Mobility of Labour as Method

My argument in this paper is that while migration studies approach rightly picks up on the role of the state in fostering the vulnerability and exploitation of migrant workers, the primacy that this strand of scholarship gives to state-migrant labour nexus hides the relevance of industry/business in both shaping of the migration flows and the very concrete working and living conditions of migrant workers. Moreover, the persistent privileging of the state as the main analytical standpoint also blackboxes the firm: we still know exceptionally little about the ways in which industry structure and firm business model shape migratory flows as well as worker agency. I ground my argument empirically by drawing on interviews with migrant workers in electronics manufacturing in Eastern Europe and in the context of changing government regulations that target in particular non-EU migrant workers, especially those from Asia. Building on labour studies scholarship as well as the scholarship that bridges labour and migration studies, I deploy mobility of labour as method to show how states’ migration measures enable firms to recruit a heterogeneous workforce much needed to front both the variable market demand as well as worker-driven turnover. I then use the mobility of labour to challenge the notion of a singular employer and show how mobility ‘fragments capital’ into client and subcontractor capital, thereby resulting in the client firm substantially losing control over workers on the shop floor and opening space for worker agency. In sum, it is by deploying the mobility of labour as method to unbox the firm/business, that this paper attempts to shift the attention from states to capital and provide a novel perspective on researching labour migration.