Paper short abstract:

This paper uses migrant precarity as a lens through which to analyse mobilisation efforts for migrants' rights by civil society (including unions). It does so by drawing on the specific case of the Migrant Forum in Asia, a region-wide network of grassroots organisations.

Paper long abstract:

Asia's temporary migrants have been identified as a particularly precarious group of workers due to their insecure legal and residential status, as well as their specific position within the international division of labour which comes with the performing of un- or under-regulated types of work along the global (re-)production chains. Moreover, as argued in this paper, with local employment in countries of origin often characterized by informal employment, poor working conditions and unsustainable livelihoods, migrant workers are caught within a 'protracted precarity' that spans life at home and abroad which is often overlooked within the existing literature. Greater attention, therefore, needs to be paid to the issue of achieving decent work in countries of origin, to overcome conditions of protracted precarity that continue to structure the need for Asia's working poor to migrate.

This paper uses migrant precarity as a lens through which to analyse mobilisation efforts for migrants' rights by civil society (including unions) at the intersection of migrant temporarlity and transnationality. Such CSO action is vital in light of the emergence, and consolidation, of global and regional migration governance frameworks which tend to actively constrain considerations for migrants' human and labour rights. The emerging global migrant rights movement emanates from regional migrant rights networks, one of the most established and active of which is the Migrant Forum in Asia (MFA).