Thailand's Hidden Workforce by Ruth Pearson Kyoko Kusakabe

Author:Ruth Pearson, Kyoko Kusakabe [Ruth Pearson, Kyoko Kusakabe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781848139848
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2012-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Burmese migrant women and families in Thailand: reproduction, children and care

For the growing number of Burmese migrants who are mothers as well as workers, a major challenge is accessing appropriate maternity services; another is how to finance and organise the care of their children while continuing to work in the export factories. These are women who in general have very limited knowledge of the Thai language, who are away from their familiar sources of support and assistance, and who in many cases have very little experience of using health or other services in the location where they work. Many are facing maternity for the first time, often in relatively unstable relationships with partners they have met since their migration to Thailand. They are living in a situation where the state is explicitly hostile to migrant women having children within its territory; they get no protection from the law in terms of maternity rights or pension, and employers generally regard them as a problem. But the migrant women we encountered in Thailand exhibited remarkable versatility in the ways in which they responded to these challenges, calling on a range of resources and institutions including family, community and religious networks to help meet their needs. Needless to say, the arrangements they were able to make are not necessarily ideal from an outside perspective, nor conducive to family stability or child welfare networks.

Structural analyses of migrant workers tend to focus either on their contribution to economic growth and accumulation in different contexts, or on the discrimination and exploitation they experience in situations where they have minimal rights and protection. There is less interest in considering migrant workers as real human beings, with the same kind of aspirations and expectations as non-migrant individuals. This is especially true with respect to the life-cycle experience of migrant workers; whilst numerous accounts of migrants working in garments and textiles not just in Thailand but all over the world highlight the female-intense nature of such employment, and report the employment of women in the 15 to 25 age group, it is surprising how little attention has been given to the fact that these workers are in their prime reproductive years.

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