1 - Theorizing Labour Mobility Power

Summary

Introduction: migration and labour turnover as contested terrains

In this chapter we take a journey across different literature streams to review the origins of the study of labour turnover in the nascent modern factory of the early 20th century, to then move on to approaches to turnover and mobility power (Smith, 2006), and that of migrant workers in particular, across labour process theory (LPT), comparative political economy (CPE), and critical migration scholarship (CMS). We explore the parallel (and ambivalent) efforts of capital at both facilitating and constraining mobility in the history of ‘labour capture’ (Smith, 2006: 397), and in relation to the mobilities of capital (Harvey, 2018; Sassen, 1990; Brenner, 1998). The relatively unfree nature of labour in capitalism, showing elements of continuity with pre-capitalist forms of labour control (van der Linden, 2008; Moulier-Boutang, 1998), helps in understanding why workers have always engaged with mobility strategies in the forms of desertion, migration, and quitting to counter or diminish exploitation (van Rossum, 2018). While the following chapters will focus on specific cases and locatio ns of labour migration and the management of labour flows in different world regions, we need to first grapple with the theoretical debates that have emerged from the study of the relationship between labour mobility (as labour turnover) and international migration, looking at theorizations of the mobility and fixity of labour in relation with those of capital. Here we thus set the theoretical core of our argument, which aims to move beyond the ongoing ‘suspicion’ towards labour migration held by industrial relations, political economy, and employment studies.

While we illuminate the ways in which labour studies can learn from migration scholarship and the autonomy of migration perspectives (Karakayali and Bojadžijev, 2007), we add to both by proposing ways to overcome the limitations of both labour and migration studies which tend to reproduce either functionalist or individualized notions of migrant mobility. We contend that both dualist segmentation theories of the migrant labour function in capitalist markets and integrationist approaches to migrant workers fail to grasp the mobility power of migrants.