Dimensions of Precarity

This study argues that the spaces, limits and strategies in organising domestic workers are informed and shaped by a country’s political economy and labour regime. It is guided by the theoretical frameworks of Robert Cox’s Neo-Gramscian action framework and Social Reproduction Theory in its analysis. These frameworks of analysis illuminate the relations of social forces engendered through the particular relations of production and reproduction, and they provide the conceptual tools with which to explain the dimensions of precarity and organising strategies that shape and constrain the spaces involved in organising migrant domestic workers. This study proposes that the interlocking dimensions of precarity perpetuate and result in the cycle of disempowerment, disposability and exclusion of migrant domestic workers in Malaysia.