Dr Wayne Palmer, Visiting Scholar, SEARC, CityU
Abstract:
The issue of migrant workers in Hong Kong is again in the news following the recent event involving the mistreatment of Erwiana Sulistyaningsih. Last year the Hong Kong Labour Department conducted over 1,000 inspections of employment companies, responding to reports, for example, that they illegally overcharged foreign domestic workers for their services. These efforts resulted in the revocation of four business licences. In the same year, Amnesty International claimed that these companies systematically extracted illegal fees from tens of thousands of Indonesian domestic workers. Why is this practice so prolific among Indonesians? The answer lies in how the Indonesian consulate engages with the Hong Kong migration policy that requires foreign governments to endorse citizens for domestic helper visas. The Indonesian consulate uses this control to impose an extraterritorial accreditation system on Hong Kong employment companies, requiring those it approves to act as intermediaries for their citizens. This paper examines the administrative arrangement, arguing that it forms part an emerging state-society social contract concerning responsibility for labour migrants.
Short Bio:
Wayne Palmer is a Visiting Scholar at the City University of Hong Kong Southeast Asia Research Centre. He contributed a book chapter on the role of discretion in handling human trafficking cases within an Indonesian embassy to Labour Migration and Human Trafficking in Southeast Asia: Critical Perspectives. Wayne’s article on extraterritorial interventions that the Indonesian consulate makes through public-private partnerships with employment companies in Hong Kong was published in Political Geography. He submitted a doctoral thesis on the role of government officials’ discretion in shaping and implementing Indonesia’s state migration programme at the University of Sydney in 2013. Wayne is the Senior Client Advisor at the Christian Action – Domestic Helpers and Migrant Workers Programme.
Dr Palmer spoke about how the accreditation system that the Indonesian consulate has built on the back of Hong Kong’s endorsement policy enables extraterritorial intervention in labour migration matters concerning domestic workers from Indonesia. The system empowers employment agencies to act as another gatekeeper to employment, enabling them to charge high (and sometimes illegal) fees for their services. The fact that Hong Kong involves foreign consulates in its immigration control system at all points to unconventional relationships between the state, citizenship and territory. The extraterritorial interventions it enables do no not improve the condition of Indonesian domestic workers: on the contrary, Amnesty International claims that employment agencies systematically extracted illegal fees from tens of thousands of Indonesian domestic workers.
Please click here for the Youtube video of Dr Palmer's seminar.
