Soziologie

The RTG 2951 Lecture Series is pleased to welcome Gracia Liu Farrer (Waseda University) for a lecture titled “The Politics of Labor: Contested Governance of the Indonesia–Japan Transnational Labor Market.”

In this lecture, Gracia Liu-Farrer examines the political construction of the transnational labour market linking Indonesia to Japan, using transnational labour market making as a methodological lens to identify the actors shaping cross-border worker dispatch under Japan's Specified Skilled Worker (SSW) program. Empirically, she traces a rivalry between two blocs: Indonesia's Ministry of Manpower (MoM) and its affiliated training-sending organizations (LPK-SO), and the newer Ministry of Migrant Worker Protection (KP2MI) alongside private recruitment agencies (P3MI). Private recruitment agencies are pushing to administer SSW entirely, displacing LPK-SO, layering onto a longer contest between Manpower's historical dominance and KP2MI's newer mandate. These claims sit against the backdrop of the Technical Intern Training Program (TITP), long run by Manpower and LPK-SO, which classified participants as "trainees" rather than workers. SSW was meant to fix TITP's core flaw—job immobility. P3MI invokes this history, emphasizing the need for labour protection and its own "ethical recruitment" standards to argue that SSW workers should be routed through P3MI like other overseas labor migrants. Ultimately, Gracia Liu-Farrer argues this contestation reflects two competing visions of SSW-ESDP: Japan increasingly frames it as long-term skill training and labour import with a latent path to permanent residency, while Indonesian actors—both KP2MI and P3MI—treat it as fixed-term, temporary labour, reinforced by narratives of migrants preferring to return home under repatriation insurance. This divergence in policy logics drives the rivalry over who controls labour dispatch to Japan.

About the Speaker

Gracia Liu-Farrer is professor of sociology at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies, and Director of Institute of Asian Migration at Waseda University, Japan. Her research examines immigration into Japan, transnational labor and student mobilities in East Asia as well as between Asia and Europe. She is the author of Labor Migration from China to Japan and coeditor of the Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations.

Date: 19 October 2026
Time: 16:00
Venue: College for Social Sciences and Humanities Lindenallee 39-41 | 45127 Essen. Saal / Conference Hall – LIN-E2.06, Hybrid Lecture, registration: grk2951@uni-bielefeld.de

We warmly invite all interested colleagues and students to join us for this lecture and the subsequent discussion.