Gabriella Alberti and Devi Sacchetto, The Politics of Migrant Labour: Exit, Voice, and Social Reproduction, Bristol University Press, 2024. Hbk £85, Epub £27.99
|
RATING: 92
|
Buy this book?
|
Yes
|
Critical political economy has made significant progress over recent decades, and in the process it has called into question practically all the tropes on which it relied in the mid- to late twentieth century, principal among these being 'Western' dominance in a world of states at the global level, and a predominant pattern in the developed world of the 'standard employment contract' (full-time work with varying degrees of job security, redundancy and pension rights), the male breadwinner/female housewife couple (gravitating towards the full-time male worker and part-time female worker) in a 'nuclear family', the 'family wage' (increasingly under threat), and the 'welfare state' as a protection against the worst effects of the market. But it has not yet shaken off these anachronistic points of reference to base itself on a new foundation which does not look back critically on past perspectives but instead addresses directly the character and dynamics of the global political economy of the twenty-first century.
However, things are changing. Marnie Holborow has recently rebased the relationship between households and capital in Homes in Crisis Capitalism. Gabriela Alberti and Devi Sacchetto (hereafter, AS) have now done the same for the global working class, making three inspired moves. First, they take as their point of reference not the male breadwinner, or the factory worker, but the migrant worker. Second, they characterize this worker not by occupation, gender, ethnicity, or endowments, but simply by mobility. And third, while they acknowledge and document the hierarchies that pervade the global labour market, the 'racialization and genderization' of migrant labour, and the discriminatory controls practiced by states, they nevertheless reverse their gaze to explore the process of labour migration from the point of view of migrant workers as a collectivity. Taking Hirschman's notions of 'exit' and 'voice' as a way in, they question the contrast between exit as an 'individualistic' act of withdrawal, and 'voice' as a positive option that might enable collective action. Rather, they suggest, both should be seen as positive strategies in this context: the widespread propensity of migrant workers to 'exit' one job and move to another makes their mobility as a collectivity a driving force behind the politics of labour on a global scale. As they have done throughout the capitalist era, employers seek to facilitate and constrain labour mobility to suit their purposes, while workers respond 'with mobility strategies in the forms of desertion, migration, and quitting to counter or diminish exploitation' (21); and states, more or less responsive from time to time to the demands of capitalists and workers respectively, seek to manage labour flows to their advantage, always on a more than national scale. Seen through the lens of class strategies, migrant workers serve the needs of capital when they are brought in to increase the level of competition for work and keep wages down, but at the same time they look to maximise their opportunities, exercising agency of their own. While employers strive to retain the workers they value while enjoying maximum freedom to discard those they don't as their priorities change, migrant workers look to move on if they can:
'One of the central arguments of the book is that the relation between migration and turnover is critical to understand worker struggle over mobility: migrant labour may be used by employers to access docile labour and reduce high turnover, but under different conditions it can also increase voluntary or worker-led turnover, as in the case of migrants who gained mobility rights through freedom of movement and are able to quit their job without losing residence rights or welfare entitlements. It is indeed because of the differentiation of labour on the one hand (through state regulations of migration, citizenship, or residence status) and on the other, the precariousness generated by intense work and the differential access to welfare and labour protections, that turnover becomes a terrain of social contestation' (4).
In short, citing Goldín (2011: 152): ‘Turnover is the shape that labour takes in global capitalism’ (194). AS accordingly focus on the strategies of highly diverse workers in what is tendentially a global labour market, getting away thereby from both the stereotypical male breadwinner in permanent full time work, and the national focus (methodological nationalism) of most work on labour markets: 'Whether or not a country’s government represents its own national borders as more or less porous according to the needs of the time, we argue that their labour market has never been purely national, in the sense that at least since the origin of the capitalist era, any market has been structured by the possibility for employers to meet their labour demand by mobilizing workers worldwide' (11, emphasis mine). And they bring to the endeavour a deep knowledge of four related literatures, on labour process theory (LPT), migration, social reproduction, and industrial relations.
Acknowledging at various points a range of influential sources (notably, Katz 2001, Smith 2006, Virdee 2014, Vickers 2020, and Baglioni et al 2022), and taking a cue from Çağlar (2016), AS 'embrace mobility as foundational for both migrant and non-migrant workers' (16). This approach escapes anachronistic points of reference, as noted, brings 'production' and 'social reproduction' into a single frame, and lays down a new foundation whose power as an analytical perspective comes from its congruity with two aspects of global political economy, one long-term, and one current. The first is that both states and capitalists pursue policies (in this case, relating to national and global labour markets) in their interests as they perceive them, but the aggregate outcome of the policies they pursue (a) escapes their control, and (b) conduces tendentially to the development of capitalism on a global scale. The second is that while once it might have seemed persuasive to contrast the precarity of migrant labour with full-time employment, 'standard' contracts, job security, and employment and welfare rights for the indigenous working class, this (in any case over-simple) contrast no longer holds. As AS remark: 'Arguably, working in an unskilled and non-standard job puts all workers in a condition of lacking interest in long-term employment, or in a slow career inside the same workplace' (153).
The upshot of this is that AS make the migrant worker, emblematic of the mobile worker, the central figure for understanding global labour markets today:
'Overall, we suggest that the mobility of migrants between workplaces and geographical areas allows them to develop knowledge of different labour markets and build a specific form of shared expertise: transnational mobility skills. Mobility skills constitute the engine of the infrastructures of migrant continuous movement across labour markets, and at the same time elude the migrant labour regime, as they do not always follow the mere logic of wage differentials and migrant dual frame of reference, but are rather concerned about the reproduction of life and household/community relations, that may transcend economic reasoning or calculations. Mobility skills are central to understanding the drivers and tensions of the mechanics of living labour today, including when borders become apparently less porous, as they help to recentre the mobility power of migrants as a central force of institutional and social change, across different infrastructures. ... We therefore shift our gaze to those activities that are required by migrants to sustain their movement across borders as well as their working lives, including access to new labour markets and legal forms of employment, which at times also require forms of conflict and negotiation that may take an explicit collective form' (188, 190).
In short, in rethinking worker power through mobility, from the initial standpoint of migration, they provide the opportunity to rethink the global labour market through mobility. The result, if we bring Holborow into the picture, is a stripped-down framework with only three components, that sheds the outworn assumptions of the past: mobile workers, in diverse households, in the world market. The rest, in a way, is detail - but highly informative detail all the same. The authors know their stuff, and the bibliography is excellent, and well deployed.
Chapter One, 'Theorizing Labour Mobility Power', reviews a range of literature, leading to the point that so-called 'national' labour markets have always been complex and highly differentiated, and extended beyond national borders: 'secure employment with social benefits has been limited to some sections of the workforce in Western countries and at a particular time of economic growth, but to the costs of coexisting with the unpaid, lower paid, and temporary work of many other (women) precarious workers'; and in this context 'even in highly segmented markets with niches of degraded migrant labour, the effects of precarization may become pervasive for hitherto protected sections of the workforce ... and ... not only those at the bottom of the labour market but all workers may see their conditions degraded when informal labour markets and unregulated sections continue to expand. In other words, indigenous workers also appear to suffer the consequences of the overall processes of precarization, of which migrant labour is just a paradigmatic exemplar' (33-4). Rather than talk in terms of 'norms' and 'exceptions', then, AS view the labour market as a complex integrated whole, and 'recentre mobility as a foundational aspect of society rather than as the exception, while criticizing the methodological nationalism that characterized not only labour but also mainstream migration studies' (45). State migration policies, in this perspective, are central to policies towards labour overall. They identify 'attempts by states and capitalists to manage the mobility of migrants in a differential manner: rather than merely by excluding or expelling undocumented migrant workers, or simply segregating them to the margins or the secondary segment of the labour market, migrant labour appears as partially included in the local labour market through migration regime, sexist racialization, and subordination' (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). They suggest that 'such forms of differentiation are made possible by a multiplication of "subject statuses", through the production of a variety of legal and contractual figures that differently exploit migrants through differentiated categories of dependency, constrained mobility, and efforts at controlling their intractable political subjectivities' (Neilson 2009), and that critically, 'these differences are also used by management to actively fragment instances of solidarity in the workforce' (Jordhus-Lier 2014). 'Similarly, the threat of deportability and the illegalization of undocumented migrants (De Genova, 2002) show how, far from merely expelling paperless migrants from the labour market, the border functions as a disciplining tool to keep wages low and make migrant workers disposable' (47-8).
So, in a valuable summary statement, again packed with illuminating secondary references:
'State migration policies appear ... critical to sustaining regimes of labour valorization and segmentation, adding to the mix of labour market de- and re-regulation, welfare reforms, and new transnational migrations and migrant division of labour in the global cities of the North (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003; Wills et al, 2009), as well as in emerging capitalist economies and global production sites (Chan and Selden, 2017; Chan et al, 2020). And yet, such "bordering technologies" are constantly challenged and put under pressure by migrant mobility practices, which are far from simply reacting to strategies of control and governmentality in contemporary migration regimes (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). Therefore, state and supranational borders should not be seen as rigid entities established once and for all and impenetrable, but as continuously criss-crossed and made porous by migrants’ own mobility practices (Papadopoulos and Tsianos, 2013), as well as by the states’ and capital’s own interest at differentially including rather than merely excluding migrants and foreigners. ... Migration can be interpreted as a form of refusal that destabilizes and questions the omnipotence of the state in controlling people’s movements (Gray and Clare, 2022: 1193), but also state assumptions about social integration' (48-9, emphasis mine).
AS look at labour mobility power, then, 'through the lenses of transnational migration as not solely economically driven, but a wider social force that attempts to reappropriate forms of livelihood across fields of production and social reproduction' (52). The four chapters that follow focus on the logistics of living labour, enclaves of differentiated labour, the field of social reproduction, and migrant organizing in turn, anchoring each to a brief vignette of a specific migrant labour regime: the kafala system in the Persian Gulf, labour mobility and immobility in China’s EPZs, the engineering of social reproduction at Ford in the 1910s, and strikes by migrant women strike in 1970s German plants respectively.
Chapter Two, on 'The Logistics of Living Labour', looks at state policies, employers, agencies/intermediaries, migrants, and their social networks and families, drawing critically on Bal's concept of the 'migrant labour regime' (2016): where he places the emphasis on the mechanisms put in place by employers, states, and agencies to limit the mobility and opportunities for protest and organizing of migrant workers, AS seek to show 'how migrants’ mobility defies or at least questions capital and state efforts to maintain a continuous recruitment flow, to dispose of migrant workers at will, and smoothly substitute them with new groups of workers' (59). In even the least promising circumstances, as when migrants from other Arab countries, South Asia and latterly Africa are drawn into the Gulf's highly repressive kafala system (53-5), the combined efforts of exporting states, agents and employers are expanding the global proletariat; and looked at more broadly, such networks are creating a differentiated infrastructure (Xiang and Lindquist, 2014) that turns 'migrants' into 'workers' on a global scale. The reversed gaze works here to reveal the expansion and replenishing of a global labour market from the bottom up, through a series of transitions that lead from the least to the most free forms of labour. In some cases, schemes that draw in migrant workers subsequently expel them, pushing them to seek alternatives elsewhere. In others, as Andrijasevic and Sacchetto (2016: 22) argue, 'multinational migrant workers' themselves move in order to improve their lives and create better opportunities for themselves and their families:
'Rather than limiting mobility practices to an individual workplace or country, the multinational worker shows how migrants share knowledge about job searches and strategize around their opportunities to find employment across different labour markets, comparing wages, terms and conditions, and life in different sites. In doing so, they defy both employers’ expectations about their availability to work irregular and insecure jobs (for meagre remuneration), as well as trade unions’ strategies that tend to exclude migrant agency workers and reduce them to the role of a disposable reserve army of labour. The multinational migrant worker is therefore a critical figure of how both economic and non-economic drivers of labour mobility intersects (sic), how they involve a multi/transnational perspective, but also how they contribute from below to the regulation of labour and mobility both within and across states (62-3, emphasis mine).
So the global migration industry, state schemes such as point-based recruitment, and migrant social networks are intermeshed and mutually constituting (68). Historically (68-72) and in the present, individual states and supranational entities (such as the British Empire and the EU) have promoted and managed labour mobility across borders in their own perceived interest, with outcomes that have often outrun their goals. 'Social networks,' AS note, 'can be used by management as an instrument for work organization, but are also a tool of workers’ organization' (79); equally, they can be used to control female migrants, but they also create opportunities for women to renegotiate gender relations and transform patterns of family authority (79-80). In short, 'the expansion of capitalist relations at the same time entraps and constrains, but also gives more leverage and power to workers, leading to ever evolving forms of circulation and regimentation, criss-crossed by racist discourses and racializing practices. ... Attempts by the state at reducing migration to a labour market strategy, while encompassing a significant amount of logistical and financial resources and relying on a multiplicity of formal and informal agents, tend to fail in the long term, showing how the ordinary practices of migrants and their ‘mobility commons’ (Papadopoulos and Tsianos, 2013) rather often defy or exceed state attempts to control migrant movements across borders' (82). This is a crucial and fundamental point.
In Chapter Three, 'Enclaves of Differentiated Labour', the focus widens to take in internal migrants, global production networks, and the 'enclaves' they create. The starting point is Foxconn and its dormitory regime in China, which is oppressive in the extreme but still part of a broader system through which people (in this case young women migrating from the countryside) become workers with enhanced autonomy: they network, and 'movements from factory to factory have become a learning opportunity for comparing working conditions, wages, hours, and quality of accommodation' (84). States try to manage and control labour inside and outside the production processes in global supply chains, but employment relations are 'embedded in transnational flows of labour, capital, and work organization practices that transcend the national and embrace the global' (87-8). In the first instance, 'the development of specific areas, namely EPZs, or what we will call enclaves of differentiated labour (EDL), allow for the assemblage and management of a specific workforce based on the intersectionality of nationality, gender, age, and race, which in turn shape different degrees of labour mobility power' (88). Workers have varying capacity, whether in EPZs or 'more broadly in workplaces characterized by high incidence of precarious employment arrangements and migrant labour in the Global North' to exercise mobility power, giving rise to a 'continuum of individual and collective agency and resistance to management control' (89). There are two sides, then, to the flow of labour through global supply chains, and global labour markets generally. On the one hand, they discriminate, in particular in terms of gender and race: 'racialized power dynamics segment and segregate certain groups of immigrants to low pay and poverty jobs', and 'differently gendered group are also positioned in specific jobs and occupations according to their socially constructed characteristics and biases about their "inherent abilities"' (94), so that 'the supply chain materially produces not only goods and services, but also unbalanced social relations and hierarchical patterns primarily based on race and gender differentiations' (95, emphasis mine). On the other hand, viewed in the round over time, the many millions of workers drawn into the global working class have agency and networks of their own, and use them where they can to gain experience, acquire skills, and seek out better opportunities. This is the basis for the claim that 'exit', or job mobility is a positive strategy that continually transforms the global workforce. Enclaves of differentiated labour can be sites of discrimination, but they can also provide stepping stones to new opportunities: 'special economic zones' and 'free zones', estimated to employ 90-100 million workers (in 2017), can trap and constrain workers, but at the same time they constitute the first stage of integration into the global economy: 'From the point of view of the global economy, different EDLs should not be considered individually, but as a set of points connected with the surrounding area and also with the rest of the world', and should be seen as 'apparently peripheral, but indeed central, nodes of capital accumulation' (98). This is the point of entry, then, for a new and highly productive way of looking at global labour.
On the politics of EDLs, then: 'The analysis of the formation of disciplined subjects, as a productive effect of power within the chains of global assembly, opens the way to the recognition of multiple forms of resistance' (99 et sec - citing inter alia Ong 1997, Brown 2019, Dutta 2020); and it is a one-sided stereotype that suggests that young women who migrate to EDLs are operating within a patriarchal system under which they inevitably return to their community of origin and marry after a period of factory employment. Entry into paid work away from home just as easily enhances their status, and can be a prelude to moving further on, rather than back. AS accordingly document migrant mobility across the Global South and North, and suggest, with reference to EU studies, that 'high levels of turnover associated with migrant labour appear to emerge mostly in relation to systems of subcontracting and poorly regulated environments where workers on very temporary contracts tend to engage in "job jumping" strategies rather than participating in collective action and unionization (for example, Berntsen, 2016; Wagner and Lillie, 2015), and where employers combine a series of flexibility and retention strategies by using temporary agencies to segment the workforce and manage turnover' (105). As employers look further and further afield to recruit and replace workers, their collective efforts further develop regional and global labour markets. In her own research, Alberti found that 'migrants employed in precarious jobs with loose employment relations, such as catering and hotel jobs, at times succeed in making a strategic use of their temporariness at work while developing independent plans to gain new skills, enrich their social lives, and reproduce their mobility transnationally (Alberti, 2014: 866), and many similar studies are cited (111). In short, 'management and labour play a crucial match on the terrain of mobility and fixity, with far from linear and highly contradictory outcomes for both labour and capital' (113).
Chapter 4, 'The Field of Social Reproduction', looks at 'how social reproduction activities are rather strictly interlinked and enmeshed with labour processes, and in particular with the mobility of labour across production and reproduction' (118). Their focus is on the way in which social reproduction networks can support the agency of migrant workers in the labour market: 'Our refusal to oppose the sphere of reproduction with that of production allows us to understand how the former is not only at the service of the latter, but constitutes a space within which different forms of resistance and self-determination are forged, and where mobility power can grow' (119). In particular, '[t]he availability of an external community that supports and articulates work issues is undoubtedly an important aspect, often overlooked, in analysing the agency of workers and migrants (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011), and key in defining fixity and mobility' (120). At the same time, 'migrant household relations and activities can become a source of protection and incentive for workers in the country of origin to refuse highly exploitative jobs, and push back against the intensification of work, as they draw from transnational remittance income sent by migrant members of the family' (124).
And in a passage typical of their critique of one-sided approaches that unduly minimize potential for worker agency in apparently unpromising situations, AS present a view of dormitories as on the one hand a strategy 'to capture and expand a pool of a just-in-time’s workforce for the needs of production' and 'a site of coercion and control over the workers, blurring the space of work and non-work to the point of creating a total institution, whose main aims are to reduce and "downscale" ... labour reproduction costs and to restrain the freedom of workers by limiting their voice and controlling their associational power', and on the other a space where 'ethnic and family networks both reinforce and moderate controls over labour mobility, but which also permits building forms of mobility', and a site of 'class recomposition and collective action, to gather knowledge about labour markets and strengthen what we call mobility skills' (137). Citing Ceccagno and Sacchetto (2020: 310) they suggest 'not to look at the single dormitory but at the multiplicity of accommodations at work available for migrants. From this point of view, the web of dormitories in Europe – as well as in other countries – can be considered as a chessboard where migrants 'can jump from one square to another in search of better conditions', and also a place where workers develop associational power (144). As they elaborate in the conclusion, 'the dormitory becomes the archetype of mobility control as well as the site where mobility skills are shared, transmitted, and multiplied' (187-8). Highly significant, and nicely put.
The final chapter, 'Migrant Organising', addresses the 'history of the racialized [and gender] segregation of migrant workers within labour markets and in the labour movement itself' (150), along with notable exceptions and variations from country to country, concluding that: 'The fact that unions have been uninterested in migrants, or even actively drawing boundaries between the domestic and foreign workforces, is clearly discernible in both Western and Eastern European countries today', resulting from 'their understanding of labour migration as cheap labour exerting downward pressure on the standards of indigenous workers' (163). It also registers signs of change (Ford, 2019), and essentially proposes that trade unions and activists should 'recenter migrant agency' and embrace the potential of migrant workers, rather than see them as rivals to indigenous workers. 'In our view, such limited funding and short-term investments in organizing migrants partly reflects the ongoing refusal of unions to deal with temporariness as a structural element of contemporary labour. As argued by Alberti and Però (2018), instead of seeing migrant workers as an exceptional and temporary figure of labour, they may be rather understood as emblematic embodiments of the contemporary traits of an increasingly diverse, transient, and precarious workforce which requires sustained organizational efforts' (173, emphasis mine).
With all this in place, the conclusion, 'Rethinking Worker Power Through Mobility' (181-95), is a tour de force that should be on every relevant reading list. Drawing initially on Shire's argument (2020) that migration contributes to the making of transnational markets, which however remain relatively unstable and far from consolidated institutions, AS address the manner in which 'spontaneous movement of people ... occurs alongside the ongoing attempt by states and employers at filtering, restricting, and taming the subjective forms of migrants’ everyday practices. But these practices are carried on in ever increasingly tense markets that appear further away from coordinated models, and are rather marked by increasingly polarized mobility politics and "migrant (own) logistics"’ (183), while 'the social networks that migrants build within and without the labour process appear to play a crucial role in sustaining mobility, but also in developing relatively informal social practices of collective organization and bargaining outside the traditional trade union model (Ryan et al, 2015; Berntsen, 2016; Theunissen et al, 2022)' (185). 'Mobility skills,' then, 'are central to understanding the drivers and tensions of the mechanics of living labour today, including when borders become apparently less porous, as they help to recentre the mobility power of migrants as a central force of institutional and social change, across different infrastructures' (188). In conclusion, and quoted at length:
'The contemporary situation shows how the global race for sourcing forces of labour continues to unfold and to be contested, whereby labour migration flows may follow a logic of their own and exceed governmental and capital expectations, whereas migrant workers strive to set themselves free from the new ties that sponsorship and temporary programmes, hostile environments, and regional systems of body shopping impose on them under new forms of unfree or semi-free waged labour. Even when the power of labour appears almost depleted (with declining union organization, a severe cost of living crisis, and precarious livelihoods across the Global North and South), workers and migrant workers in particular continue organizing on the ground, either by relying on their networks of everyday reproduction and survival, or by developing new organizational forms to confront capital and regain terrain vis-à-vis employers and the state in more coordinated and collective forms (Atzeni and Sacchetto, 2023). We have argued, however, that both individual and collective forms of protest, moving from structural mobility bargaining power at the point of production to social mobility power across the field of production and social reproduction, constitute power sources within a continuum of resistance, that characterizes the historically indeterminate relationship between capital and labour. Our perspective has centered labour mobility and the relevance of social reproduction in order to understand the politics of labour control and worker power in today's increasingly differentiated and heterogeneous markets, from the enclaves of differentiated labour of East Asia and Latin America to the precarizing migrant sectors of the Global North. We hope to renew attention to the subjective as well as structural and regulatory aspects of transnational migration and their importance for work and employment relations, by foregrounding the point of view of migrant labour. With our historical sensitivity in reassessing the development of labour turnover and migration patterns across world regions and periods, and with a critical discussion of the underlying biases that still discourage labour organizations to engage fully with the questions of migration, labour mobility, and temporariness, we also hope to have illuminated some concrete pathways to promote the improvement of the many lives of those on the move, as well as the common interests of their more settled counterparts, accepting that global mobilities will continue to be a legitimate and normal response to the compelling challenges of our uneven and fragile capitalist world' (195).
In short, this is a fundamentally significant text that provides the basis for addressing the politics of the global economy in terms of mobile workers in the world market.
References
Alberti, G. (2014) ‘Mobility strategies, “mobility differentials” and “transnational exit”: the experiences of precarious migrants in London’s hospitality jobs’, Work, Employment and Society, 28(6): 865–81.
Alberti, G. and Però, D. (2018) ‘Migrating industrial relations: migrant workers’ initiative within and outside trade unions’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 56(4): 693–715.
Andrijasevic, R. and Sacchetto, D. (2016) ‘From labour migration to labour mobility? The return of the multinational worker in Europe’, Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 22(2): 219–31.
Atzeni, M., and Sacchetto, D. (2023) ‘Locating labour conflict and its organising forms in contemporary times: between class and the reproduction of capitalism’, Global Labour Journal, 14(3): 207-19.
Baglioni, E., Campling, L., Coe, N.M., and Smith, A. eds (2022) Labour Regime and Global Production, Newcastle: Agenda Publishing.
Bal, C.S. (2016) Production Politics and Migrant Labour Regimes, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Berntsen, L. (2016) ‘Reworking labour practices: on the agency of unorganized mobile migrant construction workers’, Work, Employment and Society, 30(3): 472–88.
Brown, J.A. (2019) ‘Territorial (in) coherence: labour and special economic zones in Laos’s border manufacturing’, Antipode, 51(2): 438–57.
Çağlar, A. (2016) ‘Still “migrants” after all those years: foundational mobilities, temporal frames and emplacement of migrants’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 42(6): 952–69.
Chan, J. and Selden, M. (2017) ‘The labour politics of China’s rural migrant workers’, Globalizations, 14(2): 259–71.
Chan, J., Selden, M., and Pun, N. (2020) Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and the Lives of China’s Workers, London: Pluto.
Coe, N.M. and Jordhus-Lier, D.C. (2011) ‘Constrained agency? Re-evaluating the geographies of labour’, Progress in Human Geography, 35(2): 211–33.
Ceccagno, A. and Sacchetto, D. (2020) ‘The mobility of workers living at work in Europe’, Current Sociology, 68(3): 299–315.
De Genova, N. (2002) ‘Migrant “Illegality” and Deportability in Everyday Life’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 31(1): 419–47.
Dutta, M. (2020) ‘Workplace, emotional bonds and agency: everyday gendered experiences of work in an export processing zone in Tamil Nadu, India’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 52(7): 1357–74.
Ehrenreich, B. and Hochschild, A.R. (eds) (2003) Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, New York: Metropolitan Books.
Ford, M. (2019) From Migrant to Worker: Global Unions and Temporary Labor Migration in Asia, Ithaca-London: Cornell University Press.
Goldín, L.R. (2011) ‘Labor turnover among maquila workers of Highland Guatemala: resistance and semiproletarianization in global capitalism’, Latin American Research Review, 46(3): 133–56.
Gray, N. and Clare, N. (2022) ‘From autonomous to autonomist geography’, Progress in Human Geography, 46(5): 1185–206.
Jordhus-Lier, D. (2014) ‘Fragmentation revisited: flexibility, differentiation and solidarity in hotels’, in D. Jordhus-Lier and A. Underthun (eds) A Hospitable World? Organising Work and Workers in Hotels and Tourist Resorts, London and New York: Routledge, pp 39–51.
Katz, C. (2001) ‘Vagabond capitalism and the necessity of social reproduction’, Antipode, 33(4): 709–28.
Mezzadra, S. and Neilson, B. (2013) Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Neilson, B. (2009) ‘The world seen from a taxi: students-migrants-workers in the global multiplication of labour’, Subjectivity, 29(1): 425–44.
Ong, A. (1997) The Gender and Labor Politics of Postmodernity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Papadopoulos, D. and Tsianos, V.S. (2013) ‘After citizenship: autonomy of migration, organisational ontology and mobile commons’, Citizenship Studies, 17(2): 178–96.
Ryan, L., Erel, U., and D’Angelo, A. (2015) ‘Introduction understanding “Migrant Capital”’, in L. Ryan, U. Erel, and A. D’Angelo (eds) Migrant Capital: Networks, Identities and Strategies. Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 3–17.
Shire, K. (2020) ‘The social order of transnational migration markets’, Global Networks, 20(3): 434–53.
Smith, C. (2006) ‘The double indeterminacy of labour power: labour effort and labour mobility’, Work, Employment and Society, 20(2): 389–402.
Theunissen, A., Zanoni, P., and Van Laer, K. (2022) ‘Fragmented capital and (the loss of) control over posted workers: a case study in the Belgian meat industry’, Work, Employment and Society, 37(4): 934–51.
Vickers, T. (2020) Borders, Migration and Class in an Age of Crisis: Producing Workers and Immigrants, Bristol: Bristol University Press.
Virdee, S. (2014) Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider, London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Wagner, I. and Lillie, N. (2015) ‘Subcontracting, insecurity and posted work: evidence from construction, meat processing and ship building’, in J. Drahokoupil (ed) The Outsourcing Challenge: Organizing Workers Across Fragmented Production Networks, Brussels: ETUI, pp 157–74.
Wills, J., Datta, K., Evans, Y., Herbert, J., May, J., and McIllwaine, C. (2009) Global Cities at Work: New Migrant Division of Labour, London: Pluto Press.
Xiang, B. and Lindquist, J. (2014) ‘Migration infrastructure’, International Migration Review, 48(supplement 1): 122–48.
However, things are changing. Marnie Holborow has recently rebased the relationship between households and capital in Homes in Crisis Capitalism. Gabriela Alberti and Devi Sacchetto (hereafter, AS) have now done the same for the global working class, making three inspired moves. First, they take as their point of reference not the male breadwinner, or the factory worker, but the migrant worker. Second, they characterize this worker not by occupation, gender, ethnicity, or endowments, but simply by mobility. And third, while they acknowledge and document the hierarchies that pervade the global labour market, the 'racialization and genderization' of migrant labour, and the discriminatory controls practiced by states, they nevertheless reverse their gaze to explore the process of labour migration from the point of view of migrant workers as a collectivity. Taking Hirschman's notions of 'exit' and 'voice' as a way in, they question the contrast between exit as an 'individualistic' act of withdrawal, and 'voice' as a positive option that might enable collective action. Rather, they suggest, both should be seen as positive strategies in this context: the widespread propensity of migrant workers to 'exit' one job and move to another makes their mobility as a collectivity a driving force behind the politics of labour on a global scale. As they have done throughout the capitalist era, employers seek to facilitate and constrain labour mobility to suit their purposes, while workers respond 'with mobility strategies in the forms of desertion, migration, and quitting to counter or diminish exploitation' (21); and states, more or less responsive from time to time to the demands of capitalists and workers respectively, seek to manage labour flows to their advantage, always on a more than national scale. Seen through the lens of class strategies, migrant workers serve the needs of capital when they are brought in to increase the level of competition for work and keep wages down, but at the same time they look to maximise their opportunities, exercising agency of their own. While employers strive to retain the workers they value while enjoying maximum freedom to discard those they don't as their priorities change, migrant workers look to move on if they can:
'One of the central arguments of the book is that the relation between migration and turnover is critical to understand worker struggle over mobility: migrant labour may be used by employers to access docile labour and reduce high turnover, but under different conditions it can also increase voluntary or worker-led turnover, as in the case of migrants who gained mobility rights through freedom of movement and are able to quit their job without losing residence rights or welfare entitlements. It is indeed because of the differentiation of labour on the one hand (through state regulations of migration, citizenship, or residence status) and on the other, the precariousness generated by intense work and the differential access to welfare and labour protections, that turnover becomes a terrain of social contestation' (4).
In short, citing Goldín (2011: 152): ‘Turnover is the shape that labour takes in global capitalism’ (194). AS accordingly focus on the strategies of highly diverse workers in what is tendentially a global labour market, getting away thereby from both the stereotypical male breadwinner in permanent full time work, and the national focus (methodological nationalism) of most work on labour markets: 'Whether or not a country’s government represents its own national borders as more or less porous according to the needs of the time, we argue that their labour market has never been purely national, in the sense that at least since the origin of the capitalist era, any market has been structured by the possibility for employers to meet their labour demand by mobilizing workers worldwide' (11, emphasis mine). And they bring to the endeavour a deep knowledge of four related literatures, on labour process theory (LPT), migration, social reproduction, and industrial relations.
Acknowledging at various points a range of influential sources (notably, Katz 2001, Smith 2006, Virdee 2014, Vickers 2020, and Baglioni et al 2022), and taking a cue from Çağlar (2016), AS 'embrace mobility as foundational for both migrant and non-migrant workers' (16). This approach escapes anachronistic points of reference, as noted, brings 'production' and 'social reproduction' into a single frame, and lays down a new foundation whose power as an analytical perspective comes from its congruity with two aspects of global political economy, one long-term, and one current. The first is that both states and capitalists pursue policies (in this case, relating to national and global labour markets) in their interests as they perceive them, but the aggregate outcome of the policies they pursue (a) escapes their control, and (b) conduces tendentially to the development of capitalism on a global scale. The second is that while once it might have seemed persuasive to contrast the precarity of migrant labour with full-time employment, 'standard' contracts, job security, and employment and welfare rights for the indigenous working class, this (in any case over-simple) contrast no longer holds. As AS remark: 'Arguably, working in an unskilled and non-standard job puts all workers in a condition of lacking interest in long-term employment, or in a slow career inside the same workplace' (153).
The upshot of this is that AS make the migrant worker, emblematic of the mobile worker, the central figure for understanding global labour markets today:
'Overall, we suggest that the mobility of migrants between workplaces and geographical areas allows them to develop knowledge of different labour markets and build a specific form of shared expertise: transnational mobility skills. Mobility skills constitute the engine of the infrastructures of migrant continuous movement across labour markets, and at the same time elude the migrant labour regime, as they do not always follow the mere logic of wage differentials and migrant dual frame of reference, but are rather concerned about the reproduction of life and household/community relations, that may transcend economic reasoning or calculations. Mobility skills are central to understanding the drivers and tensions of the mechanics of living labour today, including when borders become apparently less porous, as they help to recentre the mobility power of migrants as a central force of institutional and social change, across different infrastructures. ... We therefore shift our gaze to those activities that are required by migrants to sustain their movement across borders as well as their working lives, including access to new labour markets and legal forms of employment, which at times also require forms of conflict and negotiation that may take an explicit collective form' (188, 190).
In short, in rethinking worker power through mobility, from the initial standpoint of migration, they provide the opportunity to rethink the global labour market through mobility. The result, if we bring Holborow into the picture, is a stripped-down framework with only three components, that sheds the outworn assumptions of the past: mobile workers, in diverse households, in the world market. The rest, in a way, is detail - but highly informative detail all the same. The authors know their stuff, and the bibliography is excellent, and well deployed.
Chapter One, 'Theorizing Labour Mobility Power', reviews a range of literature, leading to the point that so-called 'national' labour markets have always been complex and highly differentiated, and extended beyond national borders: 'secure employment with social benefits has been limited to some sections of the workforce in Western countries and at a particular time of economic growth, but to the costs of coexisting with the unpaid, lower paid, and temporary work of many other (women) precarious workers'; and in this context 'even in highly segmented markets with niches of degraded migrant labour, the effects of precarization may become pervasive for hitherto protected sections of the workforce ... and ... not only those at the bottom of the labour market but all workers may see their conditions degraded when informal labour markets and unregulated sections continue to expand. In other words, indigenous workers also appear to suffer the consequences of the overall processes of precarization, of which migrant labour is just a paradigmatic exemplar' (33-4). Rather than talk in terms of 'norms' and 'exceptions', then, AS view the labour market as a complex integrated whole, and 'recentre mobility as a foundational aspect of society rather than as the exception, while criticizing the methodological nationalism that characterized not only labour but also mainstream migration studies' (45). State migration policies, in this perspective, are central to policies towards labour overall. They identify 'attempts by states and capitalists to manage the mobility of migrants in a differential manner: rather than merely by excluding or expelling undocumented migrant workers, or simply segregating them to the margins or the secondary segment of the labour market, migrant labour appears as partially included in the local labour market through migration regime, sexist racialization, and subordination' (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). They suggest that 'such forms of differentiation are made possible by a multiplication of "subject statuses", through the production of a variety of legal and contractual figures that differently exploit migrants through differentiated categories of dependency, constrained mobility, and efforts at controlling their intractable political subjectivities' (Neilson 2009), and that critically, 'these differences are also used by management to actively fragment instances of solidarity in the workforce' (Jordhus-Lier 2014). 'Similarly, the threat of deportability and the illegalization of undocumented migrants (De Genova, 2002) show how, far from merely expelling paperless migrants from the labour market, the border functions as a disciplining tool to keep wages low and make migrant workers disposable' (47-8).
So, in a valuable summary statement, again packed with illuminating secondary references:
'State migration policies appear ... critical to sustaining regimes of labour valorization and segmentation, adding to the mix of labour market de- and re-regulation, welfare reforms, and new transnational migrations and migrant division of labour in the global cities of the North (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003; Wills et al, 2009), as well as in emerging capitalist economies and global production sites (Chan and Selden, 2017; Chan et al, 2020). And yet, such "bordering technologies" are constantly challenged and put under pressure by migrant mobility practices, which are far from simply reacting to strategies of control and governmentality in contemporary migration regimes (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). Therefore, state and supranational borders should not be seen as rigid entities established once and for all and impenetrable, but as continuously criss-crossed and made porous by migrants’ own mobility practices (Papadopoulos and Tsianos, 2013), as well as by the states’ and capital’s own interest at differentially including rather than merely excluding migrants and foreigners. ... Migration can be interpreted as a form of refusal that destabilizes and questions the omnipotence of the state in controlling people’s movements (Gray and Clare, 2022: 1193), but also state assumptions about social integration' (48-9, emphasis mine).
AS look at labour mobility power, then, 'through the lenses of transnational migration as not solely economically driven, but a wider social force that attempts to reappropriate forms of livelihood across fields of production and social reproduction' (52). The four chapters that follow focus on the logistics of living labour, enclaves of differentiated labour, the field of social reproduction, and migrant organizing in turn, anchoring each to a brief vignette of a specific migrant labour regime: the kafala system in the Persian Gulf, labour mobility and immobility in China’s EPZs, the engineering of social reproduction at Ford in the 1910s, and strikes by migrant women strike in 1970s German plants respectively.
Chapter Two, on 'The Logistics of Living Labour', looks at state policies, employers, agencies/intermediaries, migrants, and their social networks and families, drawing critically on Bal's concept of the 'migrant labour regime' (2016): where he places the emphasis on the mechanisms put in place by employers, states, and agencies to limit the mobility and opportunities for protest and organizing of migrant workers, AS seek to show 'how migrants’ mobility defies or at least questions capital and state efforts to maintain a continuous recruitment flow, to dispose of migrant workers at will, and smoothly substitute them with new groups of workers' (59). In even the least promising circumstances, as when migrants from other Arab countries, South Asia and latterly Africa are drawn into the Gulf's highly repressive kafala system (53-5), the combined efforts of exporting states, agents and employers are expanding the global proletariat; and looked at more broadly, such networks are creating a differentiated infrastructure (Xiang and Lindquist, 2014) that turns 'migrants' into 'workers' on a global scale. The reversed gaze works here to reveal the expansion and replenishing of a global labour market from the bottom up, through a series of transitions that lead from the least to the most free forms of labour. In some cases, schemes that draw in migrant workers subsequently expel them, pushing them to seek alternatives elsewhere. In others, as Andrijasevic and Sacchetto (2016: 22) argue, 'multinational migrant workers' themselves move in order to improve their lives and create better opportunities for themselves and their families:
'Rather than limiting mobility practices to an individual workplace or country, the multinational worker shows how migrants share knowledge about job searches and strategize around their opportunities to find employment across different labour markets, comparing wages, terms and conditions, and life in different sites. In doing so, they defy both employers’ expectations about their availability to work irregular and insecure jobs (for meagre remuneration), as well as trade unions’ strategies that tend to exclude migrant agency workers and reduce them to the role of a disposable reserve army of labour. The multinational migrant worker is therefore a critical figure of how both economic and non-economic drivers of labour mobility intersects (sic), how they involve a multi/transnational perspective, but also how they contribute from below to the regulation of labour and mobility both within and across states (62-3, emphasis mine).
So the global migration industry, state schemes such as point-based recruitment, and migrant social networks are intermeshed and mutually constituting (68). Historically (68-72) and in the present, individual states and supranational entities (such as the British Empire and the EU) have promoted and managed labour mobility across borders in their own perceived interest, with outcomes that have often outrun their goals. 'Social networks,' AS note, 'can be used by management as an instrument for work organization, but are also a tool of workers’ organization' (79); equally, they can be used to control female migrants, but they also create opportunities for women to renegotiate gender relations and transform patterns of family authority (79-80). In short, 'the expansion of capitalist relations at the same time entraps and constrains, but also gives more leverage and power to workers, leading to ever evolving forms of circulation and regimentation, criss-crossed by racist discourses and racializing practices. ... Attempts by the state at reducing migration to a labour market strategy, while encompassing a significant amount of logistical and financial resources and relying on a multiplicity of formal and informal agents, tend to fail in the long term, showing how the ordinary practices of migrants and their ‘mobility commons’ (Papadopoulos and Tsianos, 2013) rather often defy or exceed state attempts to control migrant movements across borders' (82). This is a crucial and fundamental point.
In Chapter Three, 'Enclaves of Differentiated Labour', the focus widens to take in internal migrants, global production networks, and the 'enclaves' they create. The starting point is Foxconn and its dormitory regime in China, which is oppressive in the extreme but still part of a broader system through which people (in this case young women migrating from the countryside) become workers with enhanced autonomy: they network, and 'movements from factory to factory have become a learning opportunity for comparing working conditions, wages, hours, and quality of accommodation' (84). States try to manage and control labour inside and outside the production processes in global supply chains, but employment relations are 'embedded in transnational flows of labour, capital, and work organization practices that transcend the national and embrace the global' (87-8). In the first instance, 'the development of specific areas, namely EPZs, or what we will call enclaves of differentiated labour (EDL), allow for the assemblage and management of a specific workforce based on the intersectionality of nationality, gender, age, and race, which in turn shape different degrees of labour mobility power' (88). Workers have varying capacity, whether in EPZs or 'more broadly in workplaces characterized by high incidence of precarious employment arrangements and migrant labour in the Global North' to exercise mobility power, giving rise to a 'continuum of individual and collective agency and resistance to management control' (89). There are two sides, then, to the flow of labour through global supply chains, and global labour markets generally. On the one hand, they discriminate, in particular in terms of gender and race: 'racialized power dynamics segment and segregate certain groups of immigrants to low pay and poverty jobs', and 'differently gendered group are also positioned in specific jobs and occupations according to their socially constructed characteristics and biases about their "inherent abilities"' (94), so that 'the supply chain materially produces not only goods and services, but also unbalanced social relations and hierarchical patterns primarily based on race and gender differentiations' (95, emphasis mine). On the other hand, viewed in the round over time, the many millions of workers drawn into the global working class have agency and networks of their own, and use them where they can to gain experience, acquire skills, and seek out better opportunities. This is the basis for the claim that 'exit', or job mobility is a positive strategy that continually transforms the global workforce. Enclaves of differentiated labour can be sites of discrimination, but they can also provide stepping stones to new opportunities: 'special economic zones' and 'free zones', estimated to employ 90-100 million workers (in 2017), can trap and constrain workers, but at the same time they constitute the first stage of integration into the global economy: 'From the point of view of the global economy, different EDLs should not be considered individually, but as a set of points connected with the surrounding area and also with the rest of the world', and should be seen as 'apparently peripheral, but indeed central, nodes of capital accumulation' (98). This is the point of entry, then, for a new and highly productive way of looking at global labour.
On the politics of EDLs, then: 'The analysis of the formation of disciplined subjects, as a productive effect of power within the chains of global assembly, opens the way to the recognition of multiple forms of resistance' (99 et sec - citing inter alia Ong 1997, Brown 2019, Dutta 2020); and it is a one-sided stereotype that suggests that young women who migrate to EDLs are operating within a patriarchal system under which they inevitably return to their community of origin and marry after a period of factory employment. Entry into paid work away from home just as easily enhances their status, and can be a prelude to moving further on, rather than back. AS accordingly document migrant mobility across the Global South and North, and suggest, with reference to EU studies, that 'high levels of turnover associated with migrant labour appear to emerge mostly in relation to systems of subcontracting and poorly regulated environments where workers on very temporary contracts tend to engage in "job jumping" strategies rather than participating in collective action and unionization (for example, Berntsen, 2016; Wagner and Lillie, 2015), and where employers combine a series of flexibility and retention strategies by using temporary agencies to segment the workforce and manage turnover' (105). As employers look further and further afield to recruit and replace workers, their collective efforts further develop regional and global labour markets. In her own research, Alberti found that 'migrants employed in precarious jobs with loose employment relations, such as catering and hotel jobs, at times succeed in making a strategic use of their temporariness at work while developing independent plans to gain new skills, enrich their social lives, and reproduce their mobility transnationally (Alberti, 2014: 866), and many similar studies are cited (111). In short, 'management and labour play a crucial match on the terrain of mobility and fixity, with far from linear and highly contradictory outcomes for both labour and capital' (113).
Chapter 4, 'The Field of Social Reproduction', looks at 'how social reproduction activities are rather strictly interlinked and enmeshed with labour processes, and in particular with the mobility of labour across production and reproduction' (118). Their focus is on the way in which social reproduction networks can support the agency of migrant workers in the labour market: 'Our refusal to oppose the sphere of reproduction with that of production allows us to understand how the former is not only at the service of the latter, but constitutes a space within which different forms of resistance and self-determination are forged, and where mobility power can grow' (119). In particular, '[t]he availability of an external community that supports and articulates work issues is undoubtedly an important aspect, often overlooked, in analysing the agency of workers and migrants (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011), and key in defining fixity and mobility' (120). At the same time, 'migrant household relations and activities can become a source of protection and incentive for workers in the country of origin to refuse highly exploitative jobs, and push back against the intensification of work, as they draw from transnational remittance income sent by migrant members of the family' (124).
And in a passage typical of their critique of one-sided approaches that unduly minimize potential for worker agency in apparently unpromising situations, AS present a view of dormitories as on the one hand a strategy 'to capture and expand a pool of a just-in-time’s workforce for the needs of production' and 'a site of coercion and control over the workers, blurring the space of work and non-work to the point of creating a total institution, whose main aims are to reduce and "downscale" ... labour reproduction costs and to restrain the freedom of workers by limiting their voice and controlling their associational power', and on the other a space where 'ethnic and family networks both reinforce and moderate controls over labour mobility, but which also permits building forms of mobility', and a site of 'class recomposition and collective action, to gather knowledge about labour markets and strengthen what we call mobility skills' (137). Citing Ceccagno and Sacchetto (2020: 310) they suggest 'not to look at the single dormitory but at the multiplicity of accommodations at work available for migrants. From this point of view, the web of dormitories in Europe – as well as in other countries – can be considered as a chessboard where migrants 'can jump from one square to another in search of better conditions', and also a place where workers develop associational power (144). As they elaborate in the conclusion, 'the dormitory becomes the archetype of mobility control as well as the site where mobility skills are shared, transmitted, and multiplied' (187-8). Highly significant, and nicely put.
The final chapter, 'Migrant Organising', addresses the 'history of the racialized [and gender] segregation of migrant workers within labour markets and in the labour movement itself' (150), along with notable exceptions and variations from country to country, concluding that: 'The fact that unions have been uninterested in migrants, or even actively drawing boundaries between the domestic and foreign workforces, is clearly discernible in both Western and Eastern European countries today', resulting from 'their understanding of labour migration as cheap labour exerting downward pressure on the standards of indigenous workers' (163). It also registers signs of change (Ford, 2019), and essentially proposes that trade unions and activists should 'recenter migrant agency' and embrace the potential of migrant workers, rather than see them as rivals to indigenous workers. 'In our view, such limited funding and short-term investments in organizing migrants partly reflects the ongoing refusal of unions to deal with temporariness as a structural element of contemporary labour. As argued by Alberti and Però (2018), instead of seeing migrant workers as an exceptional and temporary figure of labour, they may be rather understood as emblematic embodiments of the contemporary traits of an increasingly diverse, transient, and precarious workforce which requires sustained organizational efforts' (173, emphasis mine).
With all this in place, the conclusion, 'Rethinking Worker Power Through Mobility' (181-95), is a tour de force that should be on every relevant reading list. Drawing initially on Shire's argument (2020) that migration contributes to the making of transnational markets, which however remain relatively unstable and far from consolidated institutions, AS address the manner in which 'spontaneous movement of people ... occurs alongside the ongoing attempt by states and employers at filtering, restricting, and taming the subjective forms of migrants’ everyday practices. But these practices are carried on in ever increasingly tense markets that appear further away from coordinated models, and are rather marked by increasingly polarized mobility politics and "migrant (own) logistics"’ (183), while 'the social networks that migrants build within and without the labour process appear to play a crucial role in sustaining mobility, but also in developing relatively informal social practices of collective organization and bargaining outside the traditional trade union model (Ryan et al, 2015; Berntsen, 2016; Theunissen et al, 2022)' (185). 'Mobility skills,' then, 'are central to understanding the drivers and tensions of the mechanics of living labour today, including when borders become apparently less porous, as they help to recentre the mobility power of migrants as a central force of institutional and social change, across different infrastructures' (188). In conclusion, and quoted at length:
'The contemporary situation shows how the global race for sourcing forces of labour continues to unfold and to be contested, whereby labour migration flows may follow a logic of their own and exceed governmental and capital expectations, whereas migrant workers strive to set themselves free from the new ties that sponsorship and temporary programmes, hostile environments, and regional systems of body shopping impose on them under new forms of unfree or semi-free waged labour. Even when the power of labour appears almost depleted (with declining union organization, a severe cost of living crisis, and precarious livelihoods across the Global North and South), workers and migrant workers in particular continue organizing on the ground, either by relying on their networks of everyday reproduction and survival, or by developing new organizational forms to confront capital and regain terrain vis-à-vis employers and the state in more coordinated and collective forms (Atzeni and Sacchetto, 2023). We have argued, however, that both individual and collective forms of protest, moving from structural mobility bargaining power at the point of production to social mobility power across the field of production and social reproduction, constitute power sources within a continuum of resistance, that characterizes the historically indeterminate relationship between capital and labour. Our perspective has centered labour mobility and the relevance of social reproduction in order to understand the politics of labour control and worker power in today's increasingly differentiated and heterogeneous markets, from the enclaves of differentiated labour of East Asia and Latin America to the precarizing migrant sectors of the Global North. We hope to renew attention to the subjective as well as structural and regulatory aspects of transnational migration and their importance for work and employment relations, by foregrounding the point of view of migrant labour. With our historical sensitivity in reassessing the development of labour turnover and migration patterns across world regions and periods, and with a critical discussion of the underlying biases that still discourage labour organizations to engage fully with the questions of migration, labour mobility, and temporariness, we also hope to have illuminated some concrete pathways to promote the improvement of the many lives of those on the move, as well as the common interests of their more settled counterparts, accepting that global mobilities will continue to be a legitimate and normal response to the compelling challenges of our uneven and fragile capitalist world' (195).
In short, this is a fundamentally significant text that provides the basis for addressing the politics of the global economy in terms of mobile workers in the world market.
References
Alberti, G. (2014) ‘Mobility strategies, “mobility differentials” and “transnational exit”: the experiences of precarious migrants in London’s hospitality jobs’, Work, Employment and Society, 28(6): 865–81.
Alberti, G. and Però, D. (2018) ‘Migrating industrial relations: migrant workers’ initiative within and outside trade unions’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 56(4): 693–715.
Andrijasevic, R. and Sacchetto, D. (2016) ‘From labour migration to labour mobility? The return of the multinational worker in Europe’, Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 22(2): 219–31.
Atzeni, M., and Sacchetto, D. (2023) ‘Locating labour conflict and its organising forms in contemporary times: between class and the reproduction of capitalism’, Global Labour Journal, 14(3): 207-19.
Baglioni, E., Campling, L., Coe, N.M., and Smith, A. eds (2022) Labour Regime and Global Production, Newcastle: Agenda Publishing.
Bal, C.S. (2016) Production Politics and Migrant Labour Regimes, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Berntsen, L. (2016) ‘Reworking labour practices: on the agency of unorganized mobile migrant construction workers’, Work, Employment and Society, 30(3): 472–88.
Brown, J.A. (2019) ‘Territorial (in) coherence: labour and special economic zones in Laos’s border manufacturing’, Antipode, 51(2): 438–57.
Çağlar, A. (2016) ‘Still “migrants” after all those years: foundational mobilities, temporal frames and emplacement of migrants’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 42(6): 952–69.
Chan, J. and Selden, M. (2017) ‘The labour politics of China’s rural migrant workers’, Globalizations, 14(2): 259–71.
Chan, J., Selden, M., and Pun, N. (2020) Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and the Lives of China’s Workers, London: Pluto.
Coe, N.M. and Jordhus-Lier, D.C. (2011) ‘Constrained agency? Re-evaluating the geographies of labour’, Progress in Human Geography, 35(2): 211–33.
Ceccagno, A. and Sacchetto, D. (2020) ‘The mobility of workers living at work in Europe’, Current Sociology, 68(3): 299–315.
De Genova, N. (2002) ‘Migrant “Illegality” and Deportability in Everyday Life’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 31(1): 419–47.
Dutta, M. (2020) ‘Workplace, emotional bonds and agency: everyday gendered experiences of work in an export processing zone in Tamil Nadu, India’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 52(7): 1357–74.
Ehrenreich, B. and Hochschild, A.R. (eds) (2003) Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, New York: Metropolitan Books.
Ford, M. (2019) From Migrant to Worker: Global Unions and Temporary Labor Migration in Asia, Ithaca-London: Cornell University Press.
Goldín, L.R. (2011) ‘Labor turnover among maquila workers of Highland Guatemala: resistance and semiproletarianization in global capitalism’, Latin American Research Review, 46(3): 133–56.
Gray, N. and Clare, N. (2022) ‘From autonomous to autonomist geography’, Progress in Human Geography, 46(5): 1185–206.
Jordhus-Lier, D. (2014) ‘Fragmentation revisited: flexibility, differentiation and solidarity in hotels’, in D. Jordhus-Lier and A. Underthun (eds) A Hospitable World? Organising Work and Workers in Hotels and Tourist Resorts, London and New York: Routledge, pp 39–51.
Katz, C. (2001) ‘Vagabond capitalism and the necessity of social reproduction’, Antipode, 33(4): 709–28.
Mezzadra, S. and Neilson, B. (2013) Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Neilson, B. (2009) ‘The world seen from a taxi: students-migrants-workers in the global multiplication of labour’, Subjectivity, 29(1): 425–44.
Ong, A. (1997) The Gender and Labor Politics of Postmodernity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Papadopoulos, D. and Tsianos, V.S. (2013) ‘After citizenship: autonomy of migration, organisational ontology and mobile commons’, Citizenship Studies, 17(2): 178–96.
Ryan, L., Erel, U., and D’Angelo, A. (2015) ‘Introduction understanding “Migrant Capital”’, in L. Ryan, U. Erel, and A. D’Angelo (eds) Migrant Capital: Networks, Identities and Strategies. Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 3–17.
Shire, K. (2020) ‘The social order of transnational migration markets’, Global Networks, 20(3): 434–53.
Smith, C. (2006) ‘The double indeterminacy of labour power: labour effort and labour mobility’, Work, Employment and Society, 20(2): 389–402.
Theunissen, A., Zanoni, P., and Van Laer, K. (2022) ‘Fragmented capital and (the loss of) control over posted workers: a case study in the Belgian meat industry’, Work, Employment and Society, 37(4): 934–51.
Vickers, T. (2020) Borders, Migration and Class in an Age of Crisis: Producing Workers and Immigrants, Bristol: Bristol University Press.
Virdee, S. (2014) Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider, London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Wagner, I. and Lillie, N. (2015) ‘Subcontracting, insecurity and posted work: evidence from construction, meat processing and ship building’, in J. Drahokoupil (ed) The Outsourcing Challenge: Organizing Workers Across Fragmented Production Networks, Brussels: ETUI, pp 157–74.
Wills, J., Datta, K., Evans, Y., Herbert, J., May, J., and McIllwaine, C. (2009) Global Cities at Work: New Migrant Division of Labour, London: Pluto Press.
Xiang, B. and Lindquist, J. (2014) ‘Migration infrastructure’, International Migration Review, 48(supplement 1): 122–48.