“Like Machines” in Thailand’s Seafood Industry

Abstract: This thesis seeks to answer the research question: How can we understand the experiences of Burmese female migrants working in Thailand’s seafood-industry through the lens of interdependent reproductive, productive and virtual economies? The purpose is to increase understanding of Burmese female migrants’ experiences, illustrating how these are influenced by complex social relations and power-dynamics. In doing so, this thesis aims to contribute to understanding of globalisation by revealing its uneven and oppressive material-symbolic effects. Using feminist, critical realist case-study design, primary fieldwork was performed in Samutsakhon, Thailand. Semi-structured individual- and group-interviews with Burmese female seafood-processing workers were carried out through a combined, qualitative data-creation approach. Research participants’ stories are analysed in an iterative process using Peterson’s (2002) inter-disciplinary “RPV-framing” for integrating Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies (understood as systemic sites of power). This analysis shows that Burmese female migrant workers’ experiences are strongly shaped by systemic determinations of value that are reproduced at micro-, meso- and macro-levels. Their experiences construct, reproduce and are subjected to under-valuation of women’s work, values which influence their lives in complex ways. I conclude that their choice to migrate is a reproductive strategy that results in multiple burdens and requires complex, flexible strategies.