Migrants and the Unequal Burdening of “Toxic” Risk: Towards a New Global Governance Regime

Abstract

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.

Constructing Uncertainty: Unions and Migrant Labour in Construction in Spain and the UK

“…As the global recession started, Woolfson and Likic-Brboric (2008) suggested that these migrants are carrying an unequal burden of 'toxic' risk, in terms of both precarity and dangerous working conditions.…”

Negotiating Solidarity: Collective Actions for Precarious Migrant Workers’ Rights in Sweden

“…This would have the effect of facilitating companies operating in accordance with the rules and regulations in their home country, generating profound implications to industrial relation standards and the European Social Model (Woolfson and Sommers, 2006;Woolfson et al, 2010). In addition to this development, further impacts on the bargaining positions of workers -especially migrants in precarious employment -have been highlighted against the background of global economic downturn which has exposed labour to an increased 'unequal risk-burdening' (Woolfson and Likić-Brborić, 2008;Woolfson, 2010). These recent changes to a formally well-regulated labour market model in Sweden have particularly impacted low-wage occupations and created new areas for migrant precariousness.…”

“…Undocumented workers may thereby be forced to go deeper underground in order to avoid authorities and remain undetected (Stark, 2007;Sager 2011). Avoidance of, or complete withdrawal from, the public sphere additionally contribute to the unequal power relation between employer and employee; as these workers keep low profiles it is possible for the employer to neglect health and safety regulations and ultimately force the employees to endure unsafe practices and hazardous working environments (Ahmad, 2008;Woolfson and Likić-Brborić, 2008). All of these discrepancies from conventional labour market relations also become challenges to the work conducted by trade unions.…”

Hyenas of the Limpopo: The Social Politics of Undocumented Movement Across South Africa’s Border with Zimbabwe

“…Precarity is a term that in political economy has come to denote unstable employment, the erosion of social protection and general vulnerability in living and working conditions as a general norm (Schierup, Munck, Brboric-Likic, & Neergaard, 2015;Woolfson & Likic, 2008). The term seems particularly appropriate to describe conditions in colonial Southern Africa, where labour and regional movement rights were already actively denied and labour protections blatantly absent.…”

“…Socially constructed by the regulatory norms that govern both citizenship and international movement (Woolfson & Likic, 2008), migrant irregularity is reflective of particular regimes of social organisation and movement that marginalise those who do not conform to this normative framework. As hinted above, in the Southern African case, the logic of colonial borders, although still applicable to state territoriality, orients waged labour towards the management of racial categories, first through the designation of labour reserves, labour compounds, 'group areas' and presently through cross-border movement, access to employment and the management of labour frontiers.…”