SEAC hosted Visiting Senior Fellow Dr Andy Scott Chang (Assistant Professor, Singapore Management University) who presented Storefront Maids and Shopfloor Maids on the Global Labor Assembly Line: Control and Deployment of Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore and Indonesia.
How is a transnational workforce reproduced? In this seminar, Dr Chang argued that international staffing agencies play a midwifery role in the governance of guest workers, ensuring the replenishment of a flexible and malleable labor supply. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography in Singapore and Indonesia, he compared how two multinational employment agencies that deploy migrant labor from the same origin to the same destination construct transnational labor regimes in a gendered occupational sector. While both companies elicit the commitment of recruits, they market contrasting but complementary categories of women domestic workers. TransferMaids implements a regime of exhibition on the storefront: it disciplines sojourning migrants to display their bodies to lure the gaze of employers scouring for experienced domestics. Conversely, FreshMaids devises a regime of improvement on the shopfloor: it trains the bodies of aspiring migrants to facilitate their acquisition of overseas employment. By retaining a stock of spatially proximate migrant labor, and by producing a remote labor pool ready for cross-border deployment, international staffing firms buttress the reproduction of labor migration in spite of external shocks that destabilize it. Women manage their precarity as international job seekers in two ways. First, migrant women decline unattractive jobs and orchestrate deference, sociability, and competence to entice desirable employers. Second, they engage in soroization and backstage gossip to preserve their selfhood vis-à-vis powerful forces they perceive as exploitative, abusive, and difficult.
Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Andy Scott Chang is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Singapore Management University. He is a sociologist of gender, migration, and work. His scholarship explores the construction of transnational labor markets and migrant livelihoods in an era of accelerated globalization, with a focus on Indonesia and emerging destination states in East Asia. His research has appeared at Social Problems and Pacific Affairs and has won several awards from the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
Prof. Hyun Bang Shin (@urbancommune) is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and directs the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. His research centres on the critical analysis of the political economy of speculative urbanisation, gentrification and displacement, urban spectacles, and urbanism with particular attention to Asian cities. His books include Planetary Gentrification (Polity, 2016), Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities and Housing in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Exporting Urban Korea? Reconsidering the Korean Urban Development Experience (Routledge, 2021), and The Political Economy of Mega Projects in Asia: Globalization and Urban Transformation (Routledge, forthcoming). He is Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and is also a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation.
This event was recorded and the video can be watched here.