Guest Workers and Resistance to U.S. Corporate Despotism

Abstract

This book thoroughly investigates the use of guest workers in the United States, the largest recipient of migrant labor in the world. The book argues that the use of migrant labor is increasing in importance and represents despotic practices calculated by key U.S. business leaders in the global economy to lower labor costs and expand profits under the guise of filling a shortage of labor for substandard or scarce skilled jobs. The book shows how worker migration and guest worker programs weaken the power of labor in both sending and receiving countries. The in-depth case studies of the rapid expansion of technology and industrial workers from India and hospitality workers from Jamaica reveal how these programs expose guest workers to employers' abuses and class tensions in their home countries while decreasing jobs for American workers and undermining U.S. organized labor. Where other studies of labor migration focus on undocumented immigrant labor and contend immigrants fill jobs that others do not want, this is the first to truly advance understanding of the role of migrant labor in the transformation of the working class in the early twenty-first century. Questioning why global capitalists must rely on migrant workers for economic sustenance, the book rejects the notion that temporary workers enthusiastically go to the United States for low-paying jobs. Instead, the book asserts the motivations for improving living standards in the United States are greatly exaggerated by the media and details the ways organized labor ought to be protecting the interests of American and guest workers in the United States.

Neoliberalising Adaptation to Environmental Change: Foresight or Foreclosure?

“…This is especially the case with the seemingly uncritical promotion of``temporary and circular migration schemes''. Their utility is justified with reference to the fact that international migrants may alleviate``skill shortages'' and reduce``demographic deficits'' in industrialised countries (pages 183^185), without acknowledging the often hugely detrimental effects of these schemes on migrant's and labour's rights and for migrants themselves (Ness, 2011;Wickramasekara 2010). Although the report recognises that this`developmental' strategy actually produces further insecurities to impoverished populations by making them tributary to fluctuations in the world market, it nevertheless endorses them precisely because of their effects in producing adaptable individuals (page 184).…”

Labor Migration and Trafficking among Vietnamese Migrants in Asia

“…Legal migration does not 92 THe ANNALS OF THe AMerICAN ACADeMY necessarily offer migrants protection and labor rights, and, in some cases, researchers have documented cases where Southeast Asian migrants in Japan and Taiwan were better off as free undocumented migrants than as indentured legal migrants Lan 2007;Ness 2011). Illegality can thus take the form of resistance to an oppressive legal regime, as shown by Killias's (2010) work on Indonesian domestic workers in Malaysia.…”

Globalization and Social Transformation in the Asia-Pacific

“…Life is insecure and precarious not only for temporary and guest workers, but also increasingly for residents, citizens and the native born under neoliberal globalization where economic deregulation within and between states at a planetary level has spawned an informal economic sector and under, or un-regulated employment practices. The old 'class struggles' have been replaced by new and ever-shifting struggles to maintain basic human securities alongside the rapid growth of informal, casualized work (Ness, 2011).…”