UNE Business School welcomes Emeritus Professor Amarjit Kaur to our 2017 Seminar Series

The Good Housemaid: Indonesian and Filipina Domestic Workers in Malaysia and Singapore

When: 11.00am – 12.00pm, 4 August 2017

Where: Lecture Theatre 3, EBL Building (W40)

The movement of less-skilled migrant workers in modern Southeast Asia (ASEAN) in the past five decades has intersected with greater economic integration in the region; the broadening of sub-regional labour markets; and the increased participation of women in the paid workforce. Shifting gender relations and the gendering of migration movements have also resulted in the expansion of waged domestic work. Women’s migration concurrently demonstrates a structural continuity between class, unpaid household work and the expansion of wage labour. The domestic work sector likewise represents a survival strategy for thousands of poorer women from the Philippines and Indonesia who travel to Malaysia and Singapore in search of work. The involvement of the state in both labour-sending and labour-receiving states further confirms the gaps in state policies that incorporate paid outside work with family life and Southeast Asian states’ inadequate provision of child- and aged- care services. These interactions also link historical and contemporary labour migration movements and the specific migration agreements concluded between labour-scarce and labour-sending countries. The demand for foreign domestic workers in Southeast Asia hence exemplifies a structural continuity between women’s unpaid household work and wage labour.

The discussion focuses on Malaysia and Singapore’s contemporary migration policies and the politics of paid domestic work in these countries. Since Indonesian and Filipina domestic workers provide a vital service in these countries it is argued that the domestic work sector also continues to perpetuate gendered migration arrangements in the region. Crucially, growing income disparities have resulted in women’s migration for work becoming established within economic and social structures in the region.

Amarjit Kaur is Emeritus Professor of Economic History at the UNE Business School, University of New England, Australia and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. She is also an Esquire Bedell at UNE. Amarjit was born in Malaya/Malaysia and was educated at the University of Malaya (BA Hons; MA; Dip.Ed). She received her PhD in Economic History at Columbia University in New York. Amarjit has held visiting positions at University College London (British Academy/Wellcome Trust Fellowship); Harvard University [Fulbright/American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship]; International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam [IIAS Fellowship]; St. Antony’s College (Oxford -Japan Foundation); Clare Hall (Cambridge) and the ANU [ARC/ANU Fellowship].

Amarjit’s main research interests include Labour History, especially international labour migration; women’s migration; and forced migration. Other research interests include labour rights; social determinants of health; transport development; and forestry and deforestation. Her principal publications include Bridge and Barrier: Transport and Communications in Colonial Malaya, 1870‑1957  (OUP, 1985); Economic Change in East Malaysia (Macmillan, 1998); Wage Labour in Southeast Asia (Palgrave, 2004); Women Workers in Industrialising Asia: Costed, not valued [Ed] (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Mobility, Labour Migration and Border Controls in Asia [co-edited with Ian Metcalfe] (Palgrave, 2006); Proletarian And Gendered Mass Migrations (Brill, 2013) (co-edited with Dirk Hoerder).  The Australian Research Council, AusAID, Wellcome Trust UK, Toyota and Japan Foundations, and IIAS have mostly funded her work. Some of her recent publications on this topic include:

• Dirk Hoerder and Amarjit Kaur (eds), Proletarian and Gendered Mass Migrations: A Global Perspective on Continuities and Discontinuities from the 19th to the 21st Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2013)
• Kaur A. and Ian Metcalfe (eds) Mobility, Labour Migration and Border Controls in Asia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)
• Kaur A., Wage Labour in Southeast Asia since 1840: Globalisation, the International Division of Labour and Labour Transformations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)
• Kaur, A. (ed.), Women Workers in Industrialising Asia: Costed, not valued Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)
• Kaur, A., “Demography of Race and Ethnicity in Southeast Asia” In Regelio Saenz, David G. Embrick and Nestor P. Rodriguez (Eds), The International Handbook of the Demography of Race and Ethnicity, [Springer International Handbooks of Population] (New York, London: Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg, 2015), pp. 171-187.