Concept: Migrant Labor

Definition: (noun) labor furnished by casual and unskilled workers who move about systematically from one region to another offering their services on a temporary, usually seasonal, basis.

Related Terms: Labor migration, work, neoliberalism, gig economy

Description: The representation of labor in mainstream film or television is dichotomous: on one hand, migrant-centered narratives such as Sleep Dealer (2008), Dirty Pretty Things (2002), Maria Full of Grace (2004) and many others foreground labor or poor working conditions for its protagonists; on the other, popular television programs such as Friends rarely show any of the characters at work, unless in genre-based comedies or dramas around doctors, lawyers, or detectives. Such examples acknowledge how workers exist across different statuses, with migrant labor often discussed through the prism of governance, international relations, and migrant worker’s rights. The work of Robin Cohen has outlined historical genealogies between migrant labor and various forms of ‘unfree’ labor such as serfdom and slavery.¹ More contemporary dimensions, such as labor migration’s relationship with neoliberal gig economies, have also been more recently examined.²

One mediated form in which migrant labor has been explored in all its complexities is that of the exhibition. In 2021, a modest exhibition titled the Migrant Workers Community Museum was mounted at The Substation, Singapore’s earliest independent arts space. A wealthy city in the tropics, with a high cost-of-living rivaling New York City’s, Singapore’s towering skyline and economic growth is dependent on flows of precarious, low-wage imported labor and often exploitative labor practices.³ Migrant workers form an often-unrepresented community in the global imaginary of Singapore. As a nation that owes its existence to historical waves of migration from China and South Asia both before and after British colonization in the 19th century, more recent social histories of migrant workers are ironically overlooked or silenced in the nation-state today. Leading vastly disparate experiences of the nation-state from its citizens, the space for migrant workers to convey their own subjective experiences, desires, and needs is disproportionately circumscribed. 

The Migrant Workers Community Museum’s invited curators—Bangladesh national Rubel Fazely, Saturnina De los Santos Rotelo from the Philippines, Yulia Endang from Indonesia, May Thu Zin from Burma, and Yu Ming and Zhou Zhi Wei from China—were composed from the international community of migrant workers based in Singapore. In collaboration with artists and activists, the curators selected objects and staged exhibits that spoke to the lived experience of transient labor in Singapore. Spanning a range of personal effects like photographs and documents articulating the bureaucratic nature of gaining employment passes, the exhibition firmly positioned these seemingly ordinary notes of migration as crucial to understanding broader international conditions of precarious labor.

The exhibitionary form of the Migrant Workers Community Museum and its reliance on museological modes of presentation, instead of rendering ethnographic, thus articulates migrant labor as a significant constellation of relations, from personal hopes and found community to wider injustices and tragedies. Desires are articulated within the exhibition through colorful illustrated placards demanding “Equal pay regardless of country” or a “Pathway to citizenship,” with the mediated experience of migration surfacing possibilities while puncturing official narratives about migrant workers.

J.Y. 2024

Notes

¹ Robin Cohen, Migration and its Enemies: Global Capital, Migrant Labour and the Nation-State (London: Ashgate, 2006).

² Niels van Doorn, Fabian Ferrari, and Mark Graham, “Migration and Migrant Labour in the Gig Economy: An Intervention,” Work, Employment & Society 37, no. 4 (2023): 1099–1111. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10425276/.

³ Satveer Kaur-Gill and Mohan Jyoti Dutta, “Singapore’s Extreme Neoliberalism and the COVID Outbreak: Culturally Centering Voices of Low-Wage Migrant Workers,” American Behavioral Scientist 65, no. 10 (2021): 1302–1322.