Análisis profesora 1

Piore (1979) proposed the concept of a dual labour market as essential to the understanding of migration. Piore’s “secondary sector” correlates insecurity of employment with low skill levels, although he points to some cases where the effect of labour organisation has been to bring “unskilled” jobs into the primary sector, which he defined as places where labour has acquired the same fixedness as capital. Piore did not anticipate the work of Fröbel et al. (Fröbel, Heinrichs, & Kreye, 1980) on the rise of transnational capital, better read as an early work on globalisation16_{. Piore’s discussion of the production operation being broken into routinised tasks}

co-incides exactly with one aspect of the phenomenon then referred to as the “new international division of labour” (NIDL). A balder but only marginally different description of the primary and secondary labour markets is provided by Hann and Hart (2011) who point to a “pervasive dualism” which they date from a migratory movement of approximately equal numbers of Europeans to settler colonies and Asian “coolies” to tropical colonies, and has not essentially changed since (Hann & Hart, 2011, p. 118). Keeping high and low wage labour streams apart is seen as requiring systematic racial discrimination.

The creation of border industries, first in South Africa (Wolpe, 1980/1972) then in Mexico (Delgado Wise & Covarrubias, 2008) from 1965 leading to a proliferation of export processing zones (EPZs) and

15 _{The worst cases anecdotally described by Shelley (2007) are of undocumented migrants, not necessarily} unfree labourers.

16 _{It is beyond the scope of this chapter to give a full definition of globalisation, and the concept is fluid. Stiglitz} (2002) lays emphasis on “the removal of barriers to free trade and the closer integration of national

economies” whereas Mittelman (1994, p. 428) sees it as “the compression of time and space aspects of social relations.” Murray (2006) following Held, points to three main schools of thought on globalisation within his field of geography, being hyperglobalist, sceptics, and transformationalist.

the associated transnational movement of capital removed a sizeable section of Piore’s secondary sector from the margins of the OECD workforce to the EPZs and global factories. The secondary sector which remains in the north can therefore be viewed as belonging to those sectors of industry which “by their very nature cannot be relocated to areas of abundant, inexpensive labour” (1990, p. 187). Castles (2006, p. 745) puts it thus: “The manufacture of cars, computers, and clothing could be shifted to China, Brazil, or Malaysia, but the construction industry, hotels, restaurants, and hospitals has to be where their customers lived.” Shelley (2007) summarizes the majority of migrant exploiting sectors under the headings of food, cleaning, construction, transport, hospitality, domestic, and sex work. Agriculture, central to this thesis, appears as a glaring omission from these lists, perhaps because it can, to a limited extent, be relocated. For example, following over a century of well documented exploitation of Mexican migrant labour in California, over half of tomatoes eaten in the United States are now grown in Mexico where camp conditions are unsanitary and pay is meagre (Marosi & Bartletti, 2014).

A magnetic attraction between capital and cheap labour is treated as axiomatic in the above

statements. The phrase “race to the bottom” (Chan & Ross, 2003; Wells, 2009, p. 568) is sometimes used to portray a model of global capital which sees minimal countervailing influences in the

competitive process for the cheapest labour17_{, with consequences in aggregate demand, in contrast}

to a more complex process in which the state plays a significant role. Murray (2006, p. 112)suggests that the NIDL is being supplanted by “flexible accumulation”, sometimes called post-Fordism, with the following characteristics: more versatile computer programmable machines, labour more flexibly deployed, vertical disintegration of large firms, greater use of contracting, just in time production, closer integration of product development, more flexible labour training. The end result is that proximity to markets is more important than lowering the cost of labour with resulting industrial districts in advanced capitalist countries, e.g. Motorsport Valley in the UK. However, he also notes (p.114) that Nike along with many other corporations display elements of both regimes of

accumulation (NIDL and Post-Fordism). He could add that the use of contractors in the post-Fordist model strongly suggests a resurgence of low cost migrant labour.

Gibson and Graham (1986, p. 145) may have been the first to ask the obvious question: “Does this mean that any theoretical specificity attached to the concept migrant labour has disintegrated upon the emergence of truly global capital?” They go on to suggest that while migrant contract workers, EPZ workers, or peripheralised workers are subject to the same “intense downward pressure” on

17 _{The phrase is not only used also used to refer to low pay, but also cost savings from poor environmental} standards and low tax regimes.

wages and bargaining power, nonetheless in the political dimension migrant workers need to be treated separately. They argue that Philippine migrants contracted overseas are powerless to change conditions whereas, in some cases, EPZ workers have organised themselves into effective unions. Their argument anticipates the theme of substantive citizenship.

Two overlapping descriptions are used to portray today’s secondary sector; the first using the term ‘3-D’ for dirty, difficult, and dangerous work (Asis, 2008, p. 181; Ellerman, 2005; Maclellan & Mares, 2006, p. 2; Taran, 2000, p. 13), and the second as ‘precarized’ (Appay, 2010; Standing, 2011) or ‘precarious’. Tucker (2002, p. 26) proposes ten potential indicators of precariousness, including termination without notice, uncertain hours changed at will by employer, irregular earnings, changing job functions at will, no contract for ongoing employment, no meaningful protection against discrimination, low pay, no access to standard benefits such as sick leave, no access to training, and dangerous or unhealthy conditions. Not all these conditions have to be present to describe precarious employment. Although the concepts overlap, a growing discourse on

precarization emphasises insecurity and powerlessness, while 3-D work may be simply unpleasant18_.

Mining work, for example, provides an example of career employment which is often dirty,

dangerous, and difficult without the insecurity associated with precarised employment. In the above formulation, all the ‘D’ words refer to the nature of the work, whereas alternative formulations (such as dirty, dangerous and demeaning) embody the workplace relationship. Further, 3-D work is not clearly defined as work which local workers refuse, even though the term is normally used in this context. Standing (2011, 2012) places migrant labourers at the forefront of what he terms the precariat.

The question of whether precarious employment or migration comes first is addressed by Bauder (2006) and Taylor (2009, p. 156) who gives migrant labour the primary role (explanatory variable) in the creation of precarized employment19_{. Ness argues that the “formation of an international}

migrant labour force is the latest phase in the evolution of capital’s efforts to reduce wages in all sectors of the global economy” (Ness, 2007, p. 447). From this perspective migrant workers are tools in the hands of global capital to raise the level of exploitation of other workers as well. The likelihood that low pay and poor conditions for migrants are used to drive down the pay and conditions of local workers in a “race to the bottom” creates a dilemma for unions and other worker organisations. Taylor and Bain (2008), focusing on the off shoring of call centre workers in the UK, outline the contrast in union responses between those unions which attempt to protect the conditions of local

18 _{Following Anderson (2000), the expression “dirty work” has tended to refer to domestic labour specifically.} 19 _{This is clearly not the view of the New Zealand government which has hopes that the RSE scheme will have a} de-precarising effect on the New Zealand horticultural industry.

workers by treating migrant workers as a threat and those unions which attempt to include migrants or offshore workers in the same struggles. Munck (2010) notes that across the world trade unions are organising with and on behalf of migrant workers and rediscovering the basic principles of the labour movement, although he also suggests that in many cases the organising is being done by “a plethora of hybrid community organisations, workers centres, faith-based groups and nationality based organizations” (Munck, 2010, p. 170).Wills (2004) writes of the re-scaling of the union movement to take account of the new globalised workplace, but is obliged to note that the majority of unions at the beginning of the twenty-first century continue to be scaled at the national level.