Building Less Precarious Futures for Non-Citizen Workers

This chapter provides a critical overview of the labour law scholarship on non-citizen workers in the global north. Although scholars from a number of other disciplines write about the situation of non-citizen workers in the labour markets of receiving states, labour lawyers make an important and distinct contribution. Chief amongst these is conceptualizing how precarious migration status makes the claiming of employment law standards more difficult. Although initially, the labour law scholarship focused on the plight of temporary labour migrants, more recent scholarship has expanded its view to analyse the plight of international students, ‘modern slaves’, and those working without authorization. This chapter also considers how reforming employment and labour law, and revitalizing labour institutions such as trade unions and enforcement agencies, can contribute to the reduction in the precarity experienced by non-citizen workers.