Initiatives and Responses to Migrant Workers during the Lockdown

This narrative describes an initiative of the National Service Scheme team at Andhra Loyola Institute of Engineering and Technology. It highlights initiatives to address the situation of migrant workers during the pandemic lockdown in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh in India. In the Krishna District of Andhra Pradesh, migrant laborers were forced to walk home, sometimes hundreds, even thousands of kilometers, to reunite with their families. It was hard to ignore these images, especially those who carried the elderly on their shoulders, and small children slumped over rolling suitcases. Most used any means of transport they found, even bicycles. Some succumbed to accidents and exposure to heat. In the midst of the lockdown, the NSS team quickly came together and planned an outreach/relief camp for migrants in Krishna District. It was chosen since many villagers were migrants and the lockdown had affected in multiple ways. The relief camp took place in the month of April, a time when temperatures soar in southern India. The students and the faculty members joined hands to reach out to the Migrants in the most despairing moments. The students commented that they saw their education from a different perspective, one that integrated curriculum and good citizenship for marginalized persons. One of the ways of infusing relevance into education is to embed it within meaningful service learning. This paper is an attempt to exhibit the Initiative and Responses to the Migrant workers during the Lockdown.

Erasure, Demolition, and Violent Obsolescence in the Urban Margins

This chapter explores the lived experiences and politics of erasure, demolition, and obsolescence logics in Agbogbloshie. The author highlights how the migrant laborers who make up the majority of workers in Agbogbloshie have faced repeated rounds of eviction and forced displacement. The author shows how e-workers struggle to negotiate state-based forms of violent erasure fueled by demolition and flood control logics that paradoxically redirect and reorient the focus and politics of environmental health in Agbogbloshie. The experience of displacement and eviction in Agbogbloshie exposes intersecting logics of erasure, demolition, and obsolescence. The chapter explores how e-waste workers experience “slow violence” in the form of toxic exposures, bodily distress, and displacement. But Agbogbloshie is not simply a precarious space of destruction or an impossible place to live. As this chapter shows, e-waste workers sustain cultural life amidst dire lived experiences of erasure in Ghana’s urban margins.

Analysis of the influence of parents' going out on the mental health of left-behind children in rural areas

With the continuous and deepening of urbanization in my country, more and more migrant laborers appear, accompanied by the emergence of left-behind children. As a representative of children with lower socioeconomic status, left-behind children in rural areas have different degrees of problems in physical and mental health and learning. This article uses China’s education tracking survey data to empirically analyze the impact of parents’going out on the mental health of left-behind children in rural areas. The study found that mothers play an indispensable role in the growth of children and have a significant impact on the development of children’s mental health. Therefore, in the policy of focusing on the protection of left-behind children, it is necessary to rationally allocate the arrangements for parents to take care of home and work outside to create a normal and suitable family atmosphere for the left-behind children.

Advantage and Disadvantage of Foreign Migrant Fishermen in Small-Scale Fisheries toward Rural Coastal Areas

This research aims to explore the advantage and disadvantage of hiring foreign migrant laborers by small-scale fisheries (SSFs) toward rural coastal areas. The targeted groups are migrant fishermen coming from Indonesia who work onboard Taiwan’s fishing boats within Nanfangao area. First of all, we outline the importance of SSFs, particularly in developing countries. Many SSFs are characterized by self-governing mechanisms that have significant conservation value. This study is not only an exploratory research to find out and discover the range and scope of issues and concepts, but also is an explanatory research to explain how or why things are used to predict, which is carried out to investigate in a timely manner a phenomenon, that has not been studied before, or has not been well explained previously. As a result, this study indicates that the future research needs to demand priority and generate operational definitions for building a better-researched model. JEL classification numbers: F16, F60, H13. Keywords: Foreign Migrant Labor, Small-Scale Fisheries, Rural Coastal Areas.

Advantage and Disadvantage of Foreign Migrant Fishermen in Small-Scale Fisheries toward Rural Coastal Areas

This research aims to explore the advantage and disadvantage of hiring foreign migrant laborers by small-scale fisheries (SSFs) toward rural coastal areas. The targeted groups are migrant fishermen coming from Indonesia who work onboard Taiwan’s fishing boats within Nanfangao area. First of all, we outline the importance of SSFs, particularly in developing countries. Many SSFs are characterized by self-governing mechanisms that have significant conservation value. This study is not only an exploratory research to find out and discover the range and scope of issues and concepts, but also is an explanatory research to explain how or why things are used to predict, which is carried out to investigate in a timely manner a phenomenon, that has not been studied before, or has not been well explained previously. As a result, this study indicates that the future research needs to demand priority and generate operational definitions for building a better-researched model. JEL classification numbers: F16, F60, H13. Keywords: Foreign Migrant Labor, Small-Scale Fisheries, Rural Coastal Areas.

Digital Agriculture and Labor: A Few Challenges for Social Sustainability

Academic and political debates on the digitalization of agriculture have addressed sustainability mainly from an ecological perspective. Social sustainability, particularly questions of labor, has been largely neglected in the literature thus far. This is particularly problematic since digitalization could fundamentally change farming practices and labor processes on farms, with possibly far-reaching consequences for rural development, rural communities as well as migrant laborers. Looking at the case study of Germany, this article asks how digital technologies are changing labor processes on horticultural and arable farms. The aim of this paper is to bring labor into the debates around agriculture and digitalization and to offer a detailed picture of the impacts of digital technologies on labor in agriculture. The case study builds on fourteen in-depth interviews conducted from June 2020 to March 2021, participant observation, and digital ethnography. The results show new forms of labor control and an intensification of the work process linked to methods of digital Taylorism, as well as risks of working-class fragmentation along age lines. A deskilling of workers or farmers due to digitalization has not been observed. The suggestion of an increased dependency of workers due to the loss of employment opportunities in agriculture is contested. The results stress the importance of designing agricultural policies that foster fair and equitable working conditions.

The Panama Papers

This chapter presents a case study of grassroots networks between the Spanish anarchist movement and migrant laborers working on the construction of the Panama Canal (1904-1914). Sources provided by the anarchist press of both areas reveal sustained material and ideological exchange across the Atlantic in these years, with print materials, remittances, solidarity campaigns and public debates binding radical workers in a new and challenging context to the one they had left behind. Sites of global industrial capital, such as the Canal Zone, are thus revealed to form a central locale in the conception and functioning of an alternative, radical geography in the early twentieth century, marked by the horizontal connections sustained by the publishers, contributors and readers of anarchist print.

The main issue working with migrant construction labor: a case study in Thailand

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to study and prioritize the problems impacted on construction work together migrant laborers, by using the Delphi technique. The case study is construction work in Bangkok and metropolitan zones, Thailand.Design/methodology/approachThe framework of the perceived issues caused by working with migrant construction labors especially migrant construction laborers from neighboring countries were identified from literature reviews. The issue list was sent to 162 experts seeking for their opinions. Subsequently, a questionnaire was created from 58 items of suitable issue lists according to expert's opinions. The questionnaires were then submitted to 147 respondents from construction contractor companies. Their responses were calculated and prioritized by means of the Delphi techniqueFindingsThe polling data showed its constancy on the second round of survey. There were 34 out of 58 items passed consensus criteria. The issue “Foreman obtained incompetent or inadequate trained migrant labors when relocate them from/to other site or job” ranked 1st in priority ranking with the average score of 4.56. Subproblems were appropriately prioritized according to their mean scores.Practical implicationsThe results of this research were expected to facilitate construction operators in making appropriate decisions and primary solution concerning main issue factors in working with migrant labors, in order to help even more increasing competition efficiency in Thai construction industries.Originality/valueThe research provides a list of main issue occurred in the case study. These outcomes are also expected to provide important information for other case studies on the issue working with migrant construction labor.

Iran in Motion

Completed in 1938, the Trans-Iranian Railway connected Tehran to Iran's two major bodies of water: the Caspian Sea in the north and the Persian Gulf in the south. Iran's first national railway, it produced and disrupted various kinds of movement—voluntary and forced, intended and unintended, on different scales and in different directions—among Iranian diplomats, tribesmen, migrant laborers, technocrats, railway workers, tourists and pilgrims, as well as European imperial officials alike. Iran in Motion tells the hitherto unexplored stories of these individuals as they experienced new levels of mobility. Drawing on newspapers, industry publications, travelogues, and memoirs, as well as American, British, Danish, and Iranian archival materials, Mikiya Koyagi traces contested imaginations and practices of mobility from the conception of a trans-Iranian railway project during the nineteenth-century global transport revolution to its early years of operation on the eve of Iran's oil nationalization movement in the 1950s. Weaving together various individual experiences, this book considers how the infrastructural megaproject reoriented the flows of people and goods. In so doing, the railway project simultaneously brought the provinces closer to Tehran and pulled them away from it, thereby constantly reshaping local, national, and transnational experiences of space among mobile individuals.

Introduction: Cultural Constructions of Race and Racism in the Middle East and North Africa / Southwest Asia and North Africa

In recent years, scholars in the fields of cultural studies, American studies, history, ethnic studies, and Middle East area studies have approached questions of race and racism in this geographic region with renewed critical vigor. Recent work deconstructing anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia in the Americas and Europe has put these patterns of discrimination into intersectional conversation with anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism. New historical efforts have drawn attention to the legacies of slavery in the Ottoman, Persian, and Arab Empires, working to understand how forms of racialization and racial hierarchization predated and were exacerbated by the arrival of European imperial forces. At the same time, activists in the region draw attention to prevailing racism against migrant laborers, marginalized indigenous populations, and others as the afterlives of colonialism, war, austerity, and revolution carry on. Together, this academic and activist work asks for attention by leaders, community members, and scholars of this region to the particularities of racecraft in the region: How are “Blackness” and “whiteness” constructed in the Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish speaking worlds? What are the obstacles to discussing and identifying race particular to the histories of this region, its peoples, and its histories? This forum uses close readings of popular culture and political discourse across the Middle East and North Africa / Southwest Asia and North Africa (MENA/SWANA) in pursuit of these questions and others.