Southern Sites of Female Agency: Informal Regimes and Female Migrant Labour Resistance in East and Southeast Asia

Abstract

This chapter focuses on FDWs’ collective activism and middle-class campaigns in sending and receiving countries in East and Southeast Asia around foreign domestic worker issues. The chapter begins with a brief overview of female labour migration in East and Southeast Asia followed by a discussion of the formal regimes that seek to regulate it. It then proceeds to discuss the informal regimes that have emerged both within and across national borders since the 1980s, using examples from several countries in the region. The final section focuses on the implications of interactions between the formal and informal regimes associated with foreign domestic labour. The chapter concludes that although serious obstacles continue to hinder migrant worker groups’ and migrant labour NGOs’ campaigns, these groups are engaged in an increasingly important form of transnational collective action that enables defiance and provides a mechanism through which to attempt to influence the formal regimes that regulate the personal and working lives of FDWs.