Home-bound precarity: home violence on return Indonesian migrant domestic workers

Abstract

ABSTRACT Migration for work is often an unending journey. Many Indonesian women spend years as domestic workers overseas before they return home, and there is often no definitive answer as to when they should return, and whether such a return is ‘final’. Migration scholars have long critiqued neoliberal capitalism and the global job market for subjecting workers to uncertainty and precarity. Yet, few have explored the precarity faced by return migrant women at home. Drawing on the results of our field interviews conducted on return workers in East Java and workers in Hong Kong, we develop the concept of ‘home-bound precarity’ to examine the financial and moral violence imposed on migrant women. We argue that ‘home-bound precarity’ is one of the root causes of migrant workers’ protracted precarity. The research opens a rich vein of inquiry into return migration and sheds new light on the understanding of labor precarity.