‘Like every other day’: Writing temporalities of banal exploitation among precarious migrant workers

Abstract

The violence of precarious labour migration is often represented in popular and policy accounts through episodic frames that emphasise particular—often sensationalised and extreme—aspects and moments of more complex and mundane experiences. These depictions commonly appear under the labels of ‘modern-day slavery’ and ‘labour trafficking’. This paper advances a participatory methodology aimed at elucidating more complex temporalities experienced by precarious migrant labourers, drawing on a project with male migrant workers in Singapore. The methodology developed for this project centres on written diaries/narratives authored by the participants over periods ranging from one to three months. These detailed narratives document struggles—physically, relationally, financially and emotionally—in the context of post-labour destitution. These struggles appear as both ‘everyday’ difficulties and longer-term problems, with both temporalities rendered visible as a form of slow violence. This methodology fuses key principles of qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) methods with participatory action research (PAR) to develop a methodological orientation to temporally extenuative experiences of violence that are visible through processes that draw on participants as key producers of knowledge and advocates for change. As a way of engaging migrants' mundane post-labour struggles, this methodology allows for tracing of the longer-term and cumulative impacts of precarious migrant labour through participants' own frames of reference.