The Eng-Lite Program Lecture Series: Talk No 7
Time：2024.04.17（Wed.）14:00-16:20
Topic：Fettered Mobility and Translocality: Irregular Workers and the Informal Farm Labour Market in Rural Taiwan
Speaker：Isabelle Cockel ,Senior Lecturer, University of Portsmouth
Host：Hsin-Chin Evelyn Hsieh, Associate Professor, Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature, National Taiwan University
Venue: NTUGITL R324, Guo Qing Bldg.
By Conrad C. Carl
The second part of Dr Cockel’s presentation was concerned with a related research project that Dr Cockel conducted with Dr Beatrice Zani and Mr Jonathan Parhusip.
Again, Dr Cockel started with elucidating remarks about the context of this project. In Taiwan, by the definition given by the Ministry of Agriculture, farming households are those whose income is generated by agricultural activities engaged by their non-waged family members. Small-scale family farmers in Taiwan face several issues. Land reform and the subsequent ownership redistribution in the 1950s created an army of small-scaled farming households. They also led to industrialization in the following decades. Decades-long industrialization concurrently facilitated urbanization. Continued urbanization contributed to the ageing of farming households and rural villages in Taiwan. These are all among the factors that caused the small-scaled family farming to be neglected by an everlasting ‘developmental state.’ The lower level of mechanization meant that the high labour input required by the vegetable and fruit sectors were not met. This led to a chronic shortage of labor. Not only is there a yearly decline in workers (a decrease of 40% in 24 years) but there is also a seasonal worker shortage (201,000 ‘work units’ in 2017). For this reason, during 2013–2019, the Ministry of Agriculture lobbied with the intention to push the Ministry of Labor to open the migrant farm labour market in order to meet this labor shortage. And for most people working in this field, it is an open secret that irregular workers from Southeast Asia seek employment in these areas.
This raises two questions. Firstly, how does the employment of Southeast Asian irregular farm workers in the informal labor market of Taiwan inform us of the conceptualization of mobility? Secondly, what is the relationship between the Taiwanese state’s regulation of foreign labor and its mobility? One of the crucial concepts this research introduced is ‘fettered mobility.’ Fettered mobility refers to the fact that workers are constantly relocated in the villages’ informal farm labor market and thereby constituting a form of mobility that is in fact very much limited.
Dr Cockel sieved through many official government sources (agricultural yearbooks, inter-agency meetings, and the Control Yuan’s investigation reports) to gain insight into the specific mode of mobility at play here. Further, Dr Cockel and her team conducted interviews in Pingtung, Nantou, and Taichung with migrant spouses/farmers, migrant workers and police officers in Taipei and Changhua. Finally, they also consulted documentaries related to the guest worker system (for instance, See You, Lovable Strangers or And Miles to Go before I Sleep).
So, what did they discover?
What we can see here is that several aspects culminate: informality, irregularity, illegality and precarity. And they all converge in a way that give rise to this form of mobility that, in fact, is only fettered. Mobility can describe a myriad of things and they are subjected to limitations. Whether we focus on occupational, geographical, physical or socio-economic mobility, in the case of the migrant farm workers that were the object of this research project, they were all confined in the way their mobility could express itself. This dynamic is complicated and complex and so are the diverse facilitators of this dynamic. There is a trans-local community discernable that is made up of people both ‘at home’ and ‘abroad’, including hometown associations, churches, mosques, etc. The actual actors here are predominantly the migrant spouse farmers, the migrant works and the taxi drivers (the so-called ‘kaburan’: escape agent). There are 180,000 Southeast Asian women who married Taiwanese men. Some of them married farmers who fell to the wayside on the marriage market for several reasons. They live in remote areas, often isolated and rural. The way they make a living is, as perceived by contemporary Taiwanese society, dangerous, dirty and difficult. The income is unreliable (e.g. direct access to markets are denied by middlemen like Farmers’ Association). They are seen as leading a very traditional and conservative lifestyle which also extends to their values and beliefs about family. And last but not least, family members across several generations are mostly the source of labor. In other words, it is unpaid work. The structure and mode of employment that Dr Cockel mentioned in detail above, can be found here, also. Labor migration to Taiwan is regulated by the guest worker system. Recruitment agencies serve as the broker to establish contact between the potential employer and the prospective migrant worker. These workers pay the agencies high fees for matters related to administration, transportation, maintenance and service charge. This leads to constraints of their mobility in the form of debt bondage that is conducive to coercion. Employees cannot change their employer or their sector. The cost for moving across borders, or to service their mobility for overseas employment, is extremely high.
The abovementioned fettered mobility that Dr Cockel, Dr Zani and Mr Parhusip identified is partly a result of the Taiwanese state’s mobility regime. This regime regulates foreign workers and their mobility by assigning a hierarchical legal status to them. Fettered mobility is then, in turn, facilitated by translocal migrant communities. The constituents of these communities are mostly migrant works and migrant spouse farmers. Another dimension is added by the fact that Taiwanese farmers and unlicensed brokers also play a crucial role in this dynamic. But what are the consequences of this? Is absconding the way to be free?
Absconding and overstaying are ways to defy the mobility regime. As stated above, mobility comes in different modes. For this reason, absconding can take on various forms, too. From urban to rural areas, from one job to another; these are all situations where mobility needs to be understood in the complex context expounded on above by Dr Cockel. Can migrant workers regain their mobility? This is very unlikely to happen. The potentially regained mobility is negated by informants who collaborate with the state, reinstating the status quo of fettered mobility. The identity of these informants ranges from ‘jealous’ migrant workers to resentful Taiwanese workers or opportunistic taxi drivers. After all, the state’s authority and power can be evoked by every individual. That means that repatriation is an omnipresent threat for migrant workers.
To conclude, this research provided much insight into the relationship between mobility and immobility. It also emphasized the conditions of these forms of mobility and immobility, giving us yet another perspective on an issue that is so ubiquitous but too often not seriously enough discussed or talked about.
For both presentations as well as all the efforts and meaningful research we want to express our gratitude to Dr Cockel.
