Just Work? Migrant Workers, Capitalist Globalisation and Resistance

Aziz Choudry and Mondli Hlatshwayo

The living and working conditions of migrant workers and the political economy of migration have been examined in many studies. While this body of work helps us to understand the challenges and conditions that migrant workers face, including the dynamics of class, gender, race and immigration status, and the roles that various sections of the global migrant workforce play in labour processes, this international collection of essays illuminates a less-discussed topic: migrant workers' struggles and labour organising experiences. This book centres migrant workers' agency, forms of worker organisation, the politics of solidarity with migrant workers, campaigns to improve their working conditions and the role of trade unions, without neglecting and downplaying constraints and challenges facing migrant workers today. Together, the chapters of this book reflect critically on the possibilities and limitations of organising migrant workers across a number of sectors in five continents in an era of capitalist crisis, the neoliberalisation of immigration regimes (Akers Chacon and Davis, 2006; Arat-Koc, 1999) and 'austerity'. In Just Work?, academics and labour organisers collaborate to deepen our understanding of these phenomena, and critically examine recent labour organising efforts and the prospects for improving the economic and social conditions of migrant and immigrant workers in a number of contexts. This global volume contributes to the critical literatures on migration, precarious employment, transformation of paid work and the political actions of migrant workers. It is grounded in critical interdisciplinary scholarship, and activist and organising experiences, exploring contexts which are less well traversed by previous work on migrant and immigrant workers. It also purposefully combines the genres of academic scholarship with chapters written by labour organisers and migrant justice activists – although sometimes these approaches overlap. We believe that it is important and necessary to bring reflexive scholar-activist perspectives on labour migration more squarely into view. Migrant and immigrant workers around the world continue to organise in the face of exploitation and oppression, and often find themselves on the frontlines of struggles against precarity, austerity and other forms of capitalist exploitation which impact all working people. Indeed, their struggles continue to highlight ways in which capital exploits workers through immigration status and the social relations of race, gender and class across the world. Moreover, the struggles, organising and resistance of migrant workers are an indication of an era where migrant and immigrant workers are a vital part of a social and political force in a global power struggle.

Yet 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 liberalisation and deregulation, the majority of the world's people do not experience such freedom to move across borders. Simplistic, populist explanations which dehumanise migrants, criminalise their movements and obscure the reasons why people migrate continue to abound. Indeed, this chapter was written at a time of renewed xenophobic violence in South Africa which left several dead, while forcing thousands from their homes. Meanwhile an estimated 800 people from Africa and the Middle East had just drowned in the sinking of a single overloaded boat – one of many vessels carrying people trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe, desperate for a future. It is also one of many deadly migration routes which is claiming lives every day. In an April 2015 public address, former Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell told a University of Alberta audience that gender equality, which she claimed to be a 'Canadian value' was under threat in a 'society of immigration' (National Post, 2015). The start of the 2016 US presidential campaign gave a prominent platform for sometimes virulently racist anti-immigrant posturing by several nominees. On the other side of the Atlantic, the 2015 British election campaign saw most major political parties, once again, trying to talk 'tougher' than each other about curbing and controlling immigration.

From the murders and displacements in South Africa to the drownings in the Mediterranean, migrant deaths are not random 'incidents', but rather they are manifestations of the intentional violence of border policies and anti-migrant racism. Far from bringing people together, flattening the world, or ironing out inequities, capitalist globalisation is deepening gaps between rich and poor within and across nation states through preying on ethnic, racial and religious divisions within the working class. Growing xenophobia is also leading to immigrant-blaming, culture talk, and the securitisation and militarisation of borders fuelled by heightened state-sanctioned politics of fear and loathing against 'migrants' and 'foreigners'. Yet it is important to reiterate that the policing of borders and tighter restrictions on immigration have never been meant to completely stop migration. Rather,...