Literature on training centres tend to emphasise disciplinary power at work (Killias, 2009; Liang, 2011). They highlight immobility and are likened to prisons. But the production of a “quality maid” entails more than discipline. A quality maid is a biopolitical and entrepreneurial subject. As biopolitical subjects, training constitutes domestic workers as mobile reproductive labour, plugged into the social reproduction of their host country’s population. As entrepreneurial subjects, training converts domestic workers into units of human capital—a source of income for families, economies, local and foreign recruitment agencies and local and foreign governments. While immobility and discipline create the fundamental conditions of domestic worker migration, the assembly of an empowered, entrepreneurial subject makes possible not only the completion of her employment contract but the repeated deployment to different migrant destinations—perpetuating overseas work as a permanent means of employment and a way of life.

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Training, Packaging and Commodification

  • Liberty L. Chee

摘要

Literature on training centres tend to emphasise disciplinary power at work (Killias, 2009; Liang, 2011). They highlight immobility and are likened to prisons. But the production of a “quality maid” entails more than discipline. A quality maid is a biopolitical and entrepreneurial subject. As biopolitical subjects, training constitutes domestic workers as mobile reproductive labour, plugged into the social reproduction of their host country’s population. As entrepreneurial subjects, training converts domestic workers into units of human capital—a source of income for families, economies, local and foreign recruitment agencies and local and foreign governments. While immobility and discipline create the fundamental conditions of domestic worker migration, the assembly of an empowered, entrepreneurial subject makes possible not only the completion of her employment contract but the repeated deployment to different migrant destinations—perpetuating overseas work as a permanent means of employment and a way of life.