UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the interlocking web of social and political institutions that underpins the organization of international migration from the standpoint of a migrant-sending country. Based on 19 months of participant observation and interviews with more than 120 bureaucrats, staffing agents, NGOs, migrants and their families in Indonesia, Taiwan, and Singapore, the dissertation explores why and how labor management has propelled Indonesia’s rise as the world’s largest exporter of live-in women care workers.

This dissertation uses training centers as an entry point to examine the political economy of labor management. Training centers are the nervous system of Indonesia’s labor export system, wherein raw labor-power is transformed into an ideal mobile workforce. Against the premise of a race to the bottom in a migratory order putatively controlled by host states, sending states may vie for market access by strategically elevating emigrant skillsets through the medium of training centers. Training centers are also pivotal sites wherein diverse schemes of privately organized labor management are congealed. In these “hidden abodes” of labor production, recruiters devise an ensemble of disciplinary techniques to compete for job orders and generate profit. The dissertation takes us to two such training centers, Indodespotic and Indofam, to uncover how brokers negotiate the competing demands of states, employers, and aspiring migrants. Indodespotic and Indofam serve as prototypes of what I call the prison and the school labor regimes, which are associated, respectively, with labor camps in the urban metropolis and educational facilities in the rural periphery. Whereas Indodespotic enacts strict regulations on trainees through spatial confinement, overt coercion, and family separation, Indofam grants recruits a high level of discretion with respect to many aspects of the labor process. These labor regimes generate contrasting female subjectivities. While Indodespotic produces atomized, pliable workers for the benefit of employers, Indofam manufactures animated, if somewhat disobedient, laboring subjects to juggle the needs of workers for autonomy and employers for professionalism. Ultimately, the dissertation argues that the coexistence of these variegated labor regimes is emblematic of Indonesia’s increasingly rationalized system of migration governance.