Translating People and Policy: The Role of Maid Agents in Brokering between Employers and Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore’s Migration Industry

Introduction

Within the Asia-Pacific region, thousands of women leave their home countries each year to seek various forms of paid domestic and care labor in more developed economies such as South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore (Oishi 2017). Their migration sojourns are often only made possible by migration intermediaries who feature as bureaucratic circumnavigators (Rodriguez 2010), moral guarantors (Lindquist 2012), producers of governable subjects (Rudnyckyj 2004), and financial creditors (Friebel and Guriev 2006). Brokers are central to the business of what has been called the “migration industry” (Cranston, Schapendonk, and Spaan 2018), which, in turn, envelopes a wide range of actors, objects, and infrastructures that perform the varying functions necessary for migration to take place. Popular discourse has tended to position the broker as an exploitative figure: an intermediary who profits from would-be migrants by circumventing the law, forging passports, visas, and other documents, and subjecting migrants to a shadowy irregular existence through the compulsion of debt slavery (McKeown 2012). However, scholars have recently come to recognize that such a viewpoint is unproductive, yielding little insight into migrant brokers’ subjectivities and embeddedness in kinship networks, transnational marketplaces, and state institutions (Cranston, Schapendonk, and Spaan 2018). In this light, this article foregrounds brokerage as a mode of practice and a site of knowledge production. In other words, we focus not on the broker as simply part of a larger enterprise, but on how his/her actions actively constitute the processes and meanings of the migration industry itself and with what implications for transient labor migrants.

From this departure point, we examine migration agents’ practices through the prism of translation. We suggest that brokers behave as translators — not merely in the literal sense of being a conduit that conveys “contained” meanings from one language to another — but also as actors who actively shape and produce knowledge by brokering between various actors, interfaces, scales, and entities. As mediators, they do not just transport, but also transform, meaning (Latour 2007). By using translation as an analytical lens to make sense of brokers’ practices, we are better able to understand how migration intermediaries influence the lived experiences and working conditions of women who migrate as domestic workers. How, we ask, are migrants and employers translated to each other by migration brokers? Equally important, what are the consequences of brokers’ decisions surrounding the act of translation for the migration industry and for migrants themselves?

In addressing these questions, we show, first, that by translating encounters between domestic workers and their potential employers, brokers reproduce broader cultural knowledge about the appropriate relationship between employer and employee and the power dynamics between “maid” and “ma’am.” Second, our research demonstrates that by translating the text of policy and regulation into practice through the acts of drawing up contracts and offering employers advice, brokers have significant power to shape the spectrum of lived realities experienced by migrant domestic workers. This article throws light on what role migration brokers play, to what extent they influence the work conditions migrant workers face, and how the migration industry is regulated in the service of protecting low-waged labor migrants.

To develop these ideas, this article first discusses the relationship of translation to brokerage, to provide a conceptual framework for our arguments. We then outline the contextual contours of the migration industry that moves domestic workers transnationally in Asia, and to Singapore more specifically, before briefly explaining our study’s methods. The rest of the article focuses on how employment agents — commonly known as maid agents — broker through acts of translation. We argue that the purpose of brokerage is not to automate, quicken, or replicate processes but to bring together and activate the overlapping regulatory frameworks and dominant sociocultural modes of understanding that underpin the transnational migration industry. As linguistic interlocutors, employment agents paraphrase (Dorner, Orellana, and Li-Grining 2007) workers to employers, and vice versa, in their everyday encounters, rendering migrants legible to employers (Chávez 2009). As bureaucratic interpreters, employment agents in Singapore translate policy text into tacit advice and private contracts, working within and alongside the interstices of the state to coproduce a governance regime that oversees migrant domestic workers (Goh, Wee, and Yeoh 2017). Examining these acts of translation, we suggest, not only reveals the latitude that migration brokers have in shaping the everyday social worlds as perceived and experienced by migrant workers and employers but also allows us to follow the effects of translation choices on domestic workers’ lived realities. This last point is particularly salient, given the substantial role that brokers play as part of Singapore’s arrival infrastructure for receiving and controlling temporary labor migrants (Meeus, van Heur, and Arnaut 2019).

Brokerage as Acts of Translation

Translation is often seen as a textual and linguistic activity, defined as “the process through which a language is rendered into another language” (Giordano 2008, 589). However, beyond its purely linguistic definition, translation has also been understood as a metacultural act (Dorner, Orellana, and Li-Grining 2007) or approached as a theoretical metaphor (Giordano, 2008). While some writers have focused mainly on the translator as a subject (Wolf 2007), others are curious about how translation — as an act of explanation, textualization, and legitimation — plays into the politics of knowledge more broadly. This second aspect of translation has been the crux of multiple debates in anthropology and postcolonial studies (e.g., Asad 1986; Robinson 2014; Gal 2015). Ethnographers in particular have grappled with the consequences of representing and reproducing (often-marginalized) cultures as texts for the consumption of specific audiences frequently located in privileged sites in the Global North (Clifford and Marcus 1986). From this perspective, translators are placed in both powerful and liminal positions as they mediate particular modes of knowledge of the “other”; consequently, the act of translation often entails a degree of symbolic violence, as translations may be partial, fragmentary, or decontextualized (Dingwaney 1996). However, translation is not a unidirectional act of power and can also encompass pockets of noncompliance, silence, and polyphony from the refusal of the “other” to be understood on terms not their own (Bhabha 1994).

Situating translation firmly in the realm of social action, rather than textual production, requires us to pay analytical attention to the broker as an actor that shapes everyday life. Brokers fashion connections between disparate social worlds in various ways (Koster and van Leynseele 2018). In the anthropological literature on brokerage, scholars consider brokers critical to the alignment of different rationalities and scales of belonging (Wolf 1956). Often behaving as translators, brokers are understood to make sense of and to work between different schemas and interpretations of the world via speech- and text-based acts such as initiating conversation, producing contracts and agreements, proffering advice, and so on. In his classic ethnography on Java, for example, Clifford Geertz focused on the religious figure of the Javanese kijajis as “groups of individuals who can ‘translate’ the somewhat abstract ideologies of the ‘New Indonesia’ into one or another of the concrete idioms of rural life and can, in turn, make clear to the intelligentsia the nature of the peasantry’s fears and aspirations” (1960, 228). The kijajis acted as pedagogical educators, mystical teachers, and preachers, holding rallies, prayer meetings, and religious talks; through what Geertz called “religious vaudeville,” these brokers were part of the apparatus that translated the new Indonesian state to rural Java.

Translation, as a broad framing heuristic, has also been widely used to understand more contemporary contexts in which brokerage occurs. For example, Lo (2010) discusses the cultural brokerage that medical practitioners enact when translating between two sets of sense-making schemas: the “lifeworlds” of patients from immigrant or ethnic-minority backgrounds and the broader institutional system of American healthcare. To reconcile these divergent orientations, doctors map out patient culture and then translate between health systems to offer what Lo calls “culturally competent care.” In Lo’s work, translations are not merely the conversion of meanings from one closed system to another but also incorporate acts of hybridization, mutual inclusion, and authority sharing.

As a theoretical metaphor, translation has yielded richly textured understandings of how brokerage brings into relation disparate social realms. Insurance agents in South Africa translate between bureaucracies and people by transforming risk into apparently neutral operational costs (Bähre 2012); real-estate agents in Australia translate between working-class and middle-class tastes in gentrifying markets (Bridge 2001); secondhand car brokers translate socially constructed knowledge into market information (Beuving 2013); and commercial biofuel brokers in Jakarta selectively translate information from one community to another to perpetuate narratives of optimism (Vel 2014). The application of translation to contexts as varied as these examples reveals how translation is a fundamental element of brokerage and suggests its potential in being applied to studies of brokers of international migration.

Translation, therefore, is not the conversion of one set of meanings to another across discrete, packaged, and well-defined oppositions (Engebretsen, Sandset, and Ødemark 2017). Instead, translators are active producers of meaning and play central, rather than ancillary, roles in shaping everyday know-how. As a broad theoretical metaphor, translation allows us to see, first, how brokers fashion social meanings and, second, how these new meanings propel social action. This article uses the prism of translation to examine how broad, overarching, and seemingly coherent institutional directives and dominant sociocultural norms are creatively, elastically, and iteratively negotiated and produced in moments of interaction among brokers, employers, and workers. It joins the work of those scholars interested in unravelling brokers’ everyday practices to understand how conditions of life and labor are produced for migrants (Bélanger 2016; Alpes 2017; Killias 2018).

We also take as a starting point the notion that an examination of brokers’ everyday business practices does not limit our analysis to the “micro” scale of social life. Conversely, taking the everyday seriously allows us to throw into sharp relief the way that broader patterns of power govern, shape, and are animated by the most minute acts and interactions. An analytical emphasis on the quotidian, as we and others argue, redraws the boundaries of what has conventionally been considered worthy of scholarly attention (Smith 1987). By going beyond the description of ordinary activities, a critical approach to everyday life “analyze[s] the asymmetrical power relations that exist between a given bureaucratic or institutional system and its users…. [I]t is to this technocratic rationality that the ‘non-logical logics’ of everyday life are generally contrasted and opposed” (Gardiner 2000, 7).

Methodology

This article draws from qualitative research conducted on Singapore’s migration industry between 2015 and 2017. We conducted 28 in-depth interviews lasting 1–3 hours with employment agents who recruited and placed migrant domestic workers in Singapore. Six interviews were also conducted with actors with a degree of influence on the industry, such as representatives from professional industry associations, government officers, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and accreditation bodies. We conducted part of this fieldwork in Indonesia, where we held 13 additional in-depth interviews with training center managers, ex-domestic workers, staff members at recruitment companies, government representatives, and activists from NGOs.

The bulk of these interviews were conducted by the first two authors, who, as young Chinese-Singaporean women, were often perceived by respondents as students from one of Singapore’s best-known universities. As the vast majority of respondents were older, professionally successful adults who occupied managerial or leadership roles, this positioning — as young students — tended to work in the interviewers’ favor, as they were perceived as nonthreatening, diligent, and eager to learn.

Across these two years of fieldwork, we also accompanied agents as they conducted their activities. For example, we followed a Singaporean agent as she visited recruitment companies in Indonesia to select a pool of domestic workers to market, and attended international association meetings and gatherings with another agent. We also paid visits to several facets of the migration industry: we made detailed observations in shopping malls at which agencies clustered, sat in on domestic worker orientation and training programs conducted by the state and by private recruiters, and visited domestic worker dormitories. We looked through conflict mediation records and collected contractual agreements, payment schedules, insurance agreements, and price plans offered by employment agencies. We also conducted research briefings and focus-group discussions with migrant domestic workers to reflect on and corroborate our fieldwork findings.

This article draws mainly from one particular portion of our fieldwork in which the first author observed the goings-on at the shopfront site of one of Singapore’s major agencies over the course of three weeks. Because linguistic fluency is important to the arguments made here, we note that the first author speaks English and Mandarin, has some knowledge of the Teochew dialect, and is aware of common Bahasa Indonesia and Malay words that have been incorporated into the day-to-day vocabulary of employer–agent–maid relations. This knowledge allowed her to parse most, if not all, of the conversations she overheard. The researcher was also attentive to body language and shifts in affect, as these aspects, too, were key to understanding the processes of translation taking place.

The Business of Brokerage: Domestic Work Employment Agencies in Singapore

In the late 1990s, the migration industry, referring to “the many people who earn their livelihood by organizing migratory movements as travel agents, labor recruiters, brokers, interpreters and housing agents” (Castles and Miller 1998, 97), became a growing point of interest. Since then, the topic has come under close scrutiny, percolating around calls to unpack the “black box” of migration (Lindquist, Xiang, and Yeoh 2012). Scholars recognize a rapid growth in the breadth of the industry as well as the increasing sophistication and involution of the migration infrastructure that comprises and propels it (Xiang and Lindquist 2014). Research has generally focused on migration industry practices sited in origin countries, where brokers produce and export ideal migrant laborers for jobs abroad (Guevarra 2009; Rodriguez 2010; Lindquist 2012; Alpes and Spire 2014; Kern and Müller-Böker 2015; Awumbila et al. 2019).

Less work has focused on arrival infrastructures, defined as “those parts of the urban fabric within which newcomers become entangled on arrival, and where their future local or translocal social mobilities are produced as much as negotiated” (Meeus, van Heur, and Arnaut 2019, 1). This article takes its place alongside research that focuses specifically on brokers working in destination countries (also see Yuniarto 2016), broadening examinations of the migration industry to include brokers who also incorporate labor migrants into their new work and living environments. Research on arrival infrastructures in Western contexts has tended to focus on arrival neighborhoods or zones as spatial sites that offer migrants access to job opportunities, housing, ethnic associations, and religious organizations (Boost, Oosterlynck, and Arnaut 2019). In Asian contexts, where migrant workers are considered transient, contract-bound laborers with no rights to “settle” or gain a foothold in reception neighborhoods, spaces such as employment agencies (as well as workers’ dormitories and training centers) become important features of arrival infrastructure that play significant roles in conditioning migrant experiences and mobilities. By focusing on employment agencies that place migrant women as live-in domestic workers among Singapore families, this article adds to both literatures by examining arrival infrastructures in destination countries in the case of temporary migrant workers with limited reception networks and few pathways to permanent residency.

Singapore hosts 253,800 migrant domestic workers (Ministry of Manpower 2019b), which implies that 1 in 5 resident households employs a domestic worker (Department of Statistics Singapore 2017). Migrant domestic workers — hailing mainly from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Myanmar — enter Singapore on short-term renewable work permits. They are hired to cook, clean, carry out care work, and take on the reproductive labor outsourced by dual-career, middle-class households (Yeoh and Huang 2014). Required by law to live in employers’ places of residence, this stipulation blurs the divide between private and public space, resulting in a broad reluctance to formally legislate many aspects of domestic work (Huang and Yeoh 1996). While some workers are directly hired by employers who eschew employment agencies, the overwhelming majority (86%) of employers engage employment agents to look for a migrant domestic worker, as is shown to an official study (Ministry of Manpower 2010).

Employment agents ease the process of striking up a relationship between a Singapore-based employer and a migrant domestic worker. They work with recruitment companies in origin countries to create a pool of available labor and market these laborers to interested clients in Singapore. Prior to a worker’s arrival in Singapore, employment agents field employers’ questions, proffer advice on selecting a suitable domestic worker, and mediate interviews conducted over the phone or the internet. Brokers pick up newly-arrived domestic workers from the airport and house them in dormitories. They shuttle workers to various locations to finalize their permit applications, attend state-mandated orientation programs, and complete medical check-ups. Brokers also purchase domestic workers’ medical insurance and security bond on behalf of the employer. They ensure that a worker’s presence is legal by Singapore’s governing framework and that the conditions of her entrance are compliant with country-specific requirements, such as the purchase of an additional performance bond guarantee (Sim 2018). In the event that employment relationships splinter, brokers assist employers in hiring a new worker and securing domestic workers a new contract.

Business models for employment agencies in Singapore vary. Drawing from publicly available data on the Ministry of Manpower’s employment agency directory, our analysis of the distribution of placement volumes across the 1,716 employment agencies licensed in Singapore reveals that fewer than 20 major maid agencies dominate the industry, recruiting and placing the majority of migrant domestic workers (Ministry of Manpower 2019a). Numerically, however, the industry is overwhelmingly populated by much smaller agency models that recruit and place domestic workers at far lower volumes than the major players. As of May 2018, the largest three agencies placed over 2,400 workers per year, or 200 workers per month. In contrast, 82.4 percent of the industry — the smaller agencies, often family owned—placed around 200 workers per year, or fewer than 17 domestic workers per month. The smaller agencies also tend to have fewer staff members and a fairly flat organizational structure. They generally operate out of a single shopfront site and work in teams of 2–5, consisting of sales and administrative staff, and possibly a manager. It is a fair assumption that the staff at each shopfront takes a fairly coherent approach to their brokerage, as they all work closely at the frontline of the agency’s operations.

The major players operate slightly differently. These agencies often have multiple branches dotting Singapore, instead of a single shopfront site, and are animated by a much larger staff force: the agency with the highest placement volume in Singapore, for example, lists 23 agents licensed to their company. While their relationships with recruitment companies in origin countries contrast with those of the smaller agencies, the actual day-to-day practices at the shopfront site itself remain fairly similar. Although major agencies may have multiple shopfronts, each individual shopfront is about the same size as smaller agencies and is run by a similarly sized team. At any shopfront agency, big or small, would-be employers make enquires, sift through “biodata” files, ¹ and conduct interviews with potential employees through computer-mediated video-call programs. Migrant women wait to be interviewed. Current employers bring in domestic workers for mediation sessions with agents when fissures develop in employment relationships or negotiate the “replacement” of an unsatisfactory worker with a new one.

The difference, then, between major agencies and smaller players lies in the resources that brokers have available to meet clients’ preferences. Major agencies can more readily offer employers a range of domestic workers from which to pick. They can also deftly reshuffle contractual relationships to offer replacements to unhappy clients and be more flexible about issuing refunds in the case of soured employment relationships. In general, agents are oriented toward satisfying the employer, partly because employers are the ones who issue the capital necessary for the agencies to continue their brokerage work (Goh, Wee, and Yeoh 2016). A successful match is one where domestic workers stay in Singapore long enough to repay the debts incurred to the agent for her initial brokerage costs, hence securing the profits earned by employment agents for striking a successful match.

The rest of the article discusses two forms of translation and shows how these brokerage practices (re)produce the conditions of labor for domestic workers. By focusing on specific brokerage practices, we first show how brokers draw from the various sociocultural frameworks that come into play when organizing migration and mobilities to translate between people in a way that is doubly ordered, both linguistic and metalinguistic (Orellana et al. 2003). We then move to a close analysis of the way agents deal with sets of codified laws and regulations that relate to migration brokerage, showing how they adeptly interpret, weigh, and apply often-contradictory policy texts in dynamic and contingent practices of translation.

Translating Between People: Modulating Encounters

Migrants may not possess native facility with the primary language used in destination countries; as a result, their participation in formal discourses, such as court cases, often necessitates translation. Some research has focused on how translators rescript migrants’ stories into narratives that make them legible to the state as governable subjects. Cristiana Giordano, for example, discusses how migrant sex workers in Italy, have their narratives rendered into the “bureaucratic language of denuncia (the act of filing criminal charges)” (2008, 590). While seeking legal recourse, the “voice of the migrant [is] rendered, translated, heard, erased, and produced in different institutional settings” (597). The partial success of translation in this case conveys how a migrant woman’s lived experience is incommensurable with the bureaucratic denuncia of state-mandated legal processes. Like Giordano, Marco Jacquemet explores the “entextualization” of an asylum-seeker’s verbal performance in court into written record, where ambiguity, polyphony, and partiality are scripted into a wholly formed statement that obscures and distorts asylum-seekers’ stories as they attempt to secure citizenship (Jacquemet 2009). Translation, in both studies, involves linguistic interpretation — Giordano’s migrant prostitute and Marco’s asylum-seeker both partly rely on interpreters to tell their stories — but viewing translation as a broader theoretical (rather than mainly linguistic) metaphor also shows how migrants are rewritten, sometimes violently, into the preordained scripts of state citizenship.

While the studies cited above focus on how courts of law have translated migrants’ accounts of themselves, we turn instead to the translation work that migration intermediaries do and how migration brokers’ decisions around how and what to translate, reproduce or challenge particular forms of knowledge about migrants that have immediate consequences on how workers are presented as appealing laborers and docile subjects. Building on Giordano’s and Jacquemet’s work, we examine specific occurrences of verbal interpretation to show how migration brokers modulate interactions between workers and employers. Brokers are not interested in producing citizens out of these transient workers in the same way that state regimes might be; instead, they focus on acknowledging, fortifying, and refashioning existing sociocultural discourses about migrants to marshal together a particular type of knowledge about the migrant as laborer.

The site of the maid agency itself frequently encompassed the usage of multiple languages. Most Singaporeans speak English: since 1987, all Singapore schools have been required to teach English to students as the first language (Cai 2009). While Indonesian domestic workers often undergo language training in English before heading to Singapore to work, they are not always fully fluent when they first arrive. Linguistically, therefore, there is a gap into which brokers step. In some agencies, Chinese Malaysians — themselves migrants working in Singapore on employment passes — are popular hiring choices as frontline agents because they are often multilingual and occupy a sweet spot within the panoply of languages used in Singapore.

The agency we observed, “Good Maids,” is a major player in Singapore’s employment agency landscape. Four to five agents, including a manager, were present daily at the branch we observed to carry out the agency’s business, and the agency’s director was closely involved in its operations. Nearly all agents were Chinese-Malaysian women. They were fluent not only in Malay (a bridging language passingly familiar to many Singaporeans and linguistically similar to Bahasa Indonesia) but also in English and Chinese, as well as in a handful of Chinese dialects used by more elderly Chinese Singaporeans, such as Cantonese and Teochew. On a daily basis, Good Maids hummed like the Tower of Babel, with only the agents understanding most of what was being spoken: like a telephone switchboard, they connected meaning from one individual to another, switching between languages, tones, addresses, and moods.

Agents, therefore, had the power to produce personal and professional relationships between employer and worker through their translational work. Beyond translating language, agents also engaged in other metalinguistic translations to produce particular impressions, repair miscommunications, and preempt, minimize, or solve conflicts. Brokers produced and marshalled symbolic meanings beyond what was immediately evident in language. Because workers and employers could only grasp part of what was transpiring and depended on the agent to broker their conversations, brokers had the capacity to mediate and transform everyday interactions between workers and employers. The following field notes are an example of the sense-making work that brokers performed between people:

A young Singaporean-Chinese man, after having flipped through stacks of biodata, now wants to interview an Indonesian domestic worker whom he has shortlisted. She walks up nervously from where she has been waiting, seated at the back of the agency alongside six to seven other women on a bench. She tucks her hair behind her ears and yanks at the wrinkles on her shirt before turning to face her potential employer and the Chinese-Malaysian agent.

The man asks some preemptive questions about her name, age, and nationality. He then pauses before plunging into a series of questions in English, asked briskly while scrutinizing the worker’s employment history on her biodata: “What language do you communicate in? How long did you work for the last employer for? Why did your last employment relationship fail to work out? What are your skills?”

The agent glances between him and the worker. The worker looks consternated, unable to respond. The agent then speaks up, slowly, clearly, and kindly, addressing the worker in English: “Why last time ma’am scold you?” The worker still hesitates, unwilling to answer the question. The agent then moves on: “You cook? Cook what? Steamed fish, nasi goreng?” ²

Here, the worker answers, but haltingly. “Steamed fish, nasi goreng. Sayur.” ³

“Ikan? Tahu?” ⁴

“Yes, ikan, tahu.”

The man nods. The interview stutters on. The agent prompts, wheedles, fills in the gaps with a patchwork of English and Malay, translating almost every other question and answer asked by the worker and the potential employer.

While translation forecloses some ways of knowing — for example, understanding a migrant worker on her own terms — it also opens up others. Beyond the agent’s inscription of various dominant discourses surrounding migrant domestic work onto the interaction, this modulation also positioned the migrant woman as an ideal candidate for domestic labor. For example, the agent softened the confrontational and alien quality of the employer’s questions, which had been asked in rapid succession. By simplifying the questions and then moving toward a topic (cooking) and language (mixed Malay) where the worker had greater affinity, the agent cushioned the affective impact of the employer’s brusque mannerisms and boosted the domestic worker’s confidence in responding. At the same time, this selective translation limited the worker’s vocabulary and curtailed her response. “Why last time ma’am scold you?” offered little purchase for the worker to fully explain the circumstances of the failure of her previous employment relationship. (It is notable that the worker’s silence could also be read as a deliberate refusal to respond, thus offering the broker nothing to translate.) Additionally, the worker’s uncertainty was patched over by the agent’s intervention. The agent was quick to mend the worker’s hesitation with a litany of Malay words familiar to both the employer and the worker: a list of culinary dishes easily parsed by any Singaporean but also recognizable by the worker, who was, thus, put at ease. The worker’s ability to recognize and add to the list of dishes symbolized her culinary expertise and fostered a sense of cultural familiarity and identification with Singaporean cuisine. Through translation, the agent produced and elicited both meaning and knowledge: without the agent’s intervention, the worker might have remained mute in response to the employer’s questions and risked being perceived as ill-prepared and incompetent. Thus, the broker coperformed the worker’s hirability through this modulation work.

Brokers can nudge interactions in many ways. For example, we observed agents using language as a smokescreen as much as a bridge, dropping into Mandarin to communicate with employers and deliberately exclude workers from the conversation. The usage of a language that workers do not know allowed agents to affirm employers’ superior status by exchanging asides about domestic workers’ perceived abilities. We observed an agent speaking to a potential employer in Mandarin, explaining that the domestic worker (who was within earshot) in question was likely to have communication issues. The agent paused and said in Mandarin: “You can’t tell her one thing and then keep changing her tasks.” In turn, the potential employer nodded as if she understood the agent’s implicit meaning, responding in a lowered voice, also in Mandarin: “They’re a bit slower.” Speaking in Mandarin allowed agents to build rapport with employers through proffering a tacit alliance. In other cases, agents refused to translate entirely, using language as a cudgel. During a heated interaction, for instance, we saw an agent say sharply to a worker, “Speak English! Let ma’am understand!,” forcing the worker to engage with the employer on shaky linguistic ground rather than defending herself to the agent in Indonesian.

Some brokers also translated by making tacit knowledge explicit to employers, softening jagged tensions by demystifying domestic workers’ responses and choices. These translations were not necessarily linguistic interpretations. For example, a phone interview between an employer and a potential domestic worker in the Philippines ended abruptly when the worker announced that she was no longer interested in the job and was looking for an employer in Hong Kong instead. This revelation ruffled the employer’s feathers. The agent hastily hung up and explained that the salary in Hong Kong was much higher than in Singapore. This explanation lightened the mood and mollified the aggrieved client, as the migrant woman’s decision was contextualized as rational rather than a personal indictment of the employer's potential as an employer. This particular interaction then unfolded into a series of questions posed by the employer, who asked, “When you give them days off, then they want more and more and more. Why is that?” The agent paused and then neatly sidestepped the question, suggesting that domestic workers should be encouraged to take part in skills training courses on their days off to ensure their continued interest in working in Singapore. The employer then asked why domestic workers chose to return home after short stints of work instead of staying on. The agent responded, with no small measure of sympathy, that they often missed their families and children and that it was difficult to remain away from home for prolonged periods. In this process of translating the mystery of migrant women’s choices to the employer, the agent could have easily leaned on discourses that drew on ethnicized assumptions about migrant domestic workers. Without an actual candidate before her, doing so might have built a measure of rapport with the would-be employer, who was clearly frustrated by the decisions of domestic workers she had hired in the past. Instead, the agent chose to “translate” migrant women in a way that carried a broader measure of empathy.

The translations wrought by employment agents revealed how brokers make sense of workers and employers to one another and, by doing so, (re)produce and unsettle specific modes of knowledge about migrant women. Agents constructed, distorted, and only partially represented the explicit and implicit meanings of each conversation to the parties between whom they mediated. This process of making employers and workers legible to one another had particular consequences. For example, it delimited the ways employers perceived domestic workers or flattered employers in ways that affirmed their status as relationally superior. On the other hand, it was in both the broker’s and the migrant woman’s interest for the worker to be positioned and seen as a desirable candidate for hire. Consequently, brokers also supported migrant women’s curtailed ability to communicate and modeled for employers an ideal mode and tone of conversation that was often more effective and empathetic.

We now move on to another form of translation — the translations fashioned by brokers between the text of policy and regulation and the practices that inhere in the everyday world of brokering domestic work — to show how else brokers simultaneously relied on and set the legal parameters of the migration industry in Singapore. This section shows how brokers’ translation had not just immediate implications for how domestic workers and employers came to perceive and understand one another but also cast a shadow throughout the worker’s contractual relationship with her employer.

Translating between Text and Practice: Exercising Discretion

Not only did employment agents draw from and rework various cultural and social rationalities in translating between employers and workers, they also operated betwixt and between formally codified sets of regulations and laws. Agents pay fastidious attention to Singapore’s regulatory framework but also take into account embassies’ edicts, policy changes in origin countries, and accreditation and licensing conditions. Regulatory regimes clash and overlap, and webs of power are dispersed across a wide conglomeration of social and state actors (Fernandez 2013). Therefore, the space in which migration brokers operate is necessarily broad: there are several regulatory canons from which a broker can draw to fashion his/her translation practices, and these canons have varying levels of legal authority.

Michael Lipsky’s work (2010) lends us the vocabulary we need to understand the conditions that shape the discretionary space of brokerage. For Lipsky, broad institutions such as the government are made tangible in the micro-interactional practices of street-level bureaucrats. He argues that the ability to utilize discretion in the distribution of public services to citizens structures “the ways in which street-level bureaucrats deliver benefits and sanctions, structure, and delimit people’s lives and opportunities” (Lipsky 2010, 3). Public services, therefore, are not uniformly distributed; instead, street-level bureaucrats have the ability to determine a citizen’s level of access to these services through techniques such as client construction, routinization, and simplification, the management of costs (monetary, psychological, and informational) that clients pay for services, and the selective distribution of information.

Authors have built on Lipsky’s work to show how an increase in the number and complexity of rules has actually enhanced, rather than limited, street-level bureaucrats’ capacity to behave with discretion, since policy, like any type of text, is open to interpretation (Evans and Harris 2004). Discretion, therefore, is an extension of translation, as migration intermediaries interpret and selectively apply codified policies to coproduce a regime of migration governance (Tseng and Wang 2013; Goh, Wee, and Yeoh 2017). Conceptually, discretion has been used to better understand interactions between migrants and state representatives, especially how migrants access, or fail to access, public services (Alpes and Spire 2014; Saltsman 2014).

Discretion is fundamental to the work that employment agents do, particularly frontline sales agents, who must use, interpret, and apply an overlapping and contradictory gamut of rules, regulations, and policies. These regulations originate from the law but also from agency directives, embassy edicts, policy announcements from origin countries, and pronouncements by the Association of Employment Agencies (AEAS). Dislocated from the bureaucratic and state-bound officialdom and at the same time expected to bind together an assemblage of people, places, and papers, migration brokers caught in competing regulatory regimes play a role similar to street-level bureaucrats. We argue that examining how brokers exercise discretion when translating policy into practice illuminates the migration industry’s workings in new and useful ways.

In Singapore, employment agencies are governed by the Employment Agencies Act and the Employment Agency License Conditions. Additionally, the work permit visa under which migrant domestic workers enter and work in Singapore and the Employment of Foreign Manpower Act stipulate particular working and living conditions for migrant domestic workers. These stipulations are generally obeyed and widely accepted as the legal conditions under which agencies must operate. However, origin countries themselves can institute new laws or signal policy changes that contradict Singapore’s own. In 2016, for example, Indonesia announced that it would stop sending women abroad who had to “live in” with employers (Arshad 2016), generating a flurry of concern throughout the migration industry in Singapore. Not only were agents anticipating the costs of such a decision, but this move would also directly contravene Singapore’s governance regime in which migrant domestic workers are legally required to live with their employers. Laws and regulations aside, policy changes also emanate from the AEAS, which is constantly striking deals with professional associations or even origin-country governments to implement changes involving, for example, recruitment procedures or the payment of placement fees.

Brokers, with the latitude to weigh these regulations, guidelines, and policy announcements against one another, use the discretionary space they occupy to join and then translate several sets of codified regulations into a coherent set of actions and practices. As they assess policy announcements from Indonesia and edicts issued by the AEAS, they anticipate how these acts might affect patterns of demand and supply within the market. Agents, however, can interpret these regulations and policy announcements quite differently, depending on their own recruitment practices and business models. The uncertainty around who has the authority to govern actors in the migration industry, as well as origin governments’ limited reach to impose sanctions on agents working in destination countries, sets up conditions for substantial levels of discretion.

The employment conditions surrounding migrant domestic work in Singapore are mainly determined by the Employment of Foreign Manpower Act (EFMA). Many parts of the EFMA are strikingly vague, lending it to wide interpretation. For example, the EFMA mandates that domestic workers should receive “adequate rest daily,” “adequate food,” and “acceptable accommodation” (Ministry of Manpower 2018). If repatriated, the employer must buy the worker a ticket that offers “reasonable access to the employee’s hometown.” These terms — “adequate,” “acceptable,” and “reasonable” — are all terms of subjective degree, leaving employers and agents to guess at what sort of treatment would be considered acceptable. As mentioned earlier, because the governance of migrant domestic work muddies boundaries between public/private and leisure/work, the state is unwilling to explicitly formalize migrant domestic workers’ working conditions (Huang and Yeoh 1996; Wee, Goh, and Yeoh 2019). This abdication maintains employers’ ability to expand and constrict the scope of domestic work as necessary and to reap benefits from a flexibilized migrant workforce taking on undervalued and feminized forms of labor.

The Singapore state thus prefers to modulate the discretionary space offered to employers and agents to interpret and apply its regulations through the gentler suggestion of guidelines than laws. Guidelines available on the Ministry of Manpower’s website extrapolate on what “acceptable” accommodation, as stated in the EFMA, entails: acceptability rests in offering “adequate shelter…from environmental elements such as sun, rain or strong winds,” providing a “mattress, pillow, and blanket,” offering “sufficient ventilation,” or ensuring that workers do not “sleep near any dangerous equipment or structure that could potentially cause harm or hurt to her” (Ministry of Manpower 2018). Similarly, “adequate food” is defined as “3 meals a day,” followed by an example of meals that a woman engaged in moderate activity should consume (Ministry of Manpower 2018). Arguably, these guidelines serve more as minimum standards than sets of best practices.

Unsurprisingly, brokers, employers, and workers tussle over the interpretation of terms such as “adequate” and “reasonable” and the translation of such terms into practice. When domestic workers share the same living space as their employers, tensions erupt over varying understandings of the minimum required by law. The EFMA states that employers are responsible for migrant domestic workers’ “upkeep and maintenance,” but what this upkeep entails in practice can vary widely. One agent lamented that some employers were so particular about costs that they purchased “industrial use” shampoo for their migrant domestic workers, rather than an ordinary brand, because it was cheaper by weight, hence reducing “upkeep and maintenance” to its bare bones. To mitigate the itchiness and raw skin that workers complained of feeling, the agent purchased and gifted domestic workers shampoo suitable for daily use. Other agents have created various measures to insulate workers against employers’ discretionary interpretations of the law. One agent we interviewed put together a “starter kit” of basic toiletries for every worker recruited through his agency. Another gave every worker a SIM card to signal that owning and using a hand phone were expected to be the norm. Through minor everyday interventions, the agents attempted to reify and subtly position their own translations of the law as dominant but had to do so by utilizing a number of indirect strategies so as not to alienate or offend employers.

Practices aside, agents also leaned on an enactment of expertise (Carr 2010) to support their translations of codified regulations and policies, especially when positioning one particular source as more authoritative than another. One agent, for example, dwelt on the contradictory definitions surrounding what constituted “adequate rest”: Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower indicated eight hours of daily rest, while the Philippines embassy indicated eight hours of work. He brokered a compromise between both rulings by offering employers a “middle way” where rest hours were enfolded into the daily routine and the boundaries of rest and work became fuzzy and less countable: “For those who take care of elderly or babies… I always tell the employers you must let the girls rest in the afternoon.” The same agent, exasperated with an employer’s interpretation of the EFMA requirement that any repatriation should be to a port of entry with reasonable access to the employee’s nearest hometown, said:

You have to send the maid back to her own hometown with reasonable access. Because if they’re from Indonesia and they’re staying in north Sulawesi or Manado [only accessible from Singapore by plane], and you put them in Batam [an Indonesian island, a short ferry ride from Singapore], it’s equivalent to nothing... How is she going to go home? So as you said, normally, I will try to explain to employers using my knowledge on regulations. To me, I have to know all the regulations and work within that regulation.

His performance of expertise was fortified by challenging employers to contradict him by looking through the Ministry of Manpower’s website: “There are thousands and millions of things to read,” he said, “so I’ll just send them [the links]. If you really want to know, you can read.”

Therefore, agents have significant discretionary power to influence which regulatory canons apply, to whom, and to what extent. Not all agents chose, however, in their translations, to usher forward the most generous interpretation of the law, and some used this discretionary power to translate policy into the absolute minimum in terms of labor standards to secure workers’ compliance. For example, an agent dismissed the protections offered by signing a contract with a migrant domestic worker, suggesting that any holding power the employer may have had disintegrated the moment the migrant left Singapore:

Any agreement with the domestic worker is just a formality. The moment they say, “My mother is dead, I’m going back tomorrow,” you have nothing to hold against her.…You can’t sue her.…Even if I have to lose money, I have to let her go. The agreement to say I sumpah [swear], I have to work for two years, it’s just a formality. This is not like between you and I. I can sue you for damages because you broke contract.

On the other hand, hard laws set out by the Singapore state tended to stick because agents preferred not to risk their licenses or collect demerit points through a failure to adhere to legal statutes laid out by the government. Agents, for example, insisted that workers pay them no more than the legal two months’ salary as a placement fee and were careful to separate this fee in the contract as the sum which they were due. They were far less conscientious about the fees that workers paid to agents in origin countries because these cross-border costs did not come under Singapore’s legal purview.

At first glance, it appears that the extent to which agents — as part of the arrival infrastructures that incorporate migrant domestic workers into the city-state — have the power to determine and intervene in domestic workers’ labor conditions is unparalleled. Migrant women are often unable to select which agents to work with when they arrive in destination countries; whatever agency they end up with is instead dependent on the arrangements established between Singapore agents and brokers in Indonesia. Migration brokers’ decisions, thus, can be absolutely crucial, as it is at these agencies that a woman’s working and living conditions are concretely fixed through either contractual determination (e.g., days off, salary rates, loan repayments) or more tacit forms of advice and recommendations (e.g., food and accommodation provided). Agents also have the opportunity to intervene as the employment relationship plays out beyond the initial arrival point; as such, they have the ability to mold employment relationships well into a domestic worker’s term in Singapore. For example, employers and workers often call upon agents to mediate disputes and repair fractures in employment relationships. Nonetheless, an agent’s power is not absolute. The live-in clause associated with domestic work limits agents’ power to intercede. It is possible for an employer to hire a domestic worker and then rearrange her employment terms entirely, with no repercussions, especially if the domestic worker is prevented from communicating with anyone outside the home. In short, in the most egregious cases, agents may end up being fairly powerless to mediate long-term employer–employee relationships.

Still, agents have significant scope to translate the text of policies, regulations, and laws into practices that concretely affect migrant domestic workers’ lived realities. Many first-time employers are dependent on agents’ advice — whether explicit or tacit — in setting out the parameters governing their relationships with their domestic workers, as illustrated by earlier accounts of employers participating in drawn-out conversations with agents to make sense of the norms and forms expected in employing migrant domestic workers. Brokers’ ability to influence first-time domestic workers’ labor and living conditions is also especially powerful. By deciding what text to use and when, by weighing how much authority a set of regulations carries, by calculating how much risk an agent wants to bear by contravening, bending, or loosely interpreting a rule, by explaining legal requirements to employers and workers, and by selectively applying their understanding of the law to a wide berth of practices, agents have the discretionary power to transform the text of policy into domestic workers’ lived realities.

Conclusion

This article has used the notion of translation to understand how migration intermediaries bring together disparate social realms at two levels: first, by translating conversations between workers and employers and shaping how their relationship is forged within a specific framing of asymmetrical power, and second, by translating the multitude of regulatory canons governing the migration industry into practice. When mediating everyday encounters between workers and employers, employment agents modulate conversations to make them legible to both parties. By doing so, brokers simultaneously clarify and obscure brokered meanings in ways that position migrants as hirable subjects and serve their own business ends. When translating overlapping regulatory frameworks into advice, practices, and contracts, brokers exercise discretion to interpret codified policies and laws in their own way and, thus, influence migrant workers’ labor and living conditions.

Concomitant with migration’s increasing commercialization, scholars have been interested in defining the migration industry’s parameters (Hernández-León 2008; Sørensen and Gammeltoft-Hansen 2012). This important scholarship has provided a foundation for moving toward a more complete understanding of the migration industry (Xiang and Lindquist 2014; Cranston, Schapendonk, and Spaan 2018). By drawing on the idea of translation, this article expands upon the conceptual strand of the scholarship, making clear how migration brokers do not simply “facilitate” migration in unidirectional ways but also reproduce particular forms of knowledge about migrants that serve to constitute the inequitable social world inhabited by migrant workers and their employers.

The power of migration brokerage lies in brokers’ specific ability to translate in the spaces and situations in which employers and workers flounder in partial understanding of the law and of each other. Brokers’ ability to translate makes them necessary and accords them considerable latitude in shaping migrant women’s everyday lives. This fact, we argue, begs questions about what sort of legal frameworks should come into existence to prevent the abuse of this latitude and how coherence across regulatory frameworks, together with enforceable penalties, might become increasingly necessary in ameliorating the most egregious abuses that arise from the international migration of low-waged labor migrants and the dissipation of regulatory power as it crosses state lines.