Migrant workers: Unfree labour in the 21st Century

Aziz Choudry

Aziz Choudry is associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Social Movement Learning and Knowledge Production in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education, McGill University, Montreal, and visiting professor at the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation in the University of Johannesburg’s Faculty of Education. His latest books, on which this article is partly based, are ‘Just Work? Migrant Struggles Today’ (co-edited with Mondli Hlatshwayo, Pluto Press, 2016) and ‘Unfree Labour? Struggles of Migrant and Immigrant Workers in Canada’ (co-edited with Adrian Smith, PM Press, 2016).

Caribbean scholars Eric Williams and CLR James laid out how the industrial revolution in England and the development of European capitalism depended on slavery. Through the plantation owners, shipbuilders and merchants involved in the slave trade and the wealth they accumulated, banks and heavy industry were established in Europe, and capitalism’s reach expanded globally. The blood and sweat of slaves and indentured workers as well as that of Indigenous Peoples whose lands are still plundered and occupied, are foundational to capitalist development. And in the 21st century, with the global free market economy deeply rooted in these historical processes, the category of ‘unfree labour’ has been extended to include millions of migrant workers across the world.

Capitalist restructuring is a major driving force behind patterns of migration. Throughout the world, migrant workers provide pools of ‘cheap’ labour to be exploited by domestic and transnational economic interests. These labour pools are pivotal to the functioning of many societies in the global North and the South, even as earlier contributions of migrant workers are too often forgotten in dominant versions of history. In our recent co-edited collection, “Unfree labour? Struggles of migrant and immigrant workers in Canada”, Carleton University legal scholar Adrian Smith and I argue that the tendency of some to relegate the term ‘unfree labour’ to the past (for example, referring to historical forms of slavery and indentured labour) or to reject its ongoing explanatory usefulness sits in stark contrast to the contemporary claims and struggles of migrant and immigrant workers and organizers in countries like Canada. The term ‘unfree labour’ captures the use of extra-economic compulsion, alongside what Marx termed the “dull compulsion of economic relations,” to exact labour power. By “extra-economic,” we mean the use of political and legal compulsion specifically rooted in heavily restrictive citizenship and migratory status. This understanding helps to shed light on how “ordinary” labour exploitation becomes intensified, even transformed, under neoliberal migration, into super- or hyper-exploitation.

The term ‘unfree labour’ also invites interpretation on how historical change unfolds. It is not used to enforce a binary distinction with ‘free’ labour. Indeed, within capitalist relations, as demonstrated by Marx and others, the idea of ‘free labour’ is highly problematic as those so categorized must sell their labour power for subsistence wages and are therefore subjected to expropriation of the wealth they produce. Because we need tools or concepts to interpret our unfolding history, unfree labour signifies a conceptual interpretation of the historical record on labour controls in capitalist societies. It provides a conceptual linkage between contemporary and historical experience. Far from novel, the general thrust behind neoliberal migration, we contend, is ongoing or continuous. In other words, as Adrian Smith notes, ‘unfree labour’ serves to recognize the historically entrenched use of politico-legal compulsion to hyperexploit and pacify labour while in the context of these patterns or continuities, leaving conceptual space for examination of specific qualities of and differences between migrant and immigrant workers and corresponding regimes of regulation. Thus we regard unfree labour as signaling an intricate and nuanced continuum of modes of economic and politico-legal compulsion.

In the context of labour migration, conditions of ‘unfreedom’ are often established through the denial of citizenship and residency rights, thereby maintaining connections between labour migrants and their home country. More specifically, the political economy of migration points us towards processes of incorporation, the term used to refer to the manner in which migrants are integrated into the dominant relations of production of the host society. Canadian sociologist Vic Satzewich has argued that there are several primary forms of incorporation of foreign-born labourers, the specifics of each being reliant upon the ability of the workers to circulate in the labour market, and the nature of their citizenship