Producing Storefront and Shopfloor Maids: Transnational Carework Regimes in Singapore and Indonesia

• In Event: International Migration Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 01. Migrant domestic workers

Abstract

This article advances theories of global service work by demonstrating how staffing organisations extend employer control through cross-border labour mediation. Drawing on seven months of participant observation and 46 interviews in Singapore and Indonesia, the author compares how two private employment agencies manage migrant domestic workers nested in distinct labour markets. TransferMaids operated a storefront regime in the niche market for employers seeking experienced sojourners. It utilised a personalistic mode of labour control to inculcate what the author calls presentational personalism, a culture of servitude rooted in the self-presentation of expertise. In contrast, FreshMaids tailored a shopfloor regime to the mass market for aspiring domestics hired from overseas. Management used bureaucratic control to cultivate an ethos of prescriptive formalism, whereby the emotional states and bodily comportment of recruits were routinised through professionalisation. Although designed to engender labour compliance, these carework regimes unintentionally stimulated a repertoire of everyday resistance among jobseekers.

Author

• Andy Scott Chang, Florida State University