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Bridget Anderson - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Migrant workers: who needs them?: a framework for the analysis of staff shortages, immigration, and public policy
2010Co-Authors: Bridget AndersonAbstract:This chapter provides a comprehensive conceptual framework for evaluating employer demand for Migrant Labour in the UK. More generally, the framework can be used for discussing the relationship between Labour shortages, immigration, and public policy. It outlines relevant sorts of questions to ask when analysing Labour shortages and immigration policy. Four key issues that, the authors argue, are fundamental to the analysis, are discussed: (1) the characteristics, dimensions, and determinants of employer demand for Labour (i.e. what are employers looking for?); (2) the characteristics of and segmentations in Labour supply (i.e. who does what?); (3) employers' recruitment practices and use of Migrant Labour (i.e. how and whom do employers recruit?); and (4) immigration and alternative responses to perceived staff shortage (i.e. a need for Migrant Labour?)
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Semi-compliance and illegality in Migrant Labour markets: an analysis of Migrants, employers and the state in the UK
Population Space and Place, 2009Co-Authors: Martin Ruhs, Bridget AndersonAbstract:This paper explores the nature and determinants of illegality in Migrant Labour markets. It conceptualises the various legal ‘spaces of (il)legality’ in the employment of Migrants, and explores the perceptions and functions of these spaces from the points of view of Migrants, employers, and the state. Our theoretical approach goes beyond the notion that illegality is ‘produced’ by the state, and recognises the agency that some Migrants and employers have vis-a-vis the state's migration frameworks. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative interviews with East European Migrants and employers in the UK, and analysis of the UK government's policies, rhetoric, and enforcement, we find that Migrants, employers, and the state all recognise the distinctions between different types of illegality, and their differentiated impacts. In particular, semi-compliance – which we define as the employment of Migrants who are legally resident but working in violation of the employment restrictions attached to their immigration status – is a distinct and contested space of (il)legality that serves important functions. It allows employers and Migrants to maximize economic benefits from employment while minimizing the threat of state sanctions for violations of immigration law. Semi-compliance exists, and is likely to persist, in part because it constitutes an equilibrium, which we show, serves the interests of Migrants and employers and in practice is difficult for the state to control. We expect these findings for the UK to be of relevance to many other high-income countries, which like the UK, consider Migrants both as an important source of flexible Labour and yet as subjects of immigration control whose employment needs to be closely monitored. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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Semi-Compliance in the Migrant Labour Market
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2006Co-Authors: Martin Ruhs, Bridget AndersonAbstract:Discussions of "illegality" in the employment of Migrant workers are typically based on a "legal/illegal" dichotomy that conflates breaches of rights of residence and rights of employment. This paper aims to facilitate a more nuanced discussion by introducing the new concept of "compliance." We identify and distinguish between three levels of compliance. Compliant Migrants are legally resident and working in full compliance with the conditions attached to their immigration status. Non-compliant Migrants are those without the rights to reside in the host country. Semi-compliance indicates a situation where a Migrant is legally resident but working in violation of some or all of the conditions attached to the Migrant's immigration status. Our empirical analysis shows that, although frequently ignored in academic and public debates, semi-compliance is empirically relevant, i.e., it clearly features in the employment of Migrant workers in practice. It is also perceived and experienced by Migrants and employers as different from non-compliance. We argue that - at least to some degree - semi-compliance is simply the result of the tension between the needs of a flexible Labour market on the one hand, and the desire to closely monitor the employment of Migrants for immigration control purposes on the other hand. This raises important questions about whether and how the state can and should act on semi-compliance in the Migrant Labour market.
David Mccollum - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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'Flexible' workers for 'flexible' jobs? The Labour market function of A8 Migrant Labour in the UK
Work Employment and Society, 2015Co-Authors: David Mccollum, Allan FindlayAbstract:There is considerable academic and policy interest in how imMigrants fare in the Labour market of their host economy. This research is situated within these debates and explores the nexus between Migrant Labour and segmented Labour markets. Specifically the analysis focuses on East-Central Europeans in Britain: a sizeable cohort of largely economic and recent Migrants. A large quantity of interviews with low-wage employers and recruiters is used to examine the role served by East-Central European Migrant Labour in the UK Labour market, to question whether this function is distinct from conventional understandings of the function of Migrant Labour and to explore how employer practices and other processes ‘produce’ these employment relations. Based on the findings from this approach, an argument is developed which contends that the ready availability of a well perceived cohort of Migrant Labour has sustained and extended flexible Labour market structures towards the bottom end of the Labour market.
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Recruitment and employment regimes: Migrant Labour channels in the UK's rural agribusiness sector, from accession to recession
Journal of Rural Studies, 2013Co-Authors: Allan Findlay, David MccollumAbstract:Abstract Migrant Labour has been particularly significant in the British rural agribusiness sector, where employers often struggle to source Labour regardless of economic conditions. While most research on East-Central European migration has focused on the experiences of members of the Migrant community, this paper is one of a small number of studies that has gathered evidence from employers and Labour recruiters. The paper draws on in-depth interviews undertaken in four case study areas. The analysis focuses on the practices of employers and recruiters that have shaped how Migrant Labour is sourced and used in the UK Labour market, and how Labour migration channels have evolved since 2004. The two main conceptual contributions of this paper are a new typology of recruitment/employment practices and a schema illustrating the changing spatial impacts of migration channels in areas of destination.
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International migration and recession
Scottish Geographical Journal, 2010Co-Authors: Allan Findlay, Alistair Geddes, David MccollumAbstract:Abstract The relationship between international Labour migration and business cycles is poorly understood. This article uses Worker Registration Scheme data to examine differences in the use of Migrant Labour in Scotland following the onset of recession and argues that it has changed in spatially and sectorally uneven ways which reflect two distinct Migrant Labour functions – as ‘substitutional' relative to the domestic workforce and as ‘complementary' relative to Labour filling roles not taken up by the national workforce. In the former case the demand for Migrant Labour is highly sensitive to economic cycles. This is not so in the latter case as employers in some sectors find it difficult to source domestic Labour. The conceptual advance that the article seeks to make lies in its identification of the mechanisms accounting for the geographical distinctiveness of ‘complementary' Migrant Labour flows over the business cycle.
Stefanie Kappler - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Curating (im)mobility: Peri‐urban agency in the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum
Global Policy, 2020Co-Authors: Stefanie KapplerAbstract:This article focuses on the ways in which museums perform peri‐urban agency in urban peripheries. The latter are defined as meeting points between rural and urban economies and zones of transition and precariousness, shaped by intersectional inequalities. In South Africa, the experiences of Migrant workers include governed (im)mobilities, living on the urban periphery and seeing the continuation of colonial practices in a neoliberal economic environment. A mnemonic reading of the ways in which Migrant Labour is interpreted and curated by the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum near Cape Town reflects the extent to which the control of mobilities continues to operate in the country's post‐apartheid neoliberal system. The manner in which the museum curates the experience of Migrant‐Labour casts light on the performance of a particular form of peri‐urban agency as a way of interpreting the experience of Migrant Labour beyond Cape Town's city centre. Such agency is not free from contestation but instead an articulation of mnemonic agency in a post‐colonial political setting.
Charanpal Singh Bal - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Production Politics and Migrant Labour Regimes - Production Politics and Migrant Labour Regimes
Production Politics and Migrant Labour Regimes, 2016Co-Authors: Charanpal Singh BalAbstract:The past decade has witnessed a rise in political unrest among temporary Migrant workers in Asia and the Gulf. Existing perspectives on Migrant Labour politics—state-centred perspectives that focus on structural inhibitions to collective action, the contentious politics literature that focuses on political opportunities for activism and ethnographic accounts that focus on the everyday resistances of these workers—are insufficient to explain these recent developments. Simultaneously, useful insights from these are combined with perspectives from Labour Process Theory in constructing an approach to addressing the central research question. This results in a conceptual framework that emphasises the centrality of production politics in explaining emergent challenges to states’ Migrant Labour regimes.
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Production Politics and Migrant Labour Advocacy
Production Politics and Migrant Labour Regimes, 2016Co-Authors: Charanpal Singh BalAbstract:NGO advocacy for Migrant Labour rights has delivered small but significant reforms to the Migrant Labour regime in recent years. This chapter argues that the political impetus behind NGO contention is derived from instances of desertion rather than the perpetuation of tactical accommodation. Within the context of an illiberal political environment where NGOs are unable to collectively mobilise workers or mass citizen support, the collapse of tactical obedience indirectly allows NGOs to carve out spaces of advocacy within state-sponsored and autonomous sites of political participation. State reforms to aspects of the Migrant Labour regime represent a technocratic management of political conflict, where the scope of complaints mechanisms are broadened so that political conflict in the Labour process can be channelled into sites of de-politicised resolution.
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Contesting Migrant Labour Regimes: The State of Migrant Labour Politics in Asia and the Gulf
Production Politics and Migrant Labour Regimes, 2016Co-Authors: Charanpal Singh BalAbstract:How Migrant worker grievances transform into different forms of contention is a matter of contextual contingency. Comparative studies of the contentious politics of Chinese construction workers in Singapore, strikes among South Asian construction workers in Dubai and Migrant domestic worker (MDW) advocacy in Asia reveal that Migrant Labour politics are shaped by how production politics articulate with modes of political participation within the specific context. The nature of and outcomes from production politics in the workplace significantly impact the extent to which Migrant Labour regimes can be contested. Certain outcomes of production politics allow workers and civil society groups to carve out new modes of participation that are autonomous from the state. State actors respond by either repressing these new spaces or creating alternative state-sponsored ones where reforms are enacted.
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The Political Economy of Singapore’s Migrant Labour Regime: State Policies and Contractor Strategies
Production Politics and Migrant Labour Regimes, 2016Co-Authors: Charanpal Singh BalAbstract:This chapter examines how Singapore’s Migrant Labour policies came about and what implications they have on the way Migrant workers are managed in worksites. In contrast to existing approaches, which focus on state economic and political objectives in creating policies, this chapter explores the tensions between the state’s macro-economic objectives and the interests of construction contractors. Rather than providing contractors with a cheap source of Labour, Migrant Labour policies end up producing cost pressures for contractors. Due to the political powerlessness of Migrant workers, cost pressures are often translated into contractor strategies of wage theft in order to protect profits and ensure economic survival. The implementation of wage-theft strategies in the workplace has significant implications for how production politics are constituted and played out.
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Production Politics and Migrant Labour Advocacy in Singapore
Journal of Contemporary Asia, 2014Co-Authors: Charanpal Singh BalAbstract:AbstractSince 2005, NGO activism, calling for greater legal protection for contract Migrant workers has been the most concerted challenge to Singapore’s Migrant Labour regime. Despite a severely restricted civil society space, Migrant Labour advocacy has delivered small but significant reforms to laws covering Migrant Labour. The existing literature on Migrant Labour advocacy focuses on the importance of civil society space in determining the outcomes of organised contention. In the Singapore context, the limitations of advocacy are emphasised and explained in terms of the illiberal nature of the People’s Action Party-state and the strategies deployed by non-governmental organisations. Such an approach is limited in its explanatory potential as it only states what political spaces are not available without examining how spaces for contention are created. In contrast, this article identifies the production politics between Migrant workers and their employers as crucial in influencing the extent to which sp...
Leslie Witz - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Camp Lwandle: Rehabilitating a Migrant Labour hostel at the seaside
Social Dynamics, 2013Co-Authors: Noëleen Murray, Leslie WitzAbstract:In southern African narratives of Migrant Labour, hostels and compounds are represented as typical examples of colonial and apartheid planning. Visual and spatial comparisons are consistently made between the regulatory power of hostels and those of concentration camps. Several of these sites of violence and repression are today being reconfigured as sites of conscience, their artefactual presence on the landscape being constructed as places of remembrance. In this trajectory, a space of seeming anonymity in Lwandle, some 40 km outside of Cape Town, was identified by the newly established museum, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as a structure of significance. The Migrant Labour compound in Lwandle, of which Hostel 33 is the last remnant, was designed by planners and engineers and laid out as part of a Labour camp for male Migrant workers in the 1950s. This article explores the ambitious project initiated in 2008, by the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum (and funded largely by the US Ambassadors ...
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Revisualising township tourism in the Western Cape: the Migrant Labour Museum and the re-construction of Lwandle
Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 2011Co-Authors: Leslie WitzAbstract:This article uses a case study of the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, 40 km outside of Cape Town, to discuss how places and their histories come to be reconstituted in and along tourist routes. It argues that responsible tourism cannot merely be analysed through a hosts/guests approach that relies upon investigating impacts. This formulation does not take into account the fundamental ways that tourism is always about appropriation, systems of knowledge production, and the making of signs and values. The ways that Lwandle has been re-visualised suggests that it is much more useful to consider how places, people, cultures and histories are made and re-made in an image economy. The vast visual apparatus of tourism, depictions of place through writers, travellers and officials, gender relations, allocation of resources, claims to expertise, local and national politics, institutional arrangements and previous histories of images, are powerful mechanisms in the establishment, production and circulation of visual...