Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://ir.swu.ac.th/jspui/handle/123456789/17537
Title: Soft violence: migrant domestic worker precarity and the management of unfree labour in Singapore
Authors: Parreñas R.S.
Kantachote K.
Silvey R.
Keywords: employment
labor
legal system
management
migrant worker
violence
Singapore [Southeast Asia]
Issue Date: 2021
Abstract: In Singapore, the temporary legal status of migrant domestic workers binds them in servitude to their employer-sponsor as their residency is contingent on their continuous and sole live-in employment with a sponsor whose permission they must secure in order to transfer jobs. This legal status technically renders domestic workers unfree and precarious as it gives employers tremendous power over domestic workers. Based on 30 in-depth interviews with employers, this article examines how employers in Singapore negotiate their power over domestic workers. We identify ‘soft violence’ as a tool that employer’s utilise in their management of domestic workers. By ‘soft violence’, we refer to the practice of cloaking the unequal relationship in domestic work via the cultivation of a relationship of ‘personalism’ while simultaneously amplifying one’s control of domestic workers. Representing a strategy utilised by employers to maximise the labour of domestic workers, ‘soft violence’ emerges from the paradoxical relationship of simultaneously relieving and amplifying servitude. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
URI: https://ir.swu.ac.th/jspui/handle/123456789/17537
https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85082773079&doi=10.1080%2f1369183X.2020.1732614&partnerID=40&md5=59f606962e79e9f9dfd4213711957a24
ISSN: 1369183X
Appears in Collections:Scopus 1983-2021

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