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12 - Superdiversity, Exploitation and Migrant Workers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2018

Jocelyn Pixley
Affiliation:
Macquarie University, Sydney
Helena Flam
Affiliation:
Universität Leipzig
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Summary

With workers the focus, Wilson draws attention to parallel processes of labour mobility to mobile capital (from the 1970s), such that about 150 million people are global migrant workers. Chapter 12 examines the concept of ‘superdiversity’ in the labour markets of rich democracies, with its positive welcoming but exploitative underside. Although many non-migrants are also exploited, evidence shows super-exploitation for migrant workers. Wilson considers the worst forms of exploitation – less a functional logic of capital – suggest employers opportunistically use various sources to enforce further social inequalities. Inequalities mount up from ancient discriminations such as gender. Wilson suggests some Marxian analyses combined with liberal concepts of injustice, help to explain the common mechanisms such as deportation threats; or benefits and vulnerabilities of transnational migrant networks. Thus, as mobile capital increases the transitory nature of economic activity, with financial crises impacts of sudden dislocation, the deregulation of labour markets combines with superdiversity of workers as Wilson says, to ‘alter the terms’ for profit-seeking employers to exploit migrant and refugee workers to the max
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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