Transnational Labour Migration and the place of Reproductive Labour: Trailing Wives and Community Support in Boddington

Abstract

This article addresses the need for critical attention to families and place in the labour migration literature. Through examination of the experiences of trailing wives, it highlights the interconnected roles of state regulation, industry practice and destination communities in the gendering of transnational labour migration. Specifically, we attend to the experiences of trailing wives accompanying partners who migrated to Boddington in rural Western Australia to take up skilled work in the nearby gold mine, and incorporate (inter) related perspectives of local community members, in particular the provision of substantive migrant support by a key local figure. This research extends the labour migration literature in two ways. First, it develops understandings of how transnational labour migration fortifies gendered divisions of reproductive labour and, importantly, can encompass unpaid reproductive labour in local communities. Second, this article foregrounds the ways in which complex configurations of unpaid and paid reproductive labour – in households, community spaces and work-camp – underwrite economic globalization.

Keywords

community family migration gender labour migration migrant women mining reproductive labour trailing wives

Introduction

Labour migration¹ is a substantial and complex component of the mass movement of people characterizing neoliberal globalization. It is also deeply gendered (Halfacree, 1995, 2004; Lutz, 2010), just as gender and globalization are fundamentally interwoven (Katz, 2001; Mitchell et al., 2003; Nagar et al., 2002). An under-researched aspect of both processes are the families of participants in the global flow of labour (Cooke, 2007; Parrenas, 2000). Attention to families and to reproductive labour contributes to both a richer understanding of gender in global divisions of labour (Katz, 2001; Nagar et al., 2002) and of the processes of labour migration (Cooke, 2007; Parrenas, 2000: 565). Further, there is a pressing need for analyses which address connections between migration and broader economic, political and socio-cultural dimensions as specifically articulated in a given place and time (Castles, 2010; Smith, 2011). Importantly, attention to place extends the labour migration literature as part of a broader recognition of geography as integral to the analysis of work, employment and society (Ward, 2007).

This article addresses the need for critical attention to families and place by way of qualitative empirical research which asks: in what ways is the gendering of labour migration, specifically in relation to families and reproductive labour, shaped by industry and labour migration policy, and interconnected with the particularities of local places and communities? This is investigated through analysis of the experience of mining-related labour migration in/to Boddington in rural Western Australia. The mining industry is particularly suited to the research question given its substantial and growing use of migrant labour, grounding in specific places and ‘host’ communities, and long-standing, profoundly masculinized culture.

Families are foregrounded by focusing on the experiences and perceptions of ‘trailing wives’² accompanying partners who migrated to Boddington to take up skilled work in the nearby gold mine. To address the complex interconnections and relationships informing migration as noted above, host community experiences, in particular those of a central figure in the provision of local support for migrant wives, are also of interest. The empirical data and analysis confirm the centrality of reproductive labour to the practice and experience of transnational labour migration as it occurs in Boddington. Importantly, the analysis highlights unequal divisions of paid and unpaid reproductive labour across a number of interconnected locations: household, local community and on-site workers’ camp. These gendered divisions are shown to be fortified through industry practice, state regulation and the absence of state support, just as they are ameliorated by local communities. Further, economic globalization’s unequal incorporation of women is shown to extend to those in migration ‘host’ communities.

After introducing the concept/phenomenon of the ‘trailing wife’, the article draws on feminist transnational migration scholarship to frame the analysis of reproductive labour. Next, labour migration in/to Boddington is situated in the context of state regulation and industry global production practices. Links between migration and externally driven economic and social relationships articulated in specific destination places are foregrounded through an understanding of ‘places as open and permeable’ and as constituted through dynamic ‘combinations of social relations that originate inside and outside them’ (Ward, 2007: 270). Following a description of the method and sample, the empirical analysis focuses on the key themes of motivation for migration, reproductive labour undertaken in Boddington and on ongoing mobility.

Migration, ‘trailing wives’ and reproductive labour

The concept of the ‘trailing wife’ originates in human capital models prevalent in labour migration research in the 1970s (Cooke, 2008). Couple/family decisions to migrate were thought to be based on an expected increase in future net family (rather than individual) earnings (e.g. Mincer, 1978) and improved career opportunities for the primary income earner (Cooke, 2007). As applied to migration, the human capital model has historically been interpreted on the assumption that married women do not earn as much as their husbands and that a reduction in women’s income due to migration would be compensated by increased male income as a result of moving (Cooke, 2007; Mincer, 1978). This economic rationale was used to explain the tendency for women to follow or ‘trail’ their partners, from which emerged not only the notion of the ‘tied migrant’ but, more specifically, that of the ‘trailing’ wife (Cooke, 2007, 2008). Trailing wives experience substantial disadvantage around access to paid work, income levels and career trajectories (Bruegel, 1996; Cooke, 2007; Halfacree, 1995). In brief, trailing wives undertake migration – that they would not undertake if they were not married (Cooke, 2003) – for the benefit of other family members (Halfacree, 2004).

Contrary to the seemingly gender-neutral logic of rational choice underpinning the human capital model, ensuing research, for example as undertaken by Bruegel (1996), identifies a significant tendency, and indeed a greater propensity, to ‘trail’ among women in full-time work and/or in higher-status occupations. This suggests that though the sacrificial costs are higher for women in full-time, higher-status employment/careers, wives’ individual incomes and human capital are not necessarily constraining factors in labour migration (Cooke, 2003, 2007). This asymmetry in the relative weight of male and female human capital in the decision to undertake labour migration is explained in/by sociological research as a product of gender roles and identities (Cooke, 2003). As Halfacree (1995) notes, much of this important work is limited to the private sphere (principally households). Women’s willingness to be trailing wives, he argues, is a pragmatic response to gender discrimination not only in the home but also, and especially, in the workplace. Halfacree’s analysis demonstrates that the oppression of women is not only enacted in labour migration but also underpins such migration: women’s pre-existing inequality both individually in the household and collectively in the labour market/workplace makes male labour migration/mobility possible.

An appreciation of gender more profoundly as central to the organization of migration flows (Lutz, 2010) underpins feminist approaches to transnational migration and globalization. These processes link women into spatially diverse networks, differentiate among them, and (re)produce unequal relations with men (Nagar et al., 2002). Together with labour market/workplace inequalities (including those noted by Halfacree), reproductive labour both ‘underwrites and constitutes globalization’ (Nagar et al., 2002: 263).This has been demonstrated empirically in a rich body of literature focusing on women migrating independently as care workers. Rhacel Parrenas (2000), for example, demonstrates the complexities of women’s ongoing and undervalued responsibility for reproductive labour and related transnational hierarchies of gender inequality in global care chains. A smaller body of work examining family/spousal migration demonstrates the centrality and complexity of gendered divisions of reproductive labour both supportive of, and produced by, migration. For example, Cooke’s (2007) work shows that Chinese women professionals who migrated to Britain as trailing wives experienced lower job quality and pay linked to limited access to paid childcare in part due to cultural constraints on the use of childcare in foreign environments. Relatedly, gendered inequalities around reproductive labour, which enabled male transnational labour migration in the first place, were accentuated in the UK social context. Similarly, Schmalzbauer (2009) found that migration undertaken by Mexican women following partners into rural Montana in the United States strengthened and re-animated unequal divisions of reproductive labour as a result of women’s geographical isolation, lack of employment opportunities and access to paid childcare, along with a fear of harassment in public places.

Much of the literature, by virtue of the family as a key site of/for reproductive labour, has focused here too on domestic tasks in the private sphere (Kofman and Raghuram, 2006). Reproductive labour encompasses more than this. Theorized as fundamentally social work, as opposed to biological work, it includes, along with housework and domestic childcare, such things as the management of social relations underpinning family and community (e.g. Parrenas, 2000) and the development of education and skills needed in productive work (e.g. Katz, 2001). Social reproduction is shaped and achieved not just in/through household actions and processes, but also through state, capital and civil spheres (Katz, 2001; Kofman and Raghuram, 2006), in what are understood to be a virtually limitless number of sites (Katz, 2001). Salient here are the, largely overlooked, ways in which social reproduction both requires and is grounded in place and community (Smith and Winders, 2008). That is, social reproduction is undertaken in public and community spaces such as school drop-off zones, cafes, community centres and playgroups, and is underpinned by connections and rights to place.

Further, reproductive and productive labour are deeply interconnected, if not co-constituted (Katz, 2001; see also review in Smith and Winders, 2008). This is particularly so in neoliberal global capitalism which, for example, increasingly blurs boundaries between home and work (Mitchell et al., 2003) and through the commodification of a number of reproductive tasks, and the privatization of state reproductive responsibilities has altered the ways reproduction is achieved around the world (Katz, 2001). These changes (following McDowell, 2014) indicate a need to revisit reproductive labour’s relationship with production, and with the state and the market.

The analysis presented here builds on the above conceptualization of social reproduction, through identification of (interconnected) migrant/migration reproductive labour undertaken in household, community and work-camp sites in a specific place. In the process, connections to productive labour as shaped by the state and the needs of global capital are delineated. It is to the latter that the article now turns, focusing on mining industry practices and state policy, as a result of which labour migration to Boddington, and its specific manifestation, is made both ‘necessary’ and possible.

Mining gold in Boddington

Boddington is a small town and shire 100 km from the nearest regional city. The Newmont gold mine, reopened and extended in 2010 after being decommissioned for nearly a decade (Newmont Asia Pacific, 2012), is 16 km from the town centre, was the largest gold mine in Australia, and employed around 1800 Australian and transnational workers (Newmont, 2014). Three-quarters of this workforce long-distance commuted (Newmont, 2013). This involved an ongoing cycle of a fixed number of consecutive (usually 12-hour) shifts while staying in serviced mine accommodation, including provision of meals, followed by a fixed number of days at homes located over 50 km away. The one-quarter of the workforce that resided in Boddington doubled the local population and recast its demographics (Table 1). Between 2001 and 2006, when the mine was shuttered, local employment barely increased from 650 persons in 2001 to 655 in 2006. Following its reopening, employment increased to 1439 persons as the mining sector’s share of employment rose from 15 per cent in 2006 to 42.7 per cent in 2011. Though the mine had reserves sufficient for a 24-year lifespan (Newmont Asia Pacific, 2012), the viability of the operation, and the in/security of the labour force, was dependant on volatile global demand drivers, such as jewellery fashions and currency valuations (Collins, 2011), as well as mine-specific production costs (Heber, 2013). By 2013, over 100 workers had been cut from the Boddington operation due to falling gold prices and rising production costs (Lannin, 2013).

Table 1.

Boddington (shire) population and selected demographics, ABS Census data: 2001; 2006; and 2011.

	2001	2006	2011
Population	1407	1408	2768
Change since 2001		0.1%	96.7%

Gender (% female)	46.3%	46.2%	32.7%

Birthplace:
Australia	1181	1106	1676
Elsewhere	173	188	446
% born elsewhere^a	12.8%	14.5%	21.0%

Language spoken at home:
English	1354	1307	1997
Other	12	18	123
% other^a	0.9%	1.4%	5.8%

Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (2014).

Indicates % of reporting persons in both categories combined.

As an indicator of transnational labour migration, the percentage of migrant households from non-English speaking backgrounds grew as a result of the reopening of the mine from less than 1 per cent to almost 6 per cent, an increase highly noticeable in a small, relatively racially homogenous town. Migrant workers and families embodied the global flows and forces that at the time constituted Boddington as a node in the gold global production network, effectively ‘carrying’ global capital (Massey, 2004) into the experience of Boddington as a community and place.

Ready access to a mobile international labour force, according to national mining industry peak bodies, was crucial to the globally competitive extraction of minerals in Australia (Minerals Council of Australia, 2013). In Boddington, as elsewhere in Australia, the use of this labour was enabled and regulated through the ‘Temporary Work (Skilled) subclass 457 visa’ as part of a migration policy increasingly emphasizing transitory, ad hoc labour migration (Migration Council of Australia, 2013: 3). The 457 visa programme in addition facilitates the transfer of workers within the same company (Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP), 2012: 32); many of the husbands of interviewed ‘trailing’ wives (sample described below) had been transferred to Boddington from Newmont mines in other countries. The visa enabled employers to bring skilled workers to Australia, for periods anywhere from one day to four years, where there was an industry-demonstrated shortage in the domestic labour market (DIBP, 2012). In Australia, understandings of skilled labour and related labour market segments privilege men (see Fincher, 1997), a bias exacerbated in the male-dominated mining industry.

Migration policies, as has been argued in the literature (see, for example, Kofman and Raghuram, 2006), inform the construction of gendered categories of workers and their relation to reproductive labour. In the wider programme of 457 visa migration, families accompanied two-thirds of 457 workers (DIBP, 2012), two-thirds of these accompanying spouses were female and for over half of this group English was not a first language (Migration Council of Australia, 2013). Accompanying spouses in the 457 programme were designated as ‘secondary’ applicants/migrants whereas the (predominantly male) skilled worker was the ‘principal’ applicant/migrant. While worker rights and responsibilities were outlined in official state documentation (e.g. the DIBP’s Booklet 9), there was no reference to secondary visa holders’ rights or responsibilities. Further, this programme did not offer secondary applicants/holders full access to a range of services, with significant exclusions notably around state-serviced reproductive labour. While secondary applicants were permitted to work in Australia, they were not entitled to help with gaining employment, nor were they entitled to English lessons or health care (Migration Council of Australia, 2013).

The (re)opening and expansion of the Newmont Boddington Gold Mine can thus be understood as a local, contingent instantiation of a broader global gold production network, supported by a migration policy favouring temporary labour and which offered differential rights to primary and secondary applicants. This migration was not only embedded in but also (re)shaped the way that Boddington was experienced on the part of both transnational labour migrants and non-migrant local residents, as examined below.

Method and sample

A multi-perspectival approach using in-depth, semi-structured interviews was adopted as a means to develop a holistic understanding (Taylor et al., 2016) of the complex gendered experience of labour migration in/to Boddington as occurring in dialogue with local places and communities. Further, in light of the broader approach and research question, following Smith (2011) and Castles (2010), the ways in which migration is linked to economic, social, political and cultural relationships at work in Boddington was of interest. Accordingly, while the experiences of migrants are central, the research also sought to incorporate the experiences of local, non-migrant community members. Particular attention was given to those providing regional and local migrant support, as a group with direct relationships with a number of migrant families. The interview sampling strategy involved purposive snowballing to recruit both migrants and non-migrant community members.

Recruiting participants from migrant groups is a challenge in small rural communities where the potential sample pool is both small and interconnected (Schmalzbauer, 2009). Accordingly, the interviewer spent time with the Boddington English as a Second Language (ESL) group; for example, attending morning teas in order to build the high level of trust necessary for the successful recruitment of interviewees. This attendance allowed observation of the level of support provided to and sought by those in the group. Learning English was the ostensible function of the ESL group; however, many who joined did so for a range of (in their view, more important) social reasons as discussed in the analysis. The ESL group thus provided access to migrants competent in the English language. Through this group, and the use of subsequent purposive snowballing, 10 trailing wives were recruited from a difficult to access and small cohort. Attempts to recruit husbands, in order to gain a comparative understanding of gendered experiences, were largely unsuccessful due to the husbands’ long work shifts. Male accompanying spouses are also an under-researched group, and one with potential implications for divisions of reproductive labour. As far as it was possible to determine, however, there were no male secondary migrants in Boddington at the time.

Interviews were undertaken in 2011 and in 2013. Those undertaken in 2011 were part of a larger project which sought an overview of migration more broadly in the five shires and major city of Mandurah comprising the Peel region in which Boddington is situated. As a result of this work, Boddington was identified as a rich site for investigation of transnational labour migration by virtue of the small size of the community and the associated intensities of local experiences. On completion of the larger project, a decision was made to revisit Boddington in order to develop a richer data set and an analysis focused on Boddington. A second set of original interviews was consequently completed in 2013 to augment the earlier sample. Though the interval was dictated by circumstances, it enabled us to see the continuation of a high level of community support over time and the ongoing arrival and departure of migrant trailing wives. The local ESL group organizer and teacher, as a central figure in mediating interactions between long-term local community members and migrants, was interviewed in 2011 and again in 2013 to determine what, if anything, had changed in her role and the presence of migrants in the intervening period. She was pivotal in our ability to maintain a high level of trust and access to the migrant community.

During the second phase of interviewing, the recent arrival in Boddington of a few au pairs became apparent. By virtue of their employment/hosting by migrant families, these women were clearly connected to the mining-related labour migration to Boddington. In line with the flexible nature of qualitative research design and data collection (Taylor et al., 2016), and our intention to develop a holistic understanding of the gendered experience of labour migration, attempts were made to recruit these au pairs. Ultimately three – who constituted the majority, if not complete cohort – were interviewed.

Though limited participant observation was undertaken as noted above, the analysis presented here draws principally on 30 interviews: 15 with labour migrants (10 trailing wives, two husbands and three au pairs); five with volunteer and paid community migrant support workers recruited from local and regional groups servicing Boddington; and 10 with long-term residents of Boddington (eight women), recruited through local advertisement and community groups. The sample of migrant wives was sufficient for data saturation (Taylor et al., 2016).

The migrant wives in the sample were in Boddington as a result of their husbands’ mining employment. Indicative of the complexity of visa arrangements, two were on what they referred to as ‘bridging visas’ and eight started out on 457 visas – three of these had, or were in the process of acquiring, permanent residency. Roughly half of the migrant interviewees had been living in Boddington for less than one year and the other half had been residents for between two and three years. Interviewed trailing wives hailed variously from Indonesia, Asia, Europe and South America. This ethnically diverse sample reflects the global nature of gold mining and its mobile workforce. Interviewed au pairs hailed from Europe, and were less than 20 years of age, which aligns with the age requirements and nationalities highly represented in the Working Holiday Maker programme under which they had entered Australia (Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC), 2013). This diversity also highlights the heterogeneity of migrant groups present in local mining communities. Racial difference and ethnicity, along with other determinants of subjectivity such as class, mediate gendered experiences (Lutz, 2010). Rather than addressing these dimensions, however, the analysis seeks to foreground the ways that the organization of labour in gold production networks shapes the gendered experience of migration.

Detailed notes were taken in the first round of interviews. In the second round, with one exception, interviews were recorded and professionally transcribed. Participant confidentiality is protected through the use of pseudonyms and the removal of potentially identifying material. The more readily identifiable ESL group coordinator has approved the use of her interview material. Interviewees responded to open-ended questions about their experiences and perceptions: in the case of migrant women and husbands, questions focused on motivations informing their decisions to move to Boddington, positive and negative aspects of relocation, perceptions of Boddington as a place and community, and interrelations with local community members; in the case of local residents and support workers, questions centred on perceptions and experiences of transnational migration to Boddington with regard to changes to the local community, and interrelations with migrants. Au pairs were asked about their reasons for coming to Boddington, the work they did, and their perceptions of Boddington and interactions with the local community. Through iterative close-reading of transcripts, three key, interrelated themes were identified: family motivations for migration; emplaced reproductive labour; and ongoing mobility.

Moving to/living in Boddington

Motivations

The two most highly rated and prevalent motivations for moving to Boddington given by interviewed trailing wives were the desire to avoid long-distance commuting regimes and thus ‘stay together as a family’ (Alma) and anticipated educational benefits for offspring within a generalized perception that the move ‘would be good for the children’ (Terese). The two exceptions to this involved a straightforward acceptance that wives follow husbands. At no point was benefit to the trailing spouse offered as a motivation. Also absent were direct financial motivations and intent to migrate permanently to Australia. In contrast, interviewed husbands gave career development as their primary reason for migrating to Boddington. This is in line with the findings of a contemporaneous government survey of mining sector primary 457 visa holders, which also identified career as a leading motivation (DIBP, 2012).

The wives’ rationales encode gendered primary responsibilities for reproductive labour and an acceptance that productive labour determines sites of reproductive labour. This responsibility, as noted in the literature on trailing wives, involved personal sacrifice. Two interviewees, without prompting, explicitly noted that they would personally have been better off not moving. Sacrifices included leaving successful high-status professional careers founded on extended formal education, as Bruegel (1996) also found. Interviewed wives further highlighted a related loss of independence exacerbated by being in a culturally unfamiliar and isolated place.

Arriving in Boddington, trailing wives were confronted with a non-existent labour market. This is likely to be the norm in that mine sites are often in remote places (where mining dominates the labour market) and women are marginalized in the industry’s workforce. At the time of this fieldwork, women constituted around 16 per cent of the mining workforce, were concentrated in feminized administrative roles and suffered an average wage gap of 21.8 per cent (Mayes and Pini, 2014). None of the wives interviewed was in paid work. Several, however, commented that they would have liked to work: as Luana put it: ‘I was work 11 years. So hard it is for me to just quit. I want to go back to work again.’ Living in a small, remote rural town compounded the challenges around gaining language competencies and navigating complex/foreign institutional processes and regulations, such as those associated with skills recognition (see also Fincher, 1997). As Maria commented, finding a job in her professional field was ‘going to be hard’ and would involve ‘a lot of paper’. As noted earlier, state support for secondary migrants in relation to such difficulties was at best extremely limited. In addition, the skills and education of those from non-English-speaking backgrounds have long been devalued in the local labour market in Australia (Fincher, 1997) as opposed to the intra-company and/or global valuing of their spouses’ labour enabling employment in Boddington.

Significantly, the lack of access to paid work, as Cooke (2007) also found, was rationalized as an opportunity to be ‘good’ or ‘better’ mothers. In the process, the position that paid work and career had in their lives was reframed or demoted (Halfacree, 2004). The women emphasized the needs of their children – a key motivation for accompanying their partners to Boddington – as in the following exemplar:

It’s good I no work. It’s good because I spend time with my kids. I take advantage about that. My kids need me now. You know, I enjoy it, but I think so later, they will spend more time at school and I would like to work really. I think so. I hope I can do that. If I can’t work [in my profession], I can work at something easy. I can do something. I can work. I like work; that’s the only thing. (Lucia)

Boddington as a ‘rural’ place also comes into play. Interviewees note that Boddington is ‘small’, ‘safe’, ‘happy’ and a ‘good place for small kids’. There are clearly (indirect) positive aspects. At the same time, these aspects serve to minimize, or make a virtue out of, the circumscribed opportunities for women beyond their roles as mothers and wives. Alma, for instance, noted that when she was feeling overwhelmed by how ‘very, very difficult’ the move was for her, she would tell herself: ‘remember that you came here for the kids’. Interviewed trailing wives revealed a desire for and commitment to both reproductive and productive work, partially reconciled in the willingness to embrace downward employment mobility.

The barriers to paid work experienced by trailing wives in Boddington are clearly gendered as a direct result of state and industry-specific processes of labour migration intersecting with extant gendered ideologies around ‘motherhood’, reinforced in/by Boddington as a particular setting. The presence of the operational mine situated Boddington as a site of global capital accumulation and career advancement for male partners, while for trailing spouses Boddington was a site of reproductive labour.

Performing reproductive labour in Boddington

This reproductive labour was also intensified (see also Schmalzbauer, 2009; Zentgraf, 2002) and each trailing wife reported struggling with this. Interviewees consistently explained the highly uneven family division of reproductive labour as a result of husbands’ increased work responsibilities and 12-hour shifts, and thus reduced male time-availability for domestic work (see also Lyonette and Crompton, 2015). For example, interviewees commented of their partners: ‘he works more here, maybe too much’ and ‘previously he had more time with the kids’ (Maria); ‘he goes [to work] early and comes back late’ and tends to ‘have less time with us’ (Lucia). Women found this ‘very stressful. I am here 24 hours with the kid and the housework’ (Luana). This inequality, and rationale, is not unusual in the Australian mining industry where there is a long history of women’s exclusion and marginalization in the workplace and of the corporate/industry exploitation of their reproductive labour in the home (Rhodes, 2005).

Trailing wives’ experiences of Boddington was very much connected to undertaking reproductive tasks – both within and beyond the home – and was often hampered by language barriers, cultural difference/s and the absence of friends and family. The difficulties recounted by trailing wives signal the complexities and politics of undertaking reproductive labour in unfamiliar places and with uncertain claims to place. As Lucia put it: ‘I feel like everybody say hello, everybody help you if you ask, but in [my home country] you don’t need to ask, the people help you’. Interviewees spoke about a range of challenges from not knowing how to use the gas heater and thus suffering the cold for several nights, to feeling unsure of how to interact with others at the children’s playgroup. At the same, their presence, and right to be, in Boddington – to use local resources and spaces, such as community playgroups – was explained in several interviews as legitimated primarily through their husbands’ productive labour. As Suri commented: ‘I’m here because my husband works here’. Relatedly, many non-migrant interviewees experienced this transnational migration into Boddington through the performance of reproductive labour. For example, they tended to describe interactions with migrant women as primarily taking place in public spaces of social reproduction such as the local school child drop-off area.

The high wages characterizing the Australian mining industry, and extending to transnational skilled labour (DIBP, 2012), along with policies informing working-holiday visas, eventuated in some migrant families employing female au pairs. At the time of fieldwork, the presence of au pairs in Boddington presented something new in the local community. As the ESL coordinator noted, ‘What other small towns [in rural Australia] have au pairs?’. According to the agency (Smart Aupairs, 2014) through which one of the young women working in Boddington was recruited, au pair work is a matter of ‘cultural exchange and not employment’, is temporary (up to 6 months) and is remunerated via free full board (a furnished room and shared bathroom) and ‘pocket money’. Assuming a 35-hour week, the amount of ‘pocket money’ suggested by the agency worked out to be just under 29 per cent of the Australian minimum wage as specified by the Fair Work Ombudsman (2014).

The work that au pairs undertook in Boddington involved feeding and transporting children, supervising them in the mornings and after school, and general cleaning. The presence of au pairs would seem to run counter to the migrant narrative around having more time to devote to children and, indeed, interviewed au pairs were uncertain about why they had been recruited. One au pair noted that her employer ‘did nothing’ and had substantial ‘free time’ (Isidora). On the other hand, this hosting of au pairs can be understood as enacting a hierarchy of care (Wang, 2013) in which not all reproductive labour is equal, just as this creates divisions between women (McDowell, 2014). The use of low-paid au pairs, managed by wives, not only maintains traditional gendered unequal divisions of labour (Katz, 2001; Lyonette and Crompton, 2015) but also (re)produces an internal hierarchy in which certain aspects of reproductive labour – cleaning and transporting as opposed to nurturing and ‘spending time’ with children – are both marketized and devalued through low pay. Interviewed au pairs expected to spend between three and six months in Boddington before moving to other places in Australia. Skilled labour migration into Boddington facilitated, and was supported by, a hierarchy of women responsible for reproductive labour including both wives and female ‘unskilled’ temporary migrants, for whom there was also a dearth of state support and regulation in Boddington.

According to interviewed migrant support workers with responsibility for Boddington, diminished and uncertain state funding meant that volunteerism characterized the provision of migrant support across the region. Migrant support agencies and NGOs, all of which were staffed by women, in this period reported providing extensive, unpaid, predominantly reproductive labour across the region and an inability to adequately service Boddington (Mayes, 2012). The Boddington ESL group was founded as a direct response to local perceptions of un(der)-serviced migrant needs. Janice, a long-term local resident, was paid by the Boddington Community Resource Centre for a few hours per week to undertake ESL teaching. While such measures are often described as ‘community’ initiatives, the provision of support in fact falls to specific local women, in this case Janice, who in 2011, and still in 2013, contributed substantial and wide-ranging volunteer labour far in excess of her paid labour. Indeed, she was the primary, and in many respects sole (semi-official) support person in Boddington.

This support provided by Janice, who, like the migrant women, had young children and a husband employed in the mining industry, was crucial to the well-being of migrant women and families in Boddington. For example, one migrant interviewee, Sara, commented that she ‘began to feel better, much better’ after finding the ESL group. Janice became an indispensable ‘go-to’ person (as also observed in ESL morning teas) – health emergencies, relations with the broader community and Newmont, and general support such as help with completing forms, were, as she put it, ‘all just left to me to sort out’. In these wide-ranging ways, Janice substantively supported and cared for numerous migrant families and also au pairs:

24/7 my phone’s on. They’ll Facebook me, text me, ring me, any time, day or the night. And if they ask I never like to say no. I want to, but it is all like your family.

In undertaking this extensive, unpaid emotional and physical reproductive labour in support of the migrant wives, Janice also worked indirectly in support of their husbands’ productive labour and the smooth functioning/adaptation of the migrant labour force, and by extension the Newmont mine. One husband, Louis, opined that should any of the wives have ‘severe problems assimilating, [the company] would be sympathetic to a certain point’ after which the worker would have to make ‘a tough decision’ to leave Boddington and the company. This confirmed the broad importance of Janice’s work, not least given the limited support and rights available to women relegated to a ‘secondary’ position as a product of visa conditions. Janice’s reproductive labour was locally important not only in ameliorating the tensions between local residents and incoming transnational migrants, and maintaining social relations underpinning ‘community’, but also in terms of Boddington’s viability as a site of global capital accumulation. For example, in 2011, Boddington was named one of nine ‘SuperTowns’ as part of a Western Australian state government initiative directed at assisting communities to ‘become more desirable places to live, work and invest’ (Barnett and Grylls, 2012: 1; emphasis added). Of the ‘economic growth opportunities’ identified in the accompanying SuperTown growth plan developed for Boddington, the first of seven ‘core industrial/business focus areas’ is ‘value-adding to mining and resource based industries’ (Hames Sharley, 2012: 35). Janice’s reproductive labour can be seen to provide just such (gendered) added value.

The next move

Tensions between Boddington as a (fixed) site of mineral extraction and related productive labour and Boddington as a site of reproductive labour are evident in a discernible pattern in which migrant families moved to more urban locations as a result of dissatisfaction with the educational services for children in Boddington. As summarized by Janice:³

They’ll either send their kids away, or like now, one of the families will go to Perth on Saturday and do extra math lessons, extra English, musical instruments, and then in the end they just move to Perth.

These relocations to urban Perth involve spatial separation of family members in that, as a consequence, the husband, with the company’s permission, must take up long-distance commuting and associated on-site accommodation. This long-distance work pattern relies on commodified, company-provided reproductive labour in the form of room cleaning and provision of meals, for example. Such work, in the main, is undertaken by (low-paid) women contracted to hospitality companies. These relocations not only run counter to migrant wives’ stated desires and responsibilities around keeping families together, but also rely on a mix of paid and unpaid reproductive labour performed, respectively, in the work camp and private homes. In this situation it is placed dimensions of reproductive labour (i.e. access to ‘good’ schools) that drive migrant mobility, highlighting geographies of social reproduction in operation alongside, and in tension with, those of labour migration. Such tension however is (partially) resolved through recourse, as described above, to paid reproductive labour emplaced in the Boddington work camp. That is, the need for reproductive labour in Boddington in support of male mine-workers is met through recourse to paid reproductive labour in the mine-camp.

At the same time, future family transnational migration emerged as an accepted industry-driven practice:

I was living in X because of his job and then we moved here, and I know that we’ve got to move again one day. Don’t know when, but yeah. We can’t decide where we’re going. But I know that someday yeah we have to move again. (Maria)

Interviewees cited the precarious nature of mining work as a key justification for this ongoing mobility and their lack of agency in determining when and where they might go. A history of ‘problems’ at various mines was cited as precluding long-term work in a single location, while recent redundancies at a number of Newmont mines, including the Boddington site, were presented as necessitating a willingness to move to other sites. A further informing factor is that ongoing employer sponsorship is a precondition of 457 visas; workers who leave an employer or are made redundant have 90 consecutive days to find a new employer before being required to exit the country (DIPB, 2012). In this way, as has been argued more broadly (see Anderson, 2010), immigration controls, in this case the 457 visa, contribute to worker uncertainty and increased power for employers. This expectation of future transnational migration applied, however, not only to 457 visa holders but also to those on other arrangements, further confirming the power of this industry sector to shape family migration practices. This ongoing (trailing) migration, as noted in the literature (Cooke, 2007; Halfacree, 1995), further undermines women’s opportunities and motivations for developing a career. It also makes it difficult to achieve the rootedness necessary to and claimed through reproductive labour (Smith and Winders, 2008) as trailing wives undertake this work in a series of (new) places.

Conclusion

This article has revealed the ways in which the gendering of labour migration is shaped by intersections of industry practices and state migration policy and, further, is interconnected with the particularities of local places and host communities. In particular, it elucidates women’s ongoing unequal responsibility for social reproduction, namely for affective, physical and social reproductive labour both in the present and imagined future, as encapsulated in their responsibility for ‘keeping the family together’ in one place. This responsibility is shown to underpin women’s willingness to migrate alongside employed spouses, despite personal sacrifice, including a reduction in their opportunities for paid employment and continuing careers. Further, as Cooke (2007) and Schmalzbauer (2009) also found, this migration is shown to fortify and intensify the uneven division of family reproductive labour. Importantly, the present study extends understandings of this outcome by connecting it to migration policy and wives’ standing as ‘secondary’ visa holders, and to industry practices, in this case mining global production regimes based on 24-hour production and use of mobile, temporary, predominantly male, skilled workers at sites located in under-serviced rural or remote areas.

The challenges and tolls associated with performing reproductive labour in isolated/isolating foreign places are significantly ameliorated for trailing wives in the Boddington case by local capacities for support, exemplified by the pivotal wide-ranging unpaid reproductive labour provided by a local female community member. As a consequence she too experienced an intensification of reproductive labour. More broadly, her work needs to be understood as compensating for, if not hiding, inequalities resulting from poor state support for, and industry marginalization of, trailing wives. Further, her work helped to reconcile tensions between the mining industry’s excessive demands on/for productive labour and resultant exacerbation of uneven family divisions of reproductive labour. This community member’s unpaid work demonstrates the ways in which community members are connected through reproductive labour to global production networks. It also highlights the gendered, and exploitative, nature of such connections. Future research could usefully examine the conditions upon which this crucial provision of community-based, voluntary reproductive labour might be withdrawn, and also what opportunities there might be to challenge or subvert its underpinning inequalities.

This research extends the boundaries of analysis for (feminist) labour migration scholarship by demonstrating that the gendering of the increasingly dominant family skilled temporary labour migration in OECD countries encompasses the roles and experiences of ‘host’ communities. This research shows that women’s gendered and unequal incorporation in neoliberal globalization extends to women in migration host communities, whose unpaid work smooths over tensions between productive and reproductive labour enacted in this globalization, and reduces the effects of shortfalls in state support and migration policy.

Further, this article identifies the ways in which complex configurations of unpaid and paid reproductive labour – in households, community spaces and work-camp – underwrite economic globalization. Just as temporary labour migration policies exclude ‘secondary’ migrant wives from a range of state supports, Working Holiday Maker visas enable the transnational flow and exploitation of low-paid, unregulated and unsupported female au pairs. This maintains the underpinning devaluation of reproductive labour while also reproducing hierarchical divisions between women. Concurrently, a return to long-distance commuting arrangements, supported by paid reproductive labour in the work-camp, enables reconciliation of tensions between Boddington as a site of production and as an (inadequate) site of social reproduction. The various configurations of unpaid and paid reproductive labour (and their emplacements in and beyond Boddington) clearly underpin and are shaped by the operations of global capital, the specificities of migration policy and reductions in state-provided reproductive labour. This research thus contributes to debates about whether or not, and to what extent, contemporary capitalism needs unpaid reproductive labour (McDowell, 2014). Perhaps what is essential for (globalized) capitalism are the sorts of fluid combinations of localized capacities for unpaid, sophisticated, community-based reproductive labour, along with contingent paid reproductive labour as enacted in Boddington.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Our sincere thanks to the anonymous reviewers whose comments have been very much appreciated. We also sincerely thank Paul Thompson for insightful commentary on an earlier draft. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to our research participants.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Robyn Mayes is a Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow in the Queensland University of Technology Business School. Through a human geography lens, she has researched corporate social responsibility, local communities, new social movements and mobile/transnational labour in the context of the Australian mining sector. Recently she has begun work on the social and cultural geographies of transnational au pairs in Australia, and on the geographies of digital work as enacted in the platform economy. She has published over 40 journal articles and book chapters, and been invited to speak at a range of national and international fora.

Paul Koshy is a Research Fellow in the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education, currently based at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. His research is in the areas of education and labour economics, with a particular focus on higher education participation and related policy issues in Australia. His recent work examines key drivers of higher education aspiration, participation and attainment, and the measurement of disadvantage in this context. An extension of this work has seen him undertake policy research for the Australian government in the monitoring and reporting of participation in higher education.

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