Governing Domestic Worker Migration in Southeast Asia: Public–Private Partnerships, Regulatory Grey Zones and the Household

ABSTRACT

Focussing on the example of domestic worker migration, this article seeks to explore the regulatory regimes that control the flow of migrants across Southeast Asia. Although at first glance this appears to be a deeply statist regime, the aim of this article is to complicate this picture and to look at the role that private power and authority places in shaping migration governance. The article focusses on three interrelated issues: (i) how states have increasingly come to regulate migration via partnership arrangements with private sector actors; (ii) how these partnership arrangements are emblematic of broader processes of state transformation that take shape within the complex governance practices surrounding domestic worker migration in Southeast Asia; (iii) how a focus on the micro-processes of domestic worker governance (that is, how migrant worker bodies are constructed and disciplined) also highlights the significance of private actors in this aspect of governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Domestic workers
• migration
• non-state actors
• labour brokerage
• Southeast Asia
• gender

Acknowledgements

An early version of this article was first presented at a workshop on “Transnational Private Regulation and Multi-level Governance in Southeast Asia: Investigating the Possibilities and Limitations for Progressive Governance” convened in Monash University Malaysia in December 2014. Funding from the Monash-Warwick Strategic Alliance is gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Data on undocumented migration in particular is highly inaccurate but even official estimates suggest that these flows are substantial. For example, the World Bank reports that there are 2.1 million registered migrants in Malaysia and over a million unregistered (World Bank 2015, 2). In Thailand, an IOM report put the figure for undocumented migrants at 1.4 million, compared to one million documented migrant workers (Huguet, Chamratrithiong, and Natali 2012).

2. In this article the focus is on several states in the region that are the major sender and recipient countries for formalised flows of domestic workers – specifically, Indonesia, the Philippines and, to a lesser extent, Cambodia (sender countries); and, Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong (destination countries). Hong Kong is included even though it is a non-ASEAN member because it, like Taiwan, is a major destination county for Southeast Asian domestic workers in Asia and there are multiple similarities between labour practices in Hong Kong and other destination countries.

3. Migrant women are, of course, found working in a variety of economic sectors in Southeast Asia such as factory work (see, for example, Crinis 2013; Pearson and Kusakabe 2012). But not only do domestic workers dominate the official flows of migrants, they also face somewhat different employment regimes and conditions of work.

4. The term social reproduction is used in this article to refer to those forms of work usually centred on the household – child and elderly care, biological reproduction, household provisioning, housework – that are central to the production of life itself and generally go unaccounted for in conventional economic analysis.

5. This situation in Singapore is, of course, not unique to domestic worker recruitment. Ong (2014, 444) for example notes “the pro-business state’s reluctance to tackle illegalities” pertaining to the operations of those engaged in the country’s recruitment and migration industries.

6. On the relationship between the TIP reports and wider US foreign policy objectives, note also recent developments that saw Malaysia upgraded to TIP tier 2 at a time when the US is seeking to further develop trade ties with Malaysia via the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.

7. The Indonesian government’s plan to ban the overseas migration of domestic workers by 2017 was abandoned before it came into effect following heavy criticism from civil society campaigners.

8. But see Gerard (2013) for a less optimistic account of the role of migrant labour advocacy within ASEAN and ASEAN-focused activist spaces.

9. Lindquist (2015) notes that there are currently several thousand labour recruitment offices in Indonesia, with 150 on the island of Lombok (one of his research sites) alone.

10. Those involved in migration networks of this nature are of course not exclusively male. The term “middlemen” is widely used in discussions of various forms of rent seeking in the Southeast Asian international recruitment industry but this is not to infer that all of these individuals are male.

11. See also Silvey (2008) on the endemic corruption faced by Indonesian domestic worker migrants leaving the country via the spatially segregated “Terminal 3” of Jakarta airport.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Monash-Warwick Strategic Alliance;