulations
(2005) (IHR [2005]), member states agreed to follow WHO guidance with respect
to outbreak-related travel and trade measures and, specifically, to refrain from imposing “additional health measures” that significantly interfere with international
traffic and trade without justification (see IHR [2005], Article 43). When the WHO
declared the 2019-nCoV outbreak (now known as COVID-19) a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on January 30, 2020, it recommended
against “any travel or trade restriction.” Despite this recommendation, all 194 WHO
member states subsequently adopted some form of restriction (WHO 2020). While
adopting such restrictions when not recommended by WHO is nothing new, a far
higher number of countries have imposed a wider variety of cross-border measures
during this PHEIC compared to previous health crises.
In Singapore, the temporary legal status of migrant domestic workers binds them in servitude to their employer-sponsor as their residency is contingent on their continuous and sole live-in employment with a sponsor whose permission they must secure in order to transfer jobs. This legal status technically renders domestic workers unfree and precarious as it gives employers tremendous power over domestic workers. Based on 30 in-depth interviews with employers, this article examines how employers in Singapore negotiate their power over domestic workers. We identify ‘soft violence’ as a tool that employer’s utilise in their management of domestic workers. By ‘soft violence’, we refer to the practice of cloaking the unequal relationship in domestic work via the cultivation of a relationship of ‘personalism’ while simultaneously amplifying one’s control of domestic workers. Representing a strategy utilised by employers to maximise the labour of domestic workers, ‘soft violence’ emerges from the paradoxical relationship of simultaneously relieving and amplifying servitude.
The integration of Global South actors into the global agricultural economy has attracted research on labour effects. This is because Global South actors are often integrated at the level of production of raw materials with little power and less capture of gain. To better understand the conceptual perspectives and methodologies underpinning existing empirical studies and provide evidence for the labour-related practice, this paper conducts a systematic review of the methodologies and perspectives applied in the Global Agricultural Production Networks literature. Based on an analysis of 87 articles published in English-speaking journals, we show that the assessment of labour regulatory frameworks' impact on labour issues is more focused on private than public or social forms of governance and on vertical than horizontal frameworks. Wageworkers working on smallholder farms and agro-industries and women have received little consideration, in particular, if compared with wageworkers on plantations, as has the topic of occupational health and safety as a specific key labour issue. Overall, the existing body of empirical research can be characterised as being largely qualitative in nature, underexploiting the potential quantitative or mixed methods research designs. Our review generates methodological ideas and conceptual perspectives for future studies to consider.
Despite labouring for three decades in Singapore, and being connected to the existing Tamil diasporic community there, Tamil migrant construction workers have been left out of state rhetoric and face economic marginalization and social exclusion. In this article, we draw on rich ethnographic data on their everyday experiences of working construction and living in Singapore, and we espouse the distinctive qualities and mission of ethnographically-informed methodologies to enact change in this space. The methods include in-depth interviews with 11 Tamil labourers, and the subsequent use of worker photo diaries, known as auto-photography, with a total of 108 photographs taken. All the participants either worked construction, were on medical leave, or were seeking compensation after workplace injury. The analysis of the interview data develops themes around precarity and discrimination on construction sites (precarity of work), and the exclusory social practices experienced by workers in their offsite world (precarity of place). Following the goals of decolonized research, our innovative methods have enabled Tamil construction workers to present their lives through their own lens. By involving migrant construction workers, we identify new sites of inquiry and knowledge in examining the inequalities and injustices they face.
How does precarious work entail social vulnerabilities and moral complicities? Theorists of precarity pose two challenges for analysing labour conditions in Asia. Their first challenge is to distinguish the new kinds of social vulnerability which constitute precarious work. The second is to assign moral responsibility in the social network that produces vulnerability in depoliticised and morally detached ways. In this article, the social and normative dimensions of precarious work are connected through a conceptual investigation into how Singapore allocates responsibility for managing temporary migrant labour. First, it analyses how various management strategies, driven by globalisation and government deregulation, increase worker vulnerabilities. These strategies intensify relations of dependence, disempowerment and discrimination, which the workers may accommodate or resist in limited ways. Second, it assesses why the strategies leave the state, employers, agents and others complicit in producing the vulnerabilities. These actors enable, collaborate with, or condone the production of precarity. Their complicity is complicated by varying support or resistance to reforms. The result is a novel conceptual scheme for analysing the complicit network behind precarious work, which can be used in other sites of precarity where some are complicit in the vulnerability of others.
This paper demonstrates why and how a fuller geographical perspective extends contemporary scholarship on human trafficking within and beyond the discipline. We employ a relational approach and draw on in‐depth qualitative research with trafficked persons and a range of stakeholders in Slovakia and the United Kingdom (UK), to depict how the processes underpinning human trafficking are non‐linear and operate instantaneously at multiple intersecting scales and temporalities and through diverse mobilities. The analysis problematises the discrete and homogeneous notion of space coupled with a linear conceptualisation of time and, more specifically, the normative portrayals of recruitment, transit and exploitation as distinct and sequential phases of human trafficking. Instead, the individuated experiences of trafficked persons are examined in relational geographies of inequality, manoeuvring and mobilities. Such a conceptual shift ensures that efforts to understand and combat human trafficking address its effects as well as the wider social relations and structural conditions that facilitate exploitation. We conclude the paper by outlining how a relational‐geographic perspective has the potential to foster new forms of dialogue and inquiry within and beyond the discipline.
Within the scholarship on precarity, low-waged contract-based migrants are recognized as centrally implicated in precarious employment conditions at the bottom of neoliberal capitalist labor markets. Precarity as a socially corrosive condition stems from both the multiple insecurities of the workplace as disposable labor, and a sense of deportability as migrant subjects with marginal socio-legal status in host society. Our study of Bangladeshi construction workers in Singapore contributes to refining understandings of precarity by approaching labor migration as a cumulative, intensively mediated process, whereby risks and vulnerabilities are compounded across different sites in migrants’ trajectories, even as they enact themselves as mobile, aspiring subjects. As a condition-in-the-making, precarity is experienced and compounded, through a continuum beginning in pre-migration indebtedness, multiplying through entanglements with the migration industry, and manifesting in workplace vulnerabilities at destination. It is most finely balanced when predictability and planning yield to arbitrary hope.
Exploitation of international migrant workers in the Global North has been increasingly framed in terms of trafficking, in political and legal domains and by the media. Yet posing trafficking as a phenomenon that captures the unfreedom experienced by migrants obscures the variegated means through which unfree labour relations are both institutionalized, and related to more ‘mundane’ forms of exploitation including precarious employment (for migrants and non-migrants alike). In this paper we argue that conceptualizing forms of unfreedom along a continuum of labour relations highlights this interrelationship, which for migrant workers includes attempts to harness and control mobilities through immigration regimes that restrict mobility bargaining power within labour markets. We use the example of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) in Canada to show how precarious employment, precarious legal status and unfree labour relations interact, and how they are negotiated and contested by of workers themselves.
By severely constraining the political personhood of temporary migrant workers, states’ use of deportation laws seeks to curb agitation among these workers. Despite this, various episodes of unrest have been witnessed in both liberal and illiberal regimes across Asia. Drawing on a case study of Bangladeshi migrant construction workers in Singapore, this paper examines the development of migrant labour politics as deportation laws, and their enforcement, construct these workers as “use-and-discard” economic subjects. Data for the paper are drawn from multi-level sources—government, industry, media, and non-governmental organization (NGO) reports; interviews with key actors; and a participant observation stint in a construction firm—collected between 2010 and 2014. The paper argues that, rather than solely constraining, deportability serves as a constituent of certain forms of tactical worker contestations in the workplace. Specifically, under different workplace conditions, deportability can translate into differing forms of worker tactics, ranging from accommodation to confrontation and desertion. The outcomes of these strategies, in turn, have significant repercussions for the ways in which civil society groups and state-actors, respectively, challenge and reconfigure the political personhood of temporary migrant workers.
The International Labour Organisation (ILO) has developed a concept of decent work and set this as a standard in 1999. However, in many places in the world people labour under conditions that are far from ‘decent’. Many people are subject to forced labour and experience unfreedoms, which raises important theoretical and practical issues. In this contribution we set out some of the ways in which forced labour manifests and how it has been changing over recent years in India. India is of particular interest because, according to the ILO, Asia, and India within Asia, has more victims of forced labour than any other region. India illustrates that specific structures of social relations underpin one’s vulnerability to becoming a victim of forced labour. It illustrates also that forms of forced labour integrate into and develop within capitalism. Although neo-liberal policy prescriptions are formally opposed to forced labour, the neo-liberal capitalist system also facilitates its reproduction and spread.
The EU regulatory regime and employers’ cross-border recruitment practices complicate unions’ ability to represent increasingly diverse and transnationally mobile workers. Even in institutional contexts where the industrial relations structure and labour law are favourable, such as the Netherlands, unions struggle with maintaining labour standards for these workers. This article analyses Dutch union efforts to represent hyper-mobile construction workers at the Eemshaven construction sites. It shows that the nexus of subcontracting, transnational mobility, legal insularity and employer anti-unionism complicate enforcement so that even well-resourced unions can, at best, improve employment conditions for a limited set of workers and only for a limited period of time.
This article analyses the widely reported increase of unfree labour in Africa through neoliberalism, arguing that, far from an individual relationship of domination epiphenomenal to global political-economic restructuring, unfree labour must be understood as a social relationship of insecurity and exploitation whose acceleration in recent decades is traceable to broader shifts in the relations of production and social reproduction. These include the impact of labour market reform and privatisation on wages, employment and poverty; the rise of informalisation, including the marketisation of social reproduction; Africa in the international division of labour and labour conditions in global supply chains; and the rise of brics, the ‘new scramble’ for African resources and markets, and intensified processes of primitive accumulation. In a continent beleaguered by the slave trade and the systematic, widespread and brutal exploitation of forced labour during the colonial era, concerns around labour conditions of violence, bondage and coercion are particularly acute. Understanding the complexities of labour unfreedom in Africa today requires an understanding of the various forms and layers of coercion, immobility and exploitation fundamental to the contemporary social structures of capitalist accumulation, overcoming the binary typically posited between free and unfree labour.
This article is located in the maelstrom of debate about immigration and employment in the contemporary economy. The article presents original analysis of data from the Labour Force Survey and a workplace case-study in the cleaning sector to highlight growing employer dependence on a very diverse pool of foreign-born labour. The article explains such dependency by drawing on interview material collected from employers, employers' associations, community organizations and policymakers. In sum, we argue that London's Migrant Division of Labour (MDL) is a product of the semi-autonomous actions taken by employers, workers and government in the particular context of London. Understanding the MDL thus needs to encompass employer demand, migrants' `dual frame of reference' and limited access to benefits, as well as employers' preference for foreign-born workers over `native' labour supply.The state is also argued to play a critical role in this employment, determining the nature and terms of immigration, the accessibility and levels of benefits, and employment regulation. London's MDL is shown to intersect with, and in some cases overturn, existing patterns of labour market segmentation on the basis of human capital (class), ethnicity and gender.
The growth of precarious work since the 1970s has emerged as a core contemporary concern within politics, in the media, and among researchers. Uncertain and unpredictable work contrasts with the relative security that characterized the three decades following World War II. Precarious work constitutes a global challenge that has a wide range of consequences cutting across many areas of concern to sociologists. Hence, it is increasingly important to understand the new workplace arrangements that generate precarious work and worker insecurity. A focus on employment relations forms the foundation of theories of the institutions and structures that generate precarious work and the cultural and individual factors that influence people's responses to uncertainty. Sociologists are well-positioned to explain, offer insight, and provide input into public policy about such changes and the state of contemporary employment relations.
The growth of global economic activity has resulted in a worldwide increase in migration. Despite the growing interest in migratory labour flows, there remains little detailed empirical research about the labour relations practices experienced by immigrant workers. In this article, three general areas are examined from data collected in the Republic of Ireland: (1) what are the experiences of non-Irish national workers employed in different sectors of the economy; (2) do trade unions facilitate the integration of migrant workers in the Irish labour market; and (3) what are the strategies undertaken by trade unions in response to the challenges of immigration? Ethnographic and qualitative research methods were employed to address these broad research objectives. The evidence shows that many immigrant workers have experienced a system of near-serfdom that perpetuates social, economic and cultural exclusion on a large scale. The conclusion argues that an emerging `glocalization' of the world economy creates a labour market dynamic underpinned by neoliberal policies of the nation-state. The evidence suggests that traditional views of migration and industrial relations theory are found wanting when seeking to explain the concerns of migrant workers. A number of implications arising from this are then discussed.
Participatory action research is presented as a social research method and process and as a goal that social research should always strive to achieve. After describing the key features and strengths of participatory action research, we briefly analyze its role in promoting social change through organizational learning in three very different kinds of organizations. We argue that participatory action research is always an emergent process that can often be intensified and that works effectively to link participation, social action, and knowledge generation.
This paper analyzes the institutionalized production of precarious migration status in Canada. Building on recent work on the legal production of illegality and non-dichotomous approaches to migratory status, we review Canadian immigration and refugee policy, and analyze pathways to loss of migratory status and the implications of less than full status for access to social services. In Canada, policies provide various avenues of authorized entry, but some entrants lose work and/or residence authorization and end up with variable forms of less-than-full immigration status. We argue that binary conceptions of migration status (legal/illegal) do not reflect this context, and advocate the use of ‘precarious status’ to capture variable forms of irregular status and illegality, including documented illegality. We find that elements of Canadian policy routinely generate pathways to multiple forms of precarious status, which is accompanied by precarious access to public services. Our analysis of the production of precarious status in Canada is consistent with approaches that frame citizenship and illegality as historically produced and changeable. Considering variable pathways to and forms of precarious status supports theorizing citizenship and illegality as having blurred rather than bright boundaries. Identifying differences between Canada and the US challenges binary and tripartite models of illegality, and supports conducting contextually specific and comparative work.
Hiring-halls, specializing in the placement of day-laborers in temporary jobs, have in recent years been proliferating along major transport arteries in Chicago's low-income neighborhoods. This article examines the phenomenon of low-wage temporary work in Chicago from the perspective of the principal institutional actors in these highly 'flexibilized' or 'contingent' labor markets - the 'temp' agencies. Particular emphasis is placed on the labor-market effects of temp-agency strategies, both in respect to patterns of labor segmentation and in terms of the spatial (re)constitution of urban job markets. It is suggested that temp agencies are actively engaged in both the exploitation and facilitation of contingent labor-market conditions. In this sense, they are assuming important new roles as privatized 'labor-market intermediaries', with apparently deleterious effects for job security and social segregation in the lower reaches of urban labor markets. Their strategies can also be related to the social and geographic restructuring of these job markets, because the growth and polarization of temp employment has been associated with a 'hardening' - and indeed 'stretching' - of extant ethnic, gender and spatial inequalities.
This paper seeks to identify the spatialized dimensions of labour control in sites of rapid and recent industrialization in Southeast Asia. Using a comparative analysis of locations in Penang (Malaysia), Batam (Indonesia) and Cavite/Laguna (the Philippines), it is argued that the construction and control of space has been used to enhance control over the working body, and, in particular, to contain labour organization, unionization and collective bargaining. Three broader arguments are made. First, that labour geographies need to be cognizant of the spatialized politics of labour beyond a narrow focus on the trade union movement. Second, that space is a potent tool in labour control and must be explicitly considered alongside the identity–based control strategies and institutional structures that have usually informed studies of labour regimes in newly industrializing contexts. Finally, a comparative perspective on local labour markets, and control regimes in particular, shows that the ways in which space is constructed and controlled differs between contexts, implying that universal judgements on the relevance or importance of particular arenas or spaces for labour politics should be reserved.
"Foreigners constitute 15 percent of the population and over 20 percent of the labor force in Singapore.... This large foreign labor force is managed by a comprehensive and highly selective foreign labor policy, which is described in this paper. The strict enforcement of a guestworker policy of transience on the one hand, and the liberal encouragement of settlement on the other, are the twin pillars of this policy. Seen originally as a dispensable appendage to a labor-scarce economy, foreign labor has now become integral to the economic and increasingly, population policy of the country, as evidenced by the recent announcement of a national policy to ¿attract foreign talent'."
Temporary migrant work is a central feature of labour markets in many host states, and an increasing cause of concern for
its potential impacts on workers’ rights and protections. In Canada, as elsewhere, policymakers utilise it as a regulatory
device to lower labour standards. In this context, workers labouring transnationally are turning to unions for assistance.
Yet they are confronting obstacles to securing access to their labour rights through representation. This article analyses
one example involving a group of temporary migrant agricultural workers engaged seasonally on a British Columbian (BC) farm
under Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) seeking union representation. It considers the question, confronting
courts and tribunals in host states across the OECD, of meaningful access to collective bargaining for temporary migrant workers.
Focussing on how the BC Labour Relations Board determines an appropriate bargaining unit, the inquiry demonstrates that temporary
migrant workers are ill-served by mechanisms aimed at promoting collective bargaining. Although the union involved in the
case secured a certification, the outcome was tenuous unionisation. The resulting collective agreement contained provisions
augmenting workers’ job security by facilitating their circular movement between the sending and host state. However, the
structure of the SAWP, which reinforces workers’ deportability, together with the limits of the prevailing regime of collective
bargaining in BC, modelled on the US Wagner Act, contributed to a certification that was weakly institutionalised and underscored
labour law’s subsidiarity to legal frameworks governing work across borders.
The enlargement of the European Union in 2004 and 2007 simultaneously extended the freedom of movement to workers from new Member States and sharpened existing economic inequalities within the EU. Drawing on the data of three projects, this article examines the conditions under which, and in what ways, real (as opposed to rhetorical) solidarity is forged by trade unions within and across boundaries in relation to migrant workers. Sectoral dynamics provide important insights into cross-country commonalities. In particular, the data demonstrate the importance of the strategies of individual unions and the agency of individuals within them in explaining ‘varieties of solidarity’ and their varying success. The article concludes by arguing that the growth of right-wing xenophobic parties and the failure of social democratic parties to offer an alternative narrative mean that trade union strategies are being formulated and executed in an increasingly hostile political climate.
This special issue takes the migrant broker as a starting point for investigating contemporary regimes of transnational migration across Asia. The articles, which span large parts of Asia—including China, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, as
well as New Zealand—show that marriage migration, student migration and various forms of unskilled labour migration, including predominantly male plantation and construction work and female domestic, entertainment and sex work, are all mediated by brokers. Although much is known about
why migrants leave home and what happens to them upon arrival, considerably less is known about the forms of infrastructure that condition their mobility. A focus on brokers is one productive way of opening this “black box” of migration research. The articles in this issue are
thus not primarily concerned with the experiences of migrants or in mapping migrant networks per se, but rather in considering how mobility is made possible and organized by brokers, most notably in the process of recruitment and documentation. Drawing from this evidence, we argue that in
contrast to the social network approach, a focus on the migrant broker offers a critical methodological vantage point from which to consider the shifting logic of contemporary migration across Asia. In particular, paying ethnographic attention to brokers illuminates the broader infrastructure
that makes mobility possible while revealing that distinctions between state and market, between formal and informal, and between altruistic and profit-oriented networks are impossible to sustain in practice.
Case studies are often presented as self-evident. However, of what the material is a case is actually less evident. It is argued in this article that the analytical movements of generalization, specification, abstraction and concretization can make us more conscious of what our work might be a case, and that the same data have the potential to make different cases depending on these analytical movements. An analytical matrix is developed and the four movements and various pitfalls are discussed.
This paper examines approaches, both within geography and more broadly, to the issue of forced labour in contemporary labour markets. Far from a vestige of pre-capitalist social relations, unfree labour is part of the continuum of exploitation that is intrinsically related the contradictory nature of commodification and to capital as a social relation. The paper focuses on the UK, but draws attention to the ways in which relations of unfreedom in the new global division of labour dissolve clear-cut distinctions between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ nations. The first section focuses on definitions and approaches, including those related to migration and trafficking, from supra-national organisations such as the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The second section looks at geographical approaches to forced labour and examines what a spatially grounded framework can bring to analyses of unfreedom. The conclusion suggests future directions for geographical research on unfree labour, especially relating to the undertheorised relations between unfreedom, domestic labour and social reproduction.
The aim of this paper is to contribute to our understanding of unfree labour in the contemporary global economy, the processes by which it is generated, and its connections with poverty and vulnerability. I challenge dominant ‘residual’ views of unfree labour as either external to global economic activity or occurring solely within small-scale, localized or non-market contexts. Instead, I contend that unfree labour needs to be understood in ‘relational’ terms as a particular form of ‘adverse incorporation’ in the global economy. This form of adverse incorporation is constituted through the circular interaction between, on the one hand, the functioning of the global productive economy and associated labour markets, and, on the other, the social relations of poverty which give rise to vulnerability and to unfree labour. I draw throughout on original empirical research conducted on ‘slave labour’ in Brazilian agriculture and child labour in the Delhi garments sector.
This paper contributes to the literature on labour migration by considering the class commonalities and differences as refracted through gender that are embedded within recruitment practices of different workers. Recent writings on the recruitment of labour migrants often distinguish between low-waged and middle-income workers without clearly addressing the linkages between recruitment practices of both. By adopting a comparative framework between Bangladeshi male migrants and transnational financial professionals, I draw out the varied configurations of gender and class that are deployed in recruitment processes that contour the existing division of labour in Singapore. For both groups of workers, their access to work is conditioned not only by technical skills but by their social and cultural capital as well. Through the analyses of the mesogeography of labour assembly, recruitment methods become crucial channels the realms of economic production and social reproduction are intertwined. This accounts for the segmented social space that is the labour market by demonstrating that recruitment processes are themselves embedded with specific class intersections as deployed through varied gender constructions.
This article compares trade union strategies towards migrant workers from the ‘new Europe’. The analysis focuses on three sectors in the UK, Norway and Germany. We conclude that trade union responses to these migrant workers are shaped by the complex interplay of national industrial relations systems, sectoral dynamics, EU regulation and the agency of individual trade unions.
This article discusses the social, economic, and political factors that led to the rise and consolidation of precarious work in various countries in Asia. We first define what we mean by “precarious work” and its utility for describing the growth of work that is uncertain and insecure and in which risks are shifted from employers to workers. We then provide an overview of the factors that generated precarious work in industrial nations, notably the spread of neoliberalism as a political and economic perspective, the expansion of global competition, and technological development. These macro structural influences created an impetus for greater flexibility among both states and employers, which in turn led to more precarious work in both formal and informal sectors of the economies of many Asian countries. This, in turn, has provoked various types of resistance on the part of workers against the negative consequences of precarious work.
This article presents an analysis of slave labour (as it is known in Brazil) among sugar cane workers within a globalising production network. It employs the Global Production Network (GPN) framework to argue that the dynamics of production networks are fundamental to the reproduction of unfree and degrading labour in this case. First, the power exercised by buyers is a key aspect of processes resulting in slave labour. Conversely, efforts to combat slave labour have been strengthened by acknowledging and working through this power. Second, the state exercises governance within the production network rather than only providing its institutional context. Beyond these dynamics, however, wider processes are involved in making labour available on particular terms and conditions. Third, then, processes of racialisation facilitate the imposition of restrictions on workers’ mobility, degrading conditions and intensification of work. Labour is, in other words, devalued. This implies that the ways in which competing judgments over value are resolved merit as much attention in GPN analysis as is currently given to the creation, enhancement and capture of value.
This article strives to meet two challenges. As a review, it provides a critical discussion of the scholarship concerning undocumented migration, with a special emphasis on ethnographically informed works that foreground significant aspects of the everyday life of undocumented migrants. But another key concern here is to formulate more precisely the theoretical status of migrant "illegality" and deportability in order that further research related to undocumented migration may be conceptualized more rigorously. This review considers the study of migrant "illegality" as an epistemological, methodological, and political problem, in order to then formulate it as a theoretical problem. The article argues that it is insufficient to examine the "illegality" of undocumented migration only in terms of its consequences and that it is necessary also to produce historically informed accounts of the sociopolitical processes of "illegalization" themselves, which can be characterized as the legal production of migrant "illegality.".
Widely divergent forms of action research are emerging to meet requirements of new organizational and social environments. Cases in this special issue are tangible examples of these innovative AR efforts. This article identifies key dimensions that cut through the cases and allow for comparison and contrast. These dimensions include (1) the system level of the charge target, (2) the degree of organization of the research setting, (3) the degree of openness of the AR process, (4) the goals and purpose of the research effort, and (5) the role of the researcher(s). Dimensions are used to locate cases and to support discussion of qualitative aspects that are crucial to understanding. Several general learnings derived from the dimensional analysis and discussion are described.
The lived, and oftentimes silenced, experiences of "foreign workers" articulate the negotiation of power relations between "citizen" and "foreigner", and "Us" and "Them". These are translated into discursive practices that, in effect, legitimize and entrench differences hence, inequalities that effectively discipline the "foreign worker" as "not one of Us". By taking the example of Bangladeshi construction workers in Singapore as a case study, I argue in this paper that the workspaces of "foreign construction workers" in Singapore typify that of a "total institution", which correspondingly moulds the worker into a discursive ideal the "good, docile Other". Such impositions and productions of Otherness, however, face rupture as workers (re)negotiate, (re)work, and (re)inscribe their everyday lives through the employment of what James Scott (1985, 1987) terms "everyday 'resistances'" in rising above that which subjugates them. I will present in this paper primary data elicited and collated from direct participant observation, fieldwork, and in-depth interviews conducted in a construction project in Singapore.
An estimated 1.5 million citizens of Burma reside as refugees or migrants in Thailand, where harsh treatment, harassment and social stigmas contribute to a climate of precarity. Although one possible course of action for any community under strain is political mobilisation, for migrants from Burma in the northern city of Chiang Mai, high degrees of exploitation and insecurity have generated an overwhelming disinterest in political issues. The article examines this relationship in five main sections. The first presents the two key concepts that structure the analysis: precarity and political mobilisation. The second examines the context of migration from Burma to Thailand, focusing both on the climate of unrest found in much of Burma and on Thailand's treatment of migrant workers, its non-participation in core international legislation and its sub-standard migrant registration system. The third explains how this study of Burmese migrants in Chiang Mai was undertaken and reviews the ethical considerations required in a study of vulnerable groups. The fourth documents the study's findings and presents migrants' testimony. The fifth seeks to explain the link between precarity and political passivity in this case, and considers the wider implications. The concluding section restates the core finding.
The vast majority of migrant workers in Thailand are employed predominantly in low-paying occupations commonly described as “3-D jobs” (dangerous, dirty, and difficult). Currently, there are nearly two million documented and undocumented migrant workers, mostly from neighbouring Burma, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, and Cambodia, employed in various industries, including domestic service, throughout the country. While over half a million migrants are officially registered to work in the country, both documented and undocumented migrant workers remain unprotected primarily due to the lack of concrete measures to monitor, implement and enforce laws regarding working and living conditions. Regardless of where they are employed, migrant workers face common problems: low wages; harmful working conditions, poor living conditions; discrimination and harassment, the threat of arrest and deportation; and lack of access to basic resources such as medical care and legal assistance. Based on preliminary research conducted in the summer of 2005, this article looks at the situation of migrant factory and domestic workers in Thailand and explores the ways in which local activists, NGOs, community-based organisations, and international bodies have been looking to assist and protect migrant workers. Successful migrant workers’ struggles and ongoing efforts of mobilization have been made possible with the help of these support groups, and raise the possibility that union and NGO activity have the potential to improve the situation of migrants in Thailand. This also raises the question of whether advocacy groups should be acting in lieu of the state rather than alongside the state, especially when it appears that they are fulfilling their civic duty as enforcer and monitor of migrant workers’ problems.
Codes of labour practice implemented by corporate buyers in their global production networks are one dimension of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Research indicates the benefits of codes for workers are limited and they fail to reach the most vulnerable workers, particularly those employed by labour contractors who face the worst employment conditions. This contribution argues that the commercial dynamics of global production networks provides an opening for civil society organizations to pressure for codes, but simultaneously drives the use of a vulnerable and insecure workforce that is the ‘Achilles Heel’ of codes. Whilst codes have a role to play, inherent tensions underpinned by a commercial logic mean they should only ever be viewed as one strand in broader strategies that address the rights of the most vulnerable workers in global production.
There has been little engagement between the organized labour and labour migration literatures. Studies of organized labour movements in Asia have traditionally focused on trade unions that organize workers in factories, in offices, and on the plantations of the countries in which those unions are based, or on international cooperation between such unions. Studies of migrant labour, on the other hand, have tended to emphasize the demographic features of labour migration flows, or the experiences of migrant workers in either their country of origin or their host society. Yet, with the help of local and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), migrant workers from countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia are beginning to organize both at home and abroad. This article examines the emergence and operation of both migrant labour NGOs and migrant labour associations from a labour movement perspective. It focuses on the schism between the literature on labour migration, in which descriptions of migrant labour NGOs most often appear, and the literature on organized labour, which has generally ignored both the increasing significance of temporary overseas labour migration and the role of non-union bodies in the organization of labour. Examples from Indonesia and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China (herinafter Hong Kong) are used to argue that the experiences of migrant labour NGOs and migrant labour associations should be taken more seriously by trade unions and by the scholars who study them.
In Britain, international migrants have very recently become the major workforce in labour-intensive horticulture. This paper explores the causes of the dramatic increase since the 1990s in the employment of migrant workers in this subsector. It locates this major change in a general pattern of intensification of horticultural production driven by an ongoing process of concentration in retailer power, and in the greater availability of migrant workers, shaped in part by state initiatives to manage immigration.
The paper draws on concepts developed in the US literature on agrarian capitalism. It then uses case histories from British horticulture to illustrate how growers have directly linked innovations involving intensification through labour control to their relationships with retailers. Under pressure on ‘quality’, volume and price, growers are found to have ratcheted up the effort required from workers to achieve the minimum wage through reducing the rates paid for piecework, and in some cases to have changed the type of labour contractor they use to larger, more anonymous businesses. The paper calls for further, commodity-specific and spatially-aware research with a strong ethnographic component. Copyright
Immigration controls are often presented by government as a means of ensuring 'British jobs for British workers' and protecting migrants from exploitation. However; in practice they can undermine labour protections. As well as a tap regulating the flow of labour; immigration controls function as a mould, helping to form types of labour with particular relations to employers and the labour market. In particular; the construction of institutionalised uncertainty together with less formalised migratory processes, help produce 'precarious workers' over whom employers and labour users have particular mechanisms of control.
The aim of this article is to assess the connections between the continued expansion of forms of insecure work and the impact of rising numbers of economic migrants employed in UK labour markets. It shows how competition between foreign‐born workers for jobs in the UK is currently being recast by changes in the jobs available, in forms of precarious labour market attachment and by new patterns of migration into the UK since EU expansion in 2004. The article documents the ways in which migrants with different sets of social characteristics (nationality, gender and skin colour) and different sets of legal entitlements (legal citizenship, EU membership and entitlement to residence) are differentially placed in their competition for some of the poorest jobs in the British economy, drawing on an empirical study of the migrant divisions of labour emerging in two significant sectors in the service industries. It concludes by arguing that new and deeper divisions are emerging between foreign‐born workers in the UK.
Résumé
Cet article vise àévaluer les rapports entre l'essor constant de formes de travail précaire et l'impact des migrants économiques en nombre croissant employés sur les marchés du travail britanniques. La concurrence entre les travailleurs d'origine étrangère pour des emplois au Royaume‐Uni subit actuellement une mutation du fait de l'évolution des postes disponibles, sous des formes d'intégration précaire au marché du travail et selon de nouveaux modèles d'immigration depuis l'élargissement de l'UE en 2004. À partir d'une étude empirique sur les divisions du travail qui se dessinent chez les migrants dans deux importants secteurs de l'industrie des services, l'article met en évidence les manières dont les migrants réunissant différentes caractéristiques sociales (nationalité, genre et couleur de peau) et différentes habilitations légales (citoyenneté, ressortissant de l'UE et droit de séjour) se placent différemment dans la compétition pour certains des postes les plus médiocres de l'économie britannique. Il apparaît en conclusion que des divisions nouvelles et plus profondes apparaissent entre les travailleurs d'origine étrangère au Royaume‐Uni.
Following a brief background on Singapore's development from a product of overlapping diasporas to a multiracial nation, this paper gives attention to the dynamics of renewed streams of transnational labour flows in the current decade in the shaping of the global city. It examines the bifurcated nature of Singapore's foreign labour policies and how the transience/permanence divide is predicated on 'skill'. On the one hand, structural (non)incorporation of contract workers as they are inscribed into (and simultaneously proscribed by) the host society results in vulnerability among what are already heavily marginalised and 'flexibilised' workers with little job security and no opportunities for social advancement within the host society. On the other hand, building a nation in the image of globalisation also requires selectively inclusionist projects to entice foreign talent - highly skilled professional workers, technopreneurs, entrepreneurs and investors - in order to keep Singapore in the global race. These differential politics of inclusion and exclusion lock transmigrants into two structurally determined sectors of society and the economy, with, currently, no possibility of interpenetration. Copyright (c) 2006 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG.