Producing ideal Bangladeshi migrants for precarious construction work in Qatar

ABSTRACT

The paper analyses the mediation of Bangladeshi construction worker migration to the Gulf and how multiple and unpredictable risks and opportunities are co-created by brokers, employers and the state. It examines how migrants navigate these to achieve imagined futures and their own role in co-creating precarity. The authors employ a relational lens to examine why aspiring migrants choose informal brokers over formal migration managers. The everyday practices of brokers in producing ideal Bangladeshi workers for the Qatari labour market and how this precarises migrant labour are unpacked. Migrant and broker interviews provide insights into the degrees of precarity experienced at different stages of the migration process. Entangled with these processes of precarisation are the strategies employed by migrant workers to resist precarity and transform their social and economic positions in the long term. The rich accounts presented in the paper provide evidence on the dialectical relationship between migrants and migration intermediaries which contrasts with popular discourses about brokers as exploiters and migrants as victims without agency.

KEYWORDS:

• Precarity
• subjectivation
• Bangladesh
• migrant construction work
• agency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Priya Deshingkar http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5138-4612

Notes

1 The survey covered 1200 households and 6000 individuals with 1500 current migrants spread over 51 villages in six Upazilas (districts).

2 Until recently women were not allowed to migrate internationally from Bangladesh due to government policies rooted in such cultural beliefs (Dannecker 2009). Now, the international migration of women is significant but into other occupations such as domestic work that are stereotypically assigned to women although not from this area where migration is relatively recent and still male dominated. However, it should be noted that the migration of women for construction work within the country for ‘women’s work’ such as carrying bricks and sifting sand is widespread (Ahsan 1997; Shah 2004).

3 This term is preferred by the brokers instead of the pejorative term dalal which carries connotations of exploitation.

4 The moral contract with a dalal in the village is often witnessed by village elders locally known as Matbars or Shashlikars.

5 The non-payment of subcontractors by the company could be a factor as well. Subcontractors are the main employers of foreign labour and they cannot pay their workers until they themselves are paid. The normal practice in Qatar is for companies to pay their subcontractors after they have received payment from the client or ‘pay when paid’ (Wells and Fern 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Department for International Development, UK Government (PO 4913).