Asian Working Research Articles

In the Shadows of Family Life

From a series of interviews with Lebanese middle- and upper-class women in their latter years, the paper traces an oral history of domestic service in Lebanon over the past century. The interviews reveal various periods when women and girls were recruited from the local village poor as well from among Syrians, Palestinians, Kurds, Egyptians, and others in accordance with convenience and regional political circumstances. The long-term employment of Arab women in domestic service, with a primary focus on “live-in” maids, may be characterized as carrying a “burden” of obligation and responsibility in terms of relations of patronage and fictive kin. For example, Arab women in service, after they left the employing family, continued to claim patronage and resources for themselves and sometimes for their children as well. The outbreak of the civil war in 1975, however, marked a radical shift in the source of domestic labor, from Arab to non-Arab migrant workers, where patronage obligations were no longer required (or claimed). The paper provides anecdotal testimonies of prewar relations, identifying a continuing dependency, but now on quasi-contractual arrangements with Asian and African migrant domestic workers.

South Asian border crossings and sex work: Revisiting the question of migration in anti-trafficking interventions

Tracing the genealogy of U.S. foreign policy interests in trafficking through the first major contemporary trafficking case in the United States, the author shows that historical concerns about protecting U.S. borders form a set of principles criminalizing migrants and argues that these principles are being exported through U.S. anti-trafficking work abroad. Moving from the moment in the 1990s when a consolidated anti-trafficking agenda was being determined in the United States, the author discusses the ways in which this agenda is now potentially migrating to South Asia and, in particular, to India— albeit with some major tensions already in play. The author argues that states’ anxieties about migration are themselves migrating, such that states in different regions are aiming to coordinate their responses to increased economic migration everywhere, and shows that anxieties about preventing sex work gain purchase in an international context in which migration and decriminalized borders are increasingly suspect.

Organizing at the Margins: Women Shape the Labor Movement

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Cultures of Protest in Transnational Contexts: Indian Seamen Abroad, 1885-1945

This paper offers a preliminary exploration of contexts and forms of protest and defiance of authority by Indian seafarers employed on ocean-going steam vessels over six decades to the end of World War II. Though relatively small in numbers and apparently untypical in many respects of a ‘modern’ industrial workforce, the study of Indian seafarers can shed interesting light on several wider aspects of Indian labour history. The transnational and trans-cultural context of employment of Indian seamen also helps illuminate their subjectivities, knowledges, and agencies in ways that are obscured in more insular histories, while their encounters with bosses and others in authority invite us to re-examine pervasive notions of cultural difference–‘owned’ as well as attributed.&#x0D; &#x0D; This paper is not about union-led protests, nor about ‘everyday’ forms of resistance. It dwells instead on a potentially vast and apparently uncharted middle ground of collective resistance by ships’ crews. Such resistance, perhaps simmering for weeks at sea, came to head at key moments, usually upon arrival at a foreign port, close to sailing, or when seamen were being transferred from one vessel to another. It could involve, besides the seamen themselves and their ships’ officers, a swathe of state agencies including local authorities, the police, and the judiciary, though rarely if ever, unions of local seamen.&#x0D; &#x0D; On the evidence here, the culture of work and protest of Indian seamen appears to have been informed by a certain rationality–a certain careful weighing of costs, benefits, and opportunities for engagement and disengagement, including through protest–that is altogether at odds with characteristic representations of Calcutta jute workers and British maritime workers enduring similar circumstances or facing similar ‘choices’. At the same time this culture was open to modern, secular, and transnational solidarities grounded in universalist values. Paradoxes of this nature demand a sustained effort to recover and re-interpret the complex but immensely creative subjectivities that Indian workers and seafarers (and needless to add other Asian, African, and Caribbean workers and seamen) developed and articulated within the fluid and liminal spaces they inhabited.

Labour-market assimilation of foreign workers in Italy

This is the first paper to analyse the labour-market assimilation of foreign (i.e. non-citizen) workers in Italy. It considers the daily wages and the days of employment of male workers in WHIP, a matched employer-employee panel dataset, from 1990 to 2003. The traditional human-capital approach is augmented by a control for the probability of staying abroad, modelled by aggregate variables of the origin country. The human-capital variables considered are age and experience, both in and out of employment. What emerges from the empirical analysis is discouraging. Foreigners who are able to get higher wages are the least likely to stay, but assimilation profiles do not change when return migration is taken into account. Foreigners employed in the private sector earn the same wages as natives upon entry into employment, but the two wage profiles diverge with on-the-job experience. Neither do foreigners assimilate from an employment perspective: a differential in employment between foreign and native workers is found even upon entry, which increases over time. In the construction sector the wage and employment differential is even larger, while manufacturing and services follow the aggregate trend. Africans immigrants have the fewest career prospects while Eastern European and Asian workers are less far behind. The general pattern for foreign workers appears to be a fragmented career, either restricted to seasonal or temporary jobs or alternating between legal and illegal employment.

Critical adult learning of asian immigrant workers: A social network perspective

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2006 Adult Education Research Conference, May 20, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to This study reveals how the social networks of immigrant workers play a key role in mediating critical learning towards a particular political attitude. Theoretical relationships between critical learning and political attitudes were set up and four types of political attitudes were identified. A “resistant political attitude” was conceptually linked to critical learning, and this link was investigated by using social network analysis. Finally, based on the social network analysis, we argue that both the network size and network position of immigrant workers who represented a resistant political attitude tended to shape critical adult learning when they were associated with the collective reinterpretation of the immigrant workers’ social lives.

Sex workers, fem queens, and cross-dressers: Differential marginalizations and HIV vulnerabilities among three ethnocultural male-to-female transgender communities in New York City

This article describes 3 distinct ethnocultural male-to-female transgender communities in New York City: the low-income African American/Black and Latina(o) House Ball community; low-income, often undocumented immigrant Asian sex workers; and middle-class White cross-dressers. These communities are highly socially isolated from each other and are more connected to their ethnocultural contexts than to an abstract and shared transgender identity. Whereas previous research either has viewed male-to-female transgender people as one monolithic group or has separated them into abstract racial categories unconnected to their communities and lifestyles, this article positions them within specific social networks, cultures, neighborhoods, and lifestyles. With regard to HIV vulnerabilities, violence, and rape, House Ball community members seemed to engage in the riskiest form of survival sex work, whereas Asian sex workers seemed to engage in moderate-risk survival sex work. White cross-dressers seemed to engage in very low-risk recreational sex work.

Relation between sleep quality and quantity, quality of life, and risk of developing diabetes in healthy workers in Japan: the High-risk and Population Strategy for Occupational Health Promotion (HIPOP-OHP) Study

BackgroundThe effect of sleep on the risk of developing diabetes has not been explored in an Asian population. The objective of this study is to investigate the effect of self-reported sleep duration and sleep quality on the risk of developing diabetes in a prospective cohort in Japan.MethodsData were analyzed from the cohort of participants in a High-risk and Population Strategy for Occupational Health Promotion Study (HIPOP-OHP), conducted in Japan from the year 1999 until 2004. A Cox proportional hazard model was used to evaluate the association between sleep duration or sleep quality and the risk of diabetes.ResultsOf 6509 participants (26.1% of women, 19–69 years of age), a total of 230 type 2 diabetes cases were reported over a median 4.2 years of follow-up. For participants who often experienced difficulty in initiating sleep, the multivariate-adjusted hazard ratios for diabetes were 1.42 (95%CI, 1.05–1.91) in participants with a medium frequency of difficulty initiating sleep, and 1.61 (95%CI, 1.00–2.58) for those with a high frequency, with a statistically significant linear trend. Significant association was not observed in the association between difficulty of maintaining sleep or duration of sleep, and risk of diabetes.ConclusionMedium and high frequencies of difficulty initiating sleep, but not difficulty in maintaining sleep or in sleep duration, are associated with higher risks of diabetes in relatively healthy Asian workers, even after adjusting for a large number of possible further factors.

Asian Social Workers' Perceptions of Glass Ceiling, Organizational Fairness and Career Prospects

This study examined the glass ceiling phenomenon and its effects on Asian Americans' careers in social work. A model was tested that explored utilizing a national sample of 192 Asian American social workers. Structural equation modeling techniques were employed to evaluate the adequacy of the proposed model's appropriateness to the collected data. Results indicated that the model successfully explained the glass ceiling phenomenon and organizational fairness as mediating variables. This study adds to the literature by investigating the theoretical and observed (or not observed) link between the glass ceiling literature and social justice theory. Recommendations for further study are highlighted along with the call for theory development and empirical work on race and ethnic differences as they relate to organizational behavior, with special attention to the effects of ethnicity and gender.

Toward a Productive Interdisciplinary Relationship: Between Comparative Literature and World Literature

Goethe's concept of world literature (Weltliteratur) has been subjected to much scholarly analysis recent years. As Christopher Prendergast notes the introduction to one of the most recent books devoted to this paradigm, Debating World Literature, Weltliteratur has primarily attracted interest in two (often overlapping) areas of inquiry, comparative literature and postcolonial studies, most notably (and especially the United States) connection with the theme of (vii). The cosmopolitan nuance inherent Goethe's vision of a mutually fruitful dialogue among discrete national literatures was enabled the 1820s, when he created the paradigm, by improved communication infrastructures, increased translation activity, and a political atmosphere which nationalist sentiments had been temporarily exhausted by the Napoleonic Wars and marginalized through the machinations of the Congress of Vienna. In this essay I will explore Goethe's Weltliteratur concept, the German view of the relationship between Weltliteratur and comparative literature, the conflicted interaction between world literature and comparative literature the United States, and the potential of Goethe's paradigm to bridge the disciplinary divide between world literature and comparative literature through its use as a pedagogical tool the world-literature classroom. I. WELTLITERATUR AND WORLD LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW A renewed interest Goethean Weltliteratur is the almost inevitable result our day of developments that somewhat mirror, and advance, those of Goethe's time: the end of the cold war and the concomitant rise of global financial institutions and multinational corporations (including many publishing houses); the emergence of numerous authors whose political, cultural, and sometimes even linguistic allegiances transcend the bounds of individual nation-states; and technologies such as the World Wide Web. Thus Goethe's pronouncement 1827 on the arrival of a Weltliteratur rendering national literatures rather insignificant (Goethe, cited Strich, Goethe 397) (1) is more accurate today than it was Goethe's age, because virulent nationalism became predominant most European political and literary discourse the period extending roughly from Goethe's death 1832 until the end of World War II. To be sure, nationalism reemerged the 1990s, largely response to economic immiseration and a sense of political powerlessness attendant to globalization, but, like the Congress of Vienna Goethe's day, transnational agencies such as the United Nations and the World Bank have attempted to contain xenophobia and ethnic conflict. Whether they will be as ultimately unsuccessful this containment as was the Congress of Vienna the nineteenth century is one of the great questions of our time. Considering these historical parallels, it is not surprising that contemporary literary globalization is widely read under the sign of Goethean Weltliteratur. Concurrent with this increased employment of the paradigm as a heuristic tool comparative analyses of today's transnational culture is the renewed flourishing of world literature as an academic domain American high schools, colleges, and universities. World-literature courses were first taught the United States the 1920s by Philo Buck at the University of Wisconsin (Lawall, Richard Moulton 4). Though Buck had a personal interest literature from the Indian subcontinent, his world-literature anthology is, typically for the early years of world literature as a pedagogical domain, quite Eurocentric. The various editions of his world-literature anthology contain only a smattering of works from Asia, though the number of such works increased from the first edition to the third. In the preface to the first edition, Buck explained his relative neglect of all but a few Asian works by noting he had included only those works with a vital influence upon the European tradition (v). …

Mobility and Containment: The Voyages of South Asian Seamen, c.1900–1960

In the political and economic context of imperialism, the enormous nineteenth-century expansion of shipping within and beyond the Indian Ocean facilitated the development of a new and increasingly transcontinental regime of labour circulation. The Indian subcontinent, it is well known, emerged as a seemingly inexhaustible source for plantation, railway, and port labour in British colonies across the globe. Moreover, the new and predominantly seaborne “circulatory regime” itself relied to a considerable extent on the labour power of South Asian workers, on the lascar, as the maritime counterpart of the “coolie” labourer was called.

Ambivalent anxieties of the South Asian–Gulf Arab labor exchange

This essay explores the contradictions unleashed by che heavy reliance of Oulf Arab countries 00 South Asian expatriate labor. While worker remittances sigoificantly boost the liviog standards of borne country households, the presence of surpius labor both stimuiates the emergence of a labor permita market that facilitates the annual extraction of bulbos of doliara and allows a modero form of indentured servitude. Oespite this reality, unfavorable economic conditinos cause South Asian workers to seek employment lo the Gulf.

Banning Asbestos in Asia: Campaigns and Strategies by the Asian Network for the Rights of Occupational Accident Victims (ANROAV)

China, India, Indonesia, and Thailand are among the largest consumers of asbestos. Because markets in the West are dwindling, asbestos is heavily promoted in Asia. In spite of widespread usage, asbestos-related diseases are surprisingly few and reported cases of mesothelioma are rare in Asia except in Japan, Korea, and Singapore. The problem lies in diagnosis. Most of the asbestos-related diseases are not diagnosed in Asia and thus do not appear in government statistics. This deadly substance is killing workers. Unless drastic action is taken to stop its use, Asian workers as well as the general population will pay a heavy price.

Passive Smoking at Workplace and Risk of Diabetes in Asian Workers

Passive Smoking at Workplace and Risk of Diabetes in Asian Workers

The ‘Talk’ versus the ‘Walk’: High Performance Work Systems, Labour Market Flexibility and Lessons from Asian Workers

High commitment or high performance work systems (HPWS) are a managerial approach aimed at facilitating high performance companies by transforming employees from merely being workers into partners with employers in realizing company goals. To achieve this HPWS use human resource practices that draw on employee commitment, involvement and empowerment. The pursuit of HPWS with employees in export-oriented industries (EOI) in newly industrializing economies (NIEs) of Malaysia and Sri Lanka is explored here. The discussion confirms a number of difficulties in realizing the aims of an HPWS approach because employers simultaneously pursue labour market flexibility (LMF) practices. As a result, this hybrid labour management model fractures workers' commitment thus leading to a mismatch between the ‘talk’ and ‘walk’ of HPWS in these environments with significant implications for employers.

Ethnic minority business and the employment of illegal immigrants

Based on detailed case histories of South Asian workers and their co-ethnic employers in the West Midlands clothing and catering industries, this paper examines the use of illegal immigrant labour in small ethnic minority firms and attempts to tease out its implications for the migrants themselves, their employers and the broader national interest. To establish a proper context, we begin with a review of the recent literature on the structural changes – principally the confluence of globalization and post-industrialism – which have generated a seemingly unstoppable flow of labour migration; and the official state policies that have forced much of it underground. Our own case histories are seen as one of countless local expressions of this clash between economic and political imperatives, a clash which effectively criminalizes employers and workers for providing a positive economic and social contribution to the wider good. In the present case, it is only by employing immigrant labour that struggling entrepreneurs can survive in hyper-competitive sectors of the economy and the stark choice is between official tolerance of law-breaking or driving many of these enterprises to the wall.

Networking Grassroots Efforts to Improve Safety and Health in Informal Economy Workplaces in Asia

Many workers in Asia are in the informal economy. They often work in substandard conditions, exposed to hazards in the workplace. Learning from the recent successes of participatory training programmes to improve safety and health in Asia, the ILO has strengthened its partnership efforts with local people to improve safety and health of informal economy workplaces. The target groups were: (1) home workplaces in Cambodia and Thailand, (2) salt fields and fishing villages in Cambodia where many young workers are working, and (3) small construction sites in Cambodia, Laos, Mongolia, Thailand and Vietnam. The walk-through survey results showed that the workers and owners in the target informal economy workplaces had the strong will to improve safety and health at their own initiatives and needed practical support. In the participatory, action-oriented training workshops carried out, the participated workers and owners were able to identify their priority safety and health actions. Commonly identified were clear and safe transport ways, safer handling of hazardous substances, basic welfare needs such as drinking water and sanitary toilets, and work posture. The follow-up visits confirmed that many of the proposed actions were actually taken by using low-cost available materials. These positive changes were possible by applying the participatory training tools such as illustrated checklists and extensive use of photographs showing local good examples and placing emphasis on facilitator roles of trainers. In conclusion, the target informal economy workplaces in Asia made positive changes in safety and health through the participatory, action-oriented training focusing on local initiative and low-cost improvement measures. Local network support mechanisms to share lessons from good practices played essential roles in encouraging the voluntary implementation of practical improvement actions. It is important to increase our joint efforts to reach more informal economy workplaces in industrially developing countries and provide practical support measures focusing on local self-help initiatives.

The Debate Over Japanese Immigration: The View from France

The story of the Issei — the 100,000 Japanese immigrants who traveled to Hawaii and the United States during the turn of the 20th century — is an epic of survival amid hardship. Through the efforts of labor contractors backed by the Japanese consulate, the majority of the newcomers were recruited to undertake heavy labor on Hawaiian plantations. Others settled on the mainland, predominantly on the nation's Pacific Coast, where they worked as farmers, fishermen, railroad workers, and agricultural laborers. Smaller contingents of students, artists, and professionals also crossed the ocean and scattered through the United States. As the immigrants became established, many brought over “picture bride” wives and started families. Through careful saving of wages and communal self-help, numerous immigrant laborers bought farms and established small businesses, churches, and community institutions. At the same time, they were victimized by widespread racial prejudice and discriminatory legislation. Like other Asian immigrants, they were barred from naturalization by federal law, and therefore from voting, and in many states the Issei were forbidden to marry whites or to practice certain professions. In Hawaii, the white planter class limited educational opportunity and kept Issei in menial labor positions. On the West Coast, white laborers and political leaders, who rigidly excluded Asian workers from unions, organized movements to exclude the Issei from residence on the grounds that they depressed wage scales through their willingness to work for lower pay. Following the “Gentlemen's Agreement” of 1907–8, the entry of Japanese laborers into the country was largely restricted. Shortly thereafter, in response to demands by white farmers enraged by competition from their Issei counterparts, California and neighboring states enacted alien land acts, which forbade all Japanese and other “immigrants ineligible to citizenship” from owning agricultural land. As a result, the Issei were forced to take short-term leases on land or to put their holdings in the names of white colleagues or of their own children, the Nisei (American-born citizens of Japanese ancestry). Exclusionist pressure, founded on nativist opposition to the alleged racial danger posed by the Issei to the American population, flared up again following World War I and climaxed in the Immigration Act of 1924, which outlawed all Japanese immigration to the United States.

Between "Oriental Depravity" and "Natural Degenerates": Spatial Borderlands and the Making of Ordinary Americans

This article examines how a series of California court cases in the 1910s and 1920s recast the boundaries of American masculinity by tackling the ambiguities of sexual and social interaction between male adolescents and Asian migrant workers. Specifically, the prosecutors and police characterized South Asian and Chinese men as the importers of "unnatural" sexual practices. Police suspicion of illicit and immoral activity remade the spatial locations of contactÑthe streets, alleys, boardinghouses, labor camps, and ranches where migrant workers congregatedÑinto borderlands spaces. My critical approach tracks the transit of migrant workers and how their presence proliferates borderlands spaces along and beyond national borders. The surveillance of interracial contact and alleged sexual activity remade transient domestic and leisure spaces into sites of public scrutiny. My analysis tracks how prosecutors and judges deployed categories of normality and degeneracy to create racialized and sexualized typologies of masculinity to police the relationships of roaming male youth and foreign migrants in the early twentieth century. I argue that the jurisprudence in these cases reinterpreted and combined three seemingly distinctive strands of case law Ð sodomy, statutory rape, and vagrancy Ð to both explain and punish the contact between Asian migrants, domestic transients, and male adolescents. Yet the sexual and moral ambiguity of male adolescence confounded the jurists, forcing them to consider whether a youth was innocent, criminal, or delinquent. The protection of a specific male victim, however, became secondary to the protection of American society and civilization and the affirmation of normative masculinity. By extending the interpretive methodologies of queer borderlands scholars, this analysis denaturalizes the normalizing project of American nationality, masculinity, and heterosexuality. The policing of internal and external nomadic subjects revealed the ambiguity and insecurity of cross-racial and cross-class intimacy and intensified the fixing of new social boundaries of perversity and normality in the first decades of the twentieth century.

A Comparative Study of Condom Use and Self-Reported Sexually Transmitted Infections Between Foreign Asian and Local Clients of Sex Workers in Singapore

We conducted a survey to compare condom use and its associated factors between foreign Asian and local clients of female sex workers in Singapore. A survey was conducted between 2001 and 2002 on a random sample of 810 clients (677 foreign Asian workers and 133 locals) recruited from the streets and outside the brothels in Singapore. Foreign clients were more likely than locals to be inconsistent condom users with sex workers. Clients from China reported the highest percentage of inconsistent condom use (29.2%) and sexually transmitted infections (16.7%) compared with 8.3% (P < 0.003) and 2.3% (P < 0.005), respectively, among locals. On multivariate analysis, inconsistent condom use among foreign clients increased significantly with the number of freelance sex workers. The reverse trend was found for local clients. There is a need to design separate condom-promotion programs for foreign Asian and local clients of sex workers in Singapore.