Remittances and social capital: livelihood strategies of Timorese workers participating in the Australian Seasonal Worker Programme

Wu, Annie Yuan Cih; Neilson, Jeffrey; Connell, John

doi:10.1080/01436597.2022.2131519

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Family separation and changes to care relationships impact Pacific workers and their children alike and vary according to children's ages. Workers themselves can find family separation difficult; Stead (2019) describes how a group of ni‐Vanuatu SWP workers ‘ached’ for their children, whereas Timorese women employed through the SWP felt guilty about being unable to fulfil traditional caring roles (Wu et al., 2023). Unsurprisingly, many early SWP workers wished they could bring their children with them to Australia (Petrou & Connell, 2023).…”

Section: Transnational Care Practices: Connecting International and P...mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Sometimes, men cannot do what women can’: Pacific labour mobility, gender norms and social reproduction

Petrou,

Withers

2023

Global Networks

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Australia's 2018 introduction of the Pacific Labour Scheme (PLS) broadened the scope and duration of labour mobility pathways available to Pacific Island countries. Although longer term temporary migration schemes like the PLS expand livelihood opportunities for migrant households, they also create challenges related to the maintenance of personal relationships and care practices during transnational family separation. Though pressing concerns for Pacific Island governments, these issues have received little scholarly attention. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with migrants and their households in Kiribati, Tonga and Vanuatu, this article offers some preliminary insights into the way gender norms intersect with the reorganization of socially reproductive labour during migration. Findings indicate that women were disproportionately involved in the performance of additional unpaid care work within migrant households adjusting to transnational family life, but also suggest that women's participation in labour mobility may offer nascent opportunities to increase financial autonomy and social standing through the act of ‘remitting care’.

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Section: Transnational Care Practices: Connecting International and P...mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Sometimes, men cannot do what women can’: Pacific labour mobility, gender norms and social reproduction

Petrou,

Withers

2023

Global Networks

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“…Once in Australia, workers understand clearly that their stay is only temporary. As Wu (2020) describes in her thesis, the increasing ease of being able to stay in touch with families back home (most often through WhatsApp) means that the experience of being 'absent' is certainly changing, even if it has not quite been eliminated altogether. While a delimited stint in Australia during which workers typically remain connected to home obviously has some sort of impact on the individual's socio-economic role in their community, this change is perhaps better characterised as a shift rather than a complete separation-a move away from expectations rooted in customary gender roles, social hierarchies and capacity for physical labour, to a contri-bution defined by distance, radically increased access to money and the introduction of new but not necessarily less meaningful ways of being together virtually.…”

Section: Remittance and Return: Labour-sending From Timor Todaymentioning

confidence: 99%

The transnational village in Timor‐Leste

Rose

2022

Australian J of Anthropology

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Migrants in 2020 stay connected with their homes in ways unimaginable just 10 years ago. In the case of the Australian Seasonal Worker Program (SWP) which facilitates the short term, repeat travel of Timorese to Australia to engage in harvest labour, this connectivity particularly pronounced and important. In this article, drawing on original ethnographic fieldwork in the household of a returned SWP worker in Oecussi, I argue that this connectivity is intense enough that it calls us to reassess what we mean by migration how we think about its impact on development. Rather than thinking of SWP participants as migrants, I argue, it may be more useful to think of them as 'trans-national villagers' whose international labour encodes understandings of work and wealth that are essentially an extension of those prevailing in Timor and definitive in its impact.

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Migration, Digitalization, and Sustainable Development Across Pacific Islands

Bailey,

Zou

2024

Sustainable Development Across Pacific Islands

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Remittances and social capital: livelihood strategies of Timorese workers participating in the Australian Seasonal Worker Programme

Cited by 6 publications

References 23 publications

‘Sometimes, men cannot do what women can’: Pacific labour mobility, gender norms and social reproduction

‘Sometimes, men cannot do what women can’: Pacific labour mobility, gender norms and social reproduction

The transnational village in Timor‐Leste

Migration, Digitalization, and Sustainable Development Across Pacific Islands

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