Searching for Work

More and more, in Southeast Asia, low-skilled labor is expected to be mobile and job-seeking implies leaving. In factories, plantations, fields, extraction, commerce, services, and construction, a whole nebula of low-paid, mostly young, small-scale migrants allows the regional economy to function. This volume brings together a unique collection of bottom-up accounts of the work and life of locally mobile workers who are highly representative in their countries and throughout the region: contractual farmers in Laos, miners, young urban workers in services, construction workers in Indonesia, Filipino shoemakers, and Vietnamese factory workers. The chapters focus on these laborers’ gendered ideas of work and life at large but also on the ideology of work they have constructed. In addition to telling these stories, the contributors analyze how ill-defined mobile work leads to lives of structural and symbolic precariousness. In different ways, precarization is questioned as a specific gendered economic policy within neoliberal contexts. The workers’ reflexive considerations of their makeshift life projects lead to descriptions of embodied forms of resilience and creativity, however diverse. Through interdisciplinary approaches, heightened attention is paid to the interaction between localities, moral economies, and global neoliberal politics.

 

Contributors are Matteo Carlo Alcano, Vanina Bouté, Michela Cerimele, Concepcion Lagos, Pietro P. Masina, Giacomo Tabacco, and Silvia Vignato

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Locally Mobile Workers in Southeast Asia: An Invisible, Gendered, and Precarious Nebula

 

1. New Path of Work at the Lao-Chinese Border: From Self-Sufficient Agricultur to Wage Labor

 

2. Within and Beyond the "Rainy Mountains": Mobility, Access to Work, and Mining in Gold-Rich West Aceh

 

3. "What is the Solution, Miss?": Small-Scale Mobility, Work, and Unemployment for Young, Unskilled Laborers in Aceh

 

4. A Site for Workers: Construction Sites and Mobility in Surabaya

 

5. On Foot in the Age of Globalization: Sapatero in the Philippine Footwear Capital

 

6. Informalizing the Formal: Work and the Dual Dormitory Labor Regime in Hanoi's Thang Long Industrial Park

 

7. An Uneven Development Trap in Southeast Asia and Its Implications for Labor

 

Contributors

Index of Subjects and Authors