Events

The talk is jointly organized by the Migration Clusters at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore.  

How has migration become privatised in ways that escape ordinary attention? Join us in this expert panel which will consider two spheres of privatisation: first, the power of commercial migration brokers over how migrants are matched with employers and the recruitment debts that such migrants incur to work in Singapore; and second, the outsourcing of policing functions from public law enforcers to private security personnel. Do privatised services add precarity to the lives of such migrant workers? How do low-waged migrant workers navigate the control exercised over their bodies through privatised services? Find out more at the expert panel on ‘Privatised services: migration at what price?’

This talk will be accompanied by a PHOTO EXHIBITION on Singapore’s migration industry for domestic workers, which will run from 6-10 February 2017 at the NUS Central Library foyer. The exhibition is organized by the Asia Research Institute, with support from the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium.
MODERATOR

A/P Elaine Ho, Chair of Migration Cluster at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences; and Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

ABSTRACTS

Conditionality and Chance: Migration Brokers and the Production of Precarity among Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore
Kellynn Wee, Charmian Goh and Brenda SA Yeoh, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

In migration studies, scholars have written that precarious work exists at the intersection between flexible labour market positions and uncertain socio-legal status; it has been framed in terms of checklists, spectrums, and hierarchies. While this offers us a definitional starting point, it does not allow us to fully grasp how precarity is created, challenged, and experienced. To invigorate this idea with time, movement, and space, we apply Luin Goldring’s metaphor of precarity as a game of chutes-and-ladders to our study of how employment agents in Singapore and Indonesia recruit, place, and match migrant domestic workers to employers. Goldring suggests that migrants may glide down a ‘chute’ to greater precarity or ascend a ‘ladder’ to a more secure legal status; this movement depends on what Goldring calls the conditionality surrounding a worker’s legal status. Based on in-depth qualitative interviews with migration industry actors (n=47), we suggest that these ‘chutes’ and ‘ladders’, the board on which precarity plays out, as well as the rules of this game, are not static, pre-existing, or inherent; instead, they are actively, continuously, and dynamically produced by migration brokers and other actors. We argue that precarity lies in having to negotiate through a terrain that is constantly and unpredictably in flux. By interrogating the ways in which brokers actively produce (or mitigate) situations of precarity for workers, we open up the “black box” of the migration industry to understand how migrant workers find themselves slipping in – and out of – varying situations of precarious work.

The Price of a Job
John Gee, Transient Workers Count 2

TWC2’s latest research takes a detailed look at recruitment costs borne by female domestic workers in Singapore. Based on a survey of 232 workers conducted in early 2016, the study reveals how much they paid, to whom, and how many months’ of salary deductions these payments represented. It also gathered their opinions as to what they think would be a fair rate — a question seldom asked in any other research — and takes a stab at explaining why they hold the opinions they do. The study concludes that while the curbs on recruitment costs attempted by the Singapore government and governments of origin countries have not fully achieved their professed goals, “they have had a positive impact in bringing down the number of months that it takes workers to pay off their recruitment costs.” However, the study also reveals other issues, such as training fees and transfer fees when a placement with an employer does not work out. It calls for a fundamental rethinking of the hiring model, rather than rely on piecemeal measures.

Atmospheres of Security and Precarity: Post-Riot Policing and the Management of Dis/Order in Singapore
Joshua J. Kurz, Department of Political Science, National University of Singapore

This paper delves into the relationship between the migration industries and migrant precarity. A private police force in Singapore, charged with policing specific neighborhoods that attract high concentrations of South Asian migrant workers, is investigated as a migration industry. The privatization of policing is significant in this case for at least two reasons: the first is the ‘buffer’ it provides between the state and the policed, allowing a ‘hands off’ stance to be adopted by the state in the face of accusations of mistreatment, exploitation, and/or differential policing of migrants; the second is the atmosphere of security that has been developed in the Little India neighbourhood, a migrant enclave, particularly since the December 2013 Little India Riot. This paper takes the discussion of precarity out of the realms of the changing nature of waged work or the money-debt incurred to finance migration and instead focuses on the political and social mechanisms that extend precarity into the very fabric of urban space.
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