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Migration, Immigration Controls and the Fashioning of Precarious Workers
Abstract
Immigration controls are often presented by government as a means of ensuring 'British jobs for British workers' and protecting migrants from exploitation. However; in practice they can undermine labour protections. As well as a tap regulating the flow of labour; immigration controls function as a mould, helping to form types of labour with particular relations to employers and the labour market. In particular; the construction of institutionalised uncertainty together with less formalised migratory processes, help produce 'precarious workers' over whom employers and labour users have particular mechanisms of control.
... For migrants, insecure or low-wage employment might be justified as a strategic position in which to improve skills and/or language abilities (Alberti, 2014). A longer tradition in the study of the migrant worker explains a willingness to accept the worst working conditions as an outcome of different frames of reference (country of origin) and the perception of the temporariness of stay (Piore, 1979;Waldinger and Lichter, 2003), which is further amplified by legal status (Anderson, 2010). Hašková and Dudová (2017) suggest that insecure jobs are accepted by women with care responsibilities as a temporary strategy in order to balance work and family needs. ...
... Similarly, when Berntsen (2016) aims to counter the image of precarious workers as disempowered actors who passively accept exploitative employment relations by emphasising incremental, small-scale forms of agency, he acknowledges that these forms of agency may contribute to the continuation of oppressive employment practices. Likewise, despite the emergence of unions in some places (mostly in countries with a long history of organised collective action), authors focusing on migrant women have found that they often exhibit agency through individual resistance (Amrith and Sahraoui, 2018;Anderson, 2010). ...
... Anna had characteristics of a precarious worker as defined by Anderson (2010), for whom the character of employment invades all other areas of life. Nevertheless, she repeatedly emphasised how well off they are, alluding to benefits which reflected her previous experience with an extremely insecure legal and financial situation, particularly an inability to reunite with her children: She placed their current situation in sharp contrast to her previous employment experience in the first years after her arrival in Czechia: I worked for Tesco, in the bakery, night shifts. ...
This article examines how experience with precarious work influences the notions of control and empowerment among female migrant workers. Instead of focusing on migrant workers as victims of a continuous chain of precarious employment, the article aims to enrich the current knowledge by focusing on the complexity of elements involved in subjective assessments of agency. Based on research of Ukrainian female migrants, we show how precarious jobs can be perceived as enabling, allowing women more control over their lives. To understand these perceptions of agency, we show how important it is to focus on the embeddedness of migrants’ reflective choices in their life trajectories. In the context of migration, this implies a shift in understanding from one in which migrants compare their experience (of labour or gender structures) between country of origin and country of destination towards a more nuanced approach.
... One potential counterargument is that the industrial relations institutions of CMEs would prevent firms from employing low-skilled and low-wage migrant workers (Menz 2008); however, labor migration also challenges CME industrial relations institutions. The expansion of the labor force with workers who have lower wage expectations due to their home country frame of reference (Piore 1979), or who are easier to control, for instance, because of mobility restrictions associated with their residency status (Anderson 2010), makes effective enforcement of industrial relations institutions more difficult in both CMEs and LMEs (Clibborn and Wright 2018). For unruly firms in CMEs, labor migration creates new market conditions that motivate them to engage in behaviors that challenge institutions (Wagner 2015). ...
... Visa rules that limit migrants' mobility create advantages for employers (Anderson 2010). Restrictions on the ability of temporary skilled migrant workers to switch employers constrain workers' bargaining power and agency (Clibborn and Wright 2018). ...
In this article, the authors examine the role of labor immigration as a source of institutional change. They use a “most different systems” comparative case study analysis of the Danish and Australian construction sectors to examine the impact of increased labor migration on skill-sourcing practices in countries with distinct national skill formation and industrial relations institutions. Drawing on 73 interviews with industry stakeholders, the authors find that labor migration has produced liberalizing pressures in both Denmark and Australia, albeit in ways that differ from each other. The article contributes to comparative institutional scholarship by illustrating how labor migration can promote or support institutional change in a liberalizing direction by disincentivizing coordinated skill formation. Findings suggest that while national institutions mediate external pressures, such as labor migration, such pressures may affect the incentive structures that can either maintain or erode national institutions.
... As a group, ubiquitous yet invisible in what Hall (2018: 980) dubs the 'migrant margins' or 'discriminatory borders' of post-industrial cities, they are relatively hard to reach, hence more elusive, being hidden in plain sight. Faced with structurally limited options, they risk entrapment in temporary lowpaid employment (Bryson and White, 2019) or in a range of precarious and demeaning jobs (Anderson, 2010). ...
... Our AECs could relocate to the UK unimpeded owing to their EU citizenship. Low-skilled EU migrants are often presumed to be fashioned into precarious workers in the UK (Anderson, 2010;Sporton, 2013). However, what we found was not what we might have expected. ...
How can we better understand the puzzle of low-skilled migrants who have acquired citizenship in a European Union (EU) country, often with generous social security provision, choosing to relocate to the United Kingdom (UK)? Drawing on Elias’s figurational theory as a lens, we explore how relational interdependencies foster the mobility of low-skilled African European Citizens (AECs) from EU states to the UK. We found that AECs rely on ‘piblings networks’, loose affiliations of putative relatives, to compensate for deficits in their situated social capital, facilitating relocation. The temporary stability afforded by impermanent bonds and transient associations, in constant flux in migrant communities, does not preclude integration but paradoxically promotes it by enabling an ease of connection and disconnection. Our study elucidates how these relational networks offer AECs opportunities to achieve labour market integration, exercise self-efficacy, and realize desired futures; anchoring individuals in existing communities even when they are perpetually transforming.
... Scholars have assessed immigration policies as the most critical issue for the integration of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in the labour market (see for example Bloch et al., 2015;Mulvey, 2018). They have been described as very restrictive, bureaucratic, and expensive for both migrants and employers (Anderson, 2010). Moreover, experts have stigmatised these immigration policies' focus on attracting primarily high-skilled migrants, thus reducing the accessibility to the UK labour market for those who do not have highly specialised skills or are not filling high-earning positions (Bloch et al., 2015). ...
... In light of these two different approaches and narratives we can say that there are various challenges newcomers must overcome to be able to access the labour market and become economically self-reliant: they must learn or even master the language to a sufficient level; possess the legal status that allows them to worka complex task which requires navigating the bureaucracy of the UK Home Office; and, ultimately, they must find someone who provides an opportunity for employment, that is, an employer who is persuaded about their suitability for that specific job and their right to work (Anderson, 2010;Bloch et al., 2015;Martín et al., 2016;Mulvey, 2018). While the literature has mainly focused on analysing enablers and barriers of integration in the labour market at the policy and services levels (see for example Calò et al. (2022), scant attention has been given to the stories of migrants, their role and their agency in shaping their lives. ...
In recent years, awareness of the socio-economic costs of immigrants’ marginalisation and exclusion has led Swiss policymakers to promote integration. However, the biographical interviews with migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers (MRAs) who arrived in Switzerland between 2014 and 2019 tell a different story. MRAs consider themselves not well integrated, while the labour market outcomes of certain migrant groups are diverging. Particularly migrant women run the risk of being left behind. This chapter sheds light on these aspects. It also argues that policymaking can only be effective if it considers all structural and agential factors in their interdependence. The chapter illuminates a discrepancy between, on one hand, structural changes that do not always shape aspirations of Swiss policy actors for successful and promising policy implementation and, on the other, the realities of the migrants’ lives. Their experiences of deskilling and a consequent feeling of not being welcome lead to the development of negative epiphanic views on the inability to access gainful employment. The illuminated synergistic relationship between structural and agential factors are very instructive for policymaking: leaving agential considerations outside the scope of structural reforms can expose migrants to further risks and vulnerabilities, and exacerbate inequalities within host societies.
... Scholars have assessed immigration policies as the most critical issue for the integration of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in the labour market (see for example Bloch et al., 2015;Mulvey, 2018). They have been described as very restrictive, bureaucratic, and expensive for both migrants and employers (Anderson, 2010). Moreover, experts have stigmatised these immigration policies' focus on attracting primarily high-skilled migrants, thus reducing the accessibility to the UK labour market for those who do not have highly specialised skills or are not filling high-earning positions (Bloch et al., 2015). ...
... In light of these two different approaches and narratives we can say that there are various challenges newcomers must overcome to be able to access the labour market and become economically self-reliant: they must learn or even master the language to a sufficient level; possess the legal status that allows them to worka complex task which requires navigating the bureaucracy of the UK Home Office; and, ultimately, they must find someone who provides an opportunity for employment, that is, an employer who is persuaded about their suitability for that specific job and their right to work (Anderson, 2010;Bloch et al., 2015;Martín et al., 2016;Mulvey, 2018). While the literature has mainly focused on analysing enablers and barriers of integration in the labour market at the policy and services levels (see for example Calò et al. (2022), scant attention has been given to the stories of migrants, their role and their agency in shaping their lives. ...
The chapter focuses on micro perspectives expressed in individual trajectories of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers (MRAs) in the Czech Republic. Drawing on 14 in-depth biographic interviews with MRAs, this chapter analyses biographies of labour market integration. Particular attention is given to critical moments or those critical life junctures we name turning points that generate epiphanic, life-changing experiences. This approach is inspired by Denzin’s conceptualisation of epiphanies. The chapter is structured as follows. We first provide background information on barriers to labour market integration at macro-, meso-, and micro- levels. Next, the chapter introduces the methodological approach and elaborates on the process of recruitment and interviewing. We then discuss the various contexts in which turning points and epiphanic experiences were described by the interviewed migrants. More specifically, we explore the critical junctures that led our participants to the decision of migrating. Next, we focus on epiphanies related to positioning in terms of social status and professional aspirations and, finally, we look at the transformative impacts of social interactions structured by discrimination.
... Scholars have assessed immigration policies as the most critical issue for the integration of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in the labour market (see for example Bloch et al., 2015;Mulvey, 2018). They have been described as very restrictive, bureaucratic, and expensive for both migrants and employers (Anderson, 2010). Moreover, experts have stigmatised these immigration policies' focus on attracting primarily high-skilled migrants, thus reducing the accessibility to the UK labour market for those who do not have highly specialised skills or are not filling high-earning positions (Bloch et al., 2015). ...
... In light of these two different approaches and narratives we can say that there are various challenges newcomers must overcome to be able to access the labour market and become economically self-reliant: they must learn or even master the language to a sufficient level; possess the legal status that allows them to worka complex task which requires navigating the bureaucracy of the UK Home Office; and, ultimately, they must find someone who provides an opportunity for employment, that is, an employer who is persuaded about their suitability for that specific job and their right to work (Anderson, 2010;Bloch et al., 2015;Martín et al., 2016;Mulvey, 2018). While the literature has mainly focused on analysing enablers and barriers of integration in the labour market at the policy and services levels (see for example Calò et al. (2022), scant attention has been given to the stories of migrants, their role and their agency in shaping their lives. ...
Migrants’ agency is a promising analytical tool and approach in migration and refugee studies as it shifts the focus of analysis (and attention) from the weaknesses or ‘faults’ of the migration experience to the opportunities and capacities it can generate for migrants and the community where they settle. Still, political, institutional, cultural, and economic contexts do keep exerting influence on migrants’ capacities to operate agency. This is particularly the case for migrants seeking humanitarian protection as they experience not only personal challenges and vulnerabilities, but also constraining legal and administrative barriers, preventing them, for example, to have their capacities duly recognised and valued. This chapter discusses how migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers’ agency helps them cope with adverse circumstances such as those promoted by obstructive policies and narratives in the United Kingdom. Eleven biographical interviews explore the life paths of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. The UK context presents a very challenging environment for their integration as legislation so far has been mainly based on increasing border control and decreasing entitlements, with scant attention to strategies of integration and inclusion. This chapter discusses how the political-institutional context influences the unfolding of such agency and how, in turn, agency provokes responses and adaptations from those contexts.
... Scholars have assessed immigration policies as the most critical issue for the integration of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in the labour market (see for example Bloch et al., 2015;Mulvey, 2018). They have been described as very restrictive, bureaucratic, and expensive for both migrants and employers (Anderson, 2010). Moreover, experts have stigmatised these immigration policies' focus on attracting primarily high-skilled migrants, thus reducing the accessibility to the UK labour market for those who do not have highly specialised skills or are not filling high-earning positions (Bloch et al., 2015). ...
... In light of these two different approaches and narratives we can say that there are various challenges newcomers must overcome to be able to access the labour market and become economically self-reliant: they must learn or even master the language to a sufficient level; possess the legal status that allows them to worka complex task which requires navigating the bureaucracy of the UK Home Office; and, ultimately, they must find someone who provides an opportunity for employment, that is, an employer who is persuaded about their suitability for that specific job and their right to work (Anderson, 2010;Bloch et al., 2015;Martín et al., 2016;Mulvey, 2018). While the literature has mainly focused on analysing enablers and barriers of integration in the labour market at the policy and services levels (see for example Calò et al. (2022), scant attention has been given to the stories of migrants, their role and their agency in shaping their lives. ...
Immigrants and refugees have contributed significant growth in the Canadian economy over the last three decades. Despite clear advantages of a smooth transition into the labour force, many newcomers experience multiple barriers impeding their pathways to sustainable livelihoods. Further, significant increases in refugee resettlement and asylum claims in Canada since 2015 resulted in a growing number of refugee newcomers entering the labour market, often facing additional challenges of precarious legal status while seeking employment. To interrogate the settlement landscape, this chapter examines newcomers’ employment-related needs, experiences, and aspirations through a case study of migrants and refugees in Greater Toronto. Using narrative-biographic interviews, the chapter presents an ethnographic approach to examine how individual migrants navigate labour market policies and settlement dynamics during their initial years. A biographical approach allowed us to focus on the interplay of migrant agency, precarity, and adaption to both long-standing labour market dynamics as well as new barriers and enablers brought on by the shifting sands of Canada’s pandemic affected economy. The chapter highlights how emotions, decisions, and actions are inter-related and coalesce with broader structural conditions within a network of actors – individuals, networks, and institutions – to shape the labour market experiences of recently arrived immigrants and refugees.
... Scholars have assessed immigration policies as the most critical issue for the integration of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in the labour market (see for example Bloch et al., 2015;Mulvey, 2018). They have been described as very restrictive, bureaucratic, and expensive for both migrants and employers (Anderson, 2010). Moreover, experts have stigmatised these immigration policies' focus on attracting primarily high-skilled migrants, thus reducing the accessibility to the UK labour market for those who do not have highly specialised skills or are not filling high-earning positions (Bloch et al., 2015). ...
... In light of these two different approaches and narratives we can say that there are various challenges newcomers must overcome to be able to access the labour market and become economically self-reliant: they must learn or even master the language to a sufficient level; possess the legal status that allows them to worka complex task which requires navigating the bureaucracy of the UK Home Office; and, ultimately, they must find someone who provides an opportunity for employment, that is, an employer who is persuaded about their suitability for that specific job and their right to work (Anderson, 2010;Bloch et al., 2015;Martín et al., 2016;Mulvey, 2018). While the literature has mainly focused on analysing enablers and barriers of integration in the labour market at the policy and services levels (see for example Calò et al. (2022), scant attention has been given to the stories of migrants, their role and their agency in shaping their lives. ...
In Finland, integration is discussed in terms of labour market success. Finding work tends to occur in the ‘secondary’ labour market as migrants have difficulty accessing the more secure jobs of the ‘primary’ labour market. This chapter draws on 11 qualitative biographical narratives of migrants and refugees, looking for turning points and epiphanies about their job-seeking experiences. We classify these as agentic acts of resilience, reworking, and resistance, borrowing from Cindi Katz’s framework. Interviewees exhibited resilience in revising downward their expectations of what sort of job they would accept and how their career would develop. ‘Reworking’ was also often attempted, usually at a later stage and with limited success, through reskilling, or repackaging of existing skills to appear more desirable to employers. Resistance was rare and limited to exit from the Finnish labour market, rather than voice within it. We found that despite significant investment in their own human capital, macro structures such as segmented labour markets and unequal power relations limited the scope for their individual acts of resilience and reworking. Thus, while agency is useful for understanding migrant actions, overemphasising it obscures the role of labour market structures and employer recruitment practices – important bottlenecks to migrants moving from the secondary to primary labour market.
... Scholars have assessed immigration policies as the most critical issue for the integration of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in the labour market (see for example Bloch et al., 2015;Mulvey, 2018). They have been described as very restrictive, bureaucratic, and expensive for both migrants and employers (Anderson, 2010). Moreover, experts have stigmatised these immigration policies' focus on attracting primarily high-skilled migrants, thus reducing the accessibility to the UK labour market for those who do not have highly specialised skills or are not filling high-earning positions (Bloch et al., 2015). ...
... In light of these two different approaches and narratives we can say that there are various challenges newcomers must overcome to be able to access the labour market and become economically self-reliant: they must learn or even master the language to a sufficient level; possess the legal status that allows them to worka complex task which requires navigating the bureaucracy of the UK Home Office; and, ultimately, they must find someone who provides an opportunity for employment, that is, an employer who is persuaded about their suitability for that specific job and their right to work (Anderson, 2010;Bloch et al., 2015;Martín et al., 2016;Mulvey, 2018). While the literature has mainly focused on analysing enablers and barriers of integration in the labour market at the policy and services levels (see for example Calò et al. (2022), scant attention has been given to the stories of migrants, their role and their agency in shaping their lives. ...
Migrants and asylum seekers have faced important hurdles in integrating in the Italian labour market. The segmented and ethnicised nature of this coupled with their often-uncertain residence status significantly contribute to such difficulties. Building on previous studies that looked at the role of policies and structural factors in migrants’ labour market integration, this chapter adopts a biographical perspective to investigate how pre-migration experiences as well as turning points after arriving in Italy have shaped migrants’ and asylum seekers’ labour market integration trajectories. Using biographical narratives, we look at specific events and actors (people or organisations) that marked turning points and provoked epiphanies – whether negative or positive – for the migrant. Our findings highlight the fragmentation of the Italian labour market and the many hurdles that migrants experience. They also highlight how pre-departure experiences and networks at destination contribute to building migrants’ resilience and help them turn their migration experience into a positive one.
... Scholars have assessed immigration policies as the most critical issue for the integration of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in the labour market (see for example Bloch et al., 2015;Mulvey, 2018). They have been described as very restrictive, bureaucratic, and expensive for both migrants and employers (Anderson, 2010). Moreover, experts have stigmatised these immigration policies' focus on attracting primarily high-skilled migrants, thus reducing the accessibility to the UK labour market for those who do not have highly specialised skills or are not filling high-earning positions (Bloch et al., 2015). ...
... In light of these two different approaches and narratives we can say that there are various challenges newcomers must overcome to be able to access the labour market and become economically self-reliant: they must learn or even master the language to a sufficient level; possess the legal status that allows them to worka complex task which requires navigating the bureaucracy of the UK Home Office; and, ultimately, they must find someone who provides an opportunity for employment, that is, an employer who is persuaded about their suitability for that specific job and their right to work (Anderson, 2010;Bloch et al., 2015;Martín et al., 2016;Mulvey, 2018). While the literature has mainly focused on analysing enablers and barriers of integration in the labour market at the policy and services levels (see for example Calò et al. (2022), scant attention has been given to the stories of migrants, their role and their agency in shaping their lives. ...
This chapter summarizes the interaction between integration and agency by comparing migrants’ encounters with labour markets through which their agency challenges existing discourses. The chapter investigates the complex relationship between policy discourse, gender, and class in the production of migrant agency across different countries. The gendered experiences of low labour in Denmark centre around the crucial moments of retraining for migrant women, through which they reconsider their adjustment to the labour market as ‘devoid integration’. The EU discourses of integration are further disrupted by humanitarian migrants in Scotland and Switzerland, whose encounters with the non-recognition of qualifications and inadequate social welfare contradict the ‘migrant-welcoming’ national facades. The Canadian grand discourse of ‘smooth transition’ is opposed by the analysis of aspirations that clash with outcomes such as the labour market entrance. In this connection, we can see the Italian ‘borderline’ space of the informal market, within which many legal economic migrants navigate a complex web of existing laws and informal opportunities. The comparison is amplified by a visually ‘successful’ portrait of entrepreneurial integration, which is nevertheless perceived by skilled migrants in Finland as a less desirable option. The quality of migrants’ agency thus becomes contested if they seek to progress in the labour market. An essential element in this contestation is the transnational migrants’ disagreement with official discourses of ethnic solidarity and national citizenship in the Czech Republic. The comparative analysis of these lived experiences leads toward a new understanding of ‘agency’ and ‘resilience’ in labour market integration.
... Scholars have assessed immigration policies as the most critical issue for the integration of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in the labour market (see for example Bloch et al., 2015;Mulvey, 2018). They have been described as very restrictive, bureaucratic, and expensive for both migrants and employers (Anderson, 2010). Moreover, experts have stigmatised these immigration policies' focus on attracting primarily high-skilled migrants, thus reducing the accessibility to the UK labour market for those who do not have highly specialised skills or are not filling high-earning positions (Bloch et al., 2015). ...
... In light of these two different approaches and narratives we can say that there are various challenges newcomers must overcome to be able to access the labour market and become economically self-reliant: they must learn or even master the language to a sufficient level; possess the legal status that allows them to worka complex task which requires navigating the bureaucracy of the UK Home Office; and, ultimately, they must find someone who provides an opportunity for employment, that is, an employer who is persuaded about their suitability for that specific job and their right to work (Anderson, 2010;Bloch et al., 2015;Martín et al., 2016;Mulvey, 2018). While the literature has mainly focused on analysing enablers and barriers of integration in the labour market at the policy and services levels (see for example Calò et al. (2022), scant attention has been given to the stories of migrants, their role and their agency in shaping their lives. ...
This chapter presents the analytical framework of this volume, arguing that an interpretive-biographical methodology for analysing labour market integration can highlight the many ways in which migrants exercise agency both materially in shaping their lives but also cognitively and emotionally in making sense of what is happening to them, taking decisions and following specific courses of action. The chapter introduces the notion of turning points and epiphanies as a new approach to labour market integration that goes beyond ticking boxes of who has a job. It also looks into the employment trajectories of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. After elaborating on the interpretive biographical methodology and its tools, this chapter briefly outlines the contents of this volume.
... Scholars have assessed immigration policies as the most critical issue for the integration of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in the labour market (see for example Bloch et al., 2015;Mulvey, 2018). They have been described as very restrictive, bureaucratic, and expensive for both migrants and employers (Anderson, 2010). Moreover, experts have stigmatised these immigration policies' focus on attracting primarily high-skilled migrants, thus reducing the accessibility to the UK labour market for those who do not have highly specialised skills or are not filling high-earning positions (Bloch et al., 2015). ...
... In light of these two different approaches and narratives we can say that there are various challenges newcomers must overcome to be able to access the labour market and become economically self-reliant: they must learn or even master the language to a sufficient level; possess the legal status that allows them to worka complex task which requires navigating the bureaucracy of the UK Home Office; and, ultimately, they must find someone who provides an opportunity for employment, that is, an employer who is persuaded about their suitability for that specific job and their right to work (Anderson, 2010;Bloch et al., 2015;Martín et al., 2016;Mulvey, 2018). While the literature has mainly focused on analysing enablers and barriers of integration in the labour market at the policy and services levels (see for example Calò et al. (2022), scant attention has been given to the stories of migrants, their role and their agency in shaping their lives. ...
This chapter explores the role of gender in migrants’ efforts at integrating into the labour market in Denmark. Numerous academic works argue that the experience of integration (and migration) is qualitatively different for men and women. They conclude that gender plays a critical role in the pre-migration stage, in how men and women transition across state boundaries and, most significantly, in determining the way integration bureaucracies are experienced in host societies. Such studies demonstrate that the experience of integration is gendered and often to the detriment of women. But can the experience of women also be generalisable and reveal the foundational nature and logics of a host country’s integration regime? To answer this question, the chapter empirically focuses on the biographical accounts of female migrants in Denmark and their experiences of labour market integration (LMI). Since most holders of family reunification visas in Denmark are women, their experiences confirm the extant literature’s claim that migration is a gendered process. In addition, we argue that the nature of their experiences of LMI in Denmark also reflects the foundational character of the Danish integration regime. The biographical accounts of our female narrators are analysed through the scope of turning points – as path-altering events – in their integration narratives and associated epiphanies, that is, revelations or apprehensions triggered by turning points.
... However, many of these women migrants continue to be excluded from full the protection of national labour laws and/or work without clear terms of employment, as well as being subjected to highly restrictive migration laws -the implications of which are precarious employment conditions and limited access to legal protections (Segrave 2009;Chuang 2010;Mullally 2015). In recognition of and response to these issues, academics and labour rights advocates have identified the need to change immigration and labour laws, and thereby to enhance legislative protections, and to acknowledge migrant domestic workers as workers (Anderson 2010;Varia 2011;Blackett 2012; controls as well as discriminatory border policing practices reflects a prioritisation of state security, which in turn works counter to protections and maintains conditions of exploitation and insecurity for women migrant domestic workers. In particular, restrictive labour migration regimes create an inherent tension between the protections offered by legal frameworks and migrant workers' lived experience of protection (see Lee & Petersen 2006;Huckerby 2015;Palumbo & Sciurba 2015). ...
... In this chapter, I argue that labour migration regimes in Singapore and Hong Kong have significantly constrained workers' access to various formal and informal mechanisms of support. Women migrant domestic workers' negotiation of their employment experiences -in particular, their resistance to subordination and exploitation -is a key focus of global efforts around domestic workers' rights, as evidenced by the burgeoning activist work and research in relation to individual strategies and collective actions (e.g., Ford & Piper 2007;Lyons 2007;Constable 2009;Anderson 2010;Barua, Haukanes & Waldrop 2016). The findings presented in Chapter 5 offer a unique contribution to this scholarship by examining the type of assistance that the workers in this study sought and the factors that shaped their decisions around help-seeking. ...
... Given the deeper structural shortages of labour across the European Union prior to the pandemic (Weber and Adăscăliței, 2021), it is likely that the promotion of migrant labour will also feature during the recovery. As critical scholarship has long recognized, the development and regulation of migrant labour is precisely the institutionalization of categories of precarious labourers (Anderson, 2010). Indeed, during the pandemic, a disproportionate number of the 'essential' workers who maintained basic services in areas such as healthcare, social care and food supply were migrants, and mostly women. ...
... Different also from Working Holiday visa holders and international students, the PALMscheme participants are tied to their specified approved employers and their residency right is tied to their employment, which makes these temporary migrants from the Pacific more vulnerable to exploitation than Working Holiday visa holders because they cannot leave and choose a different employer if they are not treated fairly (Stead 2021a). 6 The role of migrants' legal status (from here onwards referred to as migrant status) has emerged as a key explainer of precarious migrant work also for other visa holders and employment sectors in Australia (see Boese et al. 2013), as well as in other countries such as Canada (Goldring and Landolt 2022;Fudge 2012;Goldring, Berinstein, and Bernhard 2009) and the UK (Anderson 2010). The concept of precarious migrant status in particular has contributed to a better understanding of the ways in which insecure legal status produces insecurity at work (Reilly et al. 2018;Van den Broek et al. 2019). ...
Over the last ten years, temporary migration schemes in the horticultural sector have received increasing attention in the Global North. The often precarious conditions of such work have been recognised, however, little attention has been paid to horticultural workers with migration backgrounds who have gained permanent residency or citizenship in the host countries. Ethnographic fieldwork with Pacific farmworkers and their families with various migration statuses in Australia, including seasonal workers, irregular migrants, and permanent residents, revealed that precarious employment conditions in horticultural work impact Pacific people across and beyond different legal statuses, challenging the notion of a clear correlation between irregularity and precariousness. This includes the children of migrants with Australian citizenship who are often employed as casual farmworkers and find it difficult to secure any other work. We argue that their experiences are fundamentally related to their position as ‘racialised’ workers. This paper sheds light on this racialisation of farmwork and its implications for the experiences of Pacific people as residents and workers in regional Australia.
... PrecAnthro collective, other members of the European Association of Social Anthropologists and some studies have recently pointed out the importance of considering the emotional dimension of precarity 3 (Cangià, 2018;McKenzie, 2018). This article contributes to this research as well as to studies on precarity in the context of mobility (Anderson, 2010(Anderson, , 2014Lewis, Dwyer, Hodkinson, & Waite, 2014;Schierup, Munck, Likic-Brboric, & Neergaard, 2015;Waite & Lewis, 2017). It also aims to contribute to recent critical approaches to the study of "highly skilled migration" (Agergaard & Ungruhe, 2016;Cangià & Zittoun, 2018;Hercog & Sandoz, 2018): I challenge the often takenfor-granted category of the "highly skilled" and "highly wanted" migrant, by considering the emotional impact of professional mobility under uncertain and unstable working conditions, for mobile professionals and their families. ...
A wide range of professions demands mobility as a requisite for “excellence”, success and “good performance”. At the same time, more precarious and flexible conditions, ranging from unemployment, to temporary, free-lance and self-employed occupations, now characterize the mobile trajectories of a large number of professionals and their partners. What is the emotional cost of these conditions in mobility? How do mobile professionals’ partners feel and deal with feeling rules regarding unemployment and job search when moving? The article examines the case of Switzerland, by exploring the experience of mobile professionals’ partners.
... In particular, advocates of this position highlight the 'good character' and positive contribution of migrants, thus resisting the idea of immigrants being detrimental to Italy (Musarò and Parmiggiani, 2017). Additionally, they would like to see a greater effort by the state in fostering integration; this idea contrasts those facets of migration governance favouring the labour of underpaid and insecure migrants (Anderson, 2010). ...
Pro-migrant volunteering is often denounced as apolitical and patronising. Voluntary initiatives for immigrants' language education, then, have been accused of facilitating the neoliberal governmentality of migration, by fashioning migrants into precarious workers. Based on 20 in-depth interviews with volunteer language teachers in Lombardy, Italy, this article complicates such understandings, by shedding light on the tensions and ambiguities characterising volunteers' activities vis-à-vis the institutional governance of migration. Indeed, whereas such initiatives take on integration tasks for the benefit of the State, and thus can be accused of allying with the State in the governmentality of migration, against a background of growing nationalism, volunteering appears to develop people’s empathy and solidarity beyond national belonging, questioning the division between citizens and non-citizens. In particular, it shows that volunteering in language education has the potential to transgress consolidated lines of inclusion and exclusion, turn volunteers from ‘active citizens’ into ‘activist citizens’, and offer resources of substantive citizenship to students. Ultimately, these ‘humanitarian’ actions by citizens belonging to the dominant society may represent acts of citizenship complementary to the initiatives of ‘denizens’.
... Against this background, it has been recently reported in the literature that in the destination countries, migrant workers are employed in low-skilled jobs and thus are often considered to be more exposed to unfavorable working conditions than native workers (Anderson, 2010;Benach et al., 2011;Tham, Fudge, 2019;van den Broek, Groutsis, 2017). It is also argued that greater difficulty in having previously acquired education and occupational safety training recognized in the host country and poor language skills may contribute to higher employment rates of immigrants in the most hazardous occupations in terms of working conditions (Rechel et al., 2013). ...
Purpose: The following two main research questions were addressed in this article: 1) Which employees’ interests are the most important for Ukrainian migrant workers? 2) To what extent companies ensure the interests of Ukrainian migrant workers? Since migration is often associated with precarious employment, the problems of the relationship between the form of employment and the interests of migrants were examined as well. Design/methodology/approach: For the purpose of this paper, such methods as literature survey of publications indexed mainly in Scopus database and empirical research in the form of a survey were used. The survey was carried out in 2020 in Poland and the respondents were Ukrainian workers. The research was conducted using the PAPI technique and based on a with the use of a representative sample. Findings: Empirical research shows that the most important interests of migrants (of 22 analyzed interests) are salaries adequate to duties, ensuring good occupational safety and health, and clear evaluation criteria. At the same time, the second and third of the indicated interests are mostly ensured by employers, regardless of the form of employment in which the respondents work. This leads to certain practical and theoretical implications. Practical implications: The Ukrainian population is gradually growing in Poland which results from the armed conflict and the difficult economic situation in Ukraine. Therefore, the presented research is utmost valid. Originality/value: The concept of socially responsible HRM (SRHRM) emerged as an element of CSR focused on the inside of the company (its employees treated as the most important stakeholders). Surveys devoted to the implementation of the concept of CSR are carried out mainly among employees who are citizens of the country where the enterprise surveyed is headquartered. The issue of migration is discussed rather from the perspective of such academic disciplines as economics and sociology than the discipline of human resource management. This study aims to fill the gap in research on SRHRM through examining the HRM practices in the context of migrant workers with a focus on employee interests. Keywords: employees, expectations, interests, corporate social responsibility, sustainable HRM. Category of the paper: research paper.
... However, the urgency to place immigrant workers in frontline work highlights employers' (and policymakers') preferences for recruiting exploitable migrant workers rather than improving wages and working conditions needed to attract and retain US-born workers. Indeed, previous research has found that employers seek to employ non-citizen workers because workers are often not free to leave sponsoring employers and are therefore more vulnerable to abuses (Anderson 2010). ...
This paper examines changes in occupational crowding of immigrant women in frontline industries in the United States during the onset of COVID-19, and we contextualize their experiences against the backdrop of broader race-based and gender-based occupational crowding. Building on the occupational crowding hypothesis, which suggests that marginalized workers are crowded in a small number of occupations to prop up wages of socially-privileged workers, we hypothesize that immigrant, Black, and Hispanic workers were shunted into frontline work to prop up the health of others during the pandemic. Our analysis of American Community Survey microdata indicates that immigrant workers, particularly immigrant women, were increasingly crowded in frontline work during the onset of the pandemic. We also find that US-born Black and Hispanic workers disproportionately faced COVID-19 exposure in their work, but were not increasingly crowded into frontline occupations following the onset of the pandemic. The paper also provides a rationale for considering the occupational crowding hypothesis along the dimensions of both wages and occupational health.
... Vielmehr geht es darum, die sozialen Positionen der Arbeiter:innen in die Analyse des Arbeitsprozesses aufzunehmen, in dem diese theoretisch reflektiert, methodisch strukturiert und empirisch eruiert werden. So offenbart zweifelsohne auch ein Blick auf die Forschungslandschaft, dass soziale Differenzierungen, mit denen sich Arbeiter:innen konfrontiert sehen, für die je spezifische Organisation und Gestaltung des Arbeitsplatzes und die hier ausgehandelten sozialen Beziehungen eine entscheidende Rolle einnehmen (z.B. Anderson, 2010;Birke & Bluhm, 2020;Dyer, McDowell & Batnitzky, 2010;Fiedler & Hielscher, 2017;Kalbermatter, 2020;Morrison, Sacchetto & Cretu, 2013;Thompson, Newsome & Commander, 2013). In diesen Forschungen widerspiegelt sich denn auch die Vielgestaltigkeit sozialer Differenzierungen, die etwa in Bezug auf Markierungen nach Gender, Race, Nation, geografischer Herkunft und Aufenthaltsstatus der Arbeiter:innen zum Ausdruck kommen. ...
Herrschaft bringt immer auch Widerständigkeit hervor. Demnach stellen Regelabweichungen, die sich aus unvollständig determiniertem Arbeitshandeln ergeben, ein strukturelles Merkmal im Arbeitsprozess dar. Die Formierung eines informellen Repertoires widerständiger Praktiken im Kontext betrieblicher Herrschaft ist dabei von der Arbeitssoziologie bisher vernachlässigt worden. Um diese konzeptionelle Leerstelle zu füllen, systematisieren die Beiträger*innen die Vielzahl der Praktiken und stellen verschiedene methodische, theoretische und empirische Perspektiven einer arbeitssoziologischen Widerstandsforschung vor.
... This was common among TFWs engaged in care work, and even more so for those who lived with their employers. Being dependent on their employers for work and housing placed these workers in a vulnerable position (see also Anderson 2010). ...
In this article, we explore temporary foreign workers’ (TFWs) access to and experiences with formal and informal supports in Canada. Our study utilized a participatory action research design and four overlapping phases of data collection: individual interviews with current and former TFWs, focus groups, individual interviews with settlement service agencies, and a cross-sectional survey with current and former TFWs. We used an intersectional theoretical framework to analyze these data and explore ways that TFWs interact with formal and informal sources of support for navigating their precarious immigration status and integration in Canada. Our findings show these supports have the potential to both benefit and harm TFWs, depending on their social positioning and availability of institutional resources. The benefits include information that aids settlement and integration processes in Canada, while the harms include misinformation that contributes to status loss. Future research and policy should recognize the complexity of informal and formal support networks available to TFWs. An absence of government support is apparent, as is the need for increased funding for settlement service agencies that serve these workers. In addition, Canada should better monitor employers, immigration consultants, and immigration lawyers to ensure these agents support rather than oppress TFWs.
... Vielmehr geht es darum, die sozialen Positionen der Arbeiter:innen in die Analyse des Arbeitsprozesses aufzunehmen, in dem diese theoretisch reflektiert, methodisch strukturiert und empirisch eruiert werden. So offenbart zweifelsohne auch ein Blick auf die Forschungslandschaft, dass soziale Differenzierungen, mit denen sich Arbeiter:innen konfrontiert sehen, für die je spezifische Organisation und Gestaltung des Arbeitsplatzes und die hier ausgehandelten sozialen Beziehungen eine entscheidende Rolle einnehmen (z.B. Anderson, 2010;Birke & Bluhm, 2020;Dyer, McDowell & Batnitzky, 2010;Fiedler & Hielscher, 2017;Kalbermatter, 2020;Morrison, Sacchetto & Cretu, 2013;Thompson, Newsome & Commander, 2013). In diesen Forschungen widerspiegelt sich denn auch die Vielgestaltigkeit sozialer Differenzierungen, die etwa in Bezug auf Markierungen nach Gender, Race, Nation, geografischer Herkunft und Aufenthaltsstatus der Arbeiter:innen zum Ausdruck kommen. ...
Herrschaft bringt immer auch Widerständigkeit hervor. Demnach stellen Regelabweichungen, die sich aus unvollständig determiniertem Arbeitshandeln ergeben, ein strukturelles Merkmal im Arbeitsprozess dar. Die Formierung eines informellen Repertoires widerständiger Praktiken im Kontext betrieblicher Herrschaft ist dabei von der Arbeitssoziologie bisher vernachlässigt worden. Um diese konzeptionelle Leerstelle zu füllen, systematisieren die Beiträger*innen die Vielzahl der Praktiken und stellen verschiedene methodische, theoretische und empirische Perspektiven einer arbeitssoziologischen Widerstandsforschung vor.
... Zakonske prepovedi in omejitve niso ustavile priseljevanja, naredile so ga le za nelegalnega in s tem sprožile druge stranske učinke (npr. tihotapljenje ljudi, trgovino z ljudmi, delo na črno in izkoriščanje) (Albahari, 2015;Anderson, 2010;Bučar Ručman, 2014 (Vrečar, 2001). ...
Prispevek predstavlja pregled ciljev trajnostnega razvoja Organizacije združenih narodov v okviru Agende 2030. V osrednjem delu prispevka avtor povezuje cilje trajnostnega razvoja z raziskovalnim delom Inštituta za varstvoslovje pri Fakulteti za varnostne vede Univerze v Mariboru po letu 2010, še posebej pa z raziskovalnimi cilji programske skupine Varnost v lokalnih skupnostih (2015–2018 in 2019–2024). V sklepnem delu prispevka je razprava o uresničevanju ciljev trajnostnega razvoja v času med in po pandemiji covida-19 in v kontekstu trenutnih mednarodnih razmer, ki so lahko kritične za uresničevanje ciljev trajnostnega razvoja v kateri koli lokalni skupnosti v Sloveniji in širši mednarodni skupnosti.
... Yet the transsexualisation of sex work naturalizes their presence, feeding into the social imaginary that this is all they are good for (Prada et al., 2012), and makes it especially hard for them to carve out a different living. Their working lives can be seen as hyper-precarious, but not only in the sense of epitomising the instability, unpredictability and temporariness lived by the migrant worker (Anderson, 2010), but also more particularly in terms of the precarity of their short-lived, sporadic inroads into other, "decent" work. Their sense of self is deeply tied up with work, and they determinedly do not want sex work to define them, or to have to depend on it in the future. ...
Within an emerging body of work on queer mobilities, a marked interest in sexuality and migration/asylum has left ample room to consider the complex experience of everyday mobility and displacement. In addition, despite its centrality to survival and its imbrication with mobility, work has been given little attention in queer migration and trans scholarship. Based on detailed narratives created over a number of years with two Central American trans women as they continue to move, the paper explores the ways in which material and social realities of work shape and are shaped by marginal queer(ed) mobility. It proposes the idea of messy survival to explore the complex navigation of marginal existence, and uses this to explore the intersections between work, mobility and trans subjectivity, arguing that this framework is a useful means of engaging with the gap between how trans, mobile lives are written, and how they are lived.
... But it's a global story with local colour, and the global and macro-economic context remains important. Regardless of the constructed differences in the work ethic of locals and migrants, overwhelmingly there is a cost and control case for employers using migrant workers (Anderson, 2010). Workers retain effort power and mobility power (Smith, 2006), as inherent freedoms over the effort they expend in the labour process or production and the decision on 'where and to which employer' (Thompson and Smith, 2009: 924) they sell their labour. ...
An expanded use of agency workers has followed a series of economic shocks in the UK since the 2008 financial crisis. Agency workers, unlike permanent workers, comprise a wide range of workers without regular, secure and long-term employment relations. In this article we examine the inherently contradictory employment relationship embodied by agency workers, namely employers’ wish to stabilise and make the workforce more predictable by bringing in agency workers under insecure and unstable employment terms. Based on a significant single case study of a distribution centre, the study compares two agency work regimes: one with systematic screening and employment of pre-formed workers, and the other with strong normative control over fragmented under-formed workers. The study details management strategies aimed to improve workforce stability in the more fragmented agency worker regime by bringing an employment intermediatory on-site, building coherency between the permanent and agency workers, and restraining the supervisor’s power of dismissal. These findings problematise framing agency employment based on an assumption of continuous and selective inflow of migrant workers. Rather, contrasting agency worker regimes demonstrates contested employment relations between an increasingly diverse group of agency workers and an employer seeking to instigate predictability and coherency in agency employment.
... In applying a critical political economy approach toward the study of migrant workers, migration scholars use a concept of precarity based on four categories: the degree of continuing employment, control over the labour process, the degree of regulatory protection, and income level (Rodgers, 1989;Paret and Gleeson, 2016;Parreñas et al., 2019). The state's role in regulating migrant workers is crucial because it can produce and legitimize the status of a migrant, which would then dictate the employer-employee relationship (Anderson, 2010). Scholars associate precarity with illegality and deportability, promoted by the state to keep migrants away from their borders (Menjivar and Kanstroom, 2013;Hari and Liew, 2018). ...
This article examines the disparity between Indonesia’s efforts to protect its migrant workers abroad with its efforts to ensure the rights of migrant workers within its borders. As a state party to the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families ( ICRMW ), Indonesia is obliged to uphold the rights of migrant workers regardless of their migratory pattern. Despite its efforts to protect Indonesian migrant workers abroad, it often seems to neglect its obligation to enforce migrant workers’ rights at home. This article will show how the state-sanctioned mechanisms to settle labor disputes between foreign migrant workers and employers are generally designed to benefit the latter. These mechanisms usually focus on the legality of the workers to determine to which rights they are entitled, if any. Furthermore, the absence of support from Indonesia in enforcing other migrant workers’ rights at ASEAN regional platforms reinforces this short-sighted approach of defining migrant workers exclusively as Indonesians overseas, while overlooking its obligations to migrant workers within Indonesia.
... The majority of cycle couriers in British cities have a migrant background and often tend to rely on these jobs as their main source of income (Cant 2020, Tassinari and Maccarrone 2020, Popan 2021. This reality echoes existing research which shows that migrants and ethnic minorities living in the UK are disproportionately represented in precarious jobs, are exposed to higher risks of exploitation and are often willing to tolerate poorer working conditions (Mcdowell et al. 2009, Anderson 2010, Galván 2012, TUC 2017. The situation is similar in Spain, where 64% of riders are from Latin America, 28% from Spain and the rest from the EU and other countries (Adigital 2020). ...
In less than a decade, with the emergence of food delivery platforms, cycling has gained increased visibility on city roads across the world. For the first time since the advent of the
automobile age, the bicycle is re-emerging globally as a dependable tool to earn a living. Food delivery start-ups such as Deliveroo, Uber Eats or Glovo enroll an increasingly precarious population as self-employed contractors to whom they grant little social protection. Having access to a bicycle and knowing how to use it is a very low entrance requirement for these jobs. Cycle food couriers hold a precarious entitlement to the road space, which makes them constantly vulnerable to bodily harm, and is compounded by a broader ontological precarity. The insecurity resulting from being engaged in an unregulated gig economy where job and income instability is amplified by issues of gender, ethnicity and migration status, further adds to road unsafety. In this chapter, we draw on case studies from the UK, Spain and South America to account for how the precarity of cycling is amplified by the political landscape of neoliberalism of the last three decades, which promotes flexible work, and the legislative setting failing to account for cycle couriers as employees.
... By studying the development of low-wage employment in Germany, Krings (2021) has observed that a disproportionately higher number of migrant workers are employed in services. The author argues for a comprehensive examination of qualifications and skills together with employer behaviour, local labour market institutions and immigration laws to understand the position of migrant workers in the labour markets (McGovern, 2007;MacKenzie and Forde, 2009;Anderson, 2010in Krings, 2021. In our research, two important factors stood out for the limited resistance observed at SU: first, the education and skill requirements in Germany, and second, the national immigration regulations. ...
Content moderation is key to platform operations. Given the largely outsourced character of content moderation work and the dynamic character of social media platforms, technology firms have to address the accompanying high degrees of uncertainty and labour indeterminacy. Central to their managerial strategies is the use of automated technology that allows them to organise work by incorporating the social media user activities within the production processes, and control workers for ensuring the accuracy of content moderation decisions. The labour process analysis is informed by two workshops with ten participants at a Berlin-based IT-services firm providing content moderation services to a lead firm based in the USA. The research design combines together the design thinking method and the focus group interview method to examine the worker–machine interaction. The research findings indicate that technical control results in continuous standardising of content moderation work through routinisation of tasks and codification of time. Its combination with bureaucratic control through the supply-side managerial functions aims to ensure the quality service delivery and points to the continued significance of human supervision. Correspondingly, there are two main contributions of our study: first, regarding the governance in content moderation value chains and second, regarding the worker experiences of technical-driven control. On account of the limited resistance observed in the labour process, we conclude that instead of seeing it as the totalisation of technical control, our findings point towards the structural conditions in Germany that restrict migrant workers’ agency.
... Exploitation of suppliers by powerful buyers (Schleper, Blome, and Wuttke 2017); of precarious labour (Anderson 2010); in 'sweatshops' (Berkey 2021;Radin and Calkins 2006 (Yu 2008). Detainees forced substance withdrawal (Fiscella et al. 2004). ...
Despite its importance in the history of European and Christian thought, the virtue of mercy is currently a problematic and under-developed concept in business ethics, compared to related ideas of care, compassion or philanthropy. This article argues for its revival as a core principle of ethical business practice. An overview is provided of the scope of contemporary business ethics research on mercy and related topics. The question is then explored as to why mercy has so little traction in business ethics. The idea of mercy in European and Anglophone philosophy is discussed, from Anselm and Aquinas to the present day, showing how discourse on mercy came to be split into a wider concept of the prevention and alleviation of suffering (misericordia) and a narrower one of clemency or leniency. The concept of misericordia is developed as the basis for a principle of mercy, which is applicable directly to corporations. The practical implications of this for standards of corporate behaviour towards employees and other stakeholders are then considered through the introduction of a ‘vulnerability grid’. The grid offers a critical contrast to other analysis tools, such as stakeholder power-interest matrices.
... Vimbai's case is not unique but exposes the plight of many of her kind living under similar conditions in the post-apartheid society. Similarly, Anderson (2010) observes that the state produces bare life and subjectivity for vulnerable migrant figures by denying them access to social services, deportations, and lack of legal protection. Thus, in this regard, the ANC government disregards the ethics of helping a neighbour in the form of immigrants. ...
Classification of African migrants in South Africa as undesirable, economic parasites, illegals, among other derogatory terms, characterises current xenophobic discourses and foregrounds frontiers that divide people in Africa. Xenophobia violates the philosophy of ubuntu/Vumunhu/Umunhu and the parable of the Good Samaritan which define humanity as diverse but collective. Drawing from this philosophy and parable as prisms through which xenophobic discourses can be analysed, we interrogate notions of African/ness and neighbour/liness in contemporary South Africa. African humanity is heterogeneous and existing xenophobic attitudes and practices provide sites for academic inquiry to generate deep understanding. Mhlongo’s After Tears identifies fault lines which need to be sutured vis-à-vis the current fear and hatred of strangers. The varied forms of xenophobia reflect nuanced but interconnected dynamics, such as historical legacies and socio-economic divisions that mask differences, which feed into makwerekwere metadiscourse. African immigrants become imagined as real sources of problems in South Africa today.
This chapter explores the gendered post-Fordist labour context through emotional labour and influencer culture. We analyse how these are coded as feminine, before introducing the format of Get Ready With Me (GRWM), a style of beauty and influencer video in which (mostly) young female-identified people talk through their make-up routines for different activities (e.g. a date, girls night). In this chapter, we explore how these videos fit with new labour contexts in digital culture, as well as the emotions that circulate in their production and consumption. We analyse a knowledgeably legitimate GRWM influencer culture, who engages with niceness alongside newer affordances of TikTok, and how this niceness manages those without the cultural capital to engage fully in influencer subjectivities.
Foreign workers holding H‐1B visas gained recourse to federal employment rights under the Immigration & Nationality Act (INA) for the very first time when Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1990 (IMMACT90). This paper examines H‐1B employment rights enforcement under the INA as it has intersected with broader features of the American legal system: what political scientists call judicial retrenchment and the quasi‐judicial state. I first show how H‐1B rights, already limited by the domestic politics that shaped the IMMACT, became subject to judicial retrenchment when the federal courts confined H‐1B disputes under the INA to the quasi‐judicial state at the Department of Labor (DOL). I then use published data on DOL investigation outcomes, published and unpublished administrative case records, and judicial cases reviewing agency action to examine the extent to which and how H‐1B workers can use the quasi‐judicial state to solve workplace problems. My empirical findings contribute to a new understanding of the relationship between rights retrenchment, the judiciary, and the rise of alternatives to court in immigration and employment law and point to possible fine‐grained changes for future immigration reform. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
The main aim of this paper is to shed light on the link between ‘onward migration’ and ‘onward precarity’ as an experience of continuous precariousness by paying attention to crisis/post-crisis contexts and how these contexts have led to precarity becoming structurally embedded in migrant labour markets in Europe. Onward migration studies have centrally focused on crisis contexts, but very little attention has been paid to post-crisis contexts. Thus, this article contributes to complementing the previous research on onward migration and onward precarity. The paper follows a qualitative and multi-sited approach based on in-depth interviews and discussion groups with Latin American migrants living in Madrid, Lisbon, and London. Our empirical analysis elucidates that labour mobility and onward migration are embedded in intersectional dynamics of exclusion which entail a continuous experience of multifaceted precarity.
This article explores how the precarity of migrants working in the national labour markets of the Global North is shaped throughout the entire transnational migration process encompassing the planning, the journey as well as the arrival, re-arrival, and engagement across the sending and the receiving societies. Introducing the concept of convoluted mobility, the article analyses how the mediation of transnational labour migration is uneven and filled with frictions of de-tours, stuckness, and obstacles leaving the migrant workers in precarious positions across the sending and receiving societies. Through the empirical examples of Ukrainian migrants working within the agricultural industry in Denmark and brokers in Ukraine, we argue that the precarity of the migrants is established through convoluted mobility characterised by the interlink between the transnational migration infrastructure that moves the migrants and the migrants’ autonomy moving through the migration infrastructure.
This article examines and unpacks how postcolonial imaginaries shape migrants’ experiences of the labour market. Drawing on qualitative primary research the article compares the narratives of Romanians and temporary Australians working in London to explore experiences of paid employment. The article finds that postcolonial imaginaries play a role in how migrants experience and understand the labour market, and that these imaginaries inform migrant agency which are used to navigate the labour market, legitimise positioning in the division of labour, and at times utilised and exchanged as a form of capital. The findings imply a need for a layered understanding of how the postcolonial shapes the macro, meso and micro phenomena of labour immigration, and a better understanding how these imaginaries intersect with relational identities in informing the experience of the labour market.
This paper advances a focus on emotions as a key dimension of the actualisation of workplace exploitation experienced by temporary migrants. In doing so, we extend understandings of forced labour, unfreedom and migration and their concern for the operation of coercion in employment relations. While political-economic and legal accounts of work and oppression can tell us much about systems that underpin the occurrence of exploitation, we argue that the fluidity of unfreedoms in labour exploitation are fundamentally embodied and shaped by emotional experiences and manipulation. In order to advance this emotional account, we draw on interviews with people holding work and study visas who have experienced workplace exploitation in Aotearoa New Zealand, a context where the rapid growth in temporary migration has been associated with growing evidence of labour market abuse. Our paper addresses three key emotional dimensions of workplace exploitation that emerged in this research: inducement into exploitation, entrapment and the emotional sustenance of exploitation. Through this account we demonstrate how unfreedom is felt in the lives of temporary migrants and point towards the need to rethink both scholarly accounts of forced labour and policy responses to the workplace exploitation of temporary migrants.
Ireland has the fastest ageing population in Europe, creating significant challenges for health and caring services in the state. Ireland depends on migrant workers, documented and undocumented to meet this growing need. Oona Frawley’s 2014 novel Flight tells the story of one of these workers. In the novel, Sandrine, from Zimbabwe, gets a job as a live-in carer for the ageing Clare and Tom, working 24/7 with just one afternoon off. Set just before the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, the story is complicated by Sandrine’s pregnancy. This article details Sandrine’s precarious labour and citizenship, impacted by the biopolitical legislation. It also foregrounds the vulnerability of the ageing population in Ireland through reliance on unregulated care solutions. Flight represents how a range of vulnerable groups in Irish society are impacted by a precarious and invisible labour market that both fails to address the needs of the worker and the ageing population.
Herrschaft bringt immer auch Widerständigkeit hervor. Demnach stellen Regelabweichungen, die sich aus unvollständig determiniertem Arbeitshandeln ergeben, ein strukturelles Merkmal im Arbeitsprozess dar. Die Formierung eines informellen Repertoires widerständiger Praktiken im Kontext betrieblicher Herrschaft ist dabei von der Arbeitssoziologie bisher vernachlässigt worden. Um diese konzeptionelle Leerstelle zu füllen, systematisieren die Beiträger*innen die Vielzahl der Praktiken und stellen verschiedene methodische, theoretische und empirische Perspektiven einer arbeitssoziologischen Widerstandsforschung vor.
Temporary migrants comprise a substantial component of the Australian workforce. Evidence of the tensions and contradictions in Australia’s reliance on temporary migrant workers was spotlighted during the COVID-19 global health crisis, particularly with regards to the actions and responsibilities of key players in the attraction, recruitment, deployment and ultimately abandonment of these workers. In this article, we interrogate the public framing of temporary migrant workers within the context of the pandemic. We employ a discourse analysis and build upon theories of precarity and dehumanisation. In doing so we demonstrate how the precarious state within which temporary migrant workers found themselves saw them cast as a dehumanised and unwelcome ‘other’, a burden to the labour market, the state and the broader society.
This article draws on narrative interviews with irregular Chinese migrant workers (ICMWs) in the United Kingdom (UK) to show how the UK's immigration policies foster forms of illegal working and labour exploitation that they are supposed to combat. It argues that the binary conceptualisation of ‘forced labour’ as the polar opposite of ‘free labour’ leaves those migrants working without a right to do so at the risk of both criminalisation and exploitation. The article shows how the fear of criminalisation, together with the pressure to become economically successful in the West, among ICMWs diminishes their capacity to leave exploitative work, reinforcing the unequal power relations between them and their employers, landlords, advisers, and translators. Many ICMWs who are officially cast as ‘illegal immigrants’ need protection, not from ‘snakeheads’ and ‘traffickers’, but the exploitative and precarious work UK government policies render them economically reliant upon.
Similarities and differences exist between contemporary temporary migration schemes in Australia and much earlier schemes, notably nineteenth-century blackbirding, and present-day schemes in Canada, New Zealand and elsewhere. Contemporary schemes are better regulated with superior wages, accommodation and conditions, with less overt racism, but few workers in both eras were able to convert the immediate gains from temporary employment into longer-term sustainable development. Contemporary schemes all demonstrate the precarity of employment, wage theft, difficult and exploitative social conditions and uneven benefits. The principal beneficiaries are the employers despite the substantial economic gains of migrant workers and the wider development benefits. Temporary migration produced a ‘triple-win’ for workers, their home and destination countries, but without equity and at some social cost, amidst an elusive development.KeywordsBlackbirdingSustainable developmentCanadaAustraliaSeasonal Worker ProgramRegulation
The introduction to this volume presents the key questions around gender-based violence in migration contexts to which the eight chapters of the volume seek to provide empirical and theoretical answers. The introduction equally clarifies the conceptual underpinnings and scholarly anchorage of the volume by defining the notion of gender-based violence and reviewing existing literature on the various forms of GBV occurrences in the context of migration. The introduction then sketches out the theoretical framework of the volume. For this purpose, it presents the main tenets of a feminist intersectional approach to GBV in migration settings and examines the relevance of the notions of precarity, precariousness and vulnerability from this perspective. Finally, the introduction lays out the structure of the book and foregrounds the main contributions of each chapter.KeywordsGBV literature reviewMigrationFeminismIntersectionalityPrecarityVulnerability
Despite the growing global consensus regarding the need to ensure minimal labour standards, such as adequate safety and health conditions, freedom of association, and the prohibition of child labour, millions of workers across the world continue to work in horrific conditions. Who should be held responsible, both morally and legally, for protecting workers' rights? What moral and legal obligations should individuals and institutions bear towards foreign workers in their countries? Is there any democratic way to generate, regulate, and enforce labour standards in a global labour market? This book addresses these questions by taking a fresh look at the normative assumptions underlying existing and proposed international labour regulations. By focusing on international labour as a particular sphere of justice, it seeks to advance both the contemporary philosophical debate on global justice and the legal scholarship on international labour.
Terms such as 'Social Europe' and 'European Social Model' have long resided in the political and regulatory lexicon of European integration. But in recent years, and in spite of the adoption of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the EU social profile has entered a profound period of crisis. The ECJ judgments of Viking and Laval exemplify the unresolved tension between the EU's strong market imperatives and its fragile social aspirations while the ongoing economic crisis, while the various 'bail out' packages are producing a constant retrenchment of social rights. The status quo is one in which workers appear to shoulder most of the risks attendant on making and executing arrangements for the doing of work. Chapters in this book advocate a reversal of this trend in favour of fair mutualization, so as to disperse these risks and share them more equitably between employers, the state, and society at large.
Recent literature focuses on the inherent challenges of food delivery work. Less is known about how these injustices impact workers and their lives more broadly, or how workers navigate them. This empirical article is based on a 12-month ethnographic theory-relevant case study and includes an innovative shadowing method focused on migrant food delivery workers in Brisbane, Australia. We found that temporary migrant workers face intersectional injustices, exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis, both within and beyond the platform economy. Nevertheless, the workers agentically enacted their own justices to navigate their precarity, in the absence of institutional supports. This study’s theoretical contribution is the development of a model explaining the agentic and structural underpinnings of the injustices that migrant platform workers experience. Moreover, our contribution reveals that the unique attributes that migrants bring to bear on their platform work provide them with the affordances to navigate the injustices they experience. In so doing they mitigate some of the negative impacts of platform work, and indeed derive benefits that non-migrant platform workers might not.
Over the past 20 years, migration and development policy have been connected in British politics in two overlapping ways – one argument is centred on migration being used for development, the other using aid to reduce migration. In this article, I argue that two seemingly contradictory policy configurations – development and migration – and the different articulations of their relationship – migration for development and aid to stop migration – stem from the same framework of racialised capitalism. I show how these relationships are in flux; related to the demands of capital and to the different ideological approaches towards migration. In different ways, the nexus helps to produce varying forms of exploitable subjects and enacts control over surplus populations across the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ world.
We investigate the labour regime of an agricultural sector in the China–Myanmar borderland. The extant literature on labour generally stresses the hyper-precarity of workers, especially migrant workers. Our case study of the sugar cane cutting industry in Dragon Village, Yunnan Province, suggests that contractors who hire workers from Myanmar are also in a state of hyper-precarity which is shaped by multiple layers of socio-economic and politico-institutional circumstances. We develop an analytic framework for investigating transnational labour contractor regimes, which highlights the strategies jointly adopted by contractors and workers to mitigate the hyper-precarity within which both parties are embedded. We find that contractors are in a hyper-precarious position due to limited micro-level transnational social networks to meet outpaced labour demand, unfavourable meso-level market conditions, and macro-level politico-institutional factors such as the added responsibilities of immigration management, a fast-evolving legal system, and military coups. We also find that contractors adopt strategies to control both workers’ labour process and everyday life, while workers use some counterstrategies to regain agency. Together, they stabilize the labour force for this industry despite their shared hyper-precarity.
The COVID-induced lockdowns in India caused significant social, psychological, and economic dents in the nation's growth. The suddenness and lack of warning of the March 2020 lockdown announcement failed to consider the implications for 456 million migrant workers in the vast informal sector in India. This massive reverse migration in India posed several questions that demanded immediate answers and long-term revamping of the institutional setup and policies regarding migrant workers. Global and local discourse around the issue revealed that the implications of the sudden lockdown for the millions of migrant workers had not even been considered, revealing that this segment of India's population was virtually “invisible” to policymakers. The current study employs a two-phase empirico-inductive approach to further explore the concept and dimensions of such “invisibility” of migrant workers in India. First, the research identifies the different ways in which Indian migrant workers are invisibilized from the narratives of 15 domain experts. The second phase of the paper uses fsQCA to compare 24 narratives of migrant labour experiencing distress due to invisibility. Finally, we establish two multicausal paths for the acuteness of invisibility experienced by the migrants during the lockdowns. Structural, Social, Political and Economic invisibilities are treated as the causal factors for the plight of the migrants during the pandemic. The implications call for more inclusive, rather regionally regulated State structures to provide visibility to the migrant workforces.KeywordsSocial invisibilityStructural invisibilityEconomic invisibilityfsQCACOVIDMigrant workers
This chapter examines three influential concepts in feminist and gender theorising -- vulnerability, precarity and intersectionality – which in different ways illuminate the complex operation of unequal power relations that produce gender based violence in migration contexts. Vulnerability theory, espoused by Fineman, emphasises the fundamental commonality of the human condition being a “universal and continuous vulnerability”, as the basis of a transformative framework. Butler focuses on the precarization processes by which precariousness is socially constructed as precarity. Intersectionality, broadly speaking, describes a perspective that recognizes that different women experience gender-based disadvantage or oppression differently. By focusing on the specific context of intersectional inequalities (Yuval Davis) this chapter argues that a heuristic vulnerability/precarity approach, integrating intersectionality, can offer a compelling interpretative framework on GBV in migration.
Transnational domestic work occurs in migration regimes that create hyper-precarious conditions for migrant workers performing care work. These hyper-precarious conditions produce intersecting marginalizing conditions that amplify inequalities and limit the mobility of migrant domestic workers, despite their movement from home to host country. The intersections of nationality, gender, race, socioeconomic status, and migration status reify the hyper-precarities faced while performing domestic work, giving rise to layers of communicative inequalities facing migrant domestic workers in the host country.
The article examines the attitudes and strategies of a UK based employer as they developed their use of migrant labour in the latest manifestation of a strategy that targeted groups of vulnerable workers with lower labour market power. Management's celebration of the `good worker', based on the stereotyping of the perceived attributes of immigrant employees, resonated with the `business case' and `resource based view' debates within the human resource management literature.Yet terms and conditions of employment remained wedded to the bottom of the labour market. The article integrates analysis of the attitudes of employers with the views, experiences and aspirations of migrant workers. Micro level processes are also located in a wider analytical framework, incorporating the broader socio-economic context and key moments of regulatory intervention.
This article explores human smuggling's consequences through a study of London's Pakistani immigrant economy, paying particular attention to the labour process and its experiential dimensions.The latter are unpacked in empirical context with due reference to literatures on illegal migration, as well as more recent writings on employment and `precariousness' that seek to make sense of the changing nature of work patterns under post-Fordist `flexible' regimes in the new global economy. All newly migrated (and some British born) Pakistanis working in ethnic economies endure long hours, poor working conditions, low pay and a general context of insecurity that is distinct from the unionized labour process that prevailed under Fordism. Smuggled migrants tend to deal with a specific set of constraints, however, including added material and psychological burdens stemming from the higher cost of migration and an inability to achieve `structural' embeddedness.
This is a study of the dynamics of the segmented labour market in Israel over the past five decades dynamics characterized by the successive incorporation into the secondary labour market of different subordinate populations with distinct political status and under varying political and economic circumstances: Palestinian citizens of Israel during the first two decades of statehood, Palestinian non-citizens under occupation after the 1967 war, and migrant workers over the past decade. The analysis focuses on the main actors involved in the production and reproduction of the segmented labour market, their specific political and economic interests, and the changing institutional mechanisms employed by the state to constitute these populations as cheap and unprotected labour. The analysis shows that beyond the state's and employers' interests directly related to the functioning of the labour market, the varying conditions in the national conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and the changing strategies employed by the Israeli state to manage this conflict have fundamentally affected the dynamics of the segmented labour market. The study sheds light on the complex interplay between political and economic forces in the constitution of subordinate populations as cheap and unprotected labour, showing that fluid political settings related to state-building processes and the state's autonomous interests deriving from these processes, as well as the distinct political status of different subordinate populations, are factors as important as the employers' demand for cheap labour.
This article is located in the maelstrom of debate about immigration and employment in the contemporary economy. The article presents original analysis of data from the Labour Force Survey and a workplace case-study in the cleaning sector to highlight growing employer dependence on a very diverse pool of foreign-born labour. The article explains such dependency by drawing on interview material collected from employers, employers' associations, community organizations and policymakers. In sum, we argue that London's Migrant Division of Labour (MDL) is a product of the semi-autonomous actions taken by employers, workers and government in the particular context of London. Understanding the MDL thus needs to encompass employer demand, migrants' `dual frame of reference' and limited access to benefits, as well as employers' preference for foreign-born workers over `native' labour supply.The state is also argued to play a critical role in this employment, determining the nature and terms of immigration, the accessibility and levels of benefits, and employment regulation. London's MDL is shown to intersect with, and in some cases overturn, existing patterns of labour market segmentation on the basis of human capital (class), ethnicity and gender.
In this empirical study, Saskia Sassen offers a fresh understanding of the processes of international migration. Focusing on immigration into the US from 1960 to 1985 and the part played by American economic activities abroad, as well as foreign investment in the US, she examines the various ways in which the internationalization of production contributes to the formation and direction of labor migration.
ANY CANADIANS engage in non-standard work—that is, employment situations that differ from the traditional model of a stable, full-time job. Under the standard employment model, a worker has one employer, works full year, full time on the employer's premises, enjoys extensive statutory benefits and entitlements, and expects to be employed indefinitely ( ECC 1990; Schellenberg and Clark 1996; Vosko 1997). Work that differs from the standard is described in several different ways, 'non-standard' and 'contingent' being two commonly used terms. Non- standard is used widely in Canada (Krahn 1991, 1995), contingent in the United States (Polivka and Nardone 1989; Polivka 1996). Another approach is to consider dimensions of 'precarious employment' in relation to a typology of total employment (Rodgers 1989; Fudge 1997; Vosko 2000). Many non-standard jobs may correspond to an employee's life-cycle needs—such as combining part- time work with full-time education, or devoting more time to activities outside the workplace. Indeed, men's and women's differing reasons for part-time work and self-employment illustrate the importance of gender- based1 analysis of trends in non-standard work. For example, in 2002, 42% of men compared with 25% of women worked part time because they were attending school, while 15% of women and just 1% of men cited child-care responsibilities. These findings reflect differing care and education trade-offs for men and women (see also Vosko 2002). At the same time, slightly over one-quarter (27%) of part-timers were working part time because of poor business condi- tions or because they could not find full-time work. The 2000 Survey of Self-Employment also highlighted differences in self-employment patterns for men and women. Data indicated that 13% of own-account
Temporary migration for agricultural work has long historical provenance globally, and has increased in the most recent period of globalisation. In this paper, using examples based on my own research on both cross-border (to the UK) and internal (within India) migration by workers for temporary agricultural jobs, I raise questions about how such movements, and the labour relations with which they are associated, have been represented in global and regional analyses. The discussion is set within a summary of recent debates over the usefulness of the concept of geographical scale. I use as a case study the ILO's 2005 report, Global Alliance Against Forced Labour, which makes a clear association between temporary migrant work in agriculture and forced labour in rural Asia. I argue that the representations of forced labour that emerge from the report risk, first, painting temporary migrants as victims, rather than as knowledgeable agents, and, second, residualising unfree labour relations, rather than shedding light on their connections to context-specific and contingent forms of capitalism and capital–state relations.
This article explores dominant discourse on ‘trafficking as modern slavery’ in relation to the many legal and social fetters that have historically been and are today imposed upon individuals who are socially imagined as ‘free’. It argues that discourse on ‘trafficking as modern slavery’ revitalizes the liberal understandings of freedom and restriction that have historically allowed vigorous moral condemnation of slavery to coexist with the continued imposition of extensive, forcible restrictions on individuals deemed to be ‘free’. In place of efforts to build political alliances between different groups of migrants, as well as between migrants and non-migrants, who share a common interest in transforming existing social and political relations, ‘trafficking as modern slavery’ discourse inspires and legitimates efforts to divide a small number of ‘deserving victims’ from the masses that remain ‘undeserving’ of rights and freedoms.
Synthesis/Synthèse: pp.295-300(eng); pp.265-269(fre)
Data from the countries which social theorists had in mind when they elaborated the idea of a new age of employment insecurity do not support their theories. If the age of insecurity is dawning anywhere, it is in Spain, Mexico, Portugal, Turkey, Finland and Poland. It is not plausible that these examples inspired Beck, Giddens and Sennett. The causes of the different trends revealed by international comparison are more likely to be found in complex, multi-factoral explanations than in an age of insecure employment. The theorists became wedded to their diagnosis because of the problems they encountered in doing theory after the demise of Marxism and the post-modern turn made their critiques insecure. Their need for legitimation made their theorizing vulnerable to co-option in dystopian nightmares that served powerful interests.
Throughout the industrialized world, international migrants serve as nannies, construction workers, gardeners and small-business entrepreneurs. Labor Movement suggests that the international migration of workers is necessary for the survival of industrialized economies. The book thus turns the conventional view of international migration on its head: it investigates how migration regulates labor markets, rather than labor markets shaping migration flows. Assuming a critical view of orthodox economic theory, the book illustrates how different legal, social and cultural strategies towards international migrants are deployed and coordinated within the wider neo-liberal project to render migrants and immigrants vulnerable, pushing them into performing distinct economic roles and into subordinate labor market situations. Drawing on social theories associated with Pierre Bourdieu and other prominent thinkers, Labor Movement suggests that migration regulates labor markets through processes of social distinction, cultural judgement and the strategic deployment of citizenship. European and North American case studies illustrate how the labor of international migrants is systematically devalued and how popular discourse legitimates the demotion of migrants to subordinate labor. Engaging with various immigrant groups in different cities, including South Asian immigrants in Vancouver, foreigners and Spätaussiedler in Berlin, and Mexican and Caribbean offshore workers in rural Ontario, the studies seek to unravel the complex web of regulatory labor market processes related to international migration. Recognizing and understanding these processes, Bauder argues, is an important step towards building effective activist strategies and for envisioning new roles for migrating workers and people. The book is a valuable resource to researchers and students in economics, ethnic and migration studies, geography, sociology, political science, and to frontline activists in Europe, North America and beyond.
A massive shift has taken place in Canadian immigration policy since the 1970s: the majority of migrants no longer enter as permanent residents but as temporary migrant workers. In Home Economics, Nandita Sharma shows how Canadian policies on citizenship and immigration contribute to the entrenchment of a system of apartheid where those categorized as ‘migrant workers’ live, work, pay taxes and sometimes die in Canada but are subordinated to a legal regime that renders them as perennial outsiders to nationalized Canadian society. In calling for a ʼno borders’ policy in Canada, Sharma argues that it is the acceptance of nationalist formulations of ‘home’ informed by racialized and gendered relations that contribute to the neo-liberal restructuring of the labour market in Canada. She exposes the ideological character of Canadian border control policies which, rather than preventing people from getting in, actually work to restrict their rights once within Canada. Home Economics is an urgent and much-needed reminder that in today’s world of growing displacement and unprecedented levels of international migration, society must pay careful attention to how nationalist ideologies construct ‘homelands’ that essentially leave the vast majority of the world’s migrant peoples homeless.
How the Other Half Works solves the riddle of America's contemporary immigration puzzle: why an increasingly high-tech society has use for so many immigrants who lack the basic skills that today's economy seems to demand. In clear and engaging style, Waldinger and Lichter isolate the key factors that explain the presence of unskilled immigrants in our midst. Focusing on Los Angeles, the capital of today's immigrant America, this hard-hitting book elucidates the other side of the new economy, showing that hiring is finding not so much "one's own kind" but rather the "right kind" to fit the demeaning, but indispensable, jobs many American workers disdain.
This chapter provides a comprehensive conceptual framework for evaluating employer demand for migrant labour in high-income countries. It discusses four key issues that, the chapter argues, are fundamental to the analysis of shortages, immigration, and public policy: (i) the characteristics, dimensions, and determinants of employer demand for labour (What are employers looking for?); (ii) characteristics of and segmentations in labour supply (Who does what?); (iii) employers' recruitment practices and use of migrant labour (How and whom do employers recruit?); and (iv) immigration and alternative responses to perceived staff shortages (A need for migrant labour?). The chapter suggests that in many sectors increasing employer demand for migrant workers can, to a significant degree, be explained by 'system effects' that 'produce' certain types of domestic labour shortages. System effects arise from the institutional and regulatory frameworks of the labour market and from wider public policies (e.g. welfare and social policies), many of which are not ostensibly to do with the labour market. These interact with a dynamic social context where job status and the gendered nature of work are important factors. Most of these system effects are outside the control of individual employers and workers and are heavily (but not exclusively) influenced by the state.
The role migrant workers play in reconciling supply and demand of skilled labour in the UK construction industry is scrutinized in this chapter. Given the idiosyncratic, project-based nature of the sector, characterized by the reliance on a mobile, itinerant, and largely self-employed workforce, it is argued that mismatches between supply and demand of skilled workers remain inevitable. Shortcomings in the institutional framework governing skills reproduction in the sector contribute further to this widening chasm. Policy intent of managing just the numerical aspects of supply and demand of skilled labour remains wholly inadequate. Recommendations are therefore made for tighter labour market regulation to ensure equal and fair treatment of workers, development of a comprehensive vocational education and training (VET) system, and a paradigm shift away from current modes of skills reproduction and employment practices towards more sophisticated deployment and development of skills for all workers.
One of the founding fathers of Italian "workerism," Antonio Negri was associated with the Marxist extra-parliamentary organization Potere operaio [Workers' Power] during the 1960s and with the Italian autonomist movement during the 1970s. He was imprisoned on political charges from 1979 to 1983 and from 1997 to 2003. Between 1983 and 1997, Negri lived in exile in Paris, where he continues to hold a university lectureship.
In the Anglophone world, Negri is best known for his collaborative work with Michael Hardt, in particular for their theory of capitalist globalization, developed in Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (London and New York: Penguin Press, 2004). "Empire" is the term coined by Negri and Hardt to describe the flexible, transnational form of sovereignty that develops contemporarily with the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism. Hardt and Negri re-introduce the concept of the "multitude"—taken from the seventeenth-century political philosophy of Hobbes, Spinoza, and others—in order to designate the collective subject that labors and struggles under Empire's global regime of exploitation.
In exploring the transformations of art and culture in the age of Empire, the essay translated below touches on many of the central themes of Negri's recent work. A prime example of Negri's capacity for theoretical synthesis, the essay surveys the economic, political, and cultural developments of the past decades in order to trace them to the anthropological and ontological transformation that accompanies the transition from the system of Fordist nation-states to Empire. Negri invokes a wide range of conceptual apparatuses—from Spinoza's ontology to the theory of space developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus – in order to reverse Adorno and Horkheimer's vision of capital's all-encompassing dominion and to argue for the autonomy and creativity of the multitude.
Max Henninger (MA, PhD) lives in Berlin and works as a translator. He is the German translator of Italian novelist and poet Nanni Balestrini. His critique of Antonio Negri's theory of post-Fordism is forthcoming in the online journal Ephemera.
This article investigates the experience of low paid workers without union representation. It reports on the findings of a recent survey of 501 low paid, non-unionized workers who experienced problems at work. The results demonstrate that problems at work are widespread and, despite a strong propensity to take action to try to resolve them, most workers failed to achieve satisfactory resolutions. In the light of these results, we argue that the current UK Government definition of vulnerability is too narrow because our results suggest that a large proportion of low paid, unrepresented workers are at risk of being denied their employment rights. Therefore we question the ability of the UK's current system of predominantly non-unionized employment relations to deliver employment rights effectively and fairly.
This article strives to meet two challenges. As a review, it provides a critical discussion of the scholarship concerning undocumented migration, with a special emphasis on ethnographically informed works that foreground significant aspects of the everyday life of undocumented migrants. But another key concern here is to formulate more precisely the theoretical status of migrant "illegality" and deportability in order that further research related to undocumented migration may be conceptualized more rigorously. This review considers the study of migrant "illegality" as an epistemological, methodological, and political problem, in order to then formulate it as a theoretical problem. The article argues that it is insufficient to examine the "illegality" of undocumented migration only in terms of its consequences and that it is necessary also to produce historically informed accounts of the sociopolitical processes of "illegalization" themselves, which can be characterized as the legal production of migrant "illegality.".
The issue of a generational exchange in Italian feminism has been crucial over the last decade. Current struggles over precariousness have revived issues previously raised by feminists of the 1970s, recalling how old forms of instability and precarious employment are still present in Italy. This essay starts from the assumption that precariousness is a constitutive aspect of many young Italian women's lives. Young Italian feminist scholars have been discussing the effects of such precarity on their generation. This article analyses the literature produced by political groups of young scholars interested in gender and feminism connected to debates on labour and power in contemporary Italy. One of the most successful strategies that younger feminists have used to gain visibility has involved entering current debates on precariousness, thus forcing a connection with the larger Italian labour movement. In doing so, this new wave of feminism has destabilized the universalism assumed by the 1970s generation. By pointing to a necessary generational change, younger feminists have been able to mark their own specificity and point to exploitative power dynamics within feminist groups, as well as in the family and in the workplace without being dismissed. In such a layered context, many young feminists argue that precariousness is a life condition, not just the effect of job market flexibility and not solely negative. The literature produced by young feminists addresses the current strategies engineered to make ‘their’ precarious life more sustainable. This essay analyses such strategies in the light of contemporary Italian politics. The main conclusion is that younger Italian women's experience requires new strategies and tools for struggle, considering that the visibility of women as political subjects is still quite minimal. Female precariousness can be seen as a fruitful starting point for a dialogue across differences, addressing gender and reproduction, immigration, work and social welfare at the same time.Feminist Review (2007) 87, 5–20. doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400357
étienne Balibar has been one of Europe's most important philosophical and political thinkers since the 1960s. His work has been vastly influential on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the humanities and the social sciences. In We, the People of Europe?, he expands on themes raised in his previous works to offer a trenchant and eloquently written analysis of "transnational citizenship" from the perspective of contemporary Europe. Balibar moves deftly from state theory, national sovereignty, and debates on multiculturalism and European racism, toward imagining a more democratic and less state-centered European citizenship.Although European unification has progressively divorced the concepts of citizenship and nationhood, this process has met with formidable obstacles. While Balibar seeks a deep understanding of this critical conjuncture, he goes beyond theoretical issues. For example, he examines the emergence, alongside the formal aspects of European citizenship, of a "European apartheid," or the reduplication of external borders in the form of "internal borders" nurtured by dubious notions of national and racial identity. He argues for the democratization of how immigrants and minorities in general are treated by the modern democratic state, and the need to reinvent what it means to be a citizen in an increasingly multicultural, diversified world. A major new work by a renowned theorist, We, the People of Europe? offers a far-reaching alternative to the usual framing of multicultural debates in the United States while also engaging with these debates.
Birds of Passage presents an unorthodox analysis of migration ion to urban industrial societies from underdeveloped rual areas. It argues that such migrations are a continuing feature of industrial societies and that they are generated by forces inherent in the nature of industrial economies. It explains why conventional economic theory finds such migrations so difficult to comprehend, and challenges a set of older assumptions that supported the view that these migrations were beneficial to both sending and receiving societies. Professor Piore seriously questions whether migration actually relieves population pressure and rural unemployment, and whether it develops skills necessary for the emergence of an industrial labour force in the home country. Furthermore, he criticizes the notion that in the long run migrant labour complements native labour. On the basis of this critique, he develops an alternative theory of the nature of the migration process.
Time and migration have become fundamental themes in recent debates about modernity, globalisation, mobility and other contemporary issues. However, the relationship between the two has rarely figured as an explicit object of research. And yet, the analysis of the mutual implications between migration and time can be crucial for the understanding of several theoretical and practical problems associated with immigration, nation-states and multicultural societies. This article examines some of the complex temporal dimensions of the migration process. It reveals that time has often appeared as an important dimension in various accounts of immigration. On the basis of empirical research conducted with a particular immigrant group, namely Brazilians in London, the article suggests a number of conceptual tools for the analysis of the temporal aspects of migration. This conceptual framework is based on the development of the notions of the strange, heteronomous, asynchronous, remembered, collage, liminal, diasporic and nomadic times of migration. Finally, I briefly discuss the relationship between these times, the nation-states' responses to immigration, and the constitution of new forms of transnational social and cultural practices.
This paper explores the emergence of a new ‘migrant division of labour’ in London. In contrast to a vision of ‘professionalization’, it shows that London's labour market has been characterized by processes of occupational polarization and that a disproportionate number of London's low-paid jobs are now filled by foreign-born workers. Drawing on original survey data, the paper explores the pay and conditions of London's low-paid migrant workers and develops a framework for understanding the emergence of a new migrant division of labour in London. In particular, the paper stresses the role of the British state in shaping this divide. The paper concludes that the emergence of such a divide in London necessitates a re-conceptualization of the place of migrant workers in the ‘global city’ and of the processes shaping global city labour markets, and outlines what this new division of labour might mean for politics and policy in London.
Dans cet article, on analyse le remplacement des travailleurs antillais par des Mexicains dans le Programme des travailleurs agricoles saisonniers du gouvernement du Canada, en mettant l'accent sur le rôle des interprétations racialisées dans la mise en œuvre de ce genre de programme. On y soutient qu'un mécanisme de racialisation étaie les discours des agriculteurs ontariens à la recherche de la main-d œuvre la plus laborieuse, fiable et flexible. Parfois même, les discours des agriculteurs affichent un racisme grossier, dépeignant les honimes antillais comme des Noirs hypersexués qui présentent un risque pour les Canadiennes, alors que, d'autres fois, ces préjugés raciaux sont formulées en termes de prédispositions physiques ou psychologiques à travailler à certaines récoltes.
This paper analyses the replacement of Caribbean workers by Mexicans in Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program, highlighting the role of racialized understandings in implementing foreign worker programs. It argues that a process of racialization underpins the discourses employed by Ontario growers in search of the most hardworking, reliable and flexible labour force. Sometimes grower discourses manifest a crude racism, casting Caribbean men as hypersexualized Black subjects who pose a risk to Canadian women, while other times these racialized assumptions are framed in terms of physical and/or psychic dispositions to the production of certain crops.
The study of refugees by geographers and other social scientists is, almost by definition, framed around a series of legal categories, which provide us with more or less neat categories of types of involuntary migrants. Yet the process of migration emerges in relation to legal categories and is not simply dictated by them. Thus, as legislation on migration in general and the interpretation of the 1951 Geneva Convention in particular have become more restrictive, patterns of migration have increasingly emerged that manipulate, circumvent or simply break existing legislation.
This paper examines the responses by researchers in geography and related disciplines to asylum–seeking and other forms of migration that are increasingly categorised as “illegal” as a result of recent European policy developments. Specifically, the potential for participatory and/or emancipatory research in such circumstances is explored, through comparative analysis of the ethical issues involved in radical research on a range of “trafficking” scenarios. The interaction of such research with public policy–making is also examined.
Media accounts typically portray African Americans and Latino immigrants as engaged in a pitched battle for jobs. Conventional wisdom suggests that the source of tension between these groups is labor competition or the racial prejudice of employers. While these explanations offer useful insights, they do not fully explain the intensity and longevity of the conflict. Nor has relevant legal scholarship offered a sufficient theoretical lens through which this conflict can be viewed. In the absence of such a theory, opportunities for solidarity building are lost and normative solutions in the context of immigration and anti-discrimination law reform are unsatisfying. This Article advances a new approach to understanding the relationship between work and citizenship that comes out of research on African American and Latino immigrant low-wage workers. In it, we critique existing theories of the link between work and citizenship for failing to attend to the realities of immigration, job differentiation within the universe of low-wage work, and the extent to which a group's race, formal citizenship status, and history affect its relationship to work. This Article fills this gap by arguing that citizenship - defined broadly as 'belonging' in the broader community - provides an additional lens for understanding interactions between African American and Latino immigrant low-wage workers. This nuanced, context-based theory of citizenship, which is grounded in insights from Critical Race Theory, immigration scholarship, and constitutional law, reveals profound differences in the way that African Americans and Latino immigrant workers who appear to be similarly situated in the low-wage context conceive of and experience work, providing a more accurate window into the conflict between them. It also highlights important similarities and convergences in the paths to the workplace taken by these groups, pointing to unique opportunities for increased solidarity between low-wage African American and Latino immigrant workers on the job.
This paper examines the relationship between the number and rights of low-skilled migrant workers in high-income countries. It identifies a trade-off: Countries with large numbers of low-skilled migrant workers offer them relatively few rights, while smaller numbers of migrants are typically associated with more rights. We discuss the number-vs.-rights trade-off in theory and practice as an example of competing goods, raising the question of whether numbers of migrants or rights of migrants should get higher priority. There is no easy or universal answer, but avoiding an explicit discussion of the issue – as has been done in recent guest worker debates – can obscure an important policy choice.
Students of European migration have been hampered by the legacy of those established forms of migration which have been historically most important – settler migrations from Europe to the Americas, guest-worker migrations from the Mediterranean Basin to Northern Europe, and refugee migrations after the World Wars. We need to appreciate that many of the key questions that were asked to frame our understanding of the functioning of migration now have a very different array of answers from the largely economic ones which shaped our earlier analyses. Now, new mobility strategies are deployed to achieve economic and, importantly, non-economic objectives. In the new global and European map of migration, the old dichotomies of migration study – internal versus international, forced versus voluntary, temporary versus permanent, legal versus illegal – blur as both the motivations and modalities of migration become much more diverse. In offering an overview of the new typologies and geographies of international migration in Europe, this paper will be less a rigorous cartography than a qualitative exploration of a changing typology including migrations of crisis, independent female migration, migration of skilled and professional people, student migration, retirement migration and hybrid tourism–migration. These relatively new forms of migration derive from new motivations (the retreat from labour migrations linked to production), new space–time flexibilities, globalisation forces, and migrations of consumption and personal self-realisation. More than ever, this multiplex nature of human migration and spatial mobility demands an interdisciplinary approach, enriched wherever possible by comparative studies. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Throughout the industrialized world, international migrants serve as nannies, construction workers, gardeners and small-business entrepreneurs. Labor Movement suggests that the international migration of workers is necessary for the survival of industrialized economies. The book thus turns the conventional view of international migration on its head: it investigates how migration regulates labor markets, rather than labor markets shaping migration flows. Assuming a critical view of orthodox economic theory, the book illustrates how different legal, social and cultural strategies towards international migrants are deployed and coordinated within the wider neo-liberal project to render migrants and immigrants vulnerable, pushing them into performing distinct economic roles and into subordinate labor market situations. Drawing on social theories associated with Pierre Bourdieu and other prominent thinkers, Labor Movement suggests that migration regulates labor markets through processes of social distinction, cultural judgement and the strategic deployment of citizenship. European and North American case studies illustrate how the labor of international migrants is systematically devalued and how popular discourse legitimates the demotion of migrants to subordinate labor. Engaging with various immigrant groups in different cities, including South Asian immigrants in Vancouver, foreigners and Spataussiedler in Berlin, and Mexican and Caribbean offshore workers in rural Ontario, the studies seek to unravel the complex web of regulatory labor market processes related to international migration. Recognizing and understanding these processes, Bauder argues, is an important step towards building effective activist strategies and for envisioning new roles for migrating workers and people. The book is a valuable resource to researchers and students in economics, ethnic and migration studies, geography, sociology, political science, and to frontline activists in Europe, North America and beyond.
Full-text of this article is not available in this e-prints service. This article was originally published following peer-review in Employee Relations, published by and copyright Emerald. Employers’ demands for cheap and flexible labour which can multi-task, make decisions and act responsibly are being met by an increasing supply of students to the part-time labour market who are having to work due to financial necessity during term-time. This article details the results of a survey and focus group study conducted at Manchester Metropolitan University in February 1999 addressing the nature of this employment relationship. Students’ employment provides them with advantages other than money – valuable work experience, the opportunity to meet people and to take on responsibility. Employers benefit from an easily recruited workforce of intelligent, articulate young people who are numerically and functionally flexible, conscientious, accepting relatively low pay, and who are easy to control. Potential conflict is indicated as students do articulate dislikes about their work and employment conditions, yet they feel unable to challenge their employers about them.
Incluye índice Incluye bibliografía Los autores analizan la dinámica contemporánea del empleo en las industrias de servicios en EUA, proponiendo sugerencias para las políticas públicas relativas que beneficien a los empleados, las empresas y los consumidores.
This review culls disparate elements from the theoretical and research literature on human migration to argue for the construction of a theory of migration that simultaneously incorporates multiple levels of analysis within a longitudinal perspective. A detailed review of interconnections among individual behavior, household strategies, community structures, and national political economies indicates that inter-level and inter-temporal dependencies are inherent to the migration process and give it a strong internal momentum. The dynamic interplay between network growth and individual migration labor, migration remittances, and local income distributions all create powerful feedback mechanisms that lead to the cumulative causation of migration. These mechanisms are reinforced and shaped by macrolevel relationships within the larger political economy.
The Increasing Precariousness of the Employment Society: Driving Force for a New Right-Wing Populism?
- K Dorre
- K Kraemer
- F Speidel
Dorre, K., Kraemer, K. and Speidel, F. (2006) 'The Increasing Precariousness of the
Employment Society: Driving Force for a New Right-Wing Populism?', paper
presented at the 15th Conference of Europeanists, Chicago.