Conference Agenda

The sociology of markets identifies three critical coordination problems in market dynamics: competition, cooperation, and value formation. This study employs qualitative, ethnographically informed methods to delve into these coordination challenges within the context of the Nepalese migrant labor recruitment industry, where the pursuit of cooperation often takes the guise of control. In the labor market for migrant workers, recruiters confront profound uncertainties. The competition among recruitment agencies is fierce, as migrant workers explore numerous job opportunities, making timely deployment a precarious endeavor. To address these coordination challenges, recruiters resort to measures that, on the surface, seek cooperation from migrant workers but often manifest as forms of control. This paper explored two such mechanisms of control in the migrant labour process: confiscation of passports and use of indebtedness and poverty as means of regulating the will and movement of migrant workers. Migrant workers, influenced by their desperation to work abroad, their past experiences and being unaware of their rights, reluctantly surrender their passports, unwittingly relinquishing control over to the migrant brokers. They often also carry a significant debt burden, incurred from informal loans taken to cover recruitment expenses and living costs. This financial vulnerability further exacerbates the power dynamic, with recruiters leveraging the workers' indebtedness to maintain control. The pursuit of cooperation, vital for market functionality in general, often morphs into such control mechanisms. Challenging and expanding the perspective of coordination problems within sociology of market, this paper relies on newly developing field of cross-border labour markets and brings in the complexities associated with markets around labour, especially those that are on the move and often positioned within highly vulnerable populations.

Relative to its working population Malaysia has one of the largest migrant labour forces in the world. Most 'low-skilled' migrants seeking employment in Malaysia stem from rural areas within the region. The state channels these workers into jobs commonly characterised as dirty, dangerous, and degrading. This applies especially to the country's highly profitable palm oil industry. Malaysia's economy is extremely dependent on the export of palm oil; and, with that, on the constant supply of what I term super-exploitable labour. Over the course of centuries, Malaysia has established a segmented labour market, which, at least in the palm oil sector, has produced (and systematically reproduced) highly mobile, hyper precarious, unorganised workers. The historically evolved labour migration regime functions as a lever disciplining migrant workers in the labour process. Legal obstacles and a perceived competition between low-skilled local and foreign workers have so far prevented the widespread organisation of workers in the palm oil sector. The paper draws a connection between the super-exploitation of migrant palm oil workers and the problem of their union organisation in Malaysia. I argue that the super-exploitation of migrants expresses itself in the difficulties of their socio-economic reproduction due to (1.) wages below the minimum level needed to sustain reproduction through the market, (2.) as a result of the preliminary exhaustion of labour power as well as (3.) through practical and institutional hurdles to unionisation. However, I put forward that formal and informal strategies of collective action can advance the immediate working and living conditions of these workers. Even though my theoretical stance draws on empirical evidence gathered in context of my ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia, I argue that the Marxist-based concept of super-exploitation helps to understand the commodification of migrant labour in different parts of the world.

Border control or visa policy is not an only means of controlling the migrant’s mobility. Socially constructed labels, such as gender, nationality, ethnicity, and even skill, also shape, limit and control the mobility of migrants. Questions of (im)mobiliy have been attracting the scholarly attention, especially after the outbreak of the pandemic. However, skilled migrants are often touted to be mobile with few restrictions, but the skilled foreign IT professionals face with obstacles in their socio, professional, economic and geographical mobilities in the host society. Using the concept of intersectionality, this study investigates how do the socially constructed labels, chiefly gender, ethnic/nationality and skill, influence on the (im)mobility experiences of Vietnamese IT professionals in Japan. Based on the qualitative approach, the data of this study is drawn from the semi-structured interviews with over 40 Vietnamese IT professionals who are employed in Japan. The findings of the study are following. Although the entry channel to the labour market remains narrow, the skilled migrants’ technical and linguistic skills allow them to secure a full-time regular job in Japan where is exposed to severe labour shortage. However, their expertise and types of works they are assigned are not accommodated to promotion system implemented in traditional Japanese firms, and their career mobility tend to be stagnant in Japan. Additionally, in a maledominant IT industry, Vietnamese female migrants experience different national and gender hierarchy, depending on a type of firm they work for, and they are forced to find their niche against these hierarchies. This paper argues that seemingly privileged skilled migrants do not experience smooth mobilities, but their gender, nationality and skill often control and prevent career mobility in the transnational labor migration.