Introduction

‘Remain myself’, this is how Anwar,¹ an Indonesian employee at a scooter factory, describes his ways of dealing with the demands of life and work as a migrant worker in Taiwan – monotonous routines in the factory, high work pressure, insults from foremen, and accommodation in cramped dormitories. To remain himself, Anwar listens to punk and metal music. He dyes his hair blond and pink and thus defies factory rules that interfere in his personal life.

Anwar is one of the 478,000 migrant workers employed in Taiwan’s manufacturing industry (as of January 2024, Ministry of Labor, 2024). The Taiwanese state officially opened its borders for low-skilled Southeast Asian migrant workers in 1989, and formalised its migration policies in 1992. State officials responded to the demands of employers for low-paid labour in the face of labour shortages in low-skilled jobs.² When some parts of manufacturing relocated to Mainland China to access the supply of cheap labour there, in Taiwan, the recruitment of migrant workers was offered as a solution for larger factories to remain profitable and for smaller businesses to remain competitive (Lee, 2004; Tierney, 2007). Over the years, the number of migrant workers in Taiwan has grown steadily, and today, close to 850,000 migrants from Southeast Asia work in factories, on fishing vessels, in private homes, in nursing homes, in the fields, and on construction sites.³

Like other receiving states in East and Southeast Asia, the Taiwanese state established policies based on the principle that low-skilled migrant workers remain temporary workers, making it impossible for most of these workers to obtain permanent residency and to bring their families to Taiwan (Tseng and Wang, 2013; Surak, 2017). For the migrant workers, such policies imply precarity, that is, experiences of uncertainty, insecurity, and vulnerability (Piper et al, 2017). In Taiwan, migrant factory workers’ visas are tied to a three-year contract with a specified employer, the length they are usually allowed to stay in Taiwan is limited to 12 years, and possibilities to change employers during a running contract are restricted (Lan, 2022). Employers can decide not to renew workers’ contracts if they, for instance, do not work as hard as expected. Meanwhile, recruitment is outsourced to private brokers. These charge high fees that put pressure on migrants to endure difficult conditions and breaches of labour regulations by their employers (Lan, 2007; Chang, 2021; Chen and Schiller, 2022).

By regulation, migrant workers are channelled into jobs with dangerous, dirty, and difficult conditions, for instance, work involving abnormal temperatures, dust, toxic gas, and manual operation (Ministry of Labor, 2023). Being allotted different work tasks and receiving lower incomes than Taiwanese co-workers at their workplaces (Tierney, 2011), racialised Southeast Asian factory workers are ‘located within a hierarchical system of labor exploitation’ (Bonacich et al, 2008: 344). Racialisation manifests itself in ascriptions to Southeast Asians and their cultural behaviour or biological traits which allegedly make them suitable for the menial labour that the state, employers, and brokers allocate to them (see also Tierney, 2011; Chang, 2021). In the context of discrimination, migrant workers in Taiwan also receive only limited support from Taiwan’s local unions (Ford, 2019). Since the early years of recruitment, local unions have defended the gap in incomes and conditions and condoned the restrictions of migrants’ ‘capacity to compete with locals for jobs [and benefits]’ (Tierney, 2011: 303).⁴

In this article, I explore how, in the face of exploitation, precarity, and racialisation, Indonesian migrants in Taiwan’s factories seek to reclaim control over their migrant lives and labour. Anwar’s desire to remain himself expresses one such attempt. I first met Anwar in June 2022 in the context of my research with Indonesian migrant workers in Taiwan. Drawing on ethnographic insights, I look into his and other workers’ subjective practices inside and outside the workplace.

The main contribution of this article to the discussion on transnational labour mobility regimes – the contested regulation and control of migrant workers on various scales and through various actors (see also Jones et al, 2024) – lies in highlighting how migrant workers exert agency on an everyday level. I describe workers’ practices as attempts to regain control over time, space, dignity, and meaning. The focus on migrant workers’ everyday experience brings me, on the one hand, to labour processes in the factories. On the other, it brings me to the ways in which migrant factory workers’ daily reproduction is organised: their sleep, food, and recreation, in short, their life outside waged labour time (see Katz, 2001). I address one central concern of this themed issue, namely, highlighting social reproduction – the reproduction of workers, labour power, and capitalist relations (Katz, 2001; Mezzadri, 2019) – as an extended analytical lens to comprehensively understand labour mobility regimes. I approach the inseparable spheres of production and reproduction as sites of both control and agency.

In the following sections, I first conceptualise my focus on migrant workers’ everyday agency by taking into account workers’ experiences of labour processes and organisation of their daily reproduction. Then, I introduce readers to my fieldwork among Indonesian factory workers. In the empirical part of this article, I first consider their work in the factories, laying out the different types of factories that employ Indonesian workers and discussing how they seek to regain control over time, space, meaning, and dignity at these workplaces. Subsequently, I address the realm of daily reproduction, migrant factory workers’ lives off the shopfloor, outlining their living conditions in dormitories and then discussing how Indonesian migrant factory workers occupy spaces beyond dormitories and factories. In conclusion, I bring my insights together and identify the contributions to discussions on migrant workers’ agency in transnational labour mobility regimes.

Labour processes, daily reproduction, and everyday forms of agency in labour mobility regimes

In recent years, international public discourse has discussed migrant labour in Taiwan’s manufacturing industry and the violations of migrant workers’ rights as a form of ‘forced labour’ (see WorkBetter Innovations, 2022; Bengsten, 2023). Often, in discussions on forced labour, migrant workers are depicted as rather passive and weak (for a critique, see McGrath, 2023). Migrant workers, however, develop rich and creative practices to ‘reformulate the conditions and possibilities of their everyday lives’ (Katz, 2004: x). Conceptually, engagement with such everyday agency implies, first, to put the focus on migrant factory workers’ everyday experience inside and outside the workplace: their experiences of labour processes and the organisation of their daily reproduction; and second, to address everyday forms of agency means to acknowledge migrants’ desires and subjective practices amid the attempt to exploit and control their labour and lives.

Academic scholarship on labour mobility regimes in East and Southeast Asia has extensively discussed migration policies and their entanglements with infrastructures of migrant labour brokerage (Xiang and Lindquist, 2014; Lin et al, 2017; Chang, 2021; Chen and Schiller, 2022). These significantly shape migrant workers’ conditions and enhance migrant workers’ precarity. However, the mentioned literature tends to treat migrant workers’ concrete experiences at their workplaces rather superficially. By contrast, I demonstrate that specific labour processes, and ways in which migrant workers’ daily reproduction is organised, engender particular experiences.

While Indonesian factory workers are subject to the same migration policies, experiences at their respective workplaces vary depending on the labour processes in particular industries, factories, or departments: whether they can employ skills in the production process, how they are monitored, and what kinds of machines they operate (see Briken, 2023). To different degrees, their workplaces are characterised by an extensive division of labour, repetitive and monotonous tasks, and tight surveillance by superiors.

I extend my analysis by taking into account migrant workers’ daily reproduction. In Taiwan, this is characterised by their accommodation in dormitories, which are often located within a factory compound or in the vicinity of factories (Lee, 2004; Lan, 2022). Studies elsewhere have shown that dormitories are sites where migrant labour power is regenerated and where, simultaneously, control over and the disposability of migrants’ labour is facilitated (Smith and Pun, 2006; Schling, 2022). By accommodation in dormitories, employers save costs, migrant workers can be called in for work as needed, and their whereabouts can be controlled. Accommodation in dormitories, separation from families, and closure of the possibility of long-term or permanent residency, reflect that migrant workers are ‘reduced to mere labour power’ (Surak, 2013: 88). Hence, time outside the workplace appears to be meant mainly for immediate maintenance and regeneration of migrants’ labour power.

Labour agency is often primarily discussed in terms of formal, collective organising (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011). Scholarship on labour migration in East and Southeast Asia has highlighted the constraints that are set to migrant organising by migrants’ precarious legal status, as well as by the apathetic and even rejective stances of labour unions towards migrant workers (Ford, 2019: 2). Alternatives to union organising, for instance activities of NGOs and alliances with migrant organisations, are discussed (Piper et al, 2017; Ford, 2019). This article shifts the focus to migrant factory workers’ everyday forms of agency. Instead of situating agency – ‘intentional, purposive and meaningful actions’ (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011: 214) – in unions, NGOs, or coalitions with migrant organisations, the vantage point of such an approach is the actions of Indonesian factory workers as they experience control, degradation, and alienation inside and outside their workplaces. Scholarship has highlighted that migrant workers in East and Southeast Asia exert everyday forms of agency through workplace mobility, which, given strict migration policies, often result in illegal status (Lan, 2007; Hoang, 2017; Killias, 2018; Parhusip, 2021). Mobility attempts are an important form of migrant factory workers’ everyday agency. Other forms inside the workplace and, in extension, in the realm of workers’ daily reproduction, however, have been less discussed (for exceptions on migrant domestic workers’ agency, see Lan, 2006; Constable, 2007; Kayoko, 2014).

To complement existing scholarship, I draw on strands of labour studies that have engaged with the plenitude of informal practices through which workers assert dignity and spaces to act at their workplaces (Heiland, 2023: 2). Such practices range from subtle forms of behaviour such as jokes about superiors, to absenteeism, slow-downs, theft, or sabotage, and have been termed ‘misbehaviour’ (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999; Karlsson, 2012), ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott, 1985), or workers’ ‘wilfulness’ (Lüdtke, 1995: 313). Some of these informal practices contradict or evade the control over time and space through which managers seek to make sure that, in the labour process, workers actually realise their labour capacity in a way that is profitable for employers (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999). Some informal practices also express a claim for self-worth and sense of meaning which are undermined by low-paid, dirty, heavy, and excessive or repetitive and monotonous labour, as well as by arbitrary treatment from superiors (Karlsson, 2012; Laaser and Karlsson, 2022).

I conceptualise Indonesian factory workers’ everyday agency as an attempt to regain control over time, space, meaning, and dignity. I do not confine myself to the workplace, but consider how the workers also seek control over their lives at sites beyond the shopfloor, demonstrating that, while workers’ practices in the workplace remain isolated, it is in the sphere of daily reproduction where Indonesian migrant workers develop collective practices. Their practices are, importantly, constrained by migrants’ precarious immigration status and other migration policies.

Many of the practices of regaining control that I will discuss can be classified as forms of coping or ‘getting by’ (Katz, 2004: 244), rather than intentional resistance against capitalist exploitation through limiting one’s work effort or disrupting the production process. Some of the practices appear conforming and do not evoke any sense of unruliness, in distinction to forms of everyday agency described as ‘misbehaviour’ (Ackroyd and Thompson, 2016). In their outcomes, they may not lead to institutional changes, nor do they ‘shift the capitalist status quo’ in favour of migrant workers (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011: 216). In fact, workers’ everyday agency is ambiguous and can result in compliance with capital’s drive to make production processes efficient (Ackroyd and Thompson, 2016).

The significance of studying workers’ attempts to regain control over time, space, meaning, and dignity lies, nevertheless, in revealing migrant workers’ interests and desires (see also Roggero, 2023). In actively dealing with the control over their work and lives, Indonesian migrant factory workers show their refusal of this control. Workers’ interests, desires, and everyday forms of behaviour can lay the ground for or complement (migrant) workers’ collective pressure for change (Ackroyd and Thompson, 2016; Heiland, 2023). As I will suggest in the conclusions, studying migrant workers’ everyday behaviour can be a starting point for further discussion on the conditions that shape migrant workers’ power in transnational labour mobility regimes.

To inquire how workers deal with the exploitation and control over their labour and lives on an everyday level, participatory, long-term observation inside workplaces has been proposed (Heiland and Schaupp, 2022). In the following section, I outline how I undertook my own ethnographic study on Indonesian factory labour in Taiwan.

Fieldwork among Indonesian factory workers in Taiwan

My insights into Indonesian factory workers’ experiences are based on narratives they have shared with me outside their workplaces, and on observations among their communities. My own status as an academic from Europe, a white-collar migrant in Taiwan, makes it difficult for me to work alongside Southeast Asian migrants in blue-collar jobs. Nevertheless, I rely on the durational and relational approach of ethnographic fieldwork (Sluka and Robben, 2012). I do this research with my partner, and since March 2022, we have met with over 40 Indonesian factory workers in factory zones all along Taiwan’s west coast, where the manufacturing industries are concentrated. We have met 16 of these workers several times and established more lasting relationships.

Currently, 81,000 Indonesians work in the Taiwanese manufacturing industries, along with 55,000 Thai, 120,000 Philippine, and 222,000 Vietnamese workers (as of January 2024, Ministry of Labor, 2024). I focus on Indonesian workers, although they make up a relatively smaller group, because my language proficiency in Indonesian allows me to communicate more extensively with them. Most of our interlocutors identify as men, which reflects the predominance of male workers among Indonesian migrants in Taiwan’s manufacturing industry.⁵ The age of our interlocutors ranges between their early twenties and early forties. Most of them have worked in Taiwan for several years, and many of them engage in different migrant workers’ communities. We meet at places where they spend time outside their wage-work: at cafés, at Indonesian restaurants, at their self-organised spaces, or at train stations. We also attend their ‘afterwork’ activities, for instance martial arts practices, concerts, and music rehearsals. In addition, we have met with migrant support organisations, which have provided us with insights into migrant workers’ conditions and background information on migration policies.

The following accounts of the workers’ experiences and perspectives are based on extensive fieldnotes that document our encounters with them. In the coming sections, I describe these experiences in detail by laying out Indonesian factory workers’ conditions and practices of regaining control, first inside and then outside the workplace.

Work in the factories

The Indonesian factory workers we have met are subject to the same immigration rules and labour laws. For instance, they should all receive the Taiwanese monthly minimum wage of NT$27,470 (2024, around US$875).⁶ Yet, as they work in Taiwanese factories that differ in size, technologies employed, and required skills, our interlocutors’ workplace experiences vary considerably. Before departing to Taiwan, Indonesian factory workers have little choice over the kind of factory they will be working at, and while they are prepared for their employment abroad, they do not undergo any standardised credentialing (Chang, 2021).

Most workers who we have met are employed at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). These play an essential role for the Taiwanese economy; they constitute 90 percent of the enterprises in the manufacturing industries and almost 70 percent of manufacturing employment (Ministry of Economic Affairs, 2022). The bulk of our interlocutors employed at such SMEs work at sweatshops with heavy work tasks and sometimes toxic environments, for instance, at metal foundries, fabric dying mills, or small plastic factories. This reflects the Taiwanese quota system which sets upper limits for the intake of migrant workers in the manufacturing industries, and which was introduced to protect employment options and working conditions for Taiwanese workers (Tierney, 2007). The quotas for the employment of migrant labour range between 15 and 40 percent. They are set higher in industries that are especially difficult and dirty and hence perpetuate the racialised segmentation of the labour market (Dinkelaker and Ruckus, 2023a).⁷ Fewer workers who we have met are employed in craft businesses, for instance at furniture manufactories. Work at these craft businesses involves using more skills than at sweatshops. The Indonesians we have met work to a lesser extent at large, high-tech plants that employ several hundred workers. Philippine workers dominate the migrant labour power in high-tech factories, because of their English proficiency and capacity to read English manuals (see also Chang, 2021; Chen and Schiller, 2022). Those of our Indonesian interlocutors who work at large-scale factories produce, for instance, supplies for electronic devices, automotive vehicles, and other machineries.

Our interlocutors experience their labour differently, depending on whether they work at a low-tech sweatshop, a craft business, or a high-tech factory. Workers at low-tech sweatshops describe their work as heavy and work environments as rough. The workshops can be hot and sticky, and sometimes protection equipment is poor. Indonesian workers speak of ‘home industries’ when they refer to the family-run, low-tech sweatshops that are characteristic of Taiwan’s SMEs (see Lee, 2004). Relationships to employers and supervisors at such family businesses are marked by personal forms of control (Edwards, 1979). This means that workers receive paternalistic care, expressed in extra bonuses or assistance with matters of daily life such as getting a scooter driving licence. At the same time, workers in these family businesses can be exposed to their employers’ arbitrariness. Some of them, for instance, are expected to perform excessive overtime work if an order has to be met.

In distinction to the labour in low-tech sweatshops, labour performed in craft businesses resembles that of artisans. Those of our interlocutors who work at such factories are involved in a variety of steps in the production process and employ certain skills, such as welding or grinding. Some of these workers collaborate closely with Taiwanese colleagues, which allows them to enhance their Mandarin skills. They enjoy the trust of their foremen and describe spaces of ‘freedom’, like being allowed to smoke at work. They express being appreciated for their work and receive extra payments for their skills.

Work at high-tech factories differs from that in small and medium-sized factories in various respects. Some of our interlocutors operate computerised numerical control (CNC) machines or work at the assembly line and do repetitive and monotonous tasks. They describe their work as safe and clean but boring. Control at these high-tech factories is exerted technically, since the machines set the work rhythm. Technical modes of control (Edwards, 1979), however, coincide with personal forms of control. This is exemplified in factory rules that workers describe as ‘trivial’, such as the rules which intrude into the workers’ personal lives – like Anwar’s who was quoted in the beginning of this article. He was punished for his dyed hair.

Amid these work situations, some of them characterised by harsh work, others by monotony and hierarchies, and others still by relative freedom, the workers develop various forms of behaviour to deal with the control over their work and lives. To some extent, these forms of behaviour are shaped by their conditions at different kinds of factories.

Seeking control over work in the factory

Responding to the control and treatment they receive, some of our interlocutors choose or consider to exit excessive control, some choose to pull through and try to make their work more bearable. Some seek improvement through performing well, others assert their interests in micro-conflicts, and some seek to grow and develop their skills. Here, I address how Indonesian factory workers attempt to regain control over time, space, meaning, and dignity through these practices.

Exit: Some of the workers at low-tech sweatshops strive to ‘exit’ and escape excessive control at their workplace. They seek to switch employers and thus improve their situation – a strategy described as the ‘trump card’ of proletarians who have only little control over the labour process (Lan, 2007: 259; Killias, 2018: 176). Eko, for instance, worked in a metal foundry when we met him for the first time in May 2022. At his workplace, ‘everything is manual’, he said. Without proper protection, he was exposed to dust coming from mixing metal powder. Since he had expected to work in a ‘modern’ factory, Eko wished to find a job at another factory. Yet, in Taiwan, migrant workers’ ‘mobility power’ (Smith, 2006) is constrained: employers have to approve if workers seek to change employers during a running contract (Lan, 2022). Also, brokers charge them high, illegal fees for finding them a new employer, so-called ‘job-buying fees’ (MENT, 2023). Eko reasoned: ‘My employer wouldn’t let me go now. We are short of workers’. He had to complete his first three-year contract before he could change his job.

Despite the constraints, migrants do follow the impulse to use their labour mobility. Such was the case of Dimas, a worker who had also worked at a metal foundry. Dimas had been subject to physical violence from his boss, who even during night shifts had been constantly behind his back to check whether he made mistakes. Dimas escaped the pressure, degradation, and his employer’s excessive control over his labour. When he first asked his broker agency to switch jobs, he was turned down. Finally, Dimas ran away from his workplace. He found refuge, first at a friend’s place who worked in another factory zone 140 kilometres away, and then at a shelter run by an NGO. This NGO helped Dimas to make use of the right of transfer to a new employer under exceptional circumstances, which include employers’ breaches of contracts, harassment, or violence in the workplace (see Lan, 2022).

Some workers use employers’ breaches of contract as tactics to get released without their employers’ consent. Such breaches include additional tasks outside the workers’ job description. The workers often accept these breaches, but some report them when they are dissatisfied with their working conditions and want to change workplaces. For other workers, exit means to become undocumented and to work in industries that partially rely on undocumented labour, such as construction and agriculture (Hoang, 2017; Parhusip, 2021).

Pulling through and making work more bearable: Those workers among our interlocutors who found work in ‘cleaner’ high-tech factories don’t voice any plans to find employment at another workplace. Chances are limited that they will find a job with significantly better conditions. Jamal, for instance, has worked at the assembly line of a factory producing fitness gear for nine years. He plans to stay at his workplace until he reaches the 12-year limit that he is allowed to stay and work in Taiwan. In ‘pulling through’, the workers develop their own ways to shape their time at work so that it becomes more bearable. Preventing boredom and stress from taking control over his mind, Jamal jokes and squabbles with his Indonesian colleagues at the assembly line. He told us: ‘Our foreman is just happy about this. When he is bored, we cheer him up’. In a situation where his work provides few ‘formal sources of meaningfulness’ (Laaser and Karlsson, 2022: 811), Jamal’s mention of the appreciation from his foreman, seemingly inconsequential, points to his and his co-workers’ drive to gain more control over the meaning of his work. Anwar who works at the scooter factory resists the boredom by distracting his thoughts from the repetitive tasks at the conveyer belt: imagining what he will be doing at the weekend or what his life will be like when, one day, he returns to Indonesia.

Performing well: Some workers, whether in low-tech sweatshops or in high-tech factories, manage to improve their position at their respective workplaces through performing well. Gito, for instance, has worked for a harsh boss at a small plastic bag workshop for six years. He recalled that previously his boss’s tough tone gave him a hard time: ‘I used to have tears in my eyes’. Gito has found self-worth and meaning through work performance. As a musician, he claims, he can easily capture the work procedures. He works night shifts, and now his boss entrusts him with the responsibility to oversee several machines as well as the work of his colleagues. Despite exhaustion, he values the nightshifts for the freedom from surveillance: a regain of control over time and space. In a similar vein, Anwar has gained more respect by performing well. He is efficient and meticulous and has managed so that superiors and Taiwanese colleagues do not ‘underestimate’ him and bully him less. He has acquired some freedom, like keeping his cell phone at his workplace.

Asserting one’s interest in micro-conflicts: Some workers disobey the orders of their superiors. For example, Anwar told us that once at his factory migrant workers were assigned responsibilities outside their regular work duties during several weeks that production was halted. The migrant workers were to do painting work or removing weeds on the factory premises, while their Taiwanese co-workers were to take a leave. Anwar initially followed his superior’s directions, but he quickly stopped working. ‘My task is to produce scooters, not to pick weeds’, he told us, convinced that his superior’s disposition of his time and labour was unacceptable. He also confronted the fact that, as a racialised migrant worker, he was treated differently from his Taiwanese co-workers. We have heard that sometimes workers also refuse to do overtime work when their employers request it, that they slow down the pace of work when their workload increases, and that they lay down their tools when they are blamed for errors they did not commit (Dinkelaker and Ruckus, 2023b).

We know only of exceptional cases in which Southeast Asian factory workers make use of their right to form unions (see Ford, 2019), or in which they are supported by local unions or migrant support organisations in workplace conflicts. An example is unions formed by Philippine workers at tech company ASUS and its subsidiary Askey. In October 2023, these workers held a protest against the companies’ plans to move overseas. They requested that the companies grant them severance pay or job protection (Wu and Wong, 2023). Generally, complicated bureaucratic procedures that require elaborate Mandarin skills set limitations to the formation of migrant worker unions. Albeit this is not mandatory, the roles of spokespersons are usually not held by the migrants themselves, but by local Taiwanese. Any engagement in open workplace conflicts bears the risk that contracts will not be extended, and that eventually migrants have to go back to their countries of origin.

Growing and developing skills: Those workers employed in craft businesses describe their work as more bearable than the heavy work in low-tech sweatshops and the monotonous work in high-tech factories. Rangga, for instance, works at a furniture workshop and carries out orders from his boss’s clients: equipping a school with bookshelves or producing and installing outdoor furniture. He identifies with the products he makes: proudly, he once showed us photos of some outside seating he prepared and installed. In the future, Rangga wants to use and develop the carpentry skills he has acquired in the furniture shop. His work allows him to gain more control over his life planning. Once he cannot renew his work permit and has to return to Indonesia, he plans to work at a place where he can make use of these skills, by opening his own furniture workshop.

Rangga also considers trying to scale up his status and work as a so-called semi-skilled worker. In 2022, the Taiwanese government introduced this status for experienced migrant workers. As a semi-skilled worker, Rangga’s work permit, valid for three years, could be renewed indefinitely beyond the 12-year limit, each time for an additional three years. He could be reclassified on condition that he meets certain qualifications and that he is supported by his employer, who must pay him a basic salary significantly higher than the minimum wage (Fahey, 2022).⁸ The status as semi-skilled worker would allow Rangga to circumvent the ‘protracted precarity’ (Piper et al, 2017) resulting from the uncertain economic perspectives he would face back in Indonesia.

Control over our interlocutors’ work and lives reaches beyond the shopfloor, and so does their desire to regain some of this control. I now turn to the time and space outside migrants’ waged working time and the shopfloor, first by describing their accommodation in dormitories, and then by describing how they seek to regain control over their lives outside waged working time.

Life off the shopfloor

In contrast to their Taiwanese co-workers, migrant factory workers are generally accommodated in dormitories provided by their employers or by broker agencies. Conditions at the dormitories vary. Most workers share their rooms with other workers. In some cases, four of them occupy one room, in others eight, and we even know of cases in which 30 workers share one large room. Government regulations stipulate that each person must have a sleeping place with at least 3.6 square meters of floor space. However, this provision is rarely followed due to a lack of inspection and fines (Lan, 2022). Anwar captured the conditions in his cramped dormitory: ‘The only private space we have here is the toilet’.

Accommodation in often substandard dormitories is a way for employers to save costs and to exert control over workers. Employers are allowed to deduct fees for lodging and food from migrant workers’ wages, a concession to employers who, in the early 2000s, had demanded an exemption of migrant workers from the minimum wage (Tierney, 2007).⁹ Since migrant workers live close to the company premises, employers can call them when needed. Once, we met an Indonesian worker on his day off who was called by his employer to do some repair work at the factory. We also learned that staff of broker agencies check on workers in their dormitories, for instance if they have called in sick. Some dormitories impose curfews, and migrant workers have to report their whereabouts.

Apart from being a site of intensifying migrant workers’ productivity and controlling their mobility, dormitories are a place where migrant workers are treated differently from the rest of Taiwanese society. This was experienced especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. When Taiwan was not under a full lockdown and the rest of Taiwanese society was allowed to move freely, some migrant workers were prevented from leaving their factories and dormitories. Meanwhile, in the crowded dormitories, they were exposed to a high risk of infection (Lan, 2022). Accommodation in the dormitories and the lack of privacy also exemplify the reduction to their role as disposable labour power. Their status does not leave them much room to live an extended life outside their work. Time outside their waged work appears to be mainly meant to regenerate their labour power. Nevertheless, migrant workers appropriate spaces which allow them to temporarily live a life outside the factory and dormitories, create meaning, and claim self-respect.

Seeking control over life outside the factory

Some Indonesian factory workers establish their own spaces by renting rooms outside the dormitories. On weekends, some of them share this room with their Indonesian wives who work as private caregivers and have to live with their patients and wards. Other workers rent hotel rooms to spend private time with their partners. Besides these individualised modes of appropriating space, factory workers create their own spaces in organisations such as home associations and the Taiwanese branches of Indonesia’s Muslim organisations. Some join martial arts groups, which form part of Indonesia’s large Pencak Silat organisations. Some workers get involved in organisations that support each other when they face problems with their employers or broker agencies, and that align themselves with Taiwanese NGOs.

To further unpack how migrant workers strive to regain control over time, space, meaning, and dignity outside their waged labour, I take the underground music scene among Indonesian migrant workers as an example. This is only one of the lively music scenes among Indonesian workers in Taiwan (Trans/Voices Project, 2021). Indonesian factory workers travel across the island to participate in music events and liven up the mosh pit: they dance wildly, jump, fall, and pull each other back to continue their dancing. Their activities have developed into a well-functioning scene consisting of bands, events, merchandise, and a community of like-minded people that is mainly sustained by factory workers (Ruckus, 2023). They organise events, some of them in public spaces, where the workers’ presence and subcultural expression become visible to a larger Taiwanese audience.

One of the most popular bands in this scene is the metal band Jubah Hitam, formed in 2019. Except for one of their members, who is a university graduate, they work in factories in different places in Taiwan, where they assemble machines, dye textiles, and produce furniture and metal pipes. The band also plays on stage with bands from Taiwan and from abroad, earning them respect from Taiwanese and international metal music enthusiasts.

Metal music is well rooted in the Indonesian and Javanese villages where the Indonesian workers originate from. In Taiwan, the migrants’ subcultural space of underground music, however, is characterised by the particular experience of migrant labour in the factories. Relatively regulated working hours, and the discipline implied in factory work, allow band members from various places to get together, rehearse in rented studios, record songs, and make definitive commitments to play gigs at festivals. All of this is less possible for migrants working in other sectors, such as caretaking or the fishing industry, where working hours are unregulated or irregular (Liang, 2021; Vandergeest and Marschke, 2021). Still, factory worker musicians and ‘metalheads’ need to come to terms with their employers who demand their time and labour, and some of them squeeze gigs in between weekend shifts.

The members of Jubah Hitam invest their time outside the factory in perfecting guitar riffs and learning sound technology. In their lyrics, Jubah Hitam reflect on spirituality. Songs titled ‘Spiritual Contemplation’ [Tirakat Spiritual] or ‘Sin’ [Dosa] touch on the precariousness of life in general, on questions of leading one’s life, and on questions of religious authority. In the established division of labour, Southeast Asian migrant workers are assigned the task of performing menial labour with time outside waged work meant to regenerate their labour power. Migrant band members regain control over this time to create meaning and self-respect. They occupy the space of doing philosophy, a space usually reserved for ‘an educated elite/capitalist owners… assigned with intellectual tasks’ (KUNCI, 2016: 22; see also; Rancière, 2012). During concerts, the loud music and expressive dancing contrast with the boredom and control over their work in the factory. Workers have told us that the hard music is a way for them to vent negative feelings related to their work or worries about their families. Anwar describes his immersion into the underground music scene as a way to retain his integrity and dignity. When we met him at a music event, he told us: ‘On working days, I am a robot. Only on days like this, I am a human.’

Conclusions

For over 30 years, Taiwanese factory owners have relied on the recruitment of low-skilled migrant workers from Southeast Asia. The Taiwanese state regulates the recruitment and employment of these workers. Migration policies channel migrant factory workers into difficult and devalued labour, and engender migrant workers’ precarity and racialisation. Against this background, this article explores forms of control and agency as they play out in Indonesian migrant factory workers’ everyday work and lives. I highlighted migrant workers’ responses to various forms of control, drawing on a notion of migrant labour agency that goes beyond formal forms of advocacy and organising.

Based on insights from my fieldwork, I described how some workers choose exit from excessive control at their workplaces, while others pull through and seek to make work more bearable. Some perform well to achieve spaces of freedom, others assert their interests in micro conflicts, and some develop their skills and capacities. Off the shopfloor, the workers rent rooms outside cramped dormitories, and they self-organise, while I described migrant workers’ underground music scene in more detail.

Indonesian migrant workers seek to regain control over time and space and respond to the various ways in which their labour is controlled and made available: through tight surveillance by superiors, through the rhythm of assembly lines, conveyor belts, and CNC-machines, or through accommodation in dormitories where employers and brokers can easily check on them. Their achievements of self-determined spaces and time can be small, such as less intense surveillance by superiors or being allowed to keep one’s cell phone at the workplace. They might be of greater significance, such as renting one’s own room outside the cramped dormitories or sustaining whole music scenes. By practices of regaining control over meaning and dignity – that is, filling their work tasks with more meaning, defying degrading work tasks, or engaging in migrant worker organisations and subcultures – the workers respond to the devalued work they perform as racialised workers in the factories and to broader societal exclusion.

Migrant workers’ agency is situated in both spheres of production and daily reproduction. I showed that in the sphere of production Indonesian migrant factory workers develop specific practices that are related to the different labour processes at their workplaces: low-tech sweatshops, craft businesses, and high-tech factories. For instance, the impulse to exit excessive control has been voiced by those of our interlocutors who work at sweatshops, where they are exposed to direct, excessive control from their superiors. Interlocutors who work at high-tech factories would rather stay put and endure while cultivating practices that make their work more bearable. Workers at the craft businesses have more control in the production process, and this allows them to develop skills and the perspective of more control over their life planning.

Certainly, such classification has limits given that, for instance, excessive control and arbitrariness are not limited to work relationships in low-tech sweatshops. Moreover, the practices with which migrant workers cope and resist at their workplaces are probably more varied than is presented here. Informal forms of resistance ‘are the rule’ (Heiland and Schaupp, 2022: 7), but workers do not always openly talk about them.

The workplace-related practices through which Indonesian factory workers regain control rarely turn into collective organising efforts at their workplaces. Conditions at the factories enhance workers’ fragmentation (Dinkelaker and Ruckus, 2023b). The smaller factories are scattered all over the island, which narrows possibilities for workers to get together in larger groups. At larger factories, due to the quotas that limit the employment of migrant workers, migrant workers make up a relatively smaller group.

Indonesian migrant workers develop collective practices off the shopfloor. In fact, the spheres of production and reproduction are inseparable: the significance of workers’ practices and communities outside their workplaces cannot be comprehensively understood without taking into account workers’ experiences inside the factories. Practices such as their participation in the underground music scene are a direct response to the particular experience of heavy and monotonous factory labour. Meanwhile, the practices through which migrant workers strive to regain control themselves can be understood as their effort to sustain themselves: an engagement in their own, daily reproduction, whether inside or outside the workplace.

Indonesian factory workers’ everyday forms of agency are constrained by their status as migrants. Their precarity shapes workers’ responses in the factory, since open conflicts with superiors imply certain risks. Moreover, their communities remain precarious. Most of the migrants will remain transient workers in Taiwan and, given tight immigration rules, most of them will eventually have to go back to Indonesia.

Furthermore, migrant workers’ drive to regain control over time, space, meaning, and dignity does not necessarily challenge the status quo of exploitation, precarity, and racialisation. Some of their practices actually sustain capitalist production processes. Workers’ strategies to make their work more bearable or to perform well, in effect, smoothen efficient production processes. Their activities outside the workplace play their part in regenerating workers’ capacity to bear conditions of heavy, monotonous, and degraded labour. Finally, the desire of some to upgrade their status and qualify as semi-skilled workers can enhance a division among migrant workers. Migrant supporters emphasise that the introduction of the status for semi-skilled workers is also a way of disciplining and fragmenting migrant workers, because it is only accessible to some workers who gain approval from their employers (Dinkelaker and Ruckus, 2024b).

The preceding analysis contributes to the general research on transnational labour mobility regimes in several ways. First, it provides an approach to discuss migrant workers’ conditions in terms of their everyday experience of labour processes and daily reproduction. As mentioned above, migration scholarship with a focus on Asia has extensively discussed the influence of state policies and recruitment infrastructures on migrant workers’ lives. The question of how particular forms of control in the labour process and workers’ daily reproduction also shape these lives, however, receives less scholarly attention (for a similar critique regarding research on labour migration in Europe, see Birke, 2022).

Second, studying everyday experience complements the critique of infringements of workers’ rights that NGOs, labour unions, journalists, and researchers of migrant labour in Asia and elsewhere often focus on: wage theft, exorbitant brokerage fees and debts, or violations of health and safety standards (for Taiwan, see WorkBetter Innovations, 2022). Migrant workers’ reappropriation of control over time, space, meaning, and dignity reveal not only extreme forms of rights violations. Their practices also point to an implicit refusal of the ordinary dimensions of control, degradation, insecurity, and reduction to labour power that underlie the exploitation of migrant labour.

Third, addressing migrant workers’ everyday agency provides an alternative to victimising representations of migrant labour as forced labour across geographical contexts, and it questions paternalistic notions of migrant workers’ protection (see McGrath, 2023). As in the case of Indonesian migrant factory workers in Taiwan, this agency can be ambivalent, and migrant workers’ striving for control may not lead to institutional change. Deeper understanding is needed regarding the conditions under which migrant workers’ refusal of their working and living conditions and everyday practices of contestation can generalise and build the basis for collective pressure. Research on transnational labour mobility regimes may, not just in the case of Indonesian workers in Taiwan, benefit from inquiries into the potentials and limitations of migrant workers’ sources of power (see Dinkelaker and Ruckus, 2024a).

Funding

The research for this article was possible due to a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Ethnology at Academia Sinica in Taipei between March 2022 and December 2023.

Acknowledgements

I thank Ralf Ruckus for discussing the argument of this article with me. Also, I thank Chun Huai Hsu, the editors of this themed issue, Katharine Jones, Nicola Piper, and Matt Withers as well as two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. I am especially grateful to my interlocutors who were willing to share their experiences with me.

Conflict of interest

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.