Migrant Labor Supply Chains: Architectures of Mobile Assemblages

Abstract

This paper explores the potential for Assemblage Theory to supplement current approaches to studying labor migration in law and the social sciences. Based upon a study of women's migration for garment and domestic work in India, I lay out the labor supply chain assemblage (LSCA) as a framework for understanding how workers find employment across multi-site, dynamic trajectories. Migration into temporary employment requires workers to move between jobs on an ongoing basis. Accordingly, studying labor supply chains as fluid assemblages defined by labor market conditions, component elements, and various agents provides a methodology for analyzing frequent job searches, across recruitment geographies, that include a range of recruitment actors. By accommodating temporal, territorial, and relational analysis, this approach provides insight into how labor migration processes for migrant garment and domestic workers in India articulate with the development of markets, working conditions, and social hierarchies – including on the basis of gender and caste.