Depleting the Pacific Labour Reserve: Transnational Social Reproduction and Uneven Development in the PALM Scheme

The recent expansion of regional guestworker migration schemes has altered the political economy of the South Pacific, creating a “permanent labour reserve” (MacWilliam 2022) for low-wage industries in rural Australia and New Zealand. Historical-structures of uneven development, against which the ‘blackbirding’ of indentured Kanaka labourers took place more than a century prior, have again enabled a transnational labour mobility regime in which Pasifika workers are rendered unfree and situated as a ‘fix’ for accumulation: limited to racialised and gendered labour practices, tied to employer-sponsors in remote locations, and without the rights afforded to other migrant workers. Taking the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme as the paradigmatic example of a resurgent guestworker model in the region, this article foregrounds overlooked processes of transnational social reproduction that emerge from the interplay of restrictive migration policies and exploitative Local Labour Control Regimes. Drawing on extensive in-depth interviews with migrant workers, their family members, and government staff from four participating Pacific Island Countries (PICs), it examines how the PALM scheme spatially and temporally reconfigures care practices, skills formation, and communal labour to progressively deplete (Rai, Hoskyns, and Thomas 2014) socially reproductive capacity within the Pacific labour reserve. The article concludes by suggesting that the unsustainable strains the PALM scheme places on social reproduction within PICs is itself a fundamental driver of uneven development across the South Pacific.