Transnational Labour Market Research Articles

The migrant labour regime and labour market intermediaries in the Taiwanese semiconductor industry

This article aims at developing a conceptual framework of the migrant labour regime (MLR) to better understand the agency of migrants in the semiconductor industry and illustrates this by the example of Filipino migrant workers in the Taiwanese semiconductor industry. Based on semi-structured interviews with key persons in the semiconductor industry, the study demonstrates the different roles of actors and connections within the global production network (GPN). With regard to the theoretical contribution, this article develops a conceptual framework of the MLR and addresses three central actors in multi-scalar networks, that is, state, firms, and LMI. The framework proposed in this article offers more analytical clarity to the primary empirical contribution. Therefore, the article identifies three key factors of dynamics in GPNs. First, it emphasises the importance of the state and firms in shaping the MLR. Regulatory institutions at the national level hinder upward mobility of migrant workers and long-term employment relationships because working contracts do not allow employees to change job tasks or employers freely. Second, the coordination between contract manufacturers and lead firms in the GPN leads to a transformation of the workplace, for example, intensification and increased flexibility. Third, LMIs play a role in facilitating and mediating migrant labour in the transnational labour market.

‘The Biggest Problem We Are Facing Is the Running Away Problem’: Recruitment and the Paradox of Facilitating the Mobility of Immobile Workers

Fee-charging recruitment industries in Asia have become gatekeepers to temporary employment in low-wage occupations for millions of migrant workers. One of these jobs is live-in domestic work in private households. Increasingly, workers’ recruiters are depicted as contributing to their precarious, sometimes exploitative, working conditions. However, these narratives misunderstand the systemic and regulatory functions of agencies as transnational labour market actors. This article analyses the relationship between domestic work placement agencies in Jordan and Lebanon and their clients (the employers) as they negotiate the recruitment of women from Bangladesh. Drawing on data from 146 qualitative interviews, it addresses the mechanisms of how exploitative, controlling practices are constructed and normalised by agencies in their everyday interactions with their clients as well as with workers. The article argues that placement agencies play a paradoxical role; whilst facilitating global mobility they also broker worker immobility.

Assimilation through transnationalism: second-generation refugees and Vietnamese transnational organizing

ABSTRACT Transnational organizations are primarily studied from the perspective of first-generation migrants and how cross-border interactions shape their identities. This study focusses on transnational activism among the second-generation, the children of refugees, asking how refugee status affects second-generation transnationalism. By analysing the case study of Vietnamese refugees in the United States, the largest refugee re-settlement effort in American history, the article analyses an originally curated database of transnational organizations (n = 632), as well as a survey of 80 organizational leaders. Findings show that participation in transnational organizations offers new ways of understanding one’s identity and social mobility in the United States and in Vietnam. This transnational point of reference includes transnational labour market opportunities and the transforming of identities from learning about silenced histories in refugee families. Transnational activism creates an alternative reference category for integration outside the common reference groups including intergenerational mobility, native co-ethnics, and the general US population.

Interest representation in transnational labour markets: Campaigning as an alternative to traditional union action?

This article addresses the challenges connected with interest representation in transnational labour markets. It draws on an in-depth case study of the labour market that matches Eastern European workers to jobs in the German meat industry. This labour market has emerged under the European Union Posted Workers Directive. The posting regime has entailed dumping wages and extreme exploitation in the German meat industry. The German Food Workers Union has faced great difficulties in organising workers posted in the meat industry and in negotiating collective agreements because of strong employer resistance to industry-level bargaining. Yet 2014 saw a shift towards a new employment regime and a re-ordering of the transnational labour market, which entailed several improvements for workers. This article sheds light on how this change came about through campaigning by a coalition of different sorts of (collective) actors and not traditional collective action by the union. The role and impact of campaigning for labour protection in transnational labour markets in the Global North are further discussed.

Theorizing transnational labour markets: a research heuristic based on the new economic sociology

AbstractIn this article, I suggest that transnational labour markets are characterized by their multi‐layered embeddedness, not only in national but also in transnational institutional settings. Hence, the national institutional factors formerly at the centre of sociological labour market theories insufficiently explain the newly emerging transnational labour markets. To account for the full complexity and institutional context of the latter, I propose an inductive theoretical approach to transnational labour markets and develop a research heuristic to instruct empirical studies about particular transnational labour markets and inductive theory building. This heuristic draws on analytical categories as developed by the new economic sociology of markets. The empirical example of the transnational labour market that matches eastern European workers to jobs in the German meat industry serves to illustrate how one can use this heuristic, which reveals some preliminary features of transnational labour markets compared with national ones, as well as some research gaps to be addressed by future studies.

English-speaking and Educated Female Domestic Workers in Contemporary India

This article foregrounds a labour market for English-speaking and educated female domestic workers and their Western expatriate employers. Many women in this anthropological study had left office jobs and institutional environs connoting dignity to take up employment in Euro-American households performing what is widely perceived as low-status work. Using the narratives of domestic workers, this article scrutinizes motivations for opting for a stigmatized occupation and finds women’s accounts to be multilayered and provocative, thereby challenging established generalizations. In the intimate space of the expatriate household, these female workers diligently perform the tasks of an ‘all-rounder’ that represents a new managerial role in globalizing India. As part of expanding niche labour markets, the article highlights how these roles demand eclectic skill sets, professionalism, certified training, transnational experience and gender-specific expertise. Nonetheless, a key leitmotif is how domestic service with expatriates’ remains embedded in power relations and class-race hierarchies. In developing the anthropology of domestic labour, this article illuminates the continuation of persistent inequality and stratification in a locally functioning transnational labour market.

What's Left for ‘Social Europe’? Brexit and Transnational Labour Market Regulation in the UK-1 and the EU-27

ABSTRACTThe paper examines UK government positions on the regulation of transnational labour in the context of Brexit. Through an analysis of EU regulations on posted workers – the practice whereby a company based in one EU member state sends workers to carry out a service in another EU member state – the paper argues that the UK has consistently advocated further liberalisation of transnational labour markets in EU level decision-making, a position consistent with promoting increasingly ‘flexible’ labour markets at home. Brexit marks a turning point. Demands from British workers for stronger protection against liberalising pressure help explain the UK's recent shift towards relaxing its opposition to ‘market-correcting’ EU initiatives like the revised posted worker directive. Brexit provides a window of opportunity for the revitalisation of ‘Social Europe’ in the EU-27, without a longstanding veto player at the bargaining table, but one more likely focused more on upholding national labour protections than initiating new supranational policies.

Focus: Compliance Alert: Forced labour in Qatar - the ball is in the company's court now!

22 | International Union Rights | 25/2 FOCUS | TRADE UNION RIGHTS IN THE MENA COUNTRIES The seemingly endless supply of cheap labour is not a ‘natural’ phenomenon. Both poverty and the production of a global work force vulnerable to forced labour are socially and economically constructed conditions This article discusses the results of ECCHRs investigation into labour abuses and forced labour in the construction sector in the Gulf and the structural reasons of why these cases cannot be brought to the courts. It also discusses the question of legal responsibility of companies along their labour supply chains and the potential for trade unions to provoke change. The problem In 2010 Qatar won its bid to host the FIFA Championship 2022. Soon after construction works started for new World Cup stadiums and infrastructure, the first media reports revealed devastating working conditions for the migrant labourers. Football temples were always symbols of passion for sports and fair play, for international understanding and fun. Suddenly they were claimed to be built by the hands of ‘slaves’. The story of Qatar is not so different from other globalisation tales, it just happened fast track. Since the early 1990s global capitalism is on the rise. Transnational corporations blasted the chains of national borders and extended their market power to a global level. Today the core market dynamics of demand and supply apply to a worldwide marketplace. The borders for migrants remain closed, unless they feed the demands of a flourishing transnational labour market. In countries like Bangladesh, India, Nepal or Kenya, there is a growing number of ‘working poor’ who are not only poor in terms of money, but also education, skill-training, access to health, sanitation and so on. These various factors of exclusion make them vulnerable for labour exploitation. If they are offered a job abroad, away from their families and for a salary of no more than 400 Euros a month, many will accept. In the eyes of global market economy they become a seemingly endless supply of cheap labour force. This supply is not simply the consequence of poor people looking for work, as much as poverty is not a ‘natural’ phenomenon. Both, poverty, and the production of a global work force vulnerable to forced labour are socially and economically constructed conditions to feed a cheap labour demand that ensures the profitability of certain economic sectors1. On the labour demand side in Qatar, the multibillion euro contracts for the construction of the FIFA World Cup infrastructure get awarded to transnational companies from China, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and Europe, such as Vinci, Porr, Besix or Hochtief. They form part of a system that generates patterns of workers’ rights infringements in Qatar. Since 2010 ever more reports of civil society organisations, investigative journalists and UN bodies denounce the labour conditions of migrant workers. They speak of people who seek an income to feed their families and must migrate abroad for it. Of people that pay high recruitment fees, even though these are illegal, in Qatar and in many home countries. Recruitment agents and sub-agents in several tiers from the capital down to the home village - all demand their share and corruption often lubricates the system. It is the workers – not the employer – who end up paying all fees. Often they sell their land and little possessions. With great debts they arrive in a country of a different language and culture, and where they are prohibited from joining or forming a trade union. They hand over their passports to their employer to get residence papers. They are accommodated in labour camps, often in a deplorable state. Waiting for their legalisation for many months, they are fully dependant on their employers. Without a job they lose their visa. Without a visa, they fear detention and deportation. But they cannot return to their families with empty hands, still indebted. So even if they get paid only 200 euro instead of the promised 400 euro, they will still accept the job: ‘the absence of choice, made the choice simple’ (Shahidul Alam, The best years of my life, 2016). A legal analysis shows that we are dealing here with forced labour rather than slavery, where a person would...

Focus: Compliance Alert: Forced labour in Qatar - the ball is in the company's court now!

22 | International Union Rights | 25/2 FOCUS | TRADE UNION RIGHTS IN THE MENA COUNTRIES The seemingly endless supply of cheap labour is not a ‘natural’ phenomenon. Both poverty and the production of a global work force vulnerable to forced labour are socially and economically constructed conditions This article discusses the results of ECCHRs investigation into labour abuses and forced labour in the construction sector in the Gulf and the structural reasons of why these cases cannot be brought to the courts. It also discusses the question of legal responsibility of companies along their labour supply chains and the potential for trade unions to provoke change. The problem In 2010 Qatar won its bid to host the FIFA Championship 2022. Soon after construction works started for new World Cup stadiums and infrastructure, the first media reports revealed devastating working conditions for the migrant labourers. Football temples were always symbols of passion for sports and fair play, for international understanding and fun. Suddenly they were claimed to be built by the hands of ‘slaves’. The story of Qatar is not so different from other globalisation tales, it just happened fast track. Since the early 1990s global capitalism is on the rise. Transnational corporations blasted the chains of national borders and extended their market power to a global level. Today the core market dynamics of demand and supply apply to a worldwide marketplace. The borders for migrants remain closed, unless they feed the demands of a flourishing transnational labour market. In countries like Bangladesh, India, Nepal or Kenya, there is a growing number of ‘working poor’ who are not only poor in terms of money, but also education, skill-training, access to health, sanitation and so on. These various factors of exclusion make them vulnerable for labour exploitation. If they are offered a job abroad, away from their families and for a salary of no more than 400 Euros a month, many will accept. In the eyes of global market economy they become a seemingly endless supply of cheap labour force. This supply is not simply the consequence of poor people looking for work, as much as poverty is not a ‘natural’ phenomenon. Both, poverty, and the production of a global work force vulnerable to forced labour are socially and economically constructed conditions to feed a cheap labour demand that ensures the profitability of certain economic sectors1. On the labour demand side in Qatar, the multibillion euro contracts for the construction of the FIFA World Cup infrastructure get awarded to transnational companies from China, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and Europe, such as Vinci, Porr, Besix or Hochtief. They form part of a system that generates patterns of workers’ rights infringements in Qatar. Since 2010 ever more reports of civil society organisations, investigative journalists and UN bodies denounce the labour conditions of migrant workers. They speak of people who seek an income to feed their families and must migrate abroad for it. Of people that pay high recruitment fees, even though these are illegal, in Qatar and in many home countries. Recruitment agents and sub-agents in several tiers from the capital down to the home village - all demand their share and corruption often lubricates the system. It is the workers – not the employer – who end up paying all fees. Often they sell their land and little possessions. With great debts they arrive in a country of a different language and culture, and where they are prohibited from joining or forming a trade union. They hand over their passports to their employer to get residence papers. They are accommodated in labour camps, often in a deplorable state. Waiting for their legalisation for many months, they are fully dependant on their employers. Without a job they lose their visa. Without a visa, they fear detention and deportation. But they cannot return to their families with empty hands, still indebted. So even if they get paid only 200 euro instead of the promised 400 euro, they will still accept the job: ‘the absence of choice, made the choice simple’ (Shahidul Alam, The best years of my life, 2016). A legal analysis shows that we are dealing here with forced labour rather than slavery, where a person would...

Aging Society and Migrant Workers in Transition : A Case Study on the Transnational Labor Market of the Japanese Construction Industry

Aging Society and Migrant Workers in Transition : A Case Study on the Transnational Labor Market of the Japanese Construction Industry

Transnational skills development in post-industrial knowledge economies: the case of Luxembourg and the Greater Region

Luxembourg exhibits strong transnational traits within its skills regime, defying any neat fit with existing educational typologies. It is characterised by its high-skill economy, cross-cultural characteristics, and central location within the European Union. As such, Luxembourg has developed a hybrid strategy of responding to labour market challenges, and by that, to skills development. Our institutionalist analysis finds that Luxembourg is involved in transnational skills development in three complementary ways: (a) employers in Luxembourg extensively recruit skilled workers at the European and global levels, but also (b) heavily rely on the distinct skills sets of cross-border commuters from the neighbouring regions of Belgium, France, and Germany (the Greater Region). Furthermore, (c) Luxembourg combines institutional elements of these neighbouring countries – representing distinct models of capitalism and welfare – within its own education system. In combining the specific strengths of different national skills regimes, institutional bricolage represents a core feature of Luxembourg’s highly stratified system of skill formation. Our analytical framework refers to two major comparative political economy perspectives, namely the welfare state and varieties of capitalism approaches, to analyse how Luxembourg has responded to deindustrialisation by creating a domestic transnational labour market.

MIGRACIÓN DE TALENTOS COMO ESTRATEGIA DE DESARROLLO: MÉXICO-JAPÓN

The international migration of qualified human resources is one of the pillars of immigration governance. Immigration policies set instruments for organizing and managing these human resources to attract skilled workers and international students in a context of global competitiveness. The main component influencing the dynamics of international migration flows to Japan is the transnational labor market of skilled resources, as well as the mechanisms that shape it. The objective of this paper is to describe the socioeconomic factors that shape, drive, and lend context to the mobility of skilled workers. The main question to answer would be: What are the characteristics of the main factors shaping migration flows between Mexico and Japan?

How to Succeed in a Transnational Labor Market: Job Search and Wages among Hungarian, Slovak, and Czech Commuters in Austria

This paper deals with job search strategies and wages among cross-border commuters residing in the Central European Region (CENTROPE). Our main aim is to investigate the role of social networks as constitutive for job searching and for successful labor market integration. We build upon a theoretical framework developed by Aguilera and Massey, reflecting on the nexus of social networks, job search methods, and related labor market outcomes. Methodologically, we use a new quantitative survey on the employment careers of cross-border commuters residing in the regions of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary bordering on Austria, conducted in the winter/spring of 2012/2013 (N = 2,573). Our results corroborate the hypothesis that human and social capital resources as well as labor market characteristics serve as key factors for job search and labor market integration among cross-border commuters in the CENTROPE transnational labor market.

Migrant workers’ engagement with labour market intermediaries in Europe: symbolic power guiding transnational exchange

This article explores the strategies of migrant workers from post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) within the process of transnational exchange characterized by transnational labour market intermediaries that have substantially altered the former national bilateral employment relations. Utilizing a Bourdieuian conceptual framework it examines Slovenian and Polish workers’ migration strategies and struggles to acquire and convert capitals within the process of transnational exchange and upon arrival in the UK. The article uncovers the (self-)colonial cultural capital embodied in CEE workers’ habitus that drives their strategies to take up various working and training opportunities in the UK in order to acquire (trans)nationally recognized cultural capital. This labour of acquisition drives Polish and Slovenian workers to seek specific cross-cultural and ethnic-niche intermediary services that can manipulate the most reliable symbolic signs in order to make profits from migrant worker-consumers. In this regard the article also exposes inter- and intra-ethnic variations.

Understanding Transnational Labour Market Trajectories of African-European Migrants: Evidence from the MAFE Survey

Labor market trajectories of migrants are seldom explored in a longitudinal and comparative perspective. However, a longitudinal approach is crucial for a better understanding of migrants’ long-term occupational attainments, while comparative research is useful to disentangle specificities and general processes across destination and origin countries. This article explores the labor market outcomes of migrants from Senegal, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ghana in different European countries, using the MAFE data to compare their occupational attainments before migration, upon arrival and during the first 10 years of stay in Europe in a longitudinal perspective. Results highlight different pattern of migrants’ selection across destinations, influenced by prior employment status and education, gender and colonial legacies, and which impact subsequent trajectories into the European labor markets. Our analyses also show a severe worsening of migrants’ occupational status in Europe compared to their situation prior to migration, which is the resultant of a dramatic downgrading upon entry and of a slow occupational recovering during the first 10 years of stay in Europe. Results suggest that the educational–occupational mismatch of skilled workers might represent a long-lasting “price” for migrants, unless (further) educational credentials are achieved in destination countries.

National and Transnational Labour Markets in European Archaeology

The EU-funded project “Discovering the Archaeologists of Europe 2014” (DISCO 2012–2014) has recently gathered data about the archaeological labour market in 21 European countries. A set of core questions was included in the national surveys, and one of these questions regarded the nationality of the archaeological workforce. As a result, it has become obvious that the archaeological labour market is a national market in some countries whereas it is a transnational one in others. This paper will examine the reasons behind this development through three case studies.

The End of Migration from Atotonilco El Bajo to Milwaukee: Breakdown of a Transnational Labor Market

Este estudio analiza la disminución rápida de la migración México-EE.UU. mediante investigar el argumento que cambios educativos y económicos en México son factores importantes. Basado en la investigación etnográfica de un mercado laboral transnacional entre Milwaukee, EE.UU. y Atotonilco el Bajo, México, este artículo ilustra que el crecimiento del nivel de educación y la diversificación del mercado laboral en Atotonilco El Bajo están contribuyendo a la disminución de migración. Sin embargo, no es evidente que los logros educativos son el resultado de oportunidades económicas en la economía Mexicana; más bien, una variedad de factores nacionales y transnacionales están contribuyendo a una cultura local de educación.

Three problems without a solution: the militant research conundrum and the social condition of migration

The article deals with the relation between research and militancy considering migration as a total social fact, employing different theoretical tools coming from the autonomy of migration theory, migrant labour studies and postcolonial critique. By posing to the reader three problems without a solution, the article frames the main features of what the author calls the migration and militant research conundrum. The essay briefly defines the three problems as the problem of the researcher, the problem of militancy in migration research and the problem of politics and migration. The article argues that if it is true that migration is a social relation mediated by different statuses/documents/definitions in the transnational space, it is thus fundamental both for the researcher and for the militant to critically analyze what does it means to be part of this social relation in postcolonial capitalism conditions. The institutional racism produced by different authorities, from the States to international assemblages, and the transnational labour market must be taken into account. Therefore, in order to address the migration and militant research conundrum in a productive manner, it is crucial to understand the specific position of the militant and the researcher vis-à-vis the materiality of rule and the larger political dimension of migration.

Welfare through migrant work: what if the Romanian ‘safety valve’ closes?

The Romanian work migration system came as an answer to the increased individual welfare risks caused by a particular form of Romanian neoliberalism. The system acts as a transnational labour market built up from the grassroots. Through its maturing, this migration system has acted as a ‘safety valve’ in Romania: neoliberal principles could be built into the Romanian welfare system. As such, migrant work abroad became a structural aspect of the Romanian welfare system. The austerity measures that are currently imposed on Mediterranean economies hosting Romanian migrants, and on Romania itself, therefore, create a double pressure on welfare in the latter, since they undermine the ‘safety valve’ capacity of the migration system.

Transborder Labor Liberalization and Social Contracts

The failure of states to liberalize labor as part of the multilateral trade liberalization project stands in stark contradiction to the liberalization of other fundamental economic inputs, thus undermining the vision for a globalized world. The disjuncture and disequilibrium between international trade law and domestic immigration law foster illegal movement across borders and result in the vulnerability of human would-be mobile labor providers to trafficking and other forms of exploitation. As a result, the transnational labor market is characterized by the illegality and temporariness that is assigned by states to mobile and would-be mobile human providers of labor. Yet, the globalized transnational economy demands and stimulates the movement of labor from one domestic economy to another. Domestic social contracts, to the extent that they exist, are subject to the pressures of transnational economic forces that have altered, fundamentally, the existing contracts between, for example, labor and capital. Concepts of distributive justice require democratization of access to the benefits of trade liberalization. To the extent that individual nation-states’ domestic laws demand that labor be rendered immobile and/or that mobile human labor providers be punished for transgressing the laws created to ensure their immobility, labor is denied full access to the benefits of trade liberalization. To create a rights-protective equilibrium in the transnational labor market, I contend that the economic nature of humans — our economic roles in the global economic system — must be more fully recognized. That recognition will require that human labor providers must have the right to easily enter and exit individual domestic labor markets in response to economic stimuli. I propose that the path to the framing, implementation, and enforcement of a global social contract that protects labor is to liberalize labor from some of the nation-state constraints to which the transborder labor market is subject.