Temporary International Labor Migration and Development in South and Southeast Asia

Abstract

Growing migrant worker remittances are regarded as an important and more reliable source of capital to finance development in South and Southeast Asia than international aid and foreign direct investment. International financial institutions (IFIs) have proselytized based on this promise and have represented the feminization of labor migration as injecting more momentum into developmental potential. Many Asian governments have been won over by this promise, establishing labor-export policies to generate overseas earnings. This promise has also colored feminist interventions, especially within international agencies focused on migrant women workers' rights, which emphasize the need to redress labor market disadvantage for migrant domestic workers in particular. Insofar as labor-export programs are based on temporary migration, this study argues that the focus of support for migrant women workers fails to address the systemic disadvantage associated with temporariness.

KEYWORDS:

• Division of labor
• globalization
• migrant labor
• occupational segregation

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful for the very constructive feedback of anonymous referees.

Notes

 ¹ Interviews were conducted with representatives from migrant worker advocacy groups and migrant worker organizations, including in the Philippines: Center for Migrant Advocacy, Center for Overseas Workers, Development Alternatives for Women for a New Era (DAWN), Migrante International, Scalabrini Migration Center, Unlad Kabayan; in Hong Kong: Associations of Sri-Lankans in Hong Kong, The Asian Migrant Centre, The Asian Migrants Coordinating Body (AMCB), Asia Monitor Resource Centre (AMRC), The Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants, The Far East Overseas Nepalese Association (FEONA), The Filipino Migrant Workers Union, The Indonesian Migrant Workers Union, The United Filipinos in Hong Kong (UNIFIL-MIGRANTE-HK); in Singapore: the Migrant Workers Centre; in Greece: Kasapi Hellas; and, in Italy: Commission for Filipino Migrant Workers(CFMW) and the Sri Lanka Association Italy.

 ² All personal information that would allow the identification of any person(s) described in this contribution has been removed.

 ³ The Philippines is the third-biggest recipient of remittances behind India, Mexico, and China, and remittances are the largest source of export earnings, accounting for a much larger proportion of Philippine national income (12–13 percent) than India (4–5 percent), Mexico (3.5 percent), and China (1 percent; World Bank 2011).

 ⁴ Other labor-export states across Asia have tended to be more hesitant in supporting women's overseas employment. Some, notably Bangladesh and Nepal, restricted women's labor migration by proscribing exit visas, especially for employment in nonprofessional occupations, such as domestic labor; for mothers with young children; and for women below a certain age. These governments are now liberalizing migration policy to promote women's labor migration as an element of economic development policy (Oishi 2005; Kazi Shek Farid, Lavlu Mozumdar, Md. Shajahan Kabir, and K. B. Hussain 2009).

 ⁵ Some critics have observed that the feminization of migration extends and exaggerates women's family responsibilities, adding yet another layer, and a spatial one at that, to women's “double day” (Parreñas 2001; Nicole Constable 2003; Pei-Chia Lan 2005; Shu-Ju Ada Cheng 2006).

 ⁶ The World Bank does not provide evidence to support this (see World Bank [2006c]: 125, 131), although it has commissioned research on gender differentials in remittance patterns, and its 2007–2010 Gender Action Plan is specifically concerned with empowering women migrant workers through improved access to finance (Buchori and Amalia 2004; World Bank 2006b, 2010).

 ⁷ Some survey data that compares remittances and earnings of women and men workers in the Philippines concluded that this finding should be treated with considerable caution (Moshe Semyonov and Anastasia Gorodzeisky 2005). The consolidation of patriarchal relations may also explain gendered differences in remittances. During the course of my fieldwork, some younger Indonesian women described how they were subject to repeated demands to remit income to meet the cost of servicing family needs, including elevating husbands' lifestyles or supporting work-shy brothers, which could simply evidence the fact that the higher rate of women's remittances reflects another way in which patriarchal relations govern behavior. Overseas paid work may have personally liberating aspects, but it can also reflect a recomposition in patriarchal relations.

 ⁸ The potentially empowering effects of migration are obviously not straightforward. One survey of Filipina and Indonesian migrant women workers reported that the majority stated that it was their decision to seek offshore employment (Maruja M. B. Asis 2001; Setiadi Sukamdi, Agus Indiyanto, Abdul Haris, and Irwan Abdullah 2001). My discussions with several Indonesian workers revealed that it was often husbands and/or parents who had decided that the women should migrate for work, so the momentum to migrate may reflect contradictory forces. Being separated from families can place women working overseas in alien socioeconomic and cultural environments that subject them to experiences at variance with those that prevail in home communities, and that are isolating and troubling and thus disempowering (Rosslyn von der Borch 2008). Petra Dannecker's (2009) research on Bangladeshi women migrant workers suggests that labor migration can also erode women's social standing. In my discussions with young Indonesian domestic workers employed in Singapore, several intimated that the relative personal freedom that they were experiencing as domestic workers would make their return to traditional roles as wives and daughters-in-law quite a challenge. There is considerable effort being undertaken by a number of migrant women workers' advocacy groups and other civil society organizations, including UNIFEM, ILO, and IOM, to promote programs toward deepening and institutionalizing migrant women's empowerment (UNIFEM n.d.).

 ⁹ The World Bank–published data sets for each of these countries over the period 1990–2008 do not demonstrate a robust association between remittances and other key economic indicators.

¹⁰ Indeed, the 2008 global financial crisis appears to have had a perverse effect on remittance flows: some families forwarded money to members working overseas as their earnings were cut, which has been noted with respect to Mexican workers in the United States and the Indian and Philippine governments establishing income relief programs (Tom Braithwaite 2009; Roel Landingin 2009; Sarah O'Connor 2009; James Lamont 2010).

¹¹ It is not always the case that formal channels are less expensive or a more effective measure for transferring money to family. My research among Filipino workers in Athens indicated that there was greater reliance upon informal networks, mostly friends, to remit money because this was more convenient and because there was a belief that the less government and immigration officials know about workers' financial affairs, the better. Research on remittance patterns among Bangladeshi workers suggests that informal money transfer channels are quicker and often less expensive than formal channels (Md. Mizanur Rahman and Lian Kwen Fee 2005).

¹² My meetings with migrant workers and civil society groups revealed a number of reintegration programs being promoted in Hong Kong and Singapore that prepared women workers for their return through training in a range of occupational skills – such as computing, accounting, and dressmaking, as well as financial management and business management more generally. Many of the schemes, however, tend to concentrate on engaging women in occupations traditionally dominated by women and characterized by low pay and poor conditions.

¹³ There is increased consideration of the opportunity costs of the reliance on expanding labor exports for other sectors of the Philippines and the Indonesian economies (Ernesto M. Pernia 2007; William Pesek 2012; Yonatri Rilmania 2011).

¹⁴ Amazingly, the World Bank recognizes the exercise and abuse of market power by recruitment agencies, resulting in workers incurring substantial costs, but it fails to argue for greater and effective regulation of recruitment and labor placement industries. The World Bank contends that regulations to govern recruitment would place labor-export countries at a competitive disadvantage, which is in contrast to the efforts of the Committee on Payment and Settlement Systems and IMF to establish a voluntary code of principles for remittance service providers (World Bank 2006c).

¹⁵ Such cases expose one of the fundamental flaws in the World Bank's argument that there is cause for specific regulations to protect at-risk workers, those that have been trafficked or are undocumented, as distinct from comprehensive labor and human rights laws that would provide greater protection for all migrant workers.

¹⁶ The competition is intensifying as countries in the region that have hitherto restricted the migration of women workers, such as Bangladesh and Nepal, are lifting restrictions, and as other countries, such as Vietnam and China, are promoting labor migration as an export-revenue–earning strategy.

¹⁷ Marking its first foray into placing workers in the international healthcare labor market, the Indonesian government negotiated under the terms of the Japan–Indonesia Economic Partnership Agreement to provide a trial deployment of nurses and nurse aid healthcare workers to work in aged care facilities in Japan (David Adam Stott 2008).

¹⁸ The ability of labor-export countries to restrict the flow of workers to those countries in which labor abuses are rife has been further frustrated by their inability to stop the migration of undocumented workers to these countries (Peter Alford 2010; Ismira Lutfia and Camelia Pasandaran 2010).

¹⁹ The World Bank notes that “the marginal propensity to remit income tends to decline with the length of a migrant's stay in a host country, and ties with the home country weaken over time” (2006c: 93). Similarly, Elke Holst, Andrea Schäfer, and Mechthild Schrooten's (2012) analysis of migrant remittances in Germany shows that the structure of transnational networks and the attainment of German citizenship have a major impact on the amount remitted, and the results differ between women and men migrants.

²⁰ The World Bank supports Mode 4 of the World Trade Organization's General Agreement on Trade in Services covering the “Movement of Natural Persons” for similar reasons.

²¹ The Singaporean government justifies unbroken work arrangements by arguing that women choose to be employed in them (Chris Wright 2010; Singapore National Committee for the United Development Fund for Women [UNIFEM Singapore], Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics [HOME], and Transient Workers Count Too [TWC2] 2011).

²² In arguing this, I do not want to diminish the importance of the much higher death and injury rate among temporary men migrant workers, especially in construction.

²³ This is acknowledged by the Singaporean government, which has recommended induction programs for new employees to acquaint them with such risks.

²⁴ The “Joint Civil Society Declaration and Recommendations on Migration, Development and Human Rights and the Future of the Global Forum on Migration and Development,” for instance, called for policies to strengthen the labor rights and human rights of migrant workers, and especially migrant women workers, but fell short of the appeal for the right to transition to resettlement (People's Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights 2009).

²⁵ The Convention was endorsed at the 100th Session of the ILO's General Conference in June 2011.