Dociles ouvrières: quelques pratiques et idées du travail salarié en Malaisie

When compared to older women’s life trajectories, the chance to work in a factory has implied a radical change for many Tamil women in Penang, Malaysia, as well as for most Malaysians, whatever their ethnic group. Devigai and Jayesh are now in their forties and have been working as factory operators since their teen age. Their life histories express a tension between an understandig of salaried work as a fundamental personal resource and other life strategies deepely rooted in ethnic belonging, especially as far as marriage is concerned. A hyatus is there between life at work and life within the ethnic community, which leads the subjects to blurring the different plans of interpretation of themselves. The difficulty these women experience to conceive of themselves as workers is the consequence of Malaysia’s developmentalist politics and one of the basic condition of the country’s fast industrial development.