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  • Just Work? Migrant Workers' Struggles Today eds. by Aziz Choudry and Mondli Hlatshwayo
  • Naomi Alisa Calnitsky
Aziz Choudry and Mondli Hlatshwayo, eds., Just Work? Migrant Workers' Struggles Today (London: Pluto Press, 2016)

Just Work? represents an important intervention in the existing scholarship on migrant worker issues, with explicit attention to challenges facing migrants and to accounts of labour organizers' "experiences." (1) Spanning five continents, the book is divided into four parts and twelve constituent chapters, organized according to geography: Africa and the Middle East, Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and North America. The volume is interdisciplinary and echoes many recent scholarly trends in the study of international migration and immigration's intersection with labour concerns in a context of neoliberal austerity and the increased "dehumani[zation]" and "criminali[zation]" of migrants worldwide. (2) The book takes on an activist character and has a professed aim to be of utility for labour organizers, broadening discussions of migrant work in a context of an increasingly divisive global migration politics. It interpretively links global capitalism and "capitalist restructuring" to changes in the migration climate as migrants occupy "different sets of rights" (4–5) and are rendered more highly subject to exploitation. The language of global illegality is problematized, while an emphasis on Southern Africa sets this work apart from other accounts; this subregion is described as an emerging "epicentre of African migration." (6) International developments in global [End Page 310] migration already accounted for in other works are reiterated at the outset to set the volume's contents in context.

A critique of the "racialised foundations" (8) of Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program considers racial exploitation in Canada's newly contrived temporary labour sector that has effectively enhanced migrants' potential to occupy "unfree" statuses in the workplace. (7) Building on earlier critiques of neoliberal restructuring, and providing a rudimentary discussion of the place of remittances in international migration and development discourse, Just Work? considers a range of contemporary migrations, giving focus to organizations, their workers, and the nature of the work they do in concert with 21st century migrant power struggles. Organizations are presented as innovative, relevant, and well-positioned to contend with the distinct challenges of the migrant class. Mondli Hlatshwayo's chapter on the politics of immigrant work in South Africa focuses on how the Congress of South African Trade Unions (cosatu) has adopted a fairly conservative position vis-àvis the immigrant workforce, while Aziz Choudry contributes a closing chapter co-authored with Mostafa Henaway on temporary labour regimes in Canada. The chapters are diverse, treating a wide range of migrant flows, circumstances, and industries. Hlatshwayo highlights xenophobia's place in relation to the immigrant community, and raises the question of the social agency of this "permanent feature" of the post-apartheid state. (22) Interviews reconstruct migration experiences among Zimbabwean emigrants, and economic dynamism in South Africa serves as a magnet. Crisis spurs emigration for a class of precarious workers forced to "navigate … difficult and unfriendly terrain." (22–23) Migrants serve as street traders, sex workers, domestics, and farm workers and efforts to advocate for precarious workers are a work in progress. The dangers of the journey, especially for women, and immigrant workers' vulnerable existence politically and economically, speak to patterns of resiliency that are foregrounded. Local ngos are here more effective in comparison to international ngos in their efforts to better conditions of the migrant class, (29) while migrant-focused organizations emerge as significant vehicles for vocalizing immigrant worker concerns.

Adam Hanieh's focus on the Gulf Arab states suggests the Gulf "constitutes a global laboratory for labour exploitation today." (56) Here, a regionally and culturally-specific kafala system facilitates exploitation, binding workers to a sponsor and denying them rights linked to citizenship. (41) Migratory flows between the Arab sending states of Egypt, Yemen, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria to countries belonging to the Gulf Cooperation Council including Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Saudi Arabia reveal an upswing in emigration in the 1970s, followed by a shift toward a new dependency on Asian labour after the 1980s. An Asian workforce would "underpin the region's massive urban development boom of the 2000s...

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