Email: phyo@iss.nl

Affiliation: International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS, The Hague)

Nationality: Myanmar

Migrant (farm) workers, war and resistance: Conscription, war and resistance in the Myanmar-Thailand corridor

Abstract

This paper takes off from and is centrally about the political economy of migrant workers from Myanmar going to Thailand is intertwined with the politics of war, conscription and resistance. In this paper I will discuss the struggles of migrant workers from the critical agrarian studies perspectives. Control of labour is key for the central state and owners of big capital, both for state-building and profit-making. These manifest in everyday acts of counting and formal registration of migrant workers. Legalizing, counting and categorizing people is essential to the state making and subject making projects. When migrant workers get themselves registered, they will become visible to the state systems. The argument used at times is for the purported state's facilitation of services to migrant workers: healthcare, social welfare, face lesser police and immigration harassment, get access to mobile telecommunications, banking and digital financial services; they may get access to education for their children. In general, labour registration is seen as an improvement and it was believed to provide visibility, legality and protection to an extent for the migrants. Formalization and legalization, however, also expose migrants to the state, and subject them to strict labour control. This becomes problematic in situations where migration is pursued as resistance because migration legalization means resisters being delivered into the hands of the state, the actor being resisted by the migrant workers. Thus, being counted and rendered visible, however, have serious implications for the Myanmar migrants in the context of the 2021 military coup and resistance. Specifically, many young men left Myanmar and migrated to Thailand after the military passed a conscription law. If visible, they can be taxed by the military regime, or worse they may face deportation and forced conscription. At this political juncture, against the rational logic some may argue, many Myanmar migrant farmworkers choose not to be registered. While Thai authorities and their employers initially insisted that they must. Finally , the Thai government relented after strong lobbying from the Thai employers and business sectors. Every actor within the labour regimes has diverse and contradicting interests, and they may all be correct at the same time, within their own set of parameters in their decision making. To provide labour registration, and therefore to take the state's responsibilities in upholding labour rights and labour protection, has long been an important demand from labour activists. In this paper, I argue that the migrant farmworkers' stance against formalization, legalization and registration is an extension of their resistance against the Myanmar military regime. This situation may not be unique to Myanmar. My hunch is many migrant workers need to make a calculated difficult choice between a hostile job-giving country or a violent conflict-ridden homeland, or in the worst case like the Rohingya refugee workers, a genocide. While mainstream research pays attention to organised forms of labour struggles, such as labour association, unionizing, or labour strike, my hunch, informed by my experience as an undocumented child labour working for a few years at a seafood factory in Mahachai, Thailand, is that Myanmar migrants will choose non-confrontational, less organised, daily resistance as their main form of political struggles. In this paper, I will try to explain what their struggle looks like, and what form, substance and ideology it may take.

The empirical material for this paper has been gathered through many years of working with Myanmar rural communities where most of the migrant workers come from. More recently, fieldwork includes data generated in the period of 2021-2024. I use qualitative methods, through FGDs, key informant interviews, and participant observation, as well as archival research.

Bio

Pa Pa Phyo is a PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS, The Hague) under the supervision of Jun Borras. She has been part of a special program, led by Jun, the "Myanmar Initiative" with and of scholar-activists from Myanmar in collaboration with the Chiang Mai University in Thailand, and the RRUSHES-5 project. She holds MA degrees in Gender and Peace Building from University for Peace (Costa Rica) and Political Science from Ateneo de Manila University. Her work experience includes being employed at a seafood factory as an underaged undocumented migrant worker in Thailand. That experience shaped her world views and political activism. Later she has been working with a youth-oriented local NGO on peace building, environmental sustainability and food sovereignty since 2008. Her PhD research examines the political economy of land and migrant labor firmly located within the sphere of production and social reproduction. It focuses on Myanmar's migrant farmworkers in Thailand, the primary destination of Myanmar's out-migration. Her research will attempt to get a better understanding of the relationship between the political economy of land and labor within an indivisible sphere of production and social reproduction.