YANNIS-ADAM ALLOUACHE

PhD Student

Research Title: Investigating the precarious labour relations and employment journeys of Southeast Asian migrants across Taiwan’s variegated geography
Research Group: Social and Cultural Geography (SCG)
Thesis Advisor: Prof Elaine Ho
Co-advisor: Prof Brenda Yeoh

Three decades of transregional migration from Southeast Asia have reshaped Taiwanese landscapes. Since the late 1980s, Taiwan began recruiting migrant workers from Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam to meet the demands of its labour-intensive industries and care work. As of the end of 2020, there were over 700 000 documented migrants, making Taiwan’s one of Asia’s leading migrant destination. The largest group by nationality are from Indonesia, of whom the majority are women employed in households as caregivers with fewer men and women working in the manufacturing sector. When experiencing strained employment relations, migrants must engage with various state and non-state actors and institutions to process, facilitate or adjudicate any disputes or issues involved. The possibility for migrants to overcome such obstacles by changing employers or to emerge out of periods of unemployment by securing a new contract with a different employer are contingent on the successful navigation and negotiation of a series of procedures involving various components of Taiwan’s migration infrastructure. Therefore, migrants arriving at their overseas work placement only marks the beginning of an enduring relationship with wide-ranging migration related procedures and bureaucracy.

My dissertation investigate the organisational structures and mediating institutions underpinning the employment journeys of Indonesian migrants across Taiwan. It adopts an ethnographic approach by examining encounters in key sites such as NGO shelters, offices and social spaces, employment centers, agencies and government offices where negotiations consequential negotiations regarding the precarious employment relations of migrants take place. In addition, I also draw on a combination of in-depth semi-structured interviews and ethnographic conversations with informants spanning across Taiwan’s migration infrastructure such as labour brokers and their agents, translators, lawyers, NGO case workers and social workers, bureaucrats across agencies, scales of government and cities, and importantly Indonesian migrants working in different sectors of the economy. The combination of these methods inform an understanding of the social and material structures which shape experiences of precarity and serve as a locus for the fostering of solidarities in the pursuit of more progressive outcomes for migrants.

My research interests are in the areas of labour, migration, precarity and the geopolitical histories which inform Taiwan’s evolving relations with Southeast Asia. From January to October 2020, I was a Visiting Research Student in the Department of Geography at National Taiwan University and a recipient of the Taiwan Fellowship by Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to conduct ethnographic fieldwork across the Taiwanese urban and semi-urban industrial landscapes where Southeast Asian migrants work and build communities. Prior to undertaking doctoral studies at NUS Geography in 2017, I completed a Master of Arts in Political Science from the School of Political Studies at University of Ottawa, Canada while working in the Office of Assistant Deputy Minister, Asia Pacific at Global Affairs Canada. I am always interested to get in touch with anyone interested in similar issues. Please feel free to contact me at yallouache@u.nus.edu.