Papers

• Between solidarity and exploitation: the complex relationships between Vietnamese nail salon owners and precarious migrant workers in the UK Seb Rumsby University of Warwick

  In recent years, increasing numbers of Vietnamese migrants have been reaching the UK and finding their way into informal employment arrangements – overwhelmingly at nail salons owned by more established Vietnamese migrants and descendants of the ‘boat people’ diaspora. The British government and popular media stigmatises nail salons as sights of potential ‘modern slavery’, where vulnerable workers are exploited by unscrupulous bosses. This narrative is rejected as an ‘ugly lie’ by both Vietnamese employers and indeed many employees, who compare UK salaries favourably with previous opportunities in Vietnam, even if they fall short of the legal minimum wage. However, when Covid-induced lockdowns in 2020-21 forced the nail salon industry to close almost overnight, and only legally registered workers were eligible for the government furlough scheme, many irregular workers were left without any means of income and forced to rely on the goodwill of their bosses – and the wider Vietnamese community.

  This paper explores the complex and sometimes uncomfortable relationships of solidarity, support and exploitation between precarious Vietnamese migrant workers and the owners of production who they often live together with and share communal spaces with. Far from being passive ‘victims’, recent migrants demonstrate their agency and ability to negotiate a degree of bargaining power in spite of their lack of access to state benefits or union representation. Meanwhile, nail salon owners displayed numerous acts of mutual support and empathy towards more vulnerable members of the Vietnamese community during the Covid-19 lockdown. Nevertheless, the potential for ‘stretched solidarity’ is continually threatened to be undermined by the unequal power relations between employers and workers.

• Entrenching Covid capitalism in the global garment industry: Labour struggles under the “neoliberal disease” in authoritarian Cambodia Sabina Lawreniuk University of Nottingham

  The COVID-19 pandemic has caused severe hardship for workers in the global garment and footwear industry, where an estimated 80% of 70 million workers worldwide are women. These dynamics are best exemplified through the mass layoffs that grabbed global media headlines throughout 2020, but are also revealed on the ground in slower, everyday practices of workplace restructuring taking place as a result of the pandemic. In this paper, we draw on original data from the GCRF-funded ReFashion project to trace the contours of an emergent Covid capitalism in Cambodia’s garment industry and its entrenchment through renewed union repression. ReFashion is a longitudinal study combining repeat quantitative surveys and qualitative follow-ups with a cohort of 200 workers over 24 months, as well as further interviews and observations with garment sector stakeholders including labour unions in Cambodia. Covid capitalism here, we argue, is underscored by deepening reliance on techniques of flexibilization and intensification in an already precarious and highly pressurised feminised workplace. In an increasingly authoritarian country context, hostile to civil society and trade union organisation, the possibilities of women’s resistance against the worsening terms of their employment are being bound further by an intensification of labour repression under the guise of Covid-19 economic and public health responses. Bridging emerging work on the co-pathogenesis of Covid-19 as a “neoliberal disease” (Sparke 2021) with calls for geographers to take a “more rigorous anti-authoritarian stance” (Simandan, Rinner, and Capurri 2022) to the pandemic response, in the paper we explore the misuse and abuse of social and health protections to fortify a long-term strengthening of the entwined forces of state and capital power against the interests of global labour.

• On the Coattails of Globalization: Migration, Migrants and COVID-19 in Asia Diana Suhardiman Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies

  This paper reveals how the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the ambivalent positioning of migration as a pathway for human development. Viewing migrants are quintessential globalization subjects and drawing on interviews with international and domestic labour migrants from Bangladesh, India, Laos and Myanmar working in Laos, Myanmar, China, Singapore and Thailand, the paper explores the vulnerabilities, challenges and opportunities that have come with migration and how these have been reconfigured as the pandemic has progressed, disproportionately heightening migrants’ exposure to the virus and their socioeconomic precarity. Even in non-pandemic times, individual migrants and their families have often experienced simultaneously outcomes that can be counted as broadly positive, and emblematic of ‘good change’, as well as negative changes. Not only are migration’s outcomes developmentally mixed, but the conclusions that are drawn are frequently tied to the lens through which the process is viewed. Through their personal stories, the paper provides insights into the evolving livelihood pathways of migrant workers during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, their (changing) views of migration as a route to progress, and tentatively sets out how ruptures caused by the pandemic may lead to a re-thinking of livelihood pathways for such men and women and their families.

• Safety net or dead end? Gig-economy work, platform giants and the politics of social policy (in)action in pandemic Southeast Asia Gerard McCarthy National University of Singapore

  The boom of app-based delivery platforms across Southeast Asia in recent years has created a paradoxical problem for policy-makers and precarious gig-economy workers alike. Apps such as Grab, Gojek and FoodPanda have filled logistical and food security gaps during lockdowns and provided work to some people laid off during the peak of downturns. Yet the growing centrality of platform giants to critical social infrastructure has also exposed the cracks in social policy frameworks while simultaneously making them more influential over regulatory decision-making than ever before. This is especially true in Southeast Asia, where patchy support to low-income households and the unemployed prior to the pandemic forced many to rely on precarious work and private debt to survive the 2020-2021 economic recession. Informed by case-studies of state-worker-business relations during COVID-19, this paper examines how laissez faire approaches to the precarity of workers in the gig-economy have been challenged in different ways across the region. In Singapore, for example, a piecemeal approach of cash transfers organized by tripartite agreement between government, platforms and nascent worker associations shaped the provision of social protection to gig-economy drivers. In contrast, Malaysia’s initially slow response gave way to a more comprehensive and state-led series of insurances as drivers organised while also legally reinforcing the categorization of workers as ‘partners’ rather than employees. Focusing on the challenge to and reinforcement of welfare regimes in the face of worker precarity and fragile macro-economic recoveries, the paper concludes by examining how the shifting dynamics of state-business-worker relations may alter the trajectory of social policy reform in the years ahead.

• Transformation of labour in Singapore: Gender and multiplications of migrant work during Covid-19 Junjia Ye Nanyang Technological University

  Situated in Singapore, this paper examines how the socio-political life of the pandemic is deeply entangled with the gendered management of low-waged labour migrants. Techno-political discourses and practices of pandemic management accelerated the state’s attempts to differently include migrant workers, amplifying the “multiplication of labour” (Mezzadra and Nielson, 2013) already in place prior to 2020. Against the backdrop of growing structural vulnerabilities for low-waged workers, I argue that migrant labour is being transformed through a striking co-production of migrant labour management and pandemic management. I draw upon government policies, regulations and speeches to demonstrate that measures of pandemic management contributes not only to the spatial regime of migrant management. They also articulate and rationalize the subject transformation of the low-waged male migrant to the extent that, on top of being a moral risk, they are also now a medical risk. The platformization of domestic work carried out by female migrants that has grown during this time also reflect the ways in which this work, that is crucial to the social reproduction of Singaporean life, is also further fragmented.

Abstract

Keywords

• Activism
• Capitalism
• Covid
• Labour
• Violence