"Raising Voices, Claiming Space: Migrant Women's Labor Activism in Bangkok"[Special Seminar] (2009/6/4)
Date:June 26 (Fri.), 2009 16:00 - 18:00
Venue:Room No. 332, Seminar Room on the 3rd floor of Inamori Foundation
Memorial Building
Speaker: Professor Mary Beth Mills (Colby College, U.S.)
Topic:"Raising Voices, Claiming Space: Migrant Women's Labor Activism
in Bangkok"
Professor Mills is the author of Thai Women in the Global Labor Force:
Consuming Desires, Contested Selves (Rutgers UP 1999), a well-cited work
on migrant women laborers from rural northeast Thailand to Bangkok.
Abstract:
Like many newly industrializing Asian nations, Thailand has relied
heavily on rural-urban migration to build a cheap, flexible, and
compliant labor force for global capital. In Bangkok, new entrants into
urban wage labor are typically young (teens and early twenties), many
are female. Prior to arriving in the city, few have extensive experience
either of urban life or of the harsh demands and disciplines of
industrial wage labor. The youth, gender, and rural origins of many wage
workers tend to position them within the urban labor force in ways that
increase their vulnerability to workplace discipline and limit their
access to the institutions and ideas about labor organizing.
Nonetheless, some migrant workers do become involved in Thailand's small
but persistent labor movement.
At one level, labor activism offers migrants practical means of
challenging the hardships they experience in the workplace. Yet
workers’ material assertions and demands often meet with only partial
success (and not always that). The attractions of labor activism for
participants, therefore, cannot be understood solely in terms of the
movement’s overt political achievements. Rather, the labor movement and
associated activities represent compelling avenues through which
participants can contest and rework broader experiences of
marginalization (as workers, as migrants, and as women). In this
analysis I examine some ways in which the labor activism of migrant
women workers takes shape in relation to their understandings and
reimagining of gendered norms and their claims to new forms of spatial
practice and autonomy.