Publication: Soft violence: migrant domestic worker precarity and the management of unfree labour in Singapore
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Issued Date
2021
Resource Type
File Type
application/pdf
ISSN
1369183X
Other identifier(s)
2-s2.0-85082773079
Rights Holder(s)
Scopus
Bibliographic Citation
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Vol 47, No.20 (2021), p.4671-4687
Suggested Citation
Parreñas R.S., Kantachote K., Silvey R. Soft violence: migrant domestic worker precarity and the management of unfree labour in Singapore. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Vol 47, No.20 (2021), p.4671-4687. doi:10.1080/1369183X.2020.1732614 Retrieved from: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14740/8128
Author(s)
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.