Suchergebnisse

This article focuses on the dilemma that labor finds itself in at the beginning of the twenty‐first century. Working people everywhere have been undermined by neoliberal labor policy which has been aimed at managing labor migration. Workers in labor‐sending countries often face the choice of working in the informal economy of their own country or of submitting to conditions of transient servitude in a developed nation, while citizen‐workers in labor‐receiving countries have to compete with a reserve service and industrial workforce maintained by a regulated flow of temporary migrant labor that has no prospect of citizenship in the host country.

Critically examines the pending US national guest worker program, to be administered & enforced by the Dept of Homeland Security (DHS) & which is seen as a strategy to exploit millions of Mexican & Central American laborers. The scope of the strategy & its consequences are indicated in a look at the target population. A history of prior US exploitation of this population as a reserve labor pool is provided, highlighting the Bracero Program, 1942-1967; the maquiladora system, 1980-2000; & the gatekeeper border policy driven by US economic need for Mexican labor. International-level prerequisites required for the plan to work include ensuring a plentiful supply of low-wage workers via the pauperization of the Mexican & Central American working classes & the World Trade Organization's General Agreement on Trade in Services, which establishes global guest worker guidelines. Domestically, the US has undertaken the construction of transportation & enforcement infrastructures to handle the movement & management of millions of migrant laborers, promotion of immigration legislation to legitimize transient servitude, & steps toward program implementation once legalized. Attention is given to the link between the guest worker program & the Secure Border Initiative; Endgame, which is the DHS's plan to remove unauthorized migrants from the US within a decade; & "transient servitude" as the true nature of "guest worker." Some of the economic, social, & political costs of this servitude are considered in closing. Tables, Charts. D. Edelman