The Making of a Global Labor Assembly Line

SEAC hosts Visiting Senior Fellow Dr Andy Scott Chang (Assistant Professor, Singapore Management University) who will present The Making of a Global Labor Assembly Line: Recruitment, Training, and Retention of Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore and Indonesia.

How is a cross-border labor pool produced and reproduced? How do migrants cope with labor control enacted by market intermediaries? In this talk, Dr Change argue that international staffing agencies serve a pivotal midwifery role in governing guest workers, ensuring the replenishment of a flexible and malleable labor supply for host societies. Drawing on 8 months of ethnographic research and 50 in-depth interviews in Singapore and Indonesia, Dr Chang compares how two Singaporean employment firms with Indonesian subsidiaries devise transnational labor regimes in a gendered occupational sector of rising global demand: domestic work. While both companies strive to elicit the commitment of recruits, they manage workers in contrasting ways. Transfer Maids implements a regime of self-exhibition in the host country: it markets migrant women already in Singapore as “storefront maids,” disciplining recently transferred workers to sit still and display their bodies to lure the gaze of employers scouring for experienced domestics. Fresh Maids, by contrast, constructs a regime of self-improvement in the sending country: it subjects aspiring migrants to months of intense training in Indonesia to enhance their skillsets vital for garnering the confidence of employers and for securing overseas passage. By retaining a suitable stock of locally available migrant labor, and by training a new pool of labor from origin communities, both firms operate to guarantee the reproduction of labor migration in spite of external shocks, such as Covid-19, that destabilize it. Dr Chang concludes by discussing how migrant women manage their precarity as job seekers in an international migration system.

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 is a hybrid event and will take place online via zoom and in person at the London School of Economics. If you wish to attend in person please register for an in-person ticket and join us in room MAR 1.09 (1st Floor, Marshall Building). If you wish to attend online please register for an online ticket and the zoom link will be sent to you in due course.

Photo by Anton on Unsplash

Host or Publisher LSE Southeast Asia