Perceptions and reality of bargaining power among migrants in mobility-dependent sectors: The case of Cambodian migrants in fishery and construction
การรับรู้และความเป็นจริงของอํานาจต่อรองของแรงงานข้ามชาติในภาคส่วน ที่ต้องพึ่งพาการเคลื่อนย้าย: กรณีแรงงานข้ามชาติกัมพูชาในการประมง และการก่อสร้าง
Keywords:
Thailand, Cambodia, migration, precarity, Covid-19Abstract
This paper evaluates the rapidly evolving structural changes in Cambodian-Thai migration pathways to determine how long-term shifts in bargaining power favoring Cambodians intersect with the abrupt restrictions on mobility imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Thailand began encouraging inward labor migration to respond to gaps in the workforce during its recovery from the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and was supported passively by a willing and young labor market in Cambodia. Classical theories describe the ensuing process well: economic conditions in sending countries improved while the need for labor in Thailand increased, causing conditions to improve for inward migrants. However, more poorly characterized by classical migration theories has been the fluid ideas of mobility for workers arising from the liberalization of travel within Southeast Asia and regional integration processes within the ASEAN bloc. In this paper, we characterize migrants’ livelihoods in mobility-dependent sectors, namely fishery and construction sector, and how they have adjusted their aspirations and expectations to match structural shifts in demography and economic opportunity. We find that, until the Covid-19 pandemic began, the balance of bargaining power between migrants, brokers, and Thai companies was in favor of migrants, although many migrants did not realize their increasing leverage. The onset of the pandemic exposed a degree of precarity that has further buried notions of bargaining power that were incrementally developing among migrants.
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