Social Protections and precarious work in Continental Southeast Asian Borderlands’
Programme group: Challenges to Democratic Representation
Globalizing trends have been linked with an increased precariousness of workers: “By the late 1990s a staggering one billion workers representing one-third of the world’s labour force, most of them in the Global South, were either unemployed or underemployed” (CIA’s World Factbook 2002 cited in Bernstein 2007:5). According to the International Labour Organization more than half of the world’s population does not have adequate social protection (ILO 2003).
Funded by: NWO
Duration: September 2012 until September 2015
Responding to these challenges, prevailing economic theory asserts that economic growth fosters transitions from informal work, associated with underdevelopment, to formal work, associated with social protections and shared wealth. The experiences in the Post-War era, particularly in Western Europe, Japan and Asia’s Newly Industrializing Countries of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore reinforce this view. In Developing Asia, however, this has not led to similar outcomes over the last three decades. This is particularly evident in manufacturing industries that have offshored from the Global north to South in search of low-cost labour. Across Continental Southeast Asia a majority of workers thus faces dual exclusion, lacking both a) state and employer-based labour protections, and b) ‘traditional’ social protections associated with families and communities.
Scholarship on the global textile and garment industry has opened analysis of firm and state strategies that create, maintain and reproduce precarious labour forces. The garment workers’ dual exclusion’, however, has not been comprehensively studied.
Research objectives
This project aims to fill this gap while extending Europe-oriented ‘precarity studies’ to Southeast Asia by focusing on changing forms of work and social protections. It concerns itself with the dynamic relation among forms of employment (fixed duration contract and day laboureres) and social location (family, citizenship, race, gender) for textile and garment workers in Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. This comparison aims to foreground context specific networks that shape links between the workplace, household and community, including state form (socialist, authoritarian, democratic), level of socio-economic development (least developed and middle income), citizenship and social frontiers (Burmese workers in Thailand and Vietnam’s marginalized rural-urban migrants) and global apparel’s drive for product flexibility, speed to market and quality.
This project could strengthen the effectiveness of several organisations’ interventions and strategies:
- In Southeast Asia the aforementioned labour and development organisations would gain both national and sub-regional level knowledge and direct experience from yearly meetings and data collection exercises. Regular involvement with the project ensure annual results that feed into and improve the subsequent stages of implementation
- At the international level the project engages Dutch and Belgian organisations that provide financial and technical support to select Southeast Asian organizations, including the Christelijk Nationaal Vakverbond (CNV-Dutch trade union) and Oxfam Solidarity-Belgium.