"The lottery of my life": Migration trajectories and the production of precarity among Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore's construction industry. (September 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Baey, Grace; Yeoh, Brenda S. A.
• Is Part Of: Asian and Pacific migration journal. Volume 27:Number 3(2018)
• Page Start: 249
• Page End: 272
• Publication Date: 2018-09
• Subjects: temporary migration regimes -- construction workers -- precarity -- aspiration -- Asia; Asia -- Emigration and immigration -- Periodicals; Pacific Area -- Emigration and immigration -- Periodicals; Migration, Internal -- Asia -- Periodicals; Migration, Internal -- Pacific Area -- Periodicals; Emigration and immigration; Migration, Internal; Asia; Pacific Area; Periodicals; 325
• DOI: 10.1177/0117196818780087
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0117-1968

Abstract

Within the scholarship on precarity, low-waged contract-based migrants are recognized as centrally implicated in precarious employment conditions at the bottom of neoliberal capitalist labor markets. Precarity as a socially corrosive condition stems from both the multiple insecurities of the workplace as disposable labor, and a sense of deportability as migrant subjects with marginal socio-legal status in the host society. Our study of Bangladeshi construction workers in Singapore contributes to refining understandings of precarity by approaching labor migration as a cumulative, intensively mediated process, whereby risks and vulnerabilities are compounded across different sites in migrants' trajectories, even as they enact themselves as mobile, aspiring subjects. As a condition-in-the-making, precarity is experienced and compounded, through a continuum beginning in pre-migration indebtedness, multiplying through entanglements with the migration industry, and manifesting in workplace vulnerabilities at destination. It is most finely balanced when predictability and planning yield to arbitrary hope.