Patterns of Exploitation: Understanding Migrant Worker Rights in Advanced Democracies

by Anna K. Boucher

Overview

Numbering an estimated 164 million globally, migrant workers are an essential component of contemporary businesses. Despite their number and indispensability in the global economy, migrant workers frequently lack the legal protections enjoyed by other workers. They work in sectors where jobs are isolated, and they lack advocates and trade union representation. They may also be undocumented, further eroding their capacity to advance their rights. Migrant workers suffer workplace violations that range from underpayment of wages and unsafe work conditions to sexual assault and industrial manslaughter. How much does this exploitation vary across different countries? What explains differences and similarities among migrant worker destinations?

In Patterns of Exploitation, Anna K. Boucher answers these questions by looking at workplace violations across four major immigration countries: the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Incorporating interviews, the Migrant Worker Rights Database, and in-depth analysis of court cases, Boucher uses legal storytelling to document individual migrant experiences and assess the patterns of exploitation that emerge in case narratives. Migrant experiences vary across ethnicity, gender, occupational sector, visa status, trade union membership, and enforcement policy, as well as the industrial relations systems within a destination country. Boucher lays out the kinds of exploitation to which migrants are subjected, the patterns discernible within migrant workers' experiences, and the solutions that can best protect migrants against workplace violations. This unique mixed-methods approach provides a novel understanding of migrant workplace violations across a variety of immigration contexts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780197599112
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/27/2023
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.42(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.14(d)

About the Author

Anna K. Boucher is Associate Professor in Comparative Politics and Public Policy at the University of Sydney. She is a global migration expert, with a focus on the ways migration intersects with public policy and comparative politics. Her research also covers gender diversity, inequality, and labor market and regulatory change. She has written three books on migration that cover skilled immigration, gender diversity, and workplace exploitation, as well as numerous articles and scholarly book chapters.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. What is exploitation?

2. "A member of the family?": Gender, Domestic Work, and Violations

3. Ethnicity, Race, Country of Origin, and the Challenges of Anti-discrimination Claims for Migrant Workers

4. A Fatal Fall: Workplace Death, Injury, and Employment

5. Labor Rights or Immigration Enforcement?: Conflict in Protecting Undocumented Migrant Workers

6. Regulation and Migrant Vulnerability: The Role of Visas in Workplace Violations

7. Decertification, Black-listing, and Circular Migration: The Challenges of Trade Union Representation for Migrant Workers

8. Strategic or General Enforcement of Migrant Worker Rights

Conclusion: Understanding the Patterns of Migrant Exploitation

Interview schedule

References

Editorial Reviews

"Boucher has written an immensely useful treatise on how a precarious, temporary, immigration status, or the lack of a valid immigration status, impacts the workplace rights that workers in four key high-income jurisdictions are able to exercise and enforce in practice. The Migrant Worker Rights Database, created by Boucher, provides a new source of data that will inform scholars and advocates alike about how different legal frameworks may facilitate or hinder the ability of migrants to enforce their rights. Boucher's findings will ultimately be invaluable for efforts to push for structural changes that better protect migrant workers around the world through regulation, legislation, and enforcement." — Daniel Costa, Director of Immigration Law and Policy Research, Economic Policy Institute

"Beginning each chapter with an engaging account of an individual migrant's encounter with the legal system, Anna Boucher vividly depicts the key themes that emerge from a database comprised of litigation brought by migrant workers in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States to enforce their labor rights. Patterns of Exploitations provides a compelling comparative analysis of violations of migrant workers' labour rights in four key migrant-receiving countries by weaving a quantitative analysis of the innovative database with insights from key legal actors. This excellent book should be read by anyone interested in how migrant workers are exploited and how to stop it." — Judy Fudge, Professor in Global Labour Issues, McMaster University

"Patterns of Exploitation is an ambitious book that explores one component of the migrant rights puzzle. Migrants are workers and human beings, yet their workplace rights are not protected to the same extent as citizen workers. To discover why these differences exist, Boucher systematically surveys legal cases filed by migrant workers across four national jurisdictions and generates an overview of the types of exploitation that migrants experience. In contrast to the prevailing notion that courts in liberal democracies tend to protect migrants, she finds that courts safeguard migration worker rights only in so far as workers are protected by the law and the law recognizes migrant vulnerabilities. This book provides a major corrective to our understanding of the role of the courts in liberal democracies in protecting migrant rights and it will be widely cited." — Jeannette Money, Professor of Political Science, University of California, Davis

"This study is very timely as the world grapples with 164 million people escaping from war, violence, and economic and environmental disasters and seeking refuge and work in advanced liberal democratic societies...Recommended. Undergraduates through faculty; professionals." — Choice

From the Publisher