From Facebook to factory: Refugee women’s livelihoods and the changing world of work amid the pandemic

Keywords: labor, refugees, gender
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 16

Abstract

Worldwide there are 2.7 billion Facebook users, with over a billion people on Facebook Marketplace. For refugees, Facebook is a lifeline to mobility and income as many seek out human smugglers and informal employment (Kaplan 2018, Dekker et al 2018). Facebook Marketplace has also emerged as a source of income for many refugee women, including Burmese Muslim and Rohingya women, who sell snacks, headscarves, makeup, and beauty services on the platform. Yet surprisingly, or unsurprisingly perhaps, Facebook business ground to a halt during the COVID-19 pandemic for a small community of Burmese women refugees living in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Many were compelled to leave the home – often to work in illicit PPE factories. Meanwhile self-employed women in domestic and Facebook-based beauty industries were pushed into narrower labor niches. Given widespread mobile phone internet access amid lockdown, why did Facebook commerce suddenly become nonviable for Burmese refugee women, and why did factory work become widespread among people who have historically been excluded from more ‘formal’ jobs in manufacturing? This paper aims to answer these questions by examining the changing political economy of refugee labor in the context of racist, xenophobic, and difficult-to-dislodge policies implemented in Malaysia during the pandemic. I also consider shifting regimes of exploitation – both in the digital and manufacturing worlds – alongside broader questions about the long-term impacts of the pandemic as the gulf between privileged work-from-home labor and unfree, precarious labor widens.