“What is the Solution, Miss?”: Small-Scale Mobility, Work, and Unemployment for Young, Unskilled Laborers in Aceh

In this chapter, I will describe some trajectories of access to work for the young women migrating from villages to Banda Aceh and discuss the imageries and experiences of work and life that are at play in their quest and in their ultimate success or failure. My main focus is the importance of small- scale mobility—that is, migration that does not target a faraway, unknown, and foreign country—in the construction of a gendered precariousness through work. I will show how some poor, young, working women plan or fail to plan their adult life within larger discourses along the line of an ideal trajectory going from less well off to better off, and from single to married. Following the growing contemporary research on work, I use “precariousness” to describe the quality as well as the effect of low-income unskilled city jobs that the women I met held or could aspire to hold. As Vosko, McDonald, and Campbell (2009, 2) write, “precarious employment can be identified as paid work characterized by limited social benefits and statutory entitlements, job insecurity, low wages, and high risks of ill-health.” This type of work is structurally functional to a neoliberal vision of labor as a marketable commodity (Arnold and Bongiovi 2013) and affects all domains of the worker’s life (Kalleberg 2012).