‘There will be no law, or people to protect us’: Irregular Southeast Asian seasonal workers in Taiwan before and during the pandemic

Abstract

This paper investigates the everyday lived realities of Southeast Asian migrant workers who left the formal sector of the labour market and entered the informal agricultural sector before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in Taiwan. Drawing on observations of migrants' daily lives and farm work and 19 in-depth interviews, it delves into migrants' subjective experiences of vulnerability, paternalism, exploitation, and control at work due to a lack of legal protection and the illegality of their employment. Although

Migrant farmworkers: Resisting and organising before, during and after COVID‐19

“…The pre-existing conditions characterising the political economy of agriculture shaped forms of control and exploitation during the pandemic, such as the mechanisms and intensity of the violence experienced in the countries of departure and arrival (Addison, 2023;Corrado & Palumbo, 2022;Keegan, 2023;Ramsaroop, 2023;Stead, 2023), the racialised and gendered exploitation experienced along the journey and in the farms and fields (Duenas et al, 2019;Madrigal, 2023;Ramsaroop, 2023;Stead, 2023), the opening or foreclosing of spaces and forms of organisation and resistance (Cohen & Hjalmarson, 2020;Madrigal, 2023;Ramsaroop, 2023) and the role of the capitalist state in reproducing subordination and conditions of visibility/invisibility (Addison, 2023;Cheng & Zani, 2023;Duenas et al, 2019;Ramsaroop, 2023;Rotz, 2017).…”

“…Lastly, Cheng and Zani (2023) bring attention to the challenges faced by irregular farm foreign workers in Taiwan, who do not have the legal documentation to work on a specific farm, and the dynamics behind a nascent foreign worker programme for its South‐east Asian workers. The paper focuses on the everyday lives of four Indonesian runaways on a fruit farm in Taichung, whose experiences are explored and expanded through interviews with other overstaying workers and runaways, subsistence farmers and even police officers.…”

“…The symposium underscores that the structural power of the capitalist system is continuously challenged by workers. Cheng and Zani (2023) focus on the stories of absconding Indonesian workers in Taiwan who function at the intersection of immobility (socio‐geographic and vocational), illegality (overstaying legal visas or working for employers different from those on their permit) and informality (the relationship between the farmers and their workers). The article illustrates how workers navigate ‘within a volatile socioeconomic space fluctuating between freedom and un‐freedom’ (Cheng & Zani, 2023).…”

“…Cheng and Zani (2023) focus on the stories of absconding Indonesian workers in Taiwan who function at the intersection of immobility (socio‐geographic and vocational), illegality (overstaying legal visas or working for employers different from those on their permit) and informality (the relationship between the farmers and their workers). The article illustrates how workers navigate ‘within a volatile socioeconomic space fluctuating between freedom and un‐freedom’ (Cheng & Zani, 2023). They point out that although the absconding workers, working for small farmers outside the temporary foreign worker programme, are particularly vulnerable to physical hardships, constant insecurity, exploitation by brokers and law enforcement and dependence on third parties in the informal and ‘illegalised’ economy, they remain strategic in their negotiation of their engagement.…”

“…Agricultural guest worker programmes now exist across continents in countries with vastly different political economies (Martin, 2016). The contributions within this symposium span the United States (Keegan, 2023;Madrigal, 2023) with its large undocumented and indigenous Latin American migrant farm-worker population working alongside employer-driven H-2A visa holders; Canada with its archetypical foreign worker programme for seasonal agricultural workers that combines bilateral agreements and employer-driven programmes (Ramsaroop, 2023); Australia and its scheme for Pacific Islander labour in horticulture (Stead, 2023); the less-discussed South Africa (Addison, 2023), which is a sending and receiving country for migrant farm labour; and Taiwan, with South-east Asian farm workers employed irregularly under a very new limited system (Cheng & Zani, 2023). Although not comprehensive, the geographical and socio-economic diversity of the case studies, mixed with the multi-disciplinarity of the approaches, provide the readers with tools and frameworks of analysis that could be adapted to other contexts and places, including European countries with their high dependence on both temporary working schemes and informal labour and Latin American and Central American countries as territories of agricultural production and workers' circulation.…”