Abstract

Recent decades have seen the EU grappling with a major struggle between the securitization of its external borders and demand for exploitable and disposable cheap workforce in various sectors. As a result, the EU has multiplied its borders by pushing them both outwards and inwards, and the distinction between migrants’ status as regular and irregular, legal and illegal, citizen and non-citizen, has been continuously portrayed as black and white. This produces and sustains an analytical, political and practical divide that often obscures commonalities in workers’ dispossession and is an obstacle to unified struggles to secure workers’ rights.

This volume moves beyond a perspective of migrants’ exclusion and inclusion as solely a product of migration processes. It contextualizes migration in the larger transformations of the local, national and transnational labour markets and relations that point to the ongoing precarization of working lives.

These processes of inclusion are methodologically approached through exclusion at macro, micro and meso levels. This positions the ethnographically documented experiences of immigrant labourers in the challenges of contemporary labour and migratory regimes, and traces new forms of collective response and contestation emerging in these reconfiguring contexts.
Olena Fedyuk is a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Marie Curie ‘ChangingEmployment’ network at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

Paul Stewart is a Professor of Sociology of Work and Employment at the Department of Human Resource Management, University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. He is also a Coordinator of the Marie Curie Initial Training Network ‘ChangingEmployment.’
This is an important contribution that aims to uncover the broader aspects of migration in relation to work and employment. The chapters look at the edges of the social and the more hidden forms of work and exploitation, as well prompting us to think about and question the effectiveness of more established forms of responding to the issue of exclusion.
Miguel Martinez Lucio, Professor of International HRM and Comparative Industrial Relations, University of Manchester
This edited volume could not be more timely in its critical examination of the intersection of precarious work and migration. Importantly migration is contextualised in wider transformation of local, national and transnational labour markets. Based on qualitative research by young scholars it goes beyond viewing migrants as victims, but focuses on their collective struggles as part of or supported by trade unions and grassroots organisation.
Jane Hardy, Professor of Political Economy, University of Hertfordshire