Scholars have noted the widespread operation of private recruiting agencies in the labour sending countries in Asia, especially in the context of temporary labourers recruitment to the Gulf states in the Middle East and to East (South Korea) and Southeast Asia (Malaysia and Singapore) (Rahman, 2012). Recruiting agencies operate in Southeast Asia: Indonesia (Lindquist, 2010, 2012), Philippines (Agunias, 2010; Constable, 2007), Thailand (Lindquist, 2010), Vietnam (Lindquist, 2010), East Asia: China (Xiang, 2012) and South Asia: Sri Lanka (Gamburd, 2000), Bangladesh (Afsar, 2009; Rahman, 2012), India (Abella, 1995) and Pakistan (Abella, 1995). In migrant source countries in Asia, private recruiting agencies serve as the main “contact point” for destination recruiting agencies and employers; on a structural and
organizational level, they are the key players in the labour recruitment process (Rahman, 2012, p. 216). However, in the context of the actual practice of recruitment, sub-agent(s) of the recruiting agency often take on the main role. These sub-agents reach out to candidates in the grass-roots rural areas; their widespread operation is noted in work on Indonesia (Lindquist, 2010, 2012), the Philippines (Agunias, 2009; Lindquist, 2010), China (Xiang, 2012, 2013) and Bangladesh
(Afsar, 2009; Rahman, 2012). Sub-agents’ operations are usually informal; that is, unlike formal recruiting agencies they work without holding a license permit from the sending state.
Rahman`s study (2012) sheds light on how recruiting agencies in Bangladesh are involved in organizing Bangladeshi temporary workers’ (predominantly male construction
58 workers, janitors, drivers, factory workers, hospitality workers, gardeners) recruitment to the Gulf states (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Bahrain). He observes that recruiting agencies in Bangladesh and the Gulf collaborate in the recruitment of Bangladeshi workers. Upon receiving a request from a recruiting agency interested in recruiting Bangladeshi workers for Gulf employers, a Bangladeshi recruiting agency looks for candidates willing to fill these positions. To this end, Bangladeshi recruiting agencies largely depend on their sub-agents who travel across village areas to recruit candidates. A primary responsibility of these informal sub-agents is to persuade people in the villages to go abroad and to use the
services of the recruiting agency (or agencies) for whom the sub-agent works. Once an
individual enrolls with the recruiting agency, the sub-agent assists the candidate with mandatory bureaucratic formalities (for example, acquiring a passport, medical examination) associated with the departure process. If need be, a sub-agent also serves as an insurer of the candidate as he/she seeks a loan, perhaps from a pawnbroker, to pay the departure cost. These sub-agents usually have affiliations in the areas where they work, maintaining connections with village elites; sub-agents are often residents of the villages where they operate and may even be among the village elite (Rahman, 2012, p. 222). Their personal and social affiliations with people in their areas of operation gives them necessary credibility to sell their services to villagers; after all, villagers need to make sure they have local access to support in case of fraud or abuse in the destination region – in this case, the Middle East.
Speaking about unskilled temporary workers’ recruitment in Malaysia and Saudi Arabia, Lindquist (2010, 2012) illuminates the important roles of informal sub-agents who work on behalf of formal recruiting agencies in Indonesia. License-holding recruiting agencies in
59 Indonesia operate through their branches in all major cities, including Jakarta and Surabya. These branches vary in size and scale of operation. Unlicensed (informal) recruiters often operate in the rural areas as representatives of licensed recruiting agencies, frequently teaming up with other informal labour agents. Networking between various informal recruiters gives rise to an extremely complex and volatile system of migration-brokerage across the country. The actual practice of migrant recruitment starts with the informal recruiters who approach prospective candidates from their village or other nearby localities, using their social relations and
networking. These informal brokers may be primary school teachers, returned migrants or even grandmothers. They mostly work as part-timers but are significant players in the Indonesian migration industry. They operate by building and working around the issue of trust; by showing themselves trustworthy to the villagers, they successfully pursue their business as migration mediators.
A more nuanced and complicated understanding of the relationships between recruiting agents and their chain of sub-agents is discussed by Biao Xiang (2012, 2013). In exploring the reason for the excessively high cost associated with the legal transnational migration of unskilled labourers from China, Xiang finds commercial migration brokers’ (both formal and informal) active collaboration explains the high cost. He notes that these migration brokers operate within a hierarchical and expanded system of networking spreading across China (from cities to rural areas). The prospective candidate pays all brokers within the network who provide services to the candidate in different stages of their migration facilitation process. Hence, candidates usually pay an exorbitant fee for their departure. Migration brokers’ operational nexus puts the state and potential migrants into an “intermediary trap” – a phrase Xiang (2013) uses to describe the
60 dependency of the Chinese state and prospective migrant workers on brokers’ network in
mediating migration. Migration brokers who constitute the intermediary trap, according to Xiang, are hierarchically connected along their operational nexus. At the top of brokers’ operational nexus are the licensed recruiting agencies – “window companies,” as Xiang terms them. These brokers deal with the bureaucratic complexities associated with migration in both China and the labour importing state. At the mid-level of this hierarchical operation chain are brokers involved in the recruitment process in conjunction with those brokers at the grass-roots level. Brokers at the grass-roots level could be institutions, for example, “local labour bureaus,” “vocational schools” or even “individuals” with “public authority,” for example, “retired cadres” or “school teachers” (Xiang, 2013, pp. 6-7). These brokers, as Xiang points out, operate by remaining embedded in their hierarchical chain of operation; in so doing, they complement each other in the migration organization process.
One common feature that resonates in works by Xiang, Lindquist and Rahman (as discussed above) is worth mentioning. Rahman (2012) focuses on the complex institutional process of Bangladeshi temporary workers’ recruitment in the Gulf mediated by various
recruiting brokers: recruiting agents in Bangladesh and the Middle East, as well as sub-agents of recruiting agents in Bangladesh; Lindquist (2010, 2012) sheds light on the institutional dynamic of migration-brokerage in the context of Indonesia, while Xiang (2013) explicitly sheds light on the hierarchal relations between different recruiting brokers within the intermediary trap. These scholars point to power hierarchies between brokers; such hierarchies inform their collaborative operation on a macro (structural) level. I contend that hierarchies at the micro and meso-levels also inform the institutional organization of broker-mediated temporary migration from China,
61 Indonesia and Bangladesh. Xiang, Lindquist and Rahman have failed to note micro or meso- level hierarchies within the brokers’ operational nexus. In practice, bridging different
hierarchical levels (macro, meso, micro) is necessary for a comprehensive understanding of the operational dynamics of power relations in the broker-mediated recruitment process.