Pei Chia Lan's chapter "Legal Servitude and Free Illegality: Migrant Guest Workers in Taiwan" explores the plights of Asian overseas contract workers (OCWs) under the legal subjugation of nations, who are more interested in migrants' labor and economic utility. Under an exploitative regime of labor migration, migrants are contractually deprived of economic and civil liberties. In the example provided in this chapter, Priscilla, a migrant worker, was paid very poorly and only allowed two days a month. After "running away" and becoming undocumented, she begins to enjoy more personal and economic freedoms, living separately from her employers and having more autonomy over her income.
I thought this reading was particularly interesting because as a Filipino, I grew up around the common misconception/belief that exploitative labor systems/abusive employers like this exist solely outside the United States (mostly in Asian and Middle Eastern countries) — because the U.S. supposedly has great labor protection rights. However, it is widely known that migrant workers in the United States enjoy far less protections than American citizens, leaving them vulnerable to powerful entities like Walmart and Amazon. I now see that these contracts and policies are only meant to serve employers and the nation state, seeking only the labor of migrants without seeing them as human with needs for protection.
Question: How have the presence of "runaway" migrant workers changed the political, cultural, and social landscapes of their host countries? How can OCWs fight back against an exploitative labor regime?
Works Cited:
Lan, Pei-Chia. "Legal Servitude and Free Illegality: Migrant" Guest" Workers in Taiwan i Pei-Chia Lan." Asian Diasporas: New Formations, New Conceptions: 253.
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