Suchergebnisse

Since the financial crisis started, the employment situation in Korea has been worsening. In a span of six months, about one million people lost their jobs. By offering the amnesty program to undocumented foreign workers right after the IMF measures took effect, the Korean government revealed its view of foreign workers as a buffer against economic ups and downs. About one-third of the illegal workers left Korea under this program. However, many Korean firms are still having difficulties in hiring local workers for the jobs which were previously held by foreign workers. This indicates that the government should reconsider its position concerning the importation of foreign labor.

The rapid mobility of labour and capital across national boundaries is a critical feature of the contemporary capitalist world economy. Japan is no exception, and the influx of foreign workers became perhaps the most discussed social problem in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The author explores this problem and discusses the social origins of migrant workers, Japanese debates on the "problem" of these workers, racial ideology and the colonial legacy. (DÜI-Sen)

The Singapore government regulates 'non-resident' workers through employment passes and repatriation in economic downturns. 'Non-residents' make up more than a third of Singapore's workforce. Until recently, Singapore's 'non-resident' manual workers have been segregated from mainstream Singapore society, and largely ignored by Singapore's trade unions. However, in late 2012 a group of bus drivers recruited from China, organised an illegal strike, something unknown in Singapore since 1977. Their action exposed to criticism by Singaporeans of the government's reliance on foreign workers. After the strike and subsequent prosecutions and repatriations, some National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) affiliates began to recruit foreign workers into their memberships. This paper reviews the political and social construction of Singapore's workforce, the re-emergence of industrial conflict, and the responses of the Singapore authorities to it. It reflects on the prospects for labour market regulation of partially incorporating foreign workers into its industrial relations system.

The present situation of foreign workers in West Germany can only be adequately understood if one takes explicit discrimination in job allocation into account. Foreigners are kept longer than Germans in stressful entry-level jobs and are blocked in their advancement to better positions. As part of the secondary labour market of big industrial firms, they do not only serve as a reservoir of flexibility in transfers; they are also more likely to lose their jobs in a period of redundancies. The thesis is put forward that contrary to many expectations about the rational behaviour of single capital units management discriminates against foreign workers in order to gain the compliance of the majority workforce and to achieve social peace in the plants. Selective personnel policies only work as smoothly as they do because there is also a selective representation of labour interests, which put Germans first and foreigners second. Although successful in sheltering the German core workforce against the threat of job losses to some extent, this selective representation of interests may in the long run imply the danger of an ethnic polarization within the labour movement.

The first part of this article reviews the reasons for a labor migration policy in Taiwan and the characteristics of foreign workers currently employed in the country. The second part examines the procedures and practices for recruiting and managing labor migrants and explores the reasons for the biggest issue in the Taiwanese labor migration policy: the runaway foreign workers. Admitting that illegal migration cannot be controlled, the paper recommends to limit employment of migrants only where it is absolutely necessary.

He felt that the commonplace idea that the huge inflow of foreign workers in the past decade caused a stagnation and even decline in real wage earnings of Singaporean workers in the bottom half of the income distribution was flawed. He argued that real wage earnings of the median worker actually increased when the number of inflows of foreign workers was reaching its peak. Prof Hoon thus felt that Singapore must now find a means to gear its political and economic institutions to continue to embrace economic openness in the next half-century, in order to be able to deliver good jobs and wages.