Home-Bound Precarity: Return Migrant Domestic Workers in Indonesia

Migration for work is often an unending trajectory. Many Indonesian women have gone overseas to work as domestic workers for many years before they return home. However, there is not a definite answer to the question of when they should return home and whether such a return is a permanent one. Migration scholars have long critiqued that neoliberalism and the global job market have subjected workers to extremely uncertain and precarious work environments that force them to search for short-term contracts in different countries, and thus push them perennially “on the move”. While most studies discuss migrant labour precarity in the destinations, few have examined their vulnerable positions and subordination after they return. It is often assumed that workers, especially female workers, have suffered from long-term separation with the family and a reunion with one’s family should be an ideal ending for them. Drawing on my field work in East Java, this research employs the concept – homebound precarity – to explicate on a different type of precarity faced by return migrant domestic workers. It finds that workers’ “return life” is a continued struggle between mobility and immobility, revolving around shifting life plans, mother- and wife-role dilemmas, evolving gender relations, and complex family relationships and economics. It will reveal how hometown cultural order has subordinated return women workers to village moral disciplining, who often find themselves being tied down by home-based duties and gender hierarchies.