Date of Award

8-31-2026

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Public Policy

First Advisor

Dr. Mark R. Warren

Second Advisor

Dr. Heather MacIndoe

Third Advisor

Dr. Amit Patel and Dr. Maryann Bylander

Abstract

Migration scholars have long assumed that women migrant laborers move as individuals, leave family behind, are governed by labor migration policies, and are employed full-time. However, in the context of South-South migration, many workers migrate as families, with husbands, wives, and sometimes even children. Some engage in the informal economy, serving as casual and on-call workers. These types of employment fall outside the scope of standard labor migration policies and therefore receive less attention. As a result, migrants’ experiences in such work arrangements remain underexplored. This study examines the experiences of Cambodian migrant women in Thailand by examining the case of women fish sorters in the Thai seafood industry. It asks how migrant women employed as casual or on-call workers experience their working conditions. Employing an intersectional lens that integrates gender, migration status, and informal employment, this study examines how these dimensions shape women’s experiences.

Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in Rayong province, Thailand, this research finds that Thailand’s fisheries policy is gendered, focusing on fishermen who work on fishing boats while excluding women who work informally as fish sorters onshore. Due to the informal nature of their employment, migrant women fish sorters experience challenges in securing legal documents and struggle to earn sufficient income. Furthermore, the informality of women’s employment, which is mediated by a patronage network of female supervisors, creates unfair treatment among women and ties them to exploitative work. Irregular work demands and family responsibilities that require women’s employment also limit women’s ability to exercise their agency to resist their working conditions, resulting in women using informal strategies to merely survive rather than thrive.

The findings of this research contribute to the literature on South-South migration by highlighting the experiences of women who migrate with their families and by extending analysis beyond the conventional assumption that migrant workers are employed full-time. Furthermore, the findings contribute to debates on migrants’ resistance, which is shaped not only by their migrant status but also by informal networks, informal compensation, and family responsibilities. An important implication of this study is that governments in the Global South should consider labor migration policies that respond to the needs of women by accounting for family migration and the realities of labor markets, which depend on informal migrant labor.

Comments

Free and open access to this work is made available to the UMass Boston community by ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. Those not on campus and those without a UMass Boston campus username and password may gain access to this work through Interlibrary Loan. If you have a UMass Boston campus username and password and would like to download this work from off-campus, click on the “Off-Campus Users” button.

Download

Share

COinS