The trauma of exploitation: Emotional geographies of temporary migration and workplace unfreedom

Abstract

This paper advances a focus on emotions as a key dimension of the actualisation of workplace exploitation experienced by temporary migrants. In doing so, we extend understandings of forced labour, unfreedom and migration and their concern for the operation of coercion in employment relations. While political-economic and legal accounts of work and oppression can tell us much about systems that underpin the occurrence of exploitation, we argue that the fluidity of unfreedoms in labour exploitation are fundamentally embodied and shaped by emotional experiences and manipulation. In order to advance this emotional account, we draw on interviews with people holding work and study visas who have experienced workplace exploitation in Aotearoa New Zealand, a context where the rapid growth in temporary migration has been associated with growing evidence of labour market abuse. Our paper addresses three key emotional dimensions of workplace exploitation that emerged in this research: inducement into exploitation, entrapment and the emotional sustenance of exploitation. Through this account we demonstrate how unfreedom is felt in the lives of temporary migrants and point towards the need to rethink both scholarly accounts of forced labour and policy responses to the workplace exploitation of temporary migrants.