Producing Migrant Domestic Work: Exploring the Everyday Political Economy of Malaysia's ‘Maid Shortage’

Abstract

The article considers how the employment of domestic workers by middle-class Malaysian households has been thrown into flux by the imposition of bans on the sending of workers by states such as Indonesia and Cambodia, as well as the decline in numbers of women seeking employment as domestic workers in Malaysia and rising employment costs. This article does not seek to focus on the high-level policy negotiations and disputes that have come to characterize systems of temporary return migration for domestic work in Asia, but to focus in on the everyday political economies (of social reproduction, work, and everyday agency) that constitute the conditions of possibility within which bilateral disputes and labour agreements between Southeast Asian states take shape. We examine three dimensions of migration for domestic work in Southeast Asia in ways that bring together literatures on everyday life and social reproduction. These interconnected yet distinct dimensions are (a) the relationship between strategies to boost remittances and flows of workers from some of the most impoverished parts of Southeast Asia; (b) the centrality of low-cost migrant domestic workers to Malaysian middle-class ‘success stories’, and (c) the day-to-day production of ‘good’ worker subjects—a process that is actively and constantly resisted by workers themselves. The article provides important insights into the mechanisms through arenas of everyday life—and the household in particular—are transformed; becoming sites for the ever widening and deepening of the market economy.

Keywords:

• Southeast Asia
• Malaysia
• domestic work
• migration
• everyday life
• feminist political economy

Acknowledgements

We extend our thanks to the anonymous reviewers whose suggestions helped to strengthen this paper. Thanks also go to Adrienne Roberts for her useful suggestions on an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For such a discussion see Elias (2013), Holliday (2012), and Khadijah and Shakila (2012).

2 Thus the ‘modern women’ is portrayed as trapped and unreflective—as in ‘control of production, of the household, children's education, social and cultural life, romance and love’ (1995, p. 153) and little else. See also Olson (2011) and Green (2012).

3 Barisan Nasional—the ruling coalition of parties that has been in power since Malaysia gained independence.

4 The year 2020 has a symbolic importance in Malaysian politics and policy-making. It is the date that former PM Mahathir Mohammed promised that the country would attain developed country status by and the date continues to loom large in state development plans, documents, and ministerial announcements.

5 The limits of viewing migration as a simplistic state-to-state transfer of people regulated via some sort of bilateral arrangement or MOU is emphasized by Lindquist, Xiang, and Yeoh (2012) who point to the significance of broker networks which operate not entirely externally to the state.

6 This issue about the relationship between state action (in this case the establishment of state-sanctioned migratory schemes) and the willingness of migrants to avoid the state by shedding their legal identity and becoming ‘undocumented’ is also found in other areas of the migration studies literature. See, for example, Ellermann (2010).

7 In interview, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) for example suggested that almost all domestic worker migration to Malaysia had gone via informal/unofficial routes (personal interview (Louth) Consultant, IOM Cambodia, interviewed in Phnom Penh, March 7, 2014), a reflection of both the poor capacity of the state to actually regulate domestic worker floes as well as an overall lack of trust in state institutions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Juanita Elias

Juanita Elias is Associate Professor in International Political Economy at the University of Warwick. Her research and teaching interests include: gendered approaches to global political economy, Southeast Asian studies, studies of work employment and migration, and the political economy of care. Her recent journal articles appear in International Political Sociology, the Pacific Review, Asian Studies Review and International Feminist Journal of Politics. She is the co-editor with Samanthi J. Gunawardana of The global political economy of the household in Asia (2013, Palgrave MacMillan) and co-editor with Lena Rethel of The everyday political economy of Southeast Asia (2016, Cambridge University Press).

Jonathon Louth

Jonathon Louth is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide where he is also an associate fellow of the Indo-Pacific Research Governance Centre. Previously he was a Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Chester in the UK. His research focuses on intersections between international relations theory, international political economy, and the philosophy of (social) science. This informs his research on Southeast Asia and the politics of wider economic integration across the region (with an emphasis on Cambodia). This has generated work on gender, everyday lives, neoliberal governance, financialization, constructions of order, and the impact of economic thought upon social structures. He has an edited volume, Edges of identity: The production of neoliberal subjectivities (forthcoming in 2016).