A rare study of labor migration in the Global South, Ethnic Dissent and Empowerment answers essential questions about why nations export and import migrant workers and how the workers protect themselves not only within the system, but by circumventing it altogether.
|AcknowledgmentsAbbreviations
Introduction
Chapter 1. Contexts Matter: Historical, Economic, Cultural, Religious Practices of the Five Ethnic Groups
Chapter 2. Transnational Labor Brokerage System and Its Infrastructure
Chapter 3. Labor Recruitment Process and Indebtedness
Chapter 4. Precarity and Coping Mechanisms
Chapter 5. Physical Third Space Empowerment
Chapter 6. Metaphorical Third Space Empowerment
Chapter 7. Aspirations After Malaysia
Conclusion
Appendix 1. Descriptions of the Samples
Appendix 2. Land Issues for the Five Ethnic Groups in This Study
Appendix 3. Chronology of the Transnational Labor Brokerage State System, 1980s–2019
Appendix 4. Legal Documentation of Labor Export Policies
Appendix 5. List of Organizations
Notes
Bibliography
Index|"Focusing on Vietnam's labor export policy to Malaysia, Angie Trần shows us why gender and ethnic hierarchies matter in remaking the politics of control and dissent. Essential reading for all those interested in South-South labor brokerage and temporary migration."
—Brenda S. A. Yeoh, coeditor of Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations
"This book features workers describing their conditions as laborers in foreign countries. Often shining through is how workers turned adversities into triumphs, usually modest but still invigorating. Also significant is that the workers are from five ethnic groups within Vietnamese society."
—Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, author of Speaking Out in Vietnam: Public Political Criticism in a Communist Party–Ruled Nation
|Angie Ngọc Trần is a professor of political economy at California State University, Monterey Bay. She is the author of Ties That Bind: Cultural Identity, Class, and Law in Vietnam's Labor Resistance.