“They are very disciplined”: The gendered political economy of bird nests

Photo by author

Situated among Chinese-Malaysian family compounds and clusters of three-story apartment buildings home to most of the area’s Rohingya community, the grey one-story house at the end of the street seemed abandoned. For months, I walked past the house on the way to the shops and businesses on the main avenue, and never once saw anyone enter or leave. The property was enclosed by a chain link fence, the corrugated steel garage door was always closed and locked. There was a pile of rubbish and a couch in the yard, but, interestingly, there was a video camera mounted above the door, though I paid no mind. When I met the two Chinese-Malaysian brothers who founded an edible bird nest company that employed Rohingya women, I was surprised to learn that the seemingly abandoned grey house was actually the factory where the nests were processed. I had never seen anyone at the factory because the mostly female workers entered in the morning and left after 6:30pm, and were only allowed to go outside once a day for their lunch break.

Tom is the younger of the two Chan brothers, and handles the accounting part of the bird nest processing business. The elder brother, Jon, managed the factory floor, where a total of twenty-one Rohingya and Myanmar Muslim refugee women and two men processed the nests. The wife of another Rohingya community leader ran a second processing ‘factory’ at her home, employing another half dozen or so women. This bird nest processing business, Tom explained, was a charity training program to help Rohingya refugees “develop themselves.” The brothers founded the enterprise in 2016, eager to start their own company after working in various sectors, including the gem trade, for most of their young adult lives. The idea for the business took shape as the brothers solicited advice from Chinese friends in the import/export business, as well as Iliaz Hussein, a well-known Rohingya community leader and co-founder of the local Rohingya children’s school and Rohingya service nonprofit. Iliaz Hussein also owned an herbal supplement export business, and convinced the Chan brothers that edible bird nests were a worthwhile business venture for two specific reasons. First, the market was booming. In 2011 China reversed a ban on importing bird nests, and one kilogram of bird nest sold for approximately 10,000USD in October of 2018. Moreover, most bird nests are sourced from Sabah and Sarawak, East Malaysia, making Kuala Lumpur a global hub for the edible bird nest industry. Processing the nests is extremely labor-intensive, and is an acutely undesirable job that involves long hours hunched over magnifying glasses, picking microscopic particles out of nests with tweezers. 

Hence, the second reason the Chan brothers decided to go into the edible bird nest processing business: Iliaz connected them to a large supply of cheap labor willing to do the work for extremely low wages, and framed the business as a worthy, charitable, and imminently necessary development project that attracted investment from wealthy Chinese Malaysians, many of whom are familiar with the Rohingya crisis and are interested in aiding the community. Iliaz was an ideal partner because he knew nearly every Rohingya and Myanmar Muslim family in the area. For years, he has conducted intake interviews when undocumented people applied for formal recognition as refugees through the local nonprofit, which referred claims to the UNHCR. He also knew how to negotiate with immigration police, and knew many local police officers, which possibly provided some degree of security from raids and fines. Iliaz was also known for giving money from his own pocket to families in dire need, most often as a result of crippling medical debt to hospitals. Each week a widower came to the offices of the nonprofit - he was left with a bill for 20,000RM when his wife died of colon cancer – and Iliaz gave him the money in his pocket. On another occasion, he raised money for a refugee woman whose twins’ care in the NICU incurred a 9,000RM bill. Yet Iliaz Hussein was often overwhelmed by the scale of this need and the limits of his own ability to give, to solve problems such as the detention of UNHCR-card holders by the immigration police, mediating domestic violence disputes, or retrieving babies held in hospitals as collateral for debt payment, while managing his own life. It was this constant barrage of anger, sickness, poverty, and tangled bureacracy that seemed to combine with a general affinity for neoliberal ideas of personal responsibility to shape Iliaz’s understandings of the “problems” facing Rohingyas and the “solutions” that would help them. More than emphasizing the need for economic investment in an abominably poor community, Iliaz emphasized the necessity of the nest-processing work for Rohingyas as individuals, especially women:

I begged [Tom and Jon] to start a business that employs Rohingya people – they have nothing, they need work. But they lack discipline. They can’t just go around smoking, eating qat, and gossiping. The women have nothing to do, they just sit at home and gossip and eat qat. They have to go to work, they need to be developed. This is a very good program, a good opportunity for them. They learn how to be responsible, they learn discipline. These Rohingyas have lost discipline because they have lost hope. Employers who hire Rohingyas who complete this program tell me that they are very disciplined, very good employees.

Indeed, the factory was an austere place. I visited one weekday afternoon, ringing a video-monitored doorbell before a young man came onto an intercom and confirmed my identity. He opened the exterior door and let me in to a mud room, where I removed my shoes, changed into slippers, and covered the slippers with a paper-cloth bootie. The young man then pulled a keycard from an extendable clip on his shirt and scanned it at a second door. Passing through into a hallway, I was taken aback to find the house interior completely hollowed out, with one large glass room situated at the center of the empty structure, secured by a third key-card controlled door. There was an office with a desk and a computer connected the factory floor by a large glass window, from which the brothers could see each worker, no matter where they were in the room. When I arrived, Jon was standing on the factory floor, watching the workers with his arms folded across his chest. His hair was styled into a stiff pompadour that rose three inches from the crown of his head, and he wore a black stone mala necklace with a large, bejeweled Buddha pendant – a piece from his prior life as a gem trader.

Jon was reluctant to meet with me. Iliaz Hussein had told me that a journalist had written about the enterprise last year, drawing unwanted attention, given that the business employs undocumented refugees, most of whom do not hold UNHCR cards. Losing employees to detention would grind business to a halt, and likely cost the Chan brothers a hefty sum in payments to officials and police. Jon was even more reluctant to answer any questions about the specifics of running the business. Assured I was not a journalist, he explained that the company processes the nests from a larger export company, who sources them from the jungle cliffs of Sabah. In October of 2018, the workers were processing about 30kg of nests per month, though the brothers aim to significantly expand and, more importantly, “improve” their workforce over the next several years. Once the workers become more disciplined and focused, Jon explained, they can complete the work faster. The bird nest export company pays the Chan brothers a flat rate of 500RM per kg to process the nests – an intricate five-step process which includes picking feathers and detritus from the tiny, delicate nest fibers, washing, trimming, and final quality control. 

There were twelve people working on the floor the day that I visited. Everything in the factory was a bright white – the floors, the tables, and the walls outside the glass cube where the workers were contained. There were three long rows of white laminate tables where the workers sat several feet apart, staggered on both sides of the tables. Each worker’s station was equipped with a 12x12” white square surface raised an inch or so off the table, where the nest was placed under a large magnifying glass that pivoted from a metal arm. On the side of the work surface there was a scale, a small water basin, and a set of tweezers, smaller magnifying glasses, and a basket. At the first stage of processing, the nest is soaked in water enlarge the fibers, allowing larger particles like feathers and egg shells to be more easily plucked from between the layers of the nest with the worker’s eyesight alone. The worker then places the nest under the large magnifying glass, using tweezers to pick out smaller pieces of dirt and sweeping the particulates off the edge of the raised square work surface onto the table with a metro card. Workers then use a more powerful hand-held magnifying glass to pluck the tiniest impurities from the nest. Once Jon or Tom approves the cleanliness of the nest at the second stage, the worker again washes the nest in the small plastic basin, gently massaging it to coax out any remaining particulates. The third and fourth steps involve trimming away any yellowed fibers of the nest to create a uniform color, then shaping the nest into a neat bowl and setting it to dry. Jon held up a raw nest that had not yet been cleaned – it was indeed very dirty, unrecognizable in comparison to menu photographs of bird nest soup. After five stages of processing, the finished product is a creamy-golden color, the individual fibers of the nest almost translucent. Each worker is given 100 grams of bird nest to process at a time, and they must be immaculately clean, or the buyer will reject them. Hence, Jon explained, there must be absolute discipline in the factory, because if the workers are “lazy and do not concentrate,” they will not finish the order, the nests will not pass quality control, and the supplier will not pay. The more focused and efficient the workers are, Jon explained, the more nests they can clean to quality standard in a given day. This is why the charity training program is so good for refugee women who aren’t accustomed to work, Jon explained: they learn to be careful and disciplined – characteristics that, according to Iliaz Hussein, displaced Rohingya women lack.

The previous evening, a group of seven Rohingya women and one Myanmar Muslim woman gathered together in the conference room of the local Rohingya school to talk about work at the factory. When asked about the most challenging aspect of their jobs, the women agreed that the rules were harsh and that they feared their bosses, especially the elder brother, Jon. Rahima, a 29-year old Rohingya woman from Maungdaw, described the strict regulation of factory space: 

There are more rules than we can count. We cannot talk, eat, or drink. We have to change our shoes, we cannot have our hand phones. The younger boss isn’t so bad, sometimes he lets us listen to music, but the older boss is bad. If we say something to each other he will stare at us and yell if we make a mistake. I’m afraid of him. We have to wash our hands all the time, and we have to do everything perfectly. We have to clean everything from the nest. Not one speck of dirt. If we break a rule or the nest isn’t perfect, the boss yells at us. If it’s not clean, they won’t take it! He will yell at us, it’s not clean enough, do it again! 

The women not only experience disciplinary power applied through verbal abuse and rules governing their bodies, ironically framed as solutions to their own “underdevelopment” and unruliness, they experience physical pain: “it is very difficult to see the small pieces of dirt and impurities in the nests,” Rahima explained. “Our eyes hurt so much, focusing on the same small thing all day. My hands and back and neck hurt. Many people stay for a few months, and leave before they can earn more money.” Beyond providing context for their own embodied experiences of work at the factory, Rahima’s comment about worker tenure turned out to be a critical one. Asked to talk more about how the pay scale worked, the women explained that actual wages were often far below 35RM per day. As “trainees,” the women are paid 35RM per 100g of nest processed for six months, or until their skill meets Tom and Jon’s vague requirements for efficiency and speed. I had assumed that the workers processed 100g per day, because a daily wage of 40RM was by far the lowest I had encountered for work outside the home in October of 2018 (some take-home piecework pays only several RM per day). Yet when asked long it took them to clean 100g of bird nest to meet inspection, they laughed: “sometimes it takes two or three days to clean the nest to their satisfaction! And they don’t pay until you finish!” Hence, workers regularly take home as little as 12RM per day, or 3USD. 

Despite the abusive environment and nearly nonexistent wages, the women are compelled to work at the factory for multiple, interconnected reasons. Hosinah explained:

It’s such hard work. But I have to work cleaning the nests because my husband doesn’t earn enough working at the market – sometimes he only earns 1000rm per month, so I have to work. If I had a UN card it would be a little easier. I could get 50RM per day, working at the toy factory or glasses factory. But without a UN card, this is the only place I could get work.

 

Each of the women shared a similar story about why they work outside the home. Of the eight women in the group, one was divorced and was a sole provider for her children. Six of the women were married, and their husbands worked at the produce or chicken markets, but their inconsistent and pitifully low wages were insufficient for surviving. At the time of research, a small apartment rented for 700RM or more per month, and a kilogram of fish cost 20RM. The inconsistency of work was compounded by high rates of injury at the markets, which together compel women to take on double shifts if they are able. Latifah, a 35-year old Rohingya woman from Bauthidaung, recently started work at the factory when her husband was injured at work in the chicken market. She has four children, and leaves the younger ones with a neighbor while the others are at school, but must still cook and care for her injured husband before and after work. Of the eight women, only Rukiah, a Myanmar Muslim woman from Mon state, had a UN card which might have enabled her to find better working conditions and higher pay. But, like several of the other women, she had young children and could not take the hours-long bus ride each day to the industrial areas where most garment and plastics manufacturing was located. Rukiah’s husband was laid off from work at the produce market, so she had to find waged work and take loans from family to make ends meet.

The refugee women’s experiences of factory discipline and below-poverty wages are familiar to many poor women workers of the world, from migrant women in Malaysian factories (Ong, 2010) to maquiladora workers at the US-Mexico border (Wright 1997, 2011) and rural Chinese women who live all but a few weeks a year in factory dormitories in special economic zones (Ngai and Smith 2007). The global “feminization” of work- and what Mezzandra and Nielson term the “great multiplication of labor” (Mezzandra and Nielson 2013: 87) – created a new and vast source of cheap work at a time when the costs of social reproduction had begun to rise precipitously (Moore 2015).

While the effects of neoliberal austerity measures pushed poor Third World women into manufacturing sectors as “docile” and flexible workers, capital also found new labor in the armies of middle-class women who doubled their shifts. In the context of Malaysia, the 1970 implementation of the New Economic Policy transformed Malay women into professionals through education and training programs, positive discrimination in workplaces like banks, and government subsidies for families (Ong 2000a, 2006; Gomez and Jomo 1996; Kaur 2014). As the Malaysian economy was retooled to shift capital into Malay hands and produce a Malay business class, the demand for domestic and manufacturing labor soared, resulting in the formalization of women “guest workers” in Malaysia through a bilateral agreement with Indonesia in 1981 (Gomez and Jomo 1996; Thein 2004). Today the vast majority of Malaysia’s foreign women workforce is Indonesian, but a growing population of undocumented refugee women without passports offers new opportunities for capitalists like the Chan brothers and Mr. Li, the produce distributor to undercut even the cheapest of Indonesian labor. Of course, many employers seize the passports of guest workers, rendering them vulnerable to extreme abuse and wage theft. Yet the framing of Rohingya and Myanmar Muslim women apart from other asylum seekers or migrant workers as uniquely in need of development, combines with the securitization of their bodies and general poverty to enable a moment of intensified exploitation.