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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the transnational geographies of manual labour produced through Pacific Islander temporary labour migration schemes in Australia. These reflect the particularities of contemporary capitalism, reanimate colonial pasts, and yield contradictory (de)valuations of physical work.

Paper long abstract

Since 2018, an expansion of temporary labour migration schemes has seen increasing numbers of Pacific Islanders travelling to Australia to work under restrictive, time-limited visas. The work they do is nominally-unskilled work for which industry struggles to recruit sufficient local labour. It is also overwhelmingly manual, including fruit-picking, aged care work, and meat-processing. As guestwork schemes reconfigure patterns of Pacific mobility and sociality, and of Australia-Pacific relations, they also produce new transnational spatial distributions of labour. These reflect the particularities of contemporary capitalism, while also reanimating colonial pasts and hierarchies. Here, the Pacific is figured as a plentiful source of manual workers, and Pacific bodies figured as well-suited to gruelling physicality. Contemporary technologies of labour and migration governance combine with these racialised tropes to provide a ‘spatial fix’ for Australian industry, making labour available when needed while ensuring that workers return to their home countries, and that the reproductive labour of sustaining this manual workforce is contained within the Pacific itself. As labour and migration regimes fuse with the scheme’s developmentalist framing, meanwhile, manual labour itself becomes subject to shifting and sometimes-contradictory forms of (de)valuation. As ‘low-skilled’ and low-paid labour it is economically devalued, but simultaneously held out to workers for its potential to transform lives, families, and communities. Farmers, meanwhile, wield ambivalent discourses of ‘work ethic’ that both valorise manual labour and reveal anxieties about their dependence on it.