Contesting Migrant Labour: A Politics of Precarity on the Thai-Myanmar Border

The global proliferation of export processing zones, linking migrant labour to international markets and global supply chains, has established these sites as critical components of contemporary globalised capitalism. As regulatory enclaves of industrial production, export processing zones are marked by forms of population administration organised around the optimisation of low-waged, flexible labour. This dissertation is a study of the social construction of formal and informal labour regulation at one such regulatory enclave. It focuses on the Mae Sot Special Border Economic Zone in northwest Thailand, where some 200,000 plus Myanmar migrants have been engaged in highly precarious employment in garment and textile manufacturing, agriculture, and service work since the early 1990s. While formal state policy significantly impacts the on-the-ground regulation of migrant labour in Mae Sot, the local situation exhibits a variety of overlapping, formal and informal regulatory regimes. These multiple regimes of regulation are subject to continual processes of contestation, negotiation and compromise, with uncertain effects on Mae Sot's border capitalism. In order to trace these processes, I present ethnographic accounts of migrants engagement with various state and private actors, including the Mae Sot police, officials of the Thai government's Labour Protection Office, private passport companies, and non-governmental organisations. I further trace the emergence of migrant social formations, shaped by the particular conditions of low-waged, flexible labour as well as despotic employment practices and coercive policing. The dissertation concludes by following the organisational efforts of a group of migrants employed at one Mae Sot garment factory, as they seek to raise their wages and improve their working conditions over the course of a year. Throughout, I find that migrants' everyday practices and patterns of struggle are shaped both by the site's network of governmental rule and by the disciplinary powers of the local police.Ph.D