Migrant Workers What About Them - MIGRANT WORKERS

MIGRANT WORKERS1 MIGRANT WORKERS1. WHAT ABOUT THEM? Goran Lukič, Mirsad Begić, Association of Free Trade Unions of Slovenia INTRODUCTION A study of fifteen European countries finds that a 1 per cent increase in the population through migration is associated with a boost to the economy of between 1.25 per cent and 1.5 per cent. The World Bank predicted that if rich countries allowed their workforce to swell by a mere 3 per cent by letting in an extra 14 million workers from developing countries between 2001 and 2025, the world would be $ 356 billion a year better off, with the new migrants themselves gaining $ 162 billion a year (Legrain 2007, 62) The argument is clear: free movement of the work force is good for national economies. But what if national economies embrace economic growth as the supreme social value? Would that be the excuse for breaching basic human rights when they obstruct achievement of that supreme goal (Pribac 2008, 12)? What about the right to decent working and living conditions for migrant workers? What about the right to proper health and safety at work for migrant workers? And what about the rights of migrant workers in the time of the current global economic and social crisis?, Answers to those questions are all linked to the thesis of this article: migrant workers are among the main involuntary hostages of the race for global economic growth. This article attempts to go behind the positive economic gains of migrant workers to look at direct individual costs migrant workers must face, from their over-representation in so called 3D jobs (“dirty, dangerous, demanding”) and low-skilled occupations to appalling living conditions. We also compare migrant workers’ reality with the legal framework meant to provide legal protection for migrant workers, and examine the gap between them. 1. THE ECONOMIC / LEGAL REALITY 1.1 ECONOMIC VIEW: MIGRATION OFFERS POTENTIALLY HUGE ECONOMIC GAINS With the number of migrants worldwide now reaching almost 200 million, their productivity and earnings are a powerful force for poverty reduction. François Bourguignon, Senior Vice President and Chief Economist, the World Bank1 For countries of destination, well-managed migration can help to prevent labour shortages and bottlenecks in the labour market, increase tax revenues, and make economies and cultures more dynamic. For countries of origin remittances and the temporary - or permanent - return of migrants can facilitate investment and the transfer of new knowledge and social capital. Speech by Tobias Billström, Minister for Migration and Asylum Policy, at the European Business Summit in Brussels, 26 March 20092 Overseas employment has built more homes, sent more children of the poor to college and established more business enterprises than all other programmes of the government put together. Philippines government minister of Labor (Legrain, 2007:161) From a global economic perspective, migration flows are found to have strong positive effects. 5 Dustmann and Kirchamp (2001) found that the savings of returning migrants may be an important source of start-up capital for micro enterprises. They found that 50 percent of a sample of Turkish emigrants returning from Germany started a micro enterprise within four years of resettling in Turkey using money saved while working abroad. 1.2 LEGAL PROVISIONS: MIGRANTS' RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS!6 In 2007 PICUM, the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants, a non-governmental organization that aims to promote respect for the human rights of undocumented migrants within Europe, issued an overview of the International Human Rights Framework regarding undocumented workers, entitled “Undocumented workers have rights.” Although this document is specifically aimed at undocumented workers7, it gives an in-depth look into the international legal framework for the protection of the rights of migrant workers. PICUM emphasizes that all of the EU member states have ratified all of the treaty bodies - with the exception of the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrants Workers and Members of Their Families (ICRMW). The ICRMW has not been ratified by any EU member state, despite the opinion of European Economic and Social Committee, which calls upon the President of the Commission and the current Presidency of the Council to undertake the necessary political initiatives to ensure that the Member States ratify this convention within the coming 24 months and that the EU also ratify the convention when the Constitutional Treaty authorises it to sign international agreements (EESC - Opinion of the European Economic and Social Committee on the ‘International Convention on Migrants’(2004/C 302/12). 2. MIGRANT WORKERS IN THE TIME OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CRISIS - WHAT ABOUT ECONOMIC GAINS AND LEGAL FRAMEWORKS? Thus, migration flow is economically beneficial and legally protected. Is it really legally protected? And who is paying the real price of economic gains of migration flows? Unfortunately, answers to these questions are best found in times of crisis. But that does not mean that the issue of migration is unproblematic in times of economic growth. We will show that that time of crisis only accelerates the vulnerable processes of migration policy, so that we can talk about a forced pattern into which migrant workers fall: the vicious crisis circle of migrant workers. The global financial and economic crisis has had severe consequences for the world of work. The global economy slowed down and contraction was announced in a number of national economies. Unemployment is on the rise. According to the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) 2009 Global Employment Trends report (GET) there is a dramatic increase in the number of people joining the ranks of the unemployed, working poor and those in vulnerable employment. Depending on the timeliness and effectiveness of recovery efforts, the GET envisages an increase in global unemployment in 2009 compared to 2007 by a range of 18 million to 30 million workers, and more than 50 million if the situation continues to deteriorate. (ILO, 2009) To determine the scope of the impact of economic and social crisis on migrant workers, we will use the assessment from the ILO’s latest publication on migrant workers, which covers four areas. First are the employment and migration opportunities available to migrant workers, including changes in demand for migrant labour and possible return to countries of origin. Second is the volume of financial remittances sent by migrant workers to their families. Remittances are the most tangible and evident benefit of labour migration for workers and their countries of origin. The third set of issues covers discrimination and xenophobia to which migrant workers may be subjected, their conditions of work and those under which their employment may be terminated. Fourth are the policies that both countries of destination and origin have put in place to deal with the impact of the crisis. Picture 1: Vicious crisis circle of migration workers in the time of global economic and social crisis: where have all the economic gains and legal frameworks gone? Source: ILO, 2009 2.1 EMPLOYMENT AND MIGRATION OPPORTUNITIES According to the latest ILO publication on migrant workers, since resorting to labour migration is a pro-cyclical measure, which aims at keeping wages under control and maximizing growth in times of economic expansion, migrant workers will be the first to lose their jobs in periods of contraction. Several factors have to be taken into account when analysing the unemployment situation of migrant workers. The first factor is the time of arrival. Recently arrived workers will have developed little social capital, such as language abilities and networks, which allow them to keep their jobs or to stay under conditions of shrinking employment opportunities. A second factor is that of regularity versus irregularity of migration. Even if they lose their jobs, migrant workers in regular employment situations might stay in countries of destination. They are entitled to unemployment benefits, which they might not receive if they were to leave. Migrant workers in irregular employment situations are more likely to return to their countries of origin. But according to the ILO, they may also stay for one or more of three reasons. As they are irregularly employed, their informal employment is less costly to employers who might hire them, faced as they are with tighter credit and lower revenues. In addition, the employment market in their countries of origin may very well be contracting and may thus dissuade them from returning. The cost and difficulty of re-entering the country of destination when economic situations improve may also persuade them to stay where they are (Ibid.). Table 2: Unemployment rates for total labour forces and for migrant workers (%) Country Unemployment rate total labour force Unemployment rate for migrant workers Unemployment rate total labour force Unemployment rate for migrant workers United States Feb. 08 4.8 Feb- 08 4,6 Feb. 09 8.1 Feb.09 6.7 United Kingdom Third Q 07 5.2 Third Q 07 6.9 Third Q 08 6.5 Third Q 08 7.3 Ireland Third Q 08 6.4 Third Q 08 - Fourth Q 08 7.4 Fourth Q 08 9.5 Spain Third Q 07 8.3 Third Q 07 11.3 Third Q 08 13.4 Third Q 17.0 Source: ILO, 2009 As seen in the table above, different countries with different labour markets have different outcomes when talking about unemployment rate of migrant workers. More targeted migrant worker admission policies, but also more widespread informal employment relationships of both regular and irregular migrant workers, may account for the relatively better labour market outcomes in the United States and the United Kingdom. In the latter, statistics from the Home Office indicated a dramatic fall in work applications from nationals of the eight accession states, which joined the EU in 2004. In the first three months of 2009 there were 23,000 applications from workers in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia and the Czech Republic – down from 48,755 in the same period in 2008. The decrease is mainly explained by a drop in Polish applicants, which fell to 12,000 in the first quarter of 2009 from 32,000 in the same period in 2008 (UKBA, 2009). 2.2. FINANCIAL REMITTANCES Revised forecasts for remittance flows to developing countries in the light of a downward revision to the World Bank’s global economic outlook suggest a sharper decline of 5‐8 percent in 2009 compared to the earlier projections of the World Bank. This decline in nominal dollar terms is small relative to the projected fall in private capital flows or official aid to developing countries. However, considering that remittances registered double‐digit annual growth in the past few years, a sharp fall in the level of remittance flows as projected will cause hardships in many poor countries (World Bank, 2009). Picture 2: Remittances flows will slow sharply in 2009 in US dollar terms Source: World Bank, 2009 In Latin America and the Caribbean – the region receiving the highest level of remittances per capita – the data highlights a slowdown in remittance growth in the third-quarter of 2008 in all countries, but with only Mexico and Ecuador showing negative growth. In South and Southeast Asia, forecasts also suggest a negative growth rate for 2009. The situation is likely to be even more in the case of countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) such as Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, which rely heavily on remittances of their workers employed in the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan. In sub- Saharan Africa after two decades of growth in remittance flows there is likely to be a significant decline in these financial flows in 2009. The Middle East and North Africa, which registered the highest growth in remittances in 2008, will have a lower negative growth rate in 2009 compared to other regions. Interestingly, remittances registered growth in Pakistan and Egypt in the fourth quarter 2008, which suggests they acted as countercyclical measures (ILO, 2009). Picture 3: Top 10 remittance-recipient developing countries in 2008 Source: World Bank, 2009 The persistence of the migrant stock will contribute to the resilience of remittance flows in the face of the crisis. Sources of risk to this outlook include uncertainty about the depth and duration of the current crisis, unpredictable movements in exchange rates, and political reaction to weak job markets in destination countries which could lead to more tightening of immigration controls (World Bank, 2009). 2.3 DISCRIMINATION, VIOLENCE AND XENOPHOBIA AGAINST MIGRANT WORKERS Research has repeatedly brought out that the segmentation of labour markets makes the vast majority of migrant workers take up jobs that natives in destination countries spurn or make themselves unavailable for. ILO, 2009: 37 (available from: http://www.ilo.org/public/english/protection/migrant/download/global_crisis.pdf) Most people in the five largest member-states of the European Union want jobless immigrants to leave their countries, suggest results of a Financial Times/Harris poll, indicating growing xenophobia as the continent's worst recession since 1945 takes hold and causes a steep rise in unemployment. The poll was conducted online by Harris Interactive among a total of 6,538 adults in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and the US between February 25 and March 3. 79 per cent of Italians, 78 per cent of Britons, 71 per cent of Spaniards, 67 per cent of Germans and 51 per cent of French would back proposals to ask jobless immigrants to leave their countries, according to a Financial Times/Harris poll (Rediff, 2009). Economic and social crisis provide fertile ground for populist voices, which often target migrant workers. As the ILO says: concerns with self-preservation and instincts of self-defence can be turned into aggressiveness against the other. Migrant workers and their families thus become victims of discrimination and fall prey to violence and xenophobia. In reality, the interests of the host societies and populations to promote social stability and the integration of migrants also become victims of such heinous acts (ILO, 2009). 2.4 POLICIES OF COUNTRIES OF DESTINATION AND ORIGIN As economic indicators go down, the push for protectionism goes up. But we are talking about global crisis that finds migrant workers stuck between the shrinking labour market on both sides of the migration – in the destination countries as well as in the origin countries. For that case we can remember the case of hundreds of Chinese migrant workers in Romania, who sat for two months in front of the Chinese embassy claiming the contractors stopped paying them. "We are here because we have no jobs and no money," said a young man, through an interpreter, while asking to remain anonymous (AFP). A lot of these workers can be described as being hired into forced labour on the basis of debt bondage. These Chinese workers were promised US$ 1000 a month by the labour export company but when they arrived in Bucharest they were forced to sign a new contract in Romanian, which they later discovered only paid about half what they had been promised. The contract was for five years, and so the workers got trapped, isolated by language from their fellow workers and neighbors, with no hope of return until they repay their debt to the labour exporter (China Labour Bulletin, 2009). But “return schemes” for migrant workers have found a place on the map of political tools for coping with migrant issues. Spain has already enacted a law, adopted by royal decree in September 2008, encouraging the return of migrant workers to their countries of origin. The law is intended for unemployed migrant workers from countries that are not members of the European Union (EU), with which Spain has signed bilateral social security agreements. These are 20 countries from which the majority of migrant workers in Spain originate. The law provides that those unemployed workers who wish to return to their home countries will be paid in advance the totality of unemployment benefits to which they are entitled. Forty per cent of the amount would be paid in Spain and 60 per cent in the country of origin, 30 to 90 days after the first payment is made. Further, their contributions to the social security system in Spain would be aggregated with those made in the country of origin, for purposes of calculating their future pensions. Finally, if they wish to do so, beneficiaries can return to Spain to reside or exercise an economic activity, but only after three years. Additional assistance is also possible to facilitate return trips. The goal of the voluntary return law is for 87,000 foreign workers to benefit from it and go back to their countries of origin. Despite some reports of migrants leaving Spain, returnees are still small in number. Less than 800 migrant workers applied for the plan in its first month of application, and the total number of beneficiaries did not reach 4,000 after the first four months (ILO). The Czech Republic put a similar scheme in place in February 2009. To benefit from the programme, applicants must hold a valid residence permit and not be subject to deportation. Applications must be filed at the Aliens Police offices. Only a one-page information sheet on the programme is available in a foreign language. Interested migrant workers need to be accompanied to the Aliens Police offices by translators. Successful applicants are entitled to free transportation to their countries of origin and a repatriation bonus of 500 Euros per adult and 250 Euros per child. In exchange they need to surrender their Czech documents. Beneficiaries can come back to the Czech Republic in the future (Ibid.). On the other side of migration, in the countries of origin, three types of policy measures have been taken in response to the crisis (Ibid.). The first policy concerns the reformulation of programmes to facilitate the reintegration of returnees in their labour markets, or expanded existing ones: The Philippines announced the establishment by the Overseas Workers’ Welfare Association (OWWA) of an Expatriate Livelihood Support Fund to provide loans to returnees to start businesses or other livelihood activities. The second policy covers the insurance of protection of migrant workers’ rights. Agreements between social partners for the protection of migrant workers and their exercise of the right to freedom of association can also serve as frameworks for the formulation of appropriate policy measures in crisis situations. Examples are the agreements signed by Sri Lankan trade unions with their counterparts in Bahrain, Jordan, and Kuwait, with support from the ILO, in May 2009. The third policy explores new labour markets for workers, looking for the economies least affected by the crisis. Sri Lanka asked its ambassadors to follow developments affecting its workers and to explore possibilities of avoiding repatriation of workers who lost their jobs by finding them alternative employment. Bangladesh took similar measures. In Uzbekistan, authorities actively sought alternative destinations for their migrant workers. 3.​ VICIOUS CRISIS CIRCLE OF MIGRANT WORKERS – CASE STUDIES 3.1 SOCIAL INTEGRATION? It is striking that in times where the operation of labour markets excludes migrant workers from work places, policies have not comprised measures actively favouring their integration. ILO, 2009: 45 (available from: http://www.ilo.org/public/english/protection/migrant/download/global_crisis.pdf) On a bitterly cold morning near the Bank of England, an Estonian man sleeps on top of a vent which blows warm air. As Britain's economy dives deeper into recession, going down with it are the jobs of thousands of migrant workers from Poland and other Eastern Eur