‘Stres’ and self-protection: Migrant workers facing everyday violence in Taiwan’s fisheries

This article discusses the sensory, affective, and emotional dimensions of ‘dirty’ and socially devalued manual labor performed by migrant workers. It examines Taiwan’s fisheries as a case study, building on 2 years of fieldwork among Indonesian migrant workers. As an entry point to the analysis, I use migrant fishers’ expressions of ‘stres’ – the Indonesian term for the English word ‘stress’. I explore how Indonesian fishers experience their everyday labor and lives on the fishing vessels. And I investigate how these fishers protect themselves from various sources of harm or threat to maintain their physical safety, emotional well-being, and dignity. I argue that accounts of stres are indicative of the everyday violence faced by migrant workers. These accounts allude to experiences that remain beneath the attention of common, sensationalized representations of migrant labor in global supply chains as modern slavery.