MIGRANT LABOUR

casual and unskilled workers who move about systematically from one region to another offering their services on a temporary, usually seasonal, basis. In North America, migrant labour is usually employed in agriculture; it generally involves harvesting activities and is manual, repetitive, easily learned, and demanding of almost no skill. The demand for migrant labour in agriculture stems from the seasonal nature of its worker requirements. In Europe and the Middle East, migrant labour has usually been recruited for urban rather than agricultural employment and involves longer periods of residence. Migrant labour in various forms is found in South Africa, the Middle East, western Europe, the United States, and India. The economic conditions that favour the demand for migrant labour include those where rapid increases in agricultural production have taken place or where there has been a rapid decrease in the number of farm labourers owing to high urban wages. The supply of migrant labour, on the other hand, is influenced by unfavourable economic and social conditions existing in the home base of such labourers. The labour market for migrant workers in agriculture is notably disorderly, partly because such workers' employment relationships are so ephemeral. Most migrant labourers have no reemployment rights, are usually not organized in unions, and have little systematic access to job seeking. Middlemen, job brokers, labour contractors, and crew leaders arise out of this fundamental disorganization of this labour market. Labour contractors, in addition to bringing the workers together, transporting them, supervising them, and dispensing their pay, also search out the employers and negotiate wages and working conditions. The wages, working conditions, and standard of life of migrant workers tend to be lower than those of other groups of workers. Migrants often must work long hours under exacting requirements. In some countries, particularly India, child labour is widespread among migrant labourers, and even in the United States those children who do not work often do not go to school, because in most localities the schools are open only to local residents. Migrant labourers' housing often amounts to little more than a roof over one's head. Literacy levels, social cohesion, and rates of political participation are exceptionally low among migrant workers. Contributing to these ills is the fact that the migrants, whether national or foreign-born, are fundamentally alien to the community in which they work. The local population, if eager to see them come, is even more eager to see them go. Migrant workers have difficulty gaining access to local health and social services, are often deprived of their rights, do not enjoy easy recourse to the courts, and are abused by exploitative employers. The fact that the migrant worker is here today and gone tomorrow makes the regulation of his working and living conditions difficult. Union- and government-established labour standards available to regular industrial and agricultural workers generally do not exist for migrant labour. Government authorities on all levels generally acknowledge the existence of serious social problems associated with migrant labour, yet claim that they are unable to deal with them effectively. Where social legislation has been passed and improvements have been achieved in the lives of migrants, the major effect has been to force employers to provide more housing and sanitary facilities and to regularize the activities of the labour contractors. In the Northern Hemisphere migrant labour moves seasonally from south to north following the harvest (in the Southern Hemisphere the pattern is reversed). Within this broad direction most migrant workers move in well-established patterns. In the United States, for example, workers may winter in Florida to help pick citrus crops and then, joined by others from Texas and Puerto Rico, move northward into New England as far as Maine, harvesting tomatoes, potatoes, apples, and other farm produce. Another large stream of workers from Texas sets out in the spring for the north-central, mountain, and Pacific states, harvesting fruits, vegetables, sugar beets, and cotton. A third stream of migrants works on harvesting vegetables, moving from southern California northward through the Pacific Coast states. In the United States, owing chiefly to the increased use of mechanization in farming, less than 500,000 persons are still occupied in migrant labour; in the 1940s there were more than 1,000,000, and in the 1920s there were twice that number. Some of the migrant workers employed are American citizens of Mexican descent, while many others are illegal immigrants from south of the border. Most are younger than 30, males predominate, and a majority of these have less than eight years of schooling. In common with those of other countries, many migrant workers in the United States suffer from underemployment, inadequate housing, and exclusion from normal community life. They usually work for low wages and have average annual incomes that amount to only a fraction of those of most American workers. The lot of migrant workers in the United States has nevertheless improved since the 1960s, when labour unions began to try to organize the migrants, and some states and localities established special committees to implement and expand social legislation benefiting them. Patterns of migrant labour on other continents have differed substantially from those in North America, with urban (rather than agricultural) employment accounting for a much greater share of such work. Migrant labour was used on a massive scale in South Africa, where black workers were drawn from rural areas to work in cities in which they lacked residence rights. This racially determined migrancy was a cornerstone of the apartheid system in the second half of the 20th century and forced millions of black workers to shuttle between their impoverished black homelands and the cities, where they enjoyed only the minimal rights common to most migrant workers. More benign forms of migrancy flourished in Europe and the Middle East in the second half of the 20th century. In West Germany, for instance, where rapid industrial growth in the decades after World War II produced a severe labour shortage, several million workers were drawn from Turkey, Greece, Italy, and Yugoslavia to jobs there. The same phenomenon drew many workers to France from North Africa, Spain, and Italy, while Britain took workers from its former colonies in South Asia, Africa, and the West Indies. After western Europe's economic growth tapered off in the 1970s, the presence of so many foreign workers became a source of social tension in some of their host countries. An even more dramatic example of migratory employment occurred in the oil-rich countries of the Persian Gulf in the 1970s and '80s; millions of workers from Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Pakistan, and other Muslim countries migrated to work in the rapidly expanding economies of Saudia Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Libya, Iraq, and Kuwait. India still probably has more migrant workers in agriculture than any other Asian country; these are involved mainly in the harvesting of tea, cotton, and rice. In Australia and the southernmost nations of Latin America, migrants work on ranches more often than on farms and are engaged in wool shearing and meat processing.