Migrant labour will face ongoing constraints in Qatar

Headline QATAR: Migrant labour will face ongoing constraints

Essential Farmworkers and the Pandemic Crisis: Migrant Labour Conditions, and Legal and Political Responses in Italy and Spain

The agri-food system across Europe relies heavily on migrant labour. Border lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic immobilised thousands of foreign farmworkers, giving rise to fears of labour shortages and food production losses in EU countries. Farmers’ organisations sought institutional interventions to address this labour demand. Although migrant workers have become a fundamental component of core sectors in recent decades, it is only in the current health emergency that they were recognised as ‘essential’ workers. The chapter analyses the working conditions of migrant farmworkers alongside national debates and institutional interventions in Italy and Spain during the pandemic. It provides a critical comparative analysis of legal and policy interventions to address migrants’ situations of vulnerability. Both countries depend on important contingents of EU and non-EU migrant farmworkers, especially in fruit and vegetable production; moreover, they present common aspects in supply chain dynamics and labour market policies, but also specific differences in labour, migration and social policies. Both adopted measures to face the condition of irregularity of migrant workers in order to respond to labour demand in the agri-food sector and to provide these workers with safe working and living conditions during the pandemic. However, these interventions reveal shortcomings that significantly limit their impact and outcomes, calling into question to what extent migrant workers are really considered as ‘essential’ in a long-term perspective and, therefore, to what extent the current pandemic constitutes an opportunity for a new push to enforce labour and migrant rights.

Cultivating Precarisation: Intersecting Vulnerabilities of Syrian Refugees in the Turkish Agricultural Sector

This article explores how the vulnerabilities of Syrian refugees influence their integration into Turkish labour markets, in particular the agricultural sector. ‘Vulnerable integration’ refers to the inclusion of the most vulnerable migrant labour – women and children – in the face of rivalry among different segments of the precariat to obtain existing agricultural jobs. With a focus on intersectional vulnerabilities and the feminisation of precarisation of Syrian labour in Turkey, I aim to highlight the interconnectedness between women’s production and social reproduction. Therefore, I develop a sociological multidimensional dynamic way of thinking about the integration of Syrian refugee labour in Turkey’s seasonal agricultural labour markets.

Migrant Care Labour, Covid-19, and the Long-Term Care Crisis: Achieving Solidarity for Care Providers and Recipients

Globally there is a care crisis in terms of the quantity of care needed for an aging population and the quality of both the care provided and work conditions of those providing this care. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and heighted this crisis of care. In this chapter we review the issue with a particular focus on long-term care (LTC) facilities and the type and skill mix of labour, including the degree to which immigrant workers are over-represented in this sector. We offer some conceptual reflections on elder care as a matter of social justice and ethics in terms of those needing and providing care. These concerns take on a specific global dimension when we understand the transnationalisation of care, or the care provisioning function of what are termed global care chains. We contextualise how this migrant labour is positioned within this sector through international comparisons of funding models for LTC, which also allows us to understand the structural conditions within which this globally-sourced workforce is positioned. We then highlight two significant contributing factors to the current LTC crisis that were intensified and exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic using Ontario, Canada, as an example: the role of the private sector and the unsustainable extraction of profits from this service, and the gendered and racialised devaluing of migrant labour so essential to the sector.

Migrations and diversifications in the UK and Japan

Japan and the UK are long-established countries of immigration which although having different histories both share experience as colonial powers which have shaped their somewhat hostile attitudes towards migration alongside a need for migrant labour and negative public attitudes towards migrants. This paper sets the context to the Special Issue of the same name. It examines the migration and diversification histories and scholarships of Japan and the UK identifying common themes as well as divergences noting the ongoing diversifications of populations in both countries albeit on different scales. It then examines the key features which shape processes underpinning the emergence of superdiversity: super-mobility, and the scale, speed and spread of diversification, arguing the need to think about such processes outside of UK and Europe and considering the ways in which shifting scholarly gaze of superdiversity researchers to Japan can address some of the critiques of its Western-centric bias. The paper then outlines four main themes in superdiversity research setting out how they are addressed in this special issue before describing the key contributions of the ten papers which form the content of the collection.

Mobile workers, contingent labour: Migration, the gig economy and the multiplication of labour

The article takes the surprising exit of the food delivery platform Deliveroo from Berlin as a starting point to analyse the relationship between migration and the gig economy. In Berlin and many cities across the globe, migrant workers are indispensable to the operations of digital platforms such as Uber, Helpling, or Deliveroo. The article uses in-depth ethnographic and qualitative research to show how the latter's exit from Berlin provides an almost exemplary picture of why urban gig economy platforms are strongholds of migrant labour, while at the same time, demonstrating the very contingency of this form of work. The article analyses the specific reasons why digital platforms are particularly open to migrants and argues that the very combination of new forms of algorithmic management and hyper-flexible forms of employment that is characteristic of gig economy platforms is also the reason why these platforms are geared perfectly toward the exploitation of migrant labour. This allows the analysis of digital platforms in the context of stratified labour markets and situates them within a long history of contingent labour that is closely intertwined with the mobility of labour.

Migrant Labour and Their “Capitalist Compatriots”: Towards a History of Ethnic Capitalism

The relationship between migration and Australian capitalism has long been a topic of robust scholarly debate in sociology and economics. Researchers in those fields have highlighted how migration has left an indelible imprint on Australian capitalism. By contrast, Australian migration histories have given scant attention to the role ethnic groups played in Australian capitalism. This lack of attention is particularly curious in historical studies of Greek Australia given the significance of small business in facilitating migration and settlement. From Federation onwards, Greek ethnic capitalism - or, more precisely, the relations between Greek migrant labourers and their petite bourgeoisie employers - became a topic of media coverage. In fact, the relations between Greek workers and employers were so important that newspapers routinely reported on the subject. This article examines this media coverage, its racialist and criminalising connotations, and historical relevance. It concludes with some observations on how histories of capitalism can productively engage with the histories of ethnicisation.