Guest Workers

9 Key excerpts on "Guest Workers"

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  International Labour Migration

  Foreign Workers and Public Policy

  • D. Bartram(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Nonetheless, it is useful to start with a baseline, drawing on the first laypersons’ notion above, i.e., that foreign workers are distinguished by lack of citizenship in the country of employment. The implicit argument is that citizenship status really makes a difference for life chances, wage levels, work conditions, etc., and thus such an approach is appropriate only when that condition holds. We may then consider alternative rules that derive from the fact that some such persons fit quite uneasily into the category itself on this basis. The non-problematic categories Guestworkers. The preeminent form of labor migration in the postwar period is that of workers on temporary restricted contracts. Contract workers are often not permitted free mobility in the labor market: the 34 International Labor Migration contract and visa often tie the worker to a specific job with a specific employer, or at least to a certain region and/or occupation. Freedom of movement is also sometimes restricted: contract workers often receive a residence permit in tandem with the state-issued work permit, and residence can be restricted to the area where the job is located. Such restrictions are often lifted as a worker’s tenure increases. Illegal immigrants. It is easy to conclude that illegal immigrants, when employed (as they usually are), are foreign workers as that term is being used here. Their presence as workers is desired by employers and perhaps implicitly by others who benefit from their inexpensive labor, but they are clearly unwelcome as members of the society. The stereo- type is that such workers do the most undesirable jobs for low wages – and in most cases the stereotype certainly contains more than a kernel of truth, even if by definition it is usually difficult to get good data on such workers.

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  Urban and Rural Change in West Germany

  • Trevor Wild(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4    GUESTWORKERS AND THEIR SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION Philip Jones

  They are people too. We forget that they would not have left the ‘country of origin’ had it offered work, and that, disruptive as the emigrants may be, the ‘host country’ tolerates them, even seeks them, because it needs them.1

  The migration of individuals and families from one country to another is a profound human experience; it generates an enormous variety of human situations and responses which remain hidden beneath econometric analyses or sophisticated mathematical models. West Germany has more than four million persons of foreign (non-German) origin, representing almost 7 per cent of its total population.2 Yet they live in an uneasy relationship with the host population, largely because West German society cannot reconcile itself to their presence, and denies the majority even the most elementary of political rights.3 The ensuing dilemma has been posed by Rist, who states,

  The present economy of the Federal Republic of Germany cannot sustain itself without foreign labour. At the same time, however, the issue remains unsolved as to whether this indispensable group of guestworkers should be understood as an additional transitory source of manpower or as new immigrants into society.4

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  Militarized Global Apartheid

  • Catherine Besteman(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  2 Temporary migrants are allowed to cross borders into countries in the global north through a dizzying array of work visa categories that carry dif-ferent rights and protections and apply to diferent sectors of the economy and diferent countries of origin. Work visas for temporary workers, which are intended to ensure control over them, share a set of similar characteris-tics across the global north: most do not ofer a pathway to citizenship but rather are short-term, controlled by employers (and sometimes by govern-ments) but not workers, cancelable at any time, and designed to create a flexible, replaceable, disempowered, and disposable workforce that can-not make demands on the host country and will not challenge the cultural integrity of the host culture. The International Organization for Migration ofers an admittedly conservative estimate that in 2013—the last year for which statistics are available—about two-thirds of the world’s immigrants, or 150 million people, were international migrant workers, about 50 percent of whom worked in North America and Europe. 3 In many countries in the global north, the contained and controlled workforce of authorized Guest Workers is augmented by a much larger workforce of undocumented people who endure exploitation, racism, insecurity, and the persistent threat of deportation in order to perform jobs that citizens refuse to do for low pay. 4 This chapter sketches the basic outlines of temporary guest worker pro-grams throughout the world, with a specific focus on those on the lower rungs of the labor market, from agricultural workers in North America to construction workers in the Gulf states to maids in Hong Kong.

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  Third World Cities

  Problems, Policies and Prospects

  • John D. Kasarda, Allan M. Parnell, John Kasarda, Allan Parnell(Authors)
  • 1992(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  10 Urban Aspects of Labor Migration A Review of Exit Countries F R A N C I S C O A L B A People's movement across national borders for employment is a centu-ries-old process. It gained additional momentum after World War II with the assumption that economic growth should not be restrained by insuffi-cient labor (Bohning 1979; Kindleberger 1967; OECD 1979). What is new about contemporary international labor migration is that it is increasingly viewed and conceptualized as evidence of an economically integrated world (Donges 1987), an exchange between countries in the context of other exchanges: goods, capital, technology, ideas, and even values. During the economic boom following World War II, international labor exchanges were considered advantageous for all involved, bring-ing the world an overall significant rise in output, income, and employ-ment. Labor-importing countries would supplement their work force to sustain growth and increase output—goals otherwise constrained for lack of labor. Labor-exporting countries would benefit from an easing of employment pressures, the return of a more skilled labor force, and the inflow of migrants' remittances. The betterment of the migrants and their families was also taken for granted. The ideal labor migration (based on the West European guest worker migration of the 1950s and 1960s) is described as a system of labor allocation between countries that implies the rotation of its members, or temporariness of visits, are salient characteristics (Garcia y Griego 220 FRANCISCO ALBA 221 1983; OECD 1979,16; Vialet and McClure 1980; Wilson 1976). 1 Labor migration seemed to have the advanced, industrial countries as main destinations, to the point that a certain south-north direction was linked to this movement. A closer view of the phenomenon obliges us to qualify both temporariness and directionality. As labor flows have matured, there has been some conversion from temporary moves to permanent residence abroad.

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  Germany in Transit

  Nation and Migration, 1955-2005

  • Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling, Anton Kaes, Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling, Anton Kaes(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  No fewer than 180 institutions have begun to work with Guest Workers: 6 federal ministries, as well as the Sal-vation Army, 11 provincial labor ministries, the Union of Women Friends of Young Girls, the German Alliance of Unions, and the Frankfurt-based For-eigners’ Brotherly Service. FAZ coeditor Karl Korn dubs Guest Workers “potential conduits of under-standing and communication,” who are now a constitutive part of the West German milieu: the gesticulating, parlaying Italians who bring a breath of Calabria into the Hansiatic train station halls, the dandified Turks who have changed out of their Anatolian footwear into fancy duds with white leather ornaments; all the foreigners, called “salami breeders,” “macaroni munch-ers,” “Spagnols,” “camel drivers,” “mutton munchers,” and “spaghettis” in the colloquial language of the people. [. . .] Guest Workers in Germany are not guests at all. They are not given any gifts; they do not enjoy any special status; they are only invited to join in the production process. They are allowed to work—and protecting this privilege is indeed a German tradition. “Foreign workers” was what they called the more than 1 million foreign-ers who sold their labor power in the time of the kaisers: on the lands of Pommeranian farm estates and in the mines of Rheinish heavy-industry sec-tors. The “Yearly Report of the Prussian Industry’s Oversight Officers” from 1908 registered a “larger reserve of domestic labor power than usual, be-cause the jobs are, for familiar reasons, filled by foreigners—Italians, Poles, and Bohemians.” The familiar reason: the foreigners’ willingness to sacrifice themselves to the most difficult work for the lowest wages. Such social disparities are not to be forgotten when considering the de-velopment of civilization and progress within Western industrial nations, as the French philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss believed.

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  Immigration Policy from 1970 to the Present

  • Rachel Stevens(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It also examined the as yet unsuccessful attempts of the U.S. Congress to introduce another large guest worker program. This chapter provided examples of how four advanced economies have become increasingly reliant on migrant workers to perform essential tasks in the critical sector of horticulture. This reliance on migrant agricultural workers is not a temporary blip but, rather, is likely to be a permanent feature of the 21st century. With the advent of the knowledge based economy, educated native workers in the developed world prefer to use “their brains instead of their backs” to earn a living, to quote Chalmers Carr, president of Titan Farms. Thus, the labor shortage in agriculture (the chief justification for importing migrant workers) is largely socially constructed and is unlikely to change in the near future. Beyond the economic imperative to import migrant workers, Australia—along with Canada and New Zealand—employed an innovative political argument: that guest worker programs can be a substitute for aid to the developing world. As was outlined in chapter 6, this argument is based on a number of assumptions, not least of which is that remittances will be used by migrant families to purchase income-generating assets. Research on the Canadian guest worker program revealed that Mexican migrant workers rarely invested in productive activities, preferring instead to purchase household items that improved material standards in the short term. Increasing the material standard of living is of course worthwhile, but in order to be sustained, it does increase dependency on future guest worker programs. Household consumption also does little to advance the economic development of sending nations. This argument also obscures the social costs borne by sending communities of migrant workers, especially in relation to long term family separation and the additional burdens placed on female heads of households

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  Ethnicity and Globalization

  • Stephen Castles(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Despite the well-organized system for temporary recruitment of guest-workers, the GFR has become a country of permanent settlement. The migratory process This brief summary of temporary labour systems in six European coun-tries can hardly d o justice to the complexity of international labour migra-tions in the post-war period, but perhaps it suffices to show certain major features. First, it should be noted that virtually all the countries concerned have had migrants of varying types: guest-workers, colonial workers, skilled personnel moving between highly developed countries, and refugees. The latter do not move in search of work, but often do enter the labour force. Particularly those from Third World countries often find themselves doing the same kind of jobs as colonial workers or guest-workers. Secondly, all the countries dealt with above have tried guest-worker systems. In the case of Britain, Belgium and France, these systems were used early in the post-war period, and then abandoned in favour of spontaneous labour migration. Switzerland used a guest-worker system throughout the post-war economic expansion, while The Netherlands and the GFR introduced such systems in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Thirdly, all the countries examined stopped labour migration at about the same time - following the Oil crisis' of 1973, when it became clear that a world recession was impending. The only exception is Britain, where labour migration had already been severely restricted through the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962. The cause lay both in Britain's already stagnating economy and in the explosive racial tensions develop-ing in the decaying inner cities. Fourthly, none of the countries expected or intended the guest-workers to become settlers. Employers and govern-ment of the recruiting countries had an interest in a flexible source of tem-porary labour.

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  Unintended Consequences

  The impact of migration law and policy

  • Marianne Dickie, Dorota Gozdecka, Sudrishti Reich(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • ANU Press

    (Publisher)

  First, significant flows of precarious foreign workers into diverse segments of the labour market are effectively hidden from public view. Second, complex migration trajectories and identities are constructed within which the boundaries between skilled/unskilled, legal/illegal, and temporary/permanent become increasingly blurred. These effects serve specific political and economic agendas yet also have broader and often unintended impacts on migration as a process of social transformation in Australia. Introduction Temporariness and circularity are increasingly important dimensions of migration processes on a global scale, with the boundaries around categories of temporary mobility and permanent mobility becoming increasingly blurry. 2 Traditional models of one-way mobility, settlement, and integration are giving way to understandings of the transnationality and temporariness of diverse migrant subjects, from elite knowledge workers to unskilled contract labour, with implications for the governance of migration as well as for new forms of migrant agency. 3 These global trends are very much apparent in Australia where a settler society identity, built up since the beginnings of post-war mass immigration, is being transformed by significant recent increases to temporary migration schemes. The focus is on the consequences, both intended and unintended, of two specific temporary visa categories: the Temporary Graduate (subclass 485) and Working Holiday (subclass 417) visas. Recent policy changes to these visa categories allow for extended periods of work and residence in Australia, primarily among young people who 2 Stephen Castles, ‘Migration and Community Formation under Conditions of Globalization’ (2002) 36 International Migration Review 1143.

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  Foundations of Modern Slavery

  Profiles of Unfree and Coerced Labor through the Ages

  • Caf Dowlah(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  But like the US, Western European countries also found it extremely difficult to maintain temporary character of the guestworker programs. An overwhelming majority of their guestworkers chose to settle down in the host countries, and eventually they brought their families as well by taking advantage of the processes of family reunification and family-formation. The longer they stayed, the harder it became politically and morally to deny them basic human rights and integration into society. At the end, the guestworker programs of Western Europe also showed that there was nothing temporary about temporary labor.

  Massive guestworker programs helped Western European countries to recover from war-time destruction and sustain post-war recovery for more than two decades, but during the process, their demographics and ethnic configurations have also changed quite dramatically. They have indeed been transformed from nations of emigration into nations of immigration, and multi-ethnic composition of their populations will most certainly continue to have far-reaching effects on their social and moral fabrics as well as economic and political policies in the future.

  Notes

  1.   1 The contemporary European continent consists of four geographical regions: (a) Eastern and Central Europe—comprising Belarus, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Russian Federation, Slovakia, and Ukraine; (b) Northern Europe—comprising current Channel Islands, Denmark, Estonia, Faeroe Islands, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Isle of Man, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Northern Ireland; (c) Western Europe—comprising Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, and Switzerland; and (d) Southern Europe—comprising Albania, Andorra, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Gibraltar, Greece, Holy See, Italy, Malta, Montenegro, Portugal, San Marino, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. In this study, Western Europe refers to Western and Northern Europe.
  2.   2

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