Brokering Pacific labour mobility: Relation, constraint and aspiration at the interstices of supply chain capitalism

Abstract Since 2008, temporary labour migration schemes have brought growing numbers of Pacific Islanders to work on Australian farms. The space between these workers and the farmers for whom they labour is organised through a complex ecology of brokerage relations, entailing diverse actors, processes and institutions. While the role of corporate labour‐hire agencies and the technocratic strictures of labour and migration regimes shape the brokerage of Pacific labour mobility in distinctly contemporary ways, ethnographic analysis highlights the enduring significance of personalised and intimate relations. Dialogue between the anthropological literature on brokerage, which emerged originally in the context of the disorganisation of the late colonial period, and recent literature on contemporary capitalist supply chains, offers insight into the nature of this multi‐scalar field and how power operates within it. Here, brokerage functions to segregate—that is, to create the distinct niches of supply chain capitalism—but can also yield defiant connections.