Gendered political economy and the politics of migrant worker rights: the view from South-East Asia

Abstract

Focusing on the South-East Asian region and looking specifically at activism around the position of migrant domestic workers in the region, this article seeks to evaluate why migrant activist organisations appear to have had, at best, modest influence on gendering the International Labour Organization's approach to labour rights. The author argues that this is largely due to how dominant understandings of labour rights have neglected the significance of social relations of reproduction (i.e. those ‘care-related’ activities associated with the household) to the functioning of the labour market. Furthermore, a transnationalisation of social relations of reproduction is manifested in the increased feminisation of labour migration in the region and this highlights further problems with dominant labour rights perspectives that remain largely state-centric in their approach. The significance of South-East Asian states in promoting localised regimes of citizenship/immigration and industrial relations greatly limits the ability of activist groups to claim and utilise the language of human rights. Nonetheless, the article argues that a concern with the human rights of female migrants can potentially destabilise dominant understandings of labour and human rights. More generally, the article seeks to demonstrate the insights that a critical feminist human rights approach can bring to studies of work and employment within international political economy.

Notes

1. This paper was presented at the ‘Sociological Turn in Australian IPE’ workshop, University of Adelaide, 4–5 October 2007. The author thanks all those who provided feedback on earlier drafts. This article draws upon research that was conducted in 2006 when the author was a visiting research fellow at the National University of Singapore's Asia Research Institute (ARI). The author acknowledges the financial support of ARI and the University of Adelaide's Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Small Grants Scheme.

2. This is not to suggest that feminist or ‘gendered’ approaches to IPE are concerned exclusively with the role and position of marginalised groups of women in the global economy. For example, as Griffin's article in this issue notes, a feminist IPE also provides useful ways into thinking through how institutions and practices of global governance are both implicitly and explicitly gendered (see also True 2008). Feminist IPE has also contributed greatly to discussions of global resistance politics (see, for example, Eschle and Maiguashca 2007) and debates on the state (see, for example, Rai 2002).

3. Hugo (2005: 60) estimates, for example, that currently nine in ten Indonesians migrating to Singapore are female domestic workers.

4. Yeoh and Huang (1999) note similar practices in Singapore.

5. Juan Somavia, Director General of the ILO, cited on the ILO International Migration Programme website, <www.ilo.org/public/english/protection/migrant> (accessed 21 October 2008).

6. These include the Migration for Employment (Revised) Convention 1949 (No. 97), the Migrant Workers (Supplementary Provisions) Convention 1975 (No. 143) and other accompanying Recommendations.

7. The CEDAW is unique amongst international human rights treaties in that it has in place a monitoring process. In 1999, the United Nations General Assembly endorsed the CEDAW Optional Protocol which, if ratified, confers upon states the responsibility to recognise the ability of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women to receive complaints from individuals and groups. This complaints procedure is known as the ‘shadow reporting mechanism’ and enables civil society groups to engage in the CEDAW process.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Juanita Elias

Juanita Elias is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Adelaide. She is the author of Fashioning Inequality: The Multinational Corporation and Gendered Employment in a Globalising World (Ashgate, 2004) and co-author of the textbook International Relations: The Basics (Routledge, 2007). Recent journal publications have appeared in the Review of International Studies, Economy and Society and Third World Quarterly