Small-scale, work-related mobility has become a constitutive feature of modern local Southeast Asian societies. This unique volume traces the lives of low-paid, mostly young, unskilled migrants who have moved away from their villages of origin in search of a job: contractual farmers in Laos; miners, young urban service workers, and construction workers in Indonesia; shoemakers in the Philippines; and factory workers in Vietnam. The case studies show how ill-defined work leads to lives of structural and symbolic precariousness and reshapes the migrants’ own moral visions of work, identity, and belonging.

Small-scale, work-related mobility has become a constitutive feature of modern local Southeast Asian societies. This unique volume traces the lives of low-paid, mostly young, unskilled migrants who have moved away from their villages of origin in search of a job: contractual farmers in Laos; miners, young urban service workers, and construction workers in Indonesia; shoemakers in the Philippines; and factory workers in Vietnam. The case studies show how ill-defined work leads to lives of structural and symbolic precariousness and reshapes the migrants’ own moral visions of work, identity, and belonging.