This article attempts to provide a critical understanding of the dual signification of "precarity". It explores what "precarity" as a concept may potentially offer to studies of the changing contemporary political economy of migration. It discusses shifting trends in global migration and point to tendencies for a possible convergence between "South" and "North", "East" and "West". Based on a review of current advances in research, it discusses, with reference to the classical work of Karl Polanyi, the potential for a contemporary "countermovement" which would challenge the precarity of migrants. Bringing forward the issue of the "space for civil society" the article addresses a still lingering democratic deficit in the global governance of migration. POLICY IMPLICATIONSThe article is relevant to policymakers, trade unions and civil society organizations. It contributes to the understanding of policy making processes in emerging multilevel global governance and focuses on issues of precarization, migration, and the implementation and accountability of human, migrant and labour rights.

Purpose – Against a theoretical discussion of informalisation, the purpose of this paper is to trace wider commonalities and migratory interconnections that are leading to informalised or deteriorated employment conditions both East and West in the enlarged Europe. Design/methodology/approach – The paper examines the ways in which informalisation has come increasingly to typify employment relations both East and West via contrastive case studies from Sweden and Latvia. Findings – The paper illustrates how a growing tendency towards informalisation of work and economy comes about as a consequence of dual tendencies towards informalisation both “from above” and “from below”. Migrant labour has a part in this process, especially in the post-EU enlargement period, increasingly enabling free movement of labour from the former socialist countries to the West. Research limitations/implications – The implications of the paper are that the harmonisation of labour standards in the enlarged EU is not necessarily in an upward direction and that wider EU labour markets may be increasingly segmented as processes of informalisation grow in scope. Practical implications – Policy-makers concerned with preserving labour standards and norms of decent work may consider the implications of the interconnected processes of informalisation and migration, in particular, with regard to “undeclared work”. Social implications – The paper raises issues concerning the European social model and its viability. Originality/value – The paper bridges research on informalisation of the economy and labour migration in the context of EU enlargement.

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Against the presentation of an asymmetric global governance, this article analyzes the formation of global migration governance with its focus on the politics of migration and development. It traces the marginalization of a rights-based approach to migration and the streamlining of migration governance into business-friendly migration management and a geopolitical securitization agenda. It also reviews the trajectory towards factoring migration into a global development policy discourse as formulated in the UN 2030 Development Agenda. Specifically, it indicates that the inclusion of migration into the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) may promote migrant workers' rights because several of these invoke universal human rights instruments, social protection and the observance of the ILO decent work agenda. However, this will only be possible if civil society critically engages powerful state and non-state actors in the process of monitoring the SDGs' implementation, and resists their streamlining into investment and free trade neoliberal development regimes.

This is an electronic version of an article published in:Charles Woolfson and Branka Likic-Brboric, Migrants and the unequal burdening of "toxic" risk: Towards a new global governance regime, 2008, Debatte, (16) AbstractThe article addresses the changing discourse that frames the neo-liberal regulatory agenda, in the context of the current financial crisis and related, system-threatening 'toxic' risk. In this, the authors claim that a flexible mix of regulation/deregulation and self-regulation is reflected in an asymmetric architecture of multilevel governance that is based on an unequal burden-sharing of risk, involving the commodification of risk and an imposition of this burden on the socially weakest groups. Migrant workers are identified as being most vulnerable to the condition of precariousness due to 'double asymmetry of hyperprecarity'. The article identifies class-biased practices of regulatory failure and the counter-movements that they have generated around the demand for "decent work". It is claimed that the present systemic failure has created only a 'window of opportunity' for the working class and civil society actors to promote de-commodification of labour and equalization of risk-burdening in the inception of a new regulatory contest on both national and transnational level.