Introduction: Migration and Labour Turnover

Summary

The question of labour turnover has been variously examined across labour and organization studies but it has not been studied systematically in relation to international migration. In this book we tackle the question of labour turnover (the churning of workers in and out of workplace organizations) from the perspective of migrant labour. Here we build on the critical strands of labour and migration studies to shift our gaze to the social composition of labour (Wright, 2002), focusing on the specific drivers and subjective and social dynamics that link the phenomenon of labour instability to international migration. We consider the relationship between labour migration and turnover as emblematic of the wider effects of the intersectional differentiation of work and employment on workers’ lives and action for change in capitalist societies.

Since the pioneering work of Hirschman (1970), the act of workers quitting their job, described as labour mobility or exit, has been countered to worker voice and presented as an individualistic, opportunistic behaviour taken autonomously by workers as opposed to engaging in labour collective voice over effort bargaining (usually expressed through trade union representation). The tendency to see turnover as a primarily individualistic behaviour can be found especially in the field of industrial relations, which privileges collective forms of action in the workplace, whether or not institutionally mediated by trade unions (see Smith, 2006; Beynon, 1973). In the field of organization and management studies, scholars have tended to favour a functionalist approach both to the question of turnover and the role of migration in flexible labour markets revolving around costs and efficiency issues for employers, while employment studies have concentrated on the impact of labour mobility on collective bargaining in the workplace.

Looking at turnover in relation to the transnational movement of workers is of paramount importance today. While the COVID- 19 pandemic has left its mark on 2020 as an unprecedented time of low mobility, in 2019 there were 169 million international migrant workers globally (IOM, 2021). Migrant workers are differently distributed geographically, with the US and Europe constituting the largest share among destination countries, and with the Arab States representing the subregion with the largest quota of migrant workers as a proportion of the entire working population (about 41.4 per cent as compared to 20 per cent in North America) in 2019.