Times of Work: Transified Workers and Contingent Careers

This chapter addresses how, for 'middling migrants' from Asia in Australia, hegemonic flexibility and the transification of migration create new forms of mobile labour and new career pathways; transform lived experiences of work time; and shape understandings of the self in relation to time and work. It argues primarily here that young and middling migrants become 'transified workers' whose careers are made up of contingent rather than teleological processes. Perceptions about young middling migrants' asynchronous temporalities and mobilities characterize them as undesirable transified workers, creating specific worker subjectivities and specific experiences of finding and retaining work. This characterization shapes their opportunities in the short and long term as well as their immediate and ongoing relationships to employers when they do find work. There is a fundamental tension between imaginaries of careers as teleological progressions and the realities of careers as temporally contingent under the conditions of hegemonic flexibility and the transification of migration. Contingency consists of unexpected detours, new dependencies and circumstances, and reimagined aspirations and desires, all framed within a sense of mobility as always unfinished and the future as ever uncertain. Transified work and contingent careers may intensify embodied time, daily schedules and the sense of the passage of time, creating dissonant, uncomfortable velocities that interlocutors felt they had little control over. Despite the significance of work to middling migrants' aspirations, it is important to understand their lives beyond their engagements with the labour market, as lifestyle, love and attachments to place, coloured their decisions and experiences just as much as their careers.