Precarious Rights

This book examines the way that migrant workers' everyday experiences are being shaped by precarious conditions in the receiving countries. Utilising a mixed methods approach, the case studies of migrant workers in Thailand and Thai migrant workers in Taiwan, South Korea and the USA from 2005-2020 are analyzed to compare the strategies used toward justice in various contexts such as labour, permanent residency, and human rights. Revealing the limitations for true economic and social integration, the author argues that precarious conditions and exclusion from legal protections are the forces that limit noncitizens’ access to remedies against wage theft, labour trafficking, forced labour and related human rights violations. NGOs advocating alongside Southeast Asian migrant workers therefore exemplify how transnational labour rights are negotiated to increase state social protections for foreign nationals abroad, working in dirty, dangerous, and degrading jobs globally. Advancing the growing literature on labour migration and precarities in South East Asia and the USA, the author combines labour and anti-trafficking theories with practices utilized by NGO and trade unions to participate in setting the agenda of this interdisciplinary field of migrant precarity. The implications are therefore not just of interest to scholars of migration from and in Asia but appeals to international practitioners in trade unions and policy makers.

Sudarat Musikawong is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Population and Social Research(IPSR), Mahidol University, Thailand. Musikawong's work connects the everyday experiences of migrant workers with the macro-socio-economic historical conditions, social political national circumstances, migration, and cultural production. Her long-term research goals are to develop methodologies, pracitioner knowledge, and theoretical frameworks that provide connections between these often-divergent research agendas between the social sciences and humanities.