The rights of migrant workers: Economics,politics and ethics

The labour immigration policies of high‐income countries are characterized by trade‐offs between openness to admitting migrant workers and some of the rights granted to migrants after admission. This empirical observation lies at the heart of the author's 2013 book, The price of rights: Regulating international labor migration. In this article, he reviews its main findings, arguments and policy implications and responds to a critical review of the book that was published in the International Labour Review in 2015. He concludes with a plea for more open debate on the linkages between migrant rights, labour migration and development among national and international organizations concerned with these issues.     

Migrants' regular army of labour: gender dimensions of the impact of the global economic crisis on migrant labor in Western Europe

The purpose of this article is to remedy the lack of explanatory endeavours concerning the positive performance of female migrant workers during the recent economic crisis in Western Europe. This phenomenon both interrogates the established association between economic downturns and their negative impact on migrant labour in low‐skilled jobs and enriches the theory of the reserve army of labour, which has been applied to understanding the fragile status of migrant workers in Western economies. Secondary analysis of Labor Force Survey (LFS) and OECD data concerning the impact of the crisis on migrant labour shows that women employed in the care‐domestic sector have been affected significantly less than men employed in manufacture and constructions. To explain this evidence, the article proposes a theoretical framework that draws on key concepts and debates in different strands of sociology: the increasing demand for paid care‐domestic work due to the ageing population and the growth of native‐born women's rates of activity; the commodification of care and the state management of migration; the affectivity and spatial fixity of care‐domestic labour. All these factors contribute to configure female migrant labour, mostly employed in the reproductive sector, as a ‘regular’ rather than a reserve army of labour.     

The structural disempowerment of Eastern European migrant farm workers in Norwegian agriculture

Since the 2004 EU enlargement established one European common labour market, a large number of Eastern Europeans have taken up seasonal employment as hired farm workers in Norwegian agriculture. Much attention in the public has been given to the potential for ‘social dumping’ of these migrating workers, as they are considered prone to exploitation by farmers looking for cheap and docile labour, and subject to low-wages and poor labour conditions. In response to these threats, Norway implemented labour regulations (‘transitional rules’) that established minimum standards for wage levels and labour conditions, combined with registration and supervision of the incoming labour force. Nevertheless, reports from the field indicate that many of the westward migrating labour force experience work conditions that are far poorer than prescribed by the labour regulations, as these are not implemented at the farm level. In this paper, we discuss the social processes that result in this mismatch between state regulations (e.g. transition rules) and the actual experiences of migrant workers building on dual labour market theory. Analysing qualitative in-depth interviews with 54 farm migrants, we argue that there are two sets of factors underlying the poorer working conditions observed on the farms: Firstly, the structural disempowerment of migrant workers, which gives them weak negotiating positions vis-à-vis their employers (farmers); and secondly, the migrant workers' frame of reference for wage levels, in which poor payment levels by Norwegian standards are found acceptable or even good when judged by Eastern European wage levels. While a number of works have described the exploitation of farm migrant labour, we demonstrate in this paper how national immigration and agricultural histories, structures and present policies configure the labour–capital relations at farm level in the Norwegian case.     

‘Escaping’ managed labour migration: worker exit as precarious migrant agency

ABSTRACT

This article narrows in on the mundane yet extraordinary events surrounding migrant farm workers’ decisions to leave their state-approved employment and to seek a better life in Canada outside of state-managed circulatory labour migration. In so doing, this research contributes to conceptualisations of precarity, and of precarious status in particular, that are beginning to recognise its effects not only on workers’ economic survival, but also the more ordinary daily conditions surrounding workers’ sense belonging and personal autonomy. In their refusal to accept the terms of their contractual circulatory labour migration agreements through what is conceptualised here as an act of ‘escape’, workers claim a space of belonging that contradicts the precarity of their formal citizenship status. In carving out a space in which they may perform autonomy and self-determination in daily life, however, this rejection of contingent citizenship status intensifies the precarious material conditions governing workers’ relationship to the state.     

Labour Mobility in East Africa: An Analysis of the East African Community's Common Market and the Free Movement of Workers

This article advocates an institutional perspective in analysing labour mobility, since rules governing cross‐border labour markets are an embodiment of access and participation rights, and can determine the formalisation or informalisation of work and the protection and benefits accrued by migrant workers. It examines the East African Community's Common Market Protocol of July 2010, which seeks to promote the ‘free movement of workers’ within the Community. It argues that there are contradictions and inconsistencies in implementing the Protocol and provides recommendations for addressing them.     

Young subjectivities and affective labour in the service economy

Post-Fordist employment is characterised by the demand for new forms of labour in which workers are expected to make personal investments in their work and to mobilise their embodied subjectivities in the practice of labour. Whilst employment insecurity is well documented in the sociology of youth, theoretical development in this area has yet to contend with the role of changes in the nature of labour itself in the production of youth. This paper draws on theories of labour under post-Fordism to explore the practice of ‘affective labour’ amongst young people performing ‘front of house’ bar work in a large metropolitan service economy. The paper theorises the role of youth subjectivities – including capacities for relationality and leisure, gendered embodiment, and tastes – in the practice of contemporary labour. The paper describes how young people doing bar work contribute to the production of affective atmospheres, or sensations of ease, pleasure and enjoyment that are offered to clientele of boutique bars. In this, we suggest that affective labour mobilises young subjectivities at work in ways that are currently unrecognised within youth studies. The paper concludes by suggesting a new research agenda that goes beyond the existing focus on youth transitions through employment to explore how youth is produced as part of the social dynamics of post-Fordist labour.     

Sexualized labour in digital culture: Instagram influencers,porn chic and the monetization of attention

The rise of digital technologies and social media platforms has been linked to changing forms of work, as well as the mainstreaming of pornography and a ‘porn chic' aesthetic. This article examines some of the ways in which these themes coalesce, and interrogates the conceptual boundaries of sexualized labour, extending beyond traditional organizational settings and into Web 2.0. The study explores performances of sexualized labour on social media by analysing visual and textual content from 172 female influencers on Instagram. This article contributes to the literature on sexualized labour in three ways. First, by demonstrating how sexualized labour is enacted across various forms of influencer labour, and how this relates to the attention economy and monetization. Second, by developing the extant conceptualization of sexualized labour and introducing connective labour as a required element to mobilize sexualized labour. Third, by opening up a critical analysis of what is meant by ‘sexualized' labour within a cultural context of pornographication.     

Bodies of work: skilling at the bottom of the global nursing care chain

ABSTRACT

In the midst of a growing global market for migrant care work, there is a need to investigate not only how such labour is consumed but how ‘ideal’ care workers are also produced. This paper investigates how schools within migrant-sending countries produce nurse labour through body work or the testing and honing of hospital procedures on patients’ bodies. Focusing on the case of the Philippines, this paper shows how the education of nurses for export creates a paradoxical impact on care work within local healthcare institutions. Aspiring nurse migrants provide much-needed manpower to understaffed public hospitals yet, treat poor patients as docile bodies to enhance their skills for future foreign employers. This practice creates an inherent inequality in the actual skilling of aspiring nurse migrants, where the poorest bodies allow nurse migrants to provide better care to more privileged bodies in wealthier nations.     

Culturally tailored workers for specialised destinations: producing Filipino migrant subjects for export

This multi-sited, mixed-methods study in Canada and the Philippines examines how migrant workers are manufactured and deployed to a range of global destinations by the Filipino migration apparatus. Building on scholarship examining how the Filipino state markets, selects and prepares Filipino (labour) migrants from and to the Philippines, I show that beyond seeking to produce a temporary migrant workforce with a ‘comparative advantage’ (including traits like ‘docile’, ‘hardworking’, ‘English-speaking’ and ‘loyal’), the state alongside recruiters and other actors in the migration industry also seek to produce workers with cultural knowledge of norms in receiving destinations. This is another dimension through which the Philippines aims to establish its ‘superiority’ in the international market for temporary labour. This study has implications for how we think about transnational labour brokering under highly saturated conditions, and the role of culture and other mediating factors in configuring ‘ideal’ worker constructions and flows.     

The labour–nature relationship: varieties of labour environmentalism

ABSTRACT

This special issue is a contribution to environmental labour studies, which aims to investigate the practices and theories that integrate labour and nature, by focusing on labour environmentalism. While nature is privately appropriated and exploited by Capital, workers’ organizations tend to construct nature as labour’s other, a place to enjoy or a place to be protected from destruction at best. In the following introductory article to this special issue, we present our view of what environmental labour studies are investigating and might investigate in the future and the place of labour environmentalism within this broader agenda. We also suggest an analytical framework to evaluate the depth, breadth, and level of the agency of the variations of labour environmentalism. We suggest that environmental labour studies can be a way of studying not only the intersections between social and environmental justice, climate change and working conditions but can also contribute to building a bridge between environmental theory and practice.     

Labour Migration and Competitiveness in the European Union

The study is about the characteristics and phenomena of the labour migration that fluxes from, through, and into the East Central European region. The typical groups of migrant workers are emphasized, like the qualified employees, the commuters, the illegal workers, or the migrants according to the family's income optimization. The brain drain is analyzed as a problem of the absence of experts in the region. The tools and possibilities of migration policy are discussed, too, to find suggestions for the state how to turn the direction of migration to the desired way. Through this topic, the countries of destination are introduced with the competitive position of the eastern migrants. The study also reflects on the problem of asymmetric flux of labour out of the region.     

Wage differentials within a female‐dominated occupation: Domestic workers in informal and flexible jobs in Portugal

The authors use an original cross‐sectional data set to examine the impact of informal and flexible contractual arrangements on the wages of domestic workers hired by private employers in Portugal. OLS estimations suggest that formality benefits workers, whether they have a stable or a flexible contract. However, social and labour market processes help to shape and maintain inequality, especially for migrant workers. Although skills are undervalued and do not generate rewards, higher wages are identified for workers who are engaged in contingent work, work for multiple employers or provide care for the elderly. However, such workers are still subject to exploitation and insecurity.     

The Impact of Migration on the Gendering of Service Work: The Case of a West London Hotel

This article responds to a call from Kerfoot and Korczynski to investigate the gendering of service sector employment. As a characteristic of many post‐industrial economies in the global North is the growing significance of migrant workers, this article investigates the impact of migration for work on the gendering of service work. Taking the embodied and emotional labour of workers to be fundamental to service work, it describes how these are refracted and produced through migration. The article draws on 60 interviews with workers in a west London hotel who were born abroad and the human resources staff and managers who are responsible for the recruitment and promotion of the workforce. We argue that migration is an important process in the construction of the contemporary workforce in post‐industrial service economies and that migration status should be understood as intersecting with gender in the production of a gendered performance at work.     

Trade in labour services and migrant worker protection with special reference to East Asia

This article argues that the East Asia international labour market is best viewed as bisected along productivity lines. Within this market, the labour-exporting countries of East Asia provide the overwhelming proportion of low-skilled migrant workers to the region, and are responding to perceived advantages of a policy of labour export.
On the other hand, the movement of highly-skilled and professional (HSP) workers is best viewed as the result of globalization and the internationalization of education, training and the professions, rather than the result of explicit labour export policies of specific countries.
The central concern of the article is that protection of migrant workers is also bisected along productivity lines with HSP workers given special consideration under international policy, while measures to protect and facilitate the movement of low-skilled workers are virtually non-existent.
Various policy measures are suggested that might be employed to advance the cause of migrant worker protection in East Asia.     

A cultural economy perspective on service sector migration in the global city: the case of Hong Kong

This article argues that in order to fully understand the geography of labour migration to global cities, it is necessary to consider economic forces in conjunction with mediating socio-cultural influences. Support for this argument is based on an examination of the pattern of migration to Hong Kong, a city which plays a significant role in the world economy.
Reported here are the results of an analysis of recently released 1996 by-census data, and the authors' interviews with foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong. These findings have shown that highly skilled immigrant workers were drawn largely from developed countries, the main sources of inward investment in this city, while less skilled immigrants were drawn from less developed neighbouring labour markets.
While the geographical pattern of immigration followed broadly that predicted from Hong Kong's position in the world economy, the results have revealed that cultural influences such as language and social networks are also important in shaping the economic roles of migrant workers.     

Labour Market Realism and the Global Compacts on Migration and Refugees

The Global Compacts on Migration (GCM) and Refugees (GCR) include policy recommendations that aim to increase opportunities for legal labour migration, improve protections for migrant workers, and provide refugees with ‘complementary pathways’ to enhanced protection via labour mobility. This paper explains why there are large gaps between these policy recommendations and the labour market policies and realities in the countries that host most of the world’s migrant workers. These gaps between ideals and realities are likely to limit the effective implementation of the GCM/GCR recommendations on labour migration. More ‘labour market realism‘ is needed to incrementally but effectively improve protections for migrant workers.     

The labour market flexibility debate in India: Re‐examining the case for signing voluntary contracts

A major focus of India's ongoing policy debate over labour market flexibilization has been the statutory requirement that firms employing 100 or more workers cannot dismiss employees without prior government permission. The case for repealing that requirement (or greatly increasing the workforce threshold) is notably underpinned by Basu, Fields and Debgupta (2009). Here, the author challenges their particular theoretical argument for hiring and firing at will based on the voluntary signing of contracts, demonstrating that their general policy conclusion is logically unsustainable even within the framework of that model. The case for labour market flexibilization through voluntary contracting thus remains unfounded.     

“There is no future in it”: Pandemic and ride-hailing hustle in Africa

This article examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on ride-hailing drivers in Africa. It argues that, although ride-hailing offers paid work to some African workers, the commodified and informalized nature of this work results in poor job quality, the effects of which were greatly amplified during the pandemic. Drawing on a mixed methods approach involving in-depth interviews with ride-hailing drivers in Nairobi and digital ethnography, it also provides accounts of drivers' hustles to demonstrate strategies of resilience, reworking and resistance among informal workers. The article concludes by highlighting the need for adequate regulatory frameworks and on-the-ground solidarity networks to ensure decent working conditions, and to push back against precarity in the gig economy.