Thesis (Ph.D.) - Carleton University, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 222-230).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 2003. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 339-358).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [181]-186) and index.

This thesis explores the production of Bangladeshi domestic workers' legal status in Hong Kong. Bangladeshi domestic workers started entering Hong Kong in 2013 and they were expected to gradually become one of the major national groups of domestic workers. But within the first two years, 50 to 60% of them left formal employment. In the migration industry, that phenomenon was referred to as the "runaway crisis". While the runaway crisis took place between 2013 and 2015, some Bangladeshi domestic workers still run away. I would like to reflect upon the migration experiences of Bangladeshi women recruited by two employment agencies and one small association of employment agencies and identify forces impacting their decision-making over their legal status. In doing that, I build upon feminist geography of domestic work and migration studies, Foucault's work on governmentality and Ahmed's affective economies which I extend by elaborating on her understanding of lovability with which I engage to argue for a performative view of legality. The main methodology of the research is feminist ethnography where data were collected during 2-year long field work in Bangladeshi training centers and Hong Kong agencies. The research suggests that domestic workers' legal status is produced in a multi-layered process which includes social structures and power dynamics and affects in migration industry institutions.

No description available.

A country of approximately 4 million citizens, Lebanon is home to over half a million Asian and black African migrant workers concentrated in its capital city of Beirut. An estimated one quarter of Lebanese households employ a live-in female migrant domestic worker on a full time basis. Over the last decade, many of these women have fled domestic confinement to enter Lebanon’s informal labour market, and have recently been joined by hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing war across the country’s eastern border. This dissertation examines the social worlds of these migrant workers. It demonstrates that non-Arab migrant workers in Beirut are not simply temporary workers, but constitute a specific subject category structured by socioeconomic relations that determine the possibility of their life in the city. Specifically, it argues that migrant workers in Beirut are subjects denied recognition, and who therefore lie outside the nation-state, while having forged an urban belonging inside the city. I demonstrate this by examining migrant workers’ interactions with the joint nexus of citizen-state authority, their experiences of time in both labour and rest, their modes of receiving address and inhabiting speech in the Arabic language, and their intimate and collective relations in the city. Together with growing numbers of male Syrian refugees, migrant workers in Beirut have created an urban underground that has transformed both what and who it means to live in the city today. This dissertation offers an ethnographic map of these transformations.

This dissertation concentrates on a circular labor migration from the provincial towns of the Kurdish region in southeastern Turkey, to rural areas of western Turkey. Each year, an estimated one and a half million workers migrate west with their families for several months to work in rural jobs such as farm labor, sharecropping, forestation, and charcoal making. Based on a total of sixteen months of ethnographic research between October 2014 and August 2016, following the migrant workers between their hometowns and work sites, this dissertation uses this labor practice as an ethnographic lens to analyze both the socio-political conditions under which this labor practice is shaped, and the material practices through which economic surplus is produced, managed, and distributed. Exploring the everyday life in the hometowns of the migrant workers, it investigates the racialized and regionally-divided class formation in Turkey, which heavily relies on labor migration from the Kurdish region. These power relations are also reproduced in western worksites through racialized and securitized practices of labor discipline and labor control. In this labor regime, the Kurdish family not only fulfills functions of social security and social reproduction, but also directly becomes the unit of production and the social hub through which relations of production are organized. However, the temporary character of this labor practice also allows the Kurdish migrant workers to construct a life in their hometowns that is not entirely determined by the structures of political domination and exploitation but is shaped through kinship, neighborhood politics, and everyday relations of multiple subjectivities to their material surroundings.

This thesis utilises Productivity and Investment Climate Survey (PICS) 2007 data to explore native and immigrant wage determinants and wage differentials in Malaysia. The Oaxaca decomposition analysis is conducted by adapting Oaxaca and Ransom (1994) and Fortin (2008) with quantile regression to identify the non-discriminatory wage structure and the components of the wage differentials along the income distribution, making this as one of the contributions of this thesis. It then further explores the unexplained component of wage differentials by investigating the causes of educational mismatch and the effect of educational mismatch on native and immigrant wages. Findings show that the educational mismatch gives dissimilar effect on native and immigrant wages. Interestingly, the educational mismatch potentially widens the native-immigrant wage differentials. Further, this thesis explores the labour demand-side effect on native and immigrant wages. This thesis applies the dominance and decomposition analyses to identify and decompose the effect of individual and firm characteristics on wage separately. The results suggest that native wage is mostly determined by individual characteristics. On the other hand, firm and regional characteristics mostly determine the immigrant wage levels. This thesis establishes and enhances our understanding on the wage determinants and wage differentials that exist between native and immigrant as well as provides an empirical evidence of the educational mismatch and firm characteristics effects on wages of native and immigrant workers in Malaysia.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.