Guest Workers and Resistance to U.S. Corporate Despotism

1. Migration and Class Struggle

1 Migration and Class Struggle For about twenty-five years, since passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) in 1986, more and more U.S. businesses have been relying on a system of migrant labor that involves guest workers. A guest worker is a foreign laborer temporarily authorized to work in a host country with the knowledge and acquiescence of that country. In the United States, employers recruit guest workers to perform both skilled and unskilled labor in newly restructured industries. These workers sign contracts with specific companiesbeforemigratingtemporarilytotheUnitedStatestoperformhighly structured jobs for a fixed duration of time. Because of the nature of their contracts , these migrants face a number of unique challenges, including confinement to one employer, onerous work arrangements, withholding of wages, and lack of access to federal employment regulations governing minimum wage and hour standards. Why do so many migrant workers participate in such an exploitive system? Simply put, as economic conditions worsen, foreign workers desperately seek jobs in the United States as a means to provide for their families and communities through remittances for basic needs such as food, housing, and education. As the program expands, these new migrant guest workers inevitably form part of the subaltern underside of their respective labor markets in the United States and the Global North as labor markets are transformed through expanding use of foreign temporary workers. While wages and conditions of work contrast significantly, highly skilled and unskilled guest workers occupy essential spaces in the labor market without the prospect of establishing a foundation of power and support, because they have no permanency and are almost always sent home upon completion of their assignments. In a range of occupations, from Internet technology, business services, and nursing, to welding, construction, and hospitality, the U.S. government is permitting private businesses to fill positions once held by U.S.-born and immigrant workers with guest workers. They require only that the employer “prove” that either, a) there are no U.S. citizens willing to fill the position or, b) there are no American workers trained and qualified to do the particular job. This situation transforms the labor market because there are no labor laws to protect these workers, who are paid less and work under exploitive conditions. Conveniently for the employer, guest workers are also in a position that leaves them generally afraid to protest because employers can send them home at any time. A repositioning of finance capital and international pressure for greater business profitability is intensifying the spread of guest work that frequently offers even lower wages and less job security than most undocumented migrants in the United States. Guest work is not only filling a shortage of labor for substandard jobs or scarce skilled jobs, but it also is part of a calculated effort by U.S. business leaders in key sectors of the global economy to lower labor costs and expand profits by increasing profitability through reducing wages, speeding up the pace of work, and introducing labor-saving technology technological advances across a range of occupations through deteriorating wages and reducing standards. This book examines the significance of this growing shift toward guest worker labor migration in place of formal immigration and settlement programs traditionally favored by capital, and the resulting growing financial and social pressure on U.S. and transnational migrant workers. In so doing, the book considers the competing social and political forces in the evolution of U.S. and global guest worker programs. Essential to the growth of guest work under advanced capitalism is a dialectical relationship between capital and labor. Capital almost always requests open migration to enlarge the reserve army of labor and increase competition with native-born workers as a means to lower wages and job standards. In opposition, organized and unorganized labor has historically opposed new immigrants entering labor markets to compete for jobs at lower wages. As largely unregulated migration to the United States since the late 1980s to the first decade of the early twentieth century has expanded the immigrant working class, some labor unions have sought to restrict migration to shield the native-born workers most vulnerable to labor migration. U.S. immigration policy plays an important role in this story. The country’s policy toward migrant labor is a politically sensitive issue for policy makers. Since the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, the political debate in the 14 . chapter 1 United States has...