Migrants at Work
Immigration and
Vulnerability in Labour Law
Edited by Cathryn Costello
and Mark Freedland
There is a highly
significant and under-considered intersection and interaction between migration
law and labour law. Labour lawyers have tended to regard migration law as
generally speaking outside their purview, and migration lawyers have somewhat
similarly tended to neglect labour law. The culmination of a collaborative
project on 'Migrants at Work' funded by the John Fell Fund, the Society of
Legal Scholars, and the Research Centre at St John's College, Oxford, this
volume brings together distinguished legal and migration scholars to examine
the impact of migration law on labour rights and how the regulation of
migration increasingly impacts upon employment and labour relations.
Examining and clarifying
the interactions between migration, migration law, and labour law, contributors
to the volume identify the many ways that migration law, as currently designed,
divides the objectives of labour law, privileging concerns about the labour
supply and demand over worker-protective concerns. In addition, migration law
creates particular forms of status, which affect employment relations, thereby
dividing the subjects of labour law.
Chapters cover the labour
laws of the UK, Australia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Germany, Sweden, and the US.
References are also made to discrete practices in Brazil, France, Greece, New
Zealand, Mexico, Poland, and South Africa. These countries all host migrants
and have developed systems of migration law reflecting very different
trajectories. Some are traditional countries of immigration and settlement
migration, while others have traditionally been countries of emigration but now
import many workers. There are, nonetheless, common features in their
immigration law which have a profound impact on labour law, for instance in
their shared contemporary shift to using temporary labour migration programmes.
Further chapters examine EU and international law on migration, labour rights,
human rights, and human trafficking and smuggling, developing cross-jurisdictional
and multi-level perspectives.
Written by leading
scholars of labour law, migration law, and migration studies, this book
provides a diverse and multidisciplinary approach to this field of legal
interaction, of interest to academics, policymakers, legal practitioners, trade
unions, and migrants' groups alike.
