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Transnational Migration: Borders, Gender and Global Justice Challenges

Authors:
Zuzana Uhde at Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Sociology
Zuzana Uhde
  • Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Sociology
Petra Ezzeddine at Charles University in Prague
Petra Ezzeddine
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Abstract

Full texts of the special issue Contested Borders: Transnational Migration and Gender is available at https://www.genderonline.cz/en/issue/47-volume-20-number-1-2019-contested-borders-transnational-migration-and-gender
issue 2_2019_Contested Borde
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Conclusion: The Significance of Nightwork
Chapter
  • Aug 2023
On the whole, the book demonstrates the migrants’ experiences of courage, determination, joy, suffering and entrapment, and visibilises their hidden labour, under-the-skin precarity and the bodily experiences of researching nightwork. I portray and analyse their lived experiences to understand better how the somatic compliance works in this (as well as in other) sector where these workers learn to tolerate and internalise the kind of terror that turns these bio-automatons (halfhumans, half-machines) into obedient individuals. This chapter highlights the book’s key findings and its contribution to the debates on the demand for disposable migrants in post-industrial societies, from the glocturnal city as its exemplary site of investigation to the production of disposability and that of invisibility, which combined push nightworkers on the lowest level of precarity in the labour system. This throws light on post-circadian capitalism, foregrounding a temporal axis with which to think about the invisibilisation of certain forms of work, next to the spatial axis already employed to understand a similar process in the case of domestic labour. I expect that readers of this book will thereafter be more aware of the valuable contribution of such people to the modern capitalist societies. More, I desire that those in higher positions similar to the pecking order described in this book, will be moved in good ways and get motivated in improving or changing for the better working conditions and (immigration) policies that inflect negatively on the lives of those somewhat unfairly classed as unskilled workers.
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Half-Rejected, Half-Permitted Migrant Workers
Chapter
  • Aug 2023
In CHAPTER THREE I elaborate upon how, structurally vulnerable migrants, like those arriving after 2000s from Eastern Europe, have been half-rejected and half-permitted or a ‘regrettable necessity’. Their labour power was needed to cover difficult, unwanted night jobs. Yet, they have been derided, if not condemned, for ‘swamping’ the market, as well as the country, and for not quite being fellow humans. I explore the critical significance of understanding the E.U. – U.K. migration, through analysing the effects of racialisation, a form of colonialist logic that rigidly controls borders and impacts negatively on workers. I also focus on the processes by which hierarchies are reproduced and persist through normalisation and invisibility. In this chapter, I lay the theoretical foundation of this study and review literature on relevant topics in migration, such as ‘differential inclusion’, global inequalities, and debates on Saskia Sassen’s notion of the ‘global city’. The same unseen, undocumented and rejected migrant workers within global city sites of polarised employment, have a strategic role in supporting the lives of the affluent corporate executives invested in maintaining a global infrastructure disproportionately located in London, a migrant city. For this reason, migrants are half-permitted.
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Introduction: Invisible Migrants
Chapter
  • Aug 2023
CHAPTER ONE introduces the book’s sections organised in stand-alone chapters. It begins with an introduction of the hidden population group – migrant nightworkers at New Spitalfields market, London – that is excluded even more than other migrants from the public debates and political agendas, hence called in this book Invisible Migrant Nightworkers. The aim is to foreground these migrant labourers’ experiences as precarious manual nightworkers in glocturnal cities of the postcircadian capitalist era. This approach is scaffolded on biographical trajectories, work situations and labour abuse of these migrant co-workers trapped in nightwork and unable to seek work elsewhere. Next, the chapter breaks down an embodied tension by tackling the issues faced by half-rejected, half-permitted migrant workers travelling for work and to live in the E.U. This is a compelling issue to uncover, especially because the migrants that I focus on end up doing the most fundamental form of work – feeding a nation, for they travail in the food supply chain in the U.K. – and working at night. As such, I expect that readers of this book will thereafter be more aware of the valuable contribution of such people to the modern capitalist societies.
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Who cares?: (Ageing, Care and Migration)
Article
Full-text available
  • Jul 2014
The Czech Republic is in the process of transforming its social system which is not capable of managing adequate care of its old citizens. In the last years we have witnessed an increase in the number of mediating agencies that import mainly Ukranian migrants for the purpose of engaging them in care work focusing on elderly people. The paper presents results of pilot ethnograpic research and focuses on commodification of care work for elderly people and the vulnerable character of domestic care work provided by Ukrainian female migrants in the Czech Republic. I argue that this specific “product” – the Ukrainian female caregiver – is based on the intersections of gender, ethnicity and migration.
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Abandoned Hungarian workers and the political economy of care work in Austria
Article
  • Jan 2018
In an era of globalization, the institutional system of mass migration is being substantially reorganized: its intensity and the variation in its forms are increasing. Global production chains combine diverse areas and different forms of work with varying wage levels by forming worldwide networks. In the Eastern European region, the growing level of emigration and relatively low fertility are leading to population loss. Hungary is not among the Eastern European countries with a high level of emigration; nevertheless, it faces serious challenges, particularly in some regions where after the transition losses of jobs were massive, and a greater proportion of people live under the poverty line than the national average. Our analysis is based on interviews, containing narrative and semi-structured parts, among domestic workers working mainly in Austria and Germany. The paper reveals possible causal mechanisms and the political economic structures behind this type of labour migration. We seek to understand how migrationrelated decisions are embedded in a global and highly unequal economic order.
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Development in the context of care migration from rural Hungary: An agency-based approach
Article
  • Jan 2018
This paper aims to create a better understanding of the interplay between structural constraints and individual agency in the process of international labor migration based on empirical evidence collected in Hungarian small towns and villages. Drawing on Amartya Sen’s capability-based concept of development, and a theory of agency elaborated by Emirbayer and Mische, the paper focuses on live-in care migration as a specific form of female circular migration from Hungary to Western European countries, and highlights the varying and dynamic nature of migrant women’s agency within the complexity of structural constraints. The object of this paper is twofold: first, it compares and systematically analyzes Hungarian migrant elderly care workers’ coping strategies in the face of constraints set in the global context of care work. Second, it aims to provide a comprehensive theoretical framework based on the concepts of agency in which diverse empirical findings – human games within a host household and narratives problematizing these specific social roles – can be interpreted. Our empirical evidence shows that human games and tactics are triggered precisely by structural constraints; they are directly inspired by limitations. Although these tactics are potential tools for enlarging individual room for maneuver situationally, they evidently cannot alter structures. The asymmetry of structure and agency is clearly demonstrated in the fact that the overwhelming majority of Hungarian care workers describe individual gains from their jobs as fragments of development. These fragments reflect not only structural constraints, but also highlight potential gains from this specific type of circular migration, pointing out that the concept of “remittances” is more complex than a mere increase in financial stability.
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