Contribution short abstract:

This conference contribution discusses labor migration in Taiwan through the concept of racialized capitalism. I propose this perspective as a counter-narrative to scandalizing discourses on "modern slavery" and "forced labor," and I reflect on conceptualizing racialized capitalism in global space.

Contribution long abstract:

This conference contribution discusses the mobilization and control of Southeast Asian migrant workers to Taiwan through the concept of racialized capitalism. I propose this perspective as a counter-narrative to scandalizing discourses on “modern slavery” and “forced labor” in global production chains. While these discourses have gained traction in the past decade and also dominated debates around migrant labor in Taiwan, they tend to obfuscate migrants’ experiences of the everyday violence of their labor as well as their various struggles against their conditions. Drawing on two years of fieldwork with Indonesian migrant workers in Taiwan’s manufacturing and fishing industries (2022-2024) and engaging with Taiwan’s thirty-year-old history of recruiting “low-skilled” temporary workers into dirty, difficult, and demeaning jobs, I argue that the racialization of Southeast Asian migrant workers is constitutive of Taiwan’s contemporary capitalist configuration. Taiwan’s migration regime produces a fragment of the working class split off from local workers with the effect of intensified exploitation and the division of workers’ struggles. My contribution outlines how the contemporary racialization of labor relations in Taiwan is embedded in earlier forms of segmenting the working classes throughout European, multiple Chinese, and Japanese colonizations of Taiwan. Thus, I attempt to contribute to discussions on racialized capitalisms in global space – varieties of racialized capitalism that are entangled with Europe’s colonial history but that also go beyond the Eurocentric framework. Furthermore, I consider how Southeast Asian migrant workers today confront their degradation and exploitation, thereby underscoring the contested nature of racialized capitalism.