Migrant workers: Unfree labour in the 21st Century

status. Migrant workers (non-citizens) constitute a form of unfree wage labour as their ability to circulate in a labour market is limited by the temporary labour contract, tied to a single employer, which curtails their right to seek alternate employment.

One example is Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program which, greatly expanded over the past decade, creates precarious employment and immigration status with marginal access to social rights. Most work permits for temporary foreign workers in Canada (and in comparable programs in many other countries) are restrictive — valid for a specific work contract and tied to a single employer. Many of these workers say it is impossible to express their discontent against abuses such as forced and unremunerated overtime work, unsafe conditions, lack of access to healthcare, arbitrary withholding of wages, harassment, and threats of deportation. They often fear job loss because with it comes the loss of their work permit and immigration status.

The creation and maintenance of categories of workers with different sets of rights tied to their immigration status is a standard policy feature and capitalist strategy which is fundamental to how many economies function, facilitating the provision of reduced labour costs to employers. In addition to those working under various temporary foreign worker programs, undocumented workers are particularly vulnerable to exploitation by employers seeking reduced labour costs and compliant workers. They may include people displaced by conflict, war, and political instability as well as others forced to seek work elsewhere. And just as it has been advantageous for economic elites to divide and rule working class people against each other, anti-immigrant sentiment yields dividends for political leaders seeking to draw attention away from the root causes of social and economic inequalities, as we have seen in recent elections and referendum results in the USA and the UK respectively.

Locked into a model of neocolonial structural adjustment, free trade and investment policies, countries that have grown dependent on exporting workers often have shrinking policy space to pursue other options for economic development. US sociologist Robyn Rodriguez argues that a ‘migration-as-development’ approach promoted by the World Bank and other intergovernmental organizations through temporary labour migration programs allows ‘employers to exploit foreign workers, absolve developing states from introducing truly redistributive developmental policies and relieve[s] states from extending the full benefits of citizenship to immigrants.” Money transfers sent back by migrant workers now exceed official development assistance flows, and in most countries, outstrip foreign direct investment. One estimate suggests that worldwide remittance flows could top US $636 billion in 2017, while a World Bank projection states that $479 billion will flow as remittances to developing countries in the next year.

With the spread of neoliberal economic policies, across the world, many trade unions have failed or faltered in fighting back against deterioriating workplace conditions, radical transformations of work, the systematic erosion of worker power and growing social inequalities. Alongside their bureaucratization and containment of rank-and-file militancy, some unions have been indifferent or even hostile to migrant workers, and sometimes embrace exclusionary nationalist politics. The traditional industrial union model has been especially weak in organizing around and addressing issues of precariousness, race, and citizenship status.

In our recent co-edited book, “Just Work? Migrant Workers’ Struggles Today”, South African sociologist, Mondli Hlatshwayo and I write that in many of the dominant popular representations of migration today, the histories, systems and structures which underpin the terms and conditions of who moves between nation states and how and why they move are often as nameless as most of the migrants themselves. The global free market economy has not led to the building of a ‘global village’ or a borderless world, despite what many of its advocates have promised. While many barriers to the mobility of capital have been dismantled through policies of liberalization and deregulation, the majority of the world’s people do not experience such freedom to move across borders. Simplistic, populist explanations which dehumanize migrants, criminalize their movements and obscure the reasons why people migrate continue to abound.

Yet around the world, important lessons are emerging from different models and strategies which migrant workers use to organize for labour justice and dignity, inside and outside of trade unions. This includes the struggles of domestic workers, farmworkers (including the thousands of Caribbean, Mexican and Guatemalan seasonal agricultural workers who have worked for up to eight months a year in Canada, for example), and many others. Examples outside of traditional unions include forms of self-organized community-based labour activism, worker committees and associations, workers’ centres, and advice offices. In Canada, they include organizations like Justicia For Migrant Workers, Montreal’s Immigrant Workers Centre, and Toronto’s Workers Action Centre, as well as an national and international alliance of Filipino migrant workers, Migrante. Their struggles also challenge us to rethink ideas about how to rebuild strong, inclusive working class movements in the 21st century, and remind us of the relevance and meaning of the rallying cry: “Workers of the world, unite!”