Lea Ypi (LSE)
1st draft
Who is exploited?
The moral dilemmas of guestworker programmes
It is often argued that guestworkers are exploited, and that unfair advantage is taken
from their vulnerable position in host societies. This paper assesses the accuracy of this
claim by examining three different theories of exploitation: a domination theory, an
egalitarian theory and a sufficientarian theory. It argues that neither the defenders of
these theories nor their critics manage to capture what is normatively problematic
about guestworker programmes. Analysing their shortcomings shows that guestworker
programmes exploit workers taken collectively (as a class) rather than distributively (as
individuals divided by state-boundaries). The paper concludes by examining the
remedial principles to which a similar perspective gives rise and by outlining their
political implications.
1. Introduction: workers and guests
A worker is someone who exchanges his labour for money. A guest worker is someone
who exchanges his labour for money, as a guest. A guestworker therefore belongs, at the
same time, to two distinguishable but related sets: the set of workers, who typically
exchange their labour for money, and the set of migrant workers, who exchange their
labour for money for a specified amount of time and in a foreign labour market.
It is often said that guestworkers are exploited and that unfair advantage is taken
from the (allegedly) vulnerable position of foreign workers in domestic labour markets
(for some relevant discussions (see (Attas 2000; Carens 2008; Lenard and Straehle
forthcoming; Mayer 2005; Ottonelli and Torresi 2010; Stilz 2010; Walzer 1983) for
discussions)). But are guestworkers exploited in virtue of being workers or of being
guests or both or neither?
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The answer to these questions depends in part on the kind of moral baseline
upon which we choose to focus in trying to capture the wrong of exploitation. If we link
that wrong to the occurrence of domination we might think that guestworkers are
exploited because they are guests rather than citizens (or permanent residents).
Deprived of a significant (even if not full) range of political and social rights that
normally protect citizens and permanent residents from the failures of the market and
the whims of employers, they can easily be manipulated and taken unfair advantage of.
Let us call this “the domination theory of exploitation”.
Alternatively, if we think an agent is exploited whenever an unequal distribution
of benefits systematically follows relatively equal amounts of effort for relatively similar
tasks performed, we might say that a guestworker is exploited both because he is a
worker and because he is a guest. As a worker, his labour is undervalued. As a guest, his
labour is undervalued compared to that of workers operating in similar market
conditions. Call this the “egalitarian theory of exploitation”.
Finally, guestworkers might be considered exploited because they operate in a
market that fails to reward their labour with sufficient access to primary resources. If
prospective temporary workers are on the verge of starvation and accept employment
offers just because they couldn’t afford to reject them, they are vulnerable to being
taking unfair advantage of. We might call this “the sufficientarian account of
exploitation”.
This paper argues that neither the domination account nor the egalitarian
account nor the sufficientarian account fully capture why guestworkers are exploited.
To illustrate the wrong of exploitation, we should focus on workers taken collectively as
a class rather than distributively as citizens belonging to different countries. The
exploitation of guestworkers is, I shall argue, a result of the collective unfreedom of
workers taken together, not of guestworkers considered as a special category deserving
particular normative attention. The relevant question to ask when reflecting on the
moral dilemmas of guestworkers is not whether guestworkers are exploited but
whether guestworker programmes are exploitative. This paper claims that they are. The
exploitative nature of guestworker programmes is manifest in the way labour markets
operate in a global sphere, in the way states and private employers interact with each
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other, and in the way the global distribution of labour negatively affects guestworkers
and domestic workers alike (even if not in equal measure).
Viewed thus, guestworker programmes make for a curious object of enquiry.
Rather than an issue to be explored in the context of a theory of just migration, they
present a relevant case in which an old and seemingly outdated issue, the exploitation of
the working class as a collective agent, re-surfaces with all its normative force. The
remedial principles to which a similar perspective gives rise are principles seeking to
abolish the exploitation of workers in general rather than the exploitation of
guestworkers in particular. The problem of guestworker programmes can therefore be
addressed not by considering a theory that concerns the distribution of the benefits and
burdens of freedom of movement but by intervening at the level of the basic
institutional structure according to which we want markets to operate.
2. The dilemmas of guestworker programmes
Since the invention of the passport and the institutionalization of border controls,
guestworker programmes have become an integral part of states’ efforts to cope with
transitions in industrial relations and shortages of labour supply. The first attempts to
regulate the entrance of temporary workers date back to the late 19th century, following
a process that accompanied the consolidation of the national territorial state and the
related increasing hostility towards prospective immigrants.1 Despite a short period of
skepticism towards such programmes in the mid-Eighties, guestworker schemes are
now in place in most affluent countries of the world: Mexican agricultural workers in
the USA, Central and East-European seasonal workers in Western Europe,
Mozambiquan diamond miners in South Africa, Asian construction workers in the
Middle East (especially in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and
Oman), Indonesian nannies in Malaysia, and Phillippina carers in Canada are only some
of the relevant cases in point (S. Castles 2006; Hahamovitch 2003). And there are no
Prussia’s introduction of guestworker programmes occurred in the two decades following German
unification, whereas migrant workers employed in the diamond and gold mines of southern Africa
followed British attempts to unify British colonies, Boer Republics and African kingdoms under British
rule, see (Hahamovitch 2003).
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signs that the flux is about to stop: since 1997, the number of temporary migrants
traveling to OECD countries has been growing annually by 9 percent. Migration to East
and West Asia, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, has also increased
by 2.5 percent per year since 1985 (Agunias and Newland 2007).
Notwithstanding a number of governmental and intergovernmental attempts to
modify the procedures surrounding the employment of guestworkers (especially in the
EU area), the conditions of their arrival and the contracts regulating their stay have only
superficially changed (S. Castles 2006). Guestworkers are neither long-term migrants
nor short-term visitors. The conditions of their temporary settlement are determined by
bilateral contracts between sending and receiving societies, and they are only allowed
to remain in the host state for strictly delimited amounts of time. They are also typically
denied access to the political and social benefits granted to citizens (and often also
permanent residents). On the one hand, it is claimed, guestworker programmes
continue to serve well the interests of states (in particular Western states) experiencing
industrial change, shortages in specific sectors of the labour market and demographic
shifts, especially population ageing and increasing decline in fertility rates. On the other
hand, the conditions under which they are able to promote these goals remain
concerning. Most guestworkers cannot participate in elections, cannot claim access to
public subsidies (e.g. unemployment benefits), cannot join collective bargaining
processes, and are in general deprived of the right to have a say on the terms according
to which the host political community requires them to conduct their lives. They are
entitled to fewer benefits of membership even compared to other immigrant workers,
e.g. compared to students who have decided to settle and work in the receiving state,
compared to refugees or compared to other immigrants who have gained entrance as a
result of practices of family reunification (to mention but some of the most prominent
categories). Unlike these other immigrants, guestworkers are typically tied to one
particular work sector, are prevented from changing employers, cannot apply for
permanent residence and eventually citizenship after a certain period of time, are often
denied the right to apply for family reunification, and are subject to being deported
from the country if they lose their jobs (Ruhs and Martin 2008: 251), see also (Stephen
Castles and Kosack 1985; Hollifield 1992; Parrenas 2001).
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Applauded by employers, politicians and policy-makers and often mistrusted by
ordinary citizens, guestworker programmes are likely to provoke bitter controversy
both when they are rejected and when they are endorsed.2 Some see them as providing
de-facto coverage to a regime of second-class citizenship which exploits the
contribution of workers but offers them no membership benefits to negotiate the terms
of that contribution. Others see them as a perhaps non-ideal but nevertheless
acceptable form of economic support for workers who can migrate for a specific amount
of time to save money, send remittances home and contribute to the development of
their countries upon return. Accepting or rejecting such arguments has often been
considered to depend on the terms according to which guestworkers are employed in
host states, the assessment of their occupational position compared to members of
receiving societies and the potential benefits they receive compared to fellow-citizens
who are left behind. In other words, addressing the moral dilemmas of guestworker
programmes has often been attempted in the context of theories of just migration
seeking to fairly distribute the benefits and burdens of freedom of movement. That may
not necessarily be the most appropriate way to go. To understand why, we need to
examine in some detail one of the most vexed questions that is typically raised in the
context of the employment of guestworkers: the issue of their potential exploitation. As
we shall see in what follows it is when we address this question that both the moral
dilemmas of guestworker programmes and the shortcomings of their solutions come
prominently to the fore.
3. Guestworkers and domination
The fact that guestworkers are denied many of the standard membership rights
typically granted to citizens (and often also permanent residents) has induced some to
criticize these programmes as exploitative, linking their exploitative nature to the
political disenfranchisement from which guestworkers typically suffer (Walzer 1983:
For an informative discussion of the attitudes of the American public towards temporary work
programmes see Shayerah Ilias, Katherine Fennelly, and Christopher M. Federico, 'American Attitudes
toward Guest Worker Policies', International Migration Review, 42/4 (2008), 741-66.
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59). Being deprived of political membership implies that guestworkers are unable to
appeal to the protection of state institutions to defend themselves from abuses of power
in the public sphere. Although they are required to comply with the rules of receiving
states, they do not have an equal say in the making of these rules. They are subjected to
the laws but banned from authoring them. Political inequality leaves guestworkers in a
vulnerable condition and exposes them to the possibility of others taking advantage of
that condition to derive profit from it. Indeed, so the argument goes, the very point of
their disenfranchised status is to prevent temporary workers from overcoming their
vulnerability. For if guestworkers ceased to be treated as politically unequal, they would
end up being just like domestic workers, and the benefits accrued by the programmes in
which they take part would cease to serve the interests of employers in the host state.
The exploitation of guestworkers depends on the status of second-class citizens to
which they are confined due to the absence of political and economic rights.
Of course being politically disenfranchised is not a sufficient condition for
declaring guestworkers an exploited category. After all guestworkers are visitors, and
like all other visitors (tourists and students, for example), it is reasonable to ask them to
respect the terms under which they are admitted. We do not find problematic the fact
that tourists are required to obey traffic laws in the countries that they visit, nor do we
ever try to campaign to give them a say in the making of such laws. However, some
might argue here that, unlike tourists and students, guestworkers are deprived of the
benefits of political membership whilst being asked to contribute to the system that
creates and upholds such benefits (Carens 2008; Stilz 2010). It is the contribution
guestworkers make to the production of public goods in receiving societies without
being able to claim back equal benefits which might then account for the unfair
treatment to which they allegedly subjected.
However, it is not clear why we must always expect the sphere in which a
productive contribution is made and the sphere where equal benefits are claimed to
overlap so neatly with each other. The argument from cooperation in the production of
certain goods would have more force if guestworkers were deprived of the benefits of
citizenship altogether, not necessarily if they were deprived of such benefits in a
particular host country but continued to retain access to them in their home states.
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To see this point, consider the following example. David, a prominent academic
from Oxford has been invited to give a series of keynote lectures at the University of
Toronto. The series lasts for one month and, although David is guaranteed
accommodation on campus during that period, he has no right to borrowing facilities
from the library, no access to a university of Toronto email address, and no entitlement
to attend meetings of the academic board. He is of course working hard to prepare his
lectures and contributing to upholding the standards of teaching and research at the
University of Toronto. Yet the benefits he can claim during his visiting period in the
department are significantly lower compared to those granted to his friend Joe, who is a
member of the department. Still, it would be difficult to insist that David is being
exploited. He is a member of Oxford University, can borrow from his college library, can
use his Oxford email address, and can attend departmental meetings in his home
university. He has rights of membership in the Politics department at Oxford. Although
he may miss important meetings and fail to have a say on particular funding decisions
during his research stay in Canada, he will be able to make up for those by being an
active member of the department and influence the agenda of meetings upon his return.
Guestworkers do not lose all membership rights because of their status of guests.
They remain citizens of their country of origin, they enjoy diplomatic protection from
such countries in their host state, and they retain relevant membership entitlements
(such as voting) in the places from which they come from. Although they do make a
contribution to the economy of receiving states without being able to claim the same
entitlements as citizens of those states (just like David can’t claim the same entitlements
as Joe at the university of Toronto even though his lectures make a productive
contribution there), their work contracts have been negotiated with the input of their
home states. Despite the fact that guestworkers do not have an immediate say in
making the rules with which they are asked to comply, in the long term they can
contribute modifying the criteria on the basis of which multilateral contracts are signed.
In other words, they can negotiate acceptable terms of interaction through the
institutions of their home states.
Of course all this presupposes both that states signing guestworker contracts
must have roughly equal negotiating powers to come up with mutually advantageous
terms of cooperation, and that workers from sending states must have ample margins of
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democratic participation to ensure their voice really is channelled by the appropriate
mechanisms for political decision making. In practice this is hardly ever the case. But if
guestworkers end up being exploited as a result of inequalities in bargaining power
between sending and receiving states or due to insufficient channels of democratic
participation in their home countries, this simply strengthens the point we are trying to
make. Socio-political disenfranchisement does not by itself explain the kind of injustice
suffered by guestworkers in the countries that they visit, nor does lack of equal rights of
membership suffice to illustrate why such category of people is always vulnerable to
exploitation. Other factors have to be taken into account before we can establish the
moral baseline on grounds of which we can show that unfair advantage has been taken
from them.
4. Guestworkers and egalitarianism
An alternative way to think about the exploitation of guestworkers is to reflect on their
condition by observing the relative inequalities of occupational position in which
temporary labour programmes tend to confine them. Short-term contracts subject
guestworkers to terms of employment that differ significantly from those of domestic
workers. They typically work the same hours, perform the same jobs but are paid
simply less. Moreover, unlike domestic workers, guestworkers are barred from trying to
change employers, cannot search for jobs different from the ones that they were initially
admitted to perform, are bound to remain in a particular work sector, enjoy limited
opportunities for participation in workers’ unions, and have very little or no say in the
possible extension of their work contracts. Guestworkers are at a relative disadvantage
compared to domestic workers. Some have argued, it is precisely this relatively
different position in the job market that renders them vulnerable to exploitation (Attas
2000; Carens 2008). But what exactly is the baseline with regard to which we consider
the process to confer an unfair advantage upon those who buy labour at the expense of
those who sell it?
To answer this question we need to look at the dynamic of supply and demand
governing the exchange of labour. Those who defend the egalitarian theory of
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exploitation typically do so from a classical liberal economic perspective. On this view, a
just price of labour is the one that emerges if supply and demand balance each other in
circumstances of perfect competition, undistorted by extra-market factors. The
problem, critics argue, is that guestworkers’ restricted access to the labour market
modifies the nature of the exchange between employers and workers. Due to the
contractual constraints temporary workers face, the labour market is partially closed to
them. Their freedom of occupational choice is severely restricted. Consequently the
negotiations in which they are involved tend to favour those placed in a stronger
bargaining position, for example those that have full capacity to choose who to hire. But,
unlike the domination case we examined in the previous section, the problem is not,
inherently, one of limited access to the benefits of political membership. The problem is
rather that, due to their socio-economic placement in society, temporary workers are
treated unfairly because they are forced to accept jobs remunerated at a price which is
lower than the equilibrium price for their labour. Exploitation consists in employers
profiting more and workers obtaining less for their labour than they would if they were
to exchange their labour in perfectly competitive markets (Attas 2000: 75-9; Carens
2008: 12-14).
Those who endorse this perspective typically emphasize that one of its
advantages consists in allowing us to distinguish between denying guestworkers the full
package of political membership benefits and compelling us to extend them
comprehensive rights of participation in the economic sphere. Whilst fellow-citizens
right to self-determination may entitle them to deny permanent rights of political
participation to temporary members, guestworkers are entitled to an inclusive list of
rights usually associated to the economic sphere. More specifically, it is argued that
freedom of exchange, freedom of occupational choice, freedom of movement and
organisation, the right to participate in collective bargaining, to strike and to
unemployment benefits and compensation for loss of income ought to be extended to
guestworkers to allow them to remove the cause of unequal exchange for the wages
they receive (Attas 2000: 77). If guestworkers’ vulnerability to exploitation is due to
their limited access to the economic sphere, making that sphere fully accessible to them
might sound like a plausible remedial measure.
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We may wonder however whether drawing a sharp line of division between
political and economic membership as this argument seems to require, really serves the
kind of egalitarian theory that its defenders would want to support. One problem with
placing the burden of the argument on a market-centred, classical liberal perspective is
that it forces us to see the market and the state as independent social agents. If we want
to focus consistently on the supply and demand process generated by interactions
between economic agents based in different states we also have to take seriously the
conditions that trigger that process in the first place: the need to fill labour market
shortages in the host-society and the availability of excess labour-force in the sending
state. And we also have to consider the voluntary, spontaneous and impersonal nature
of labour exchange in a global, rather than simply domestic market.
This drives our attention to an issue which is crucial to assessing whether
guestworkers are exploited within the egalitarian theory we have just outlined: the link
between the conditions on the basis of which guestworkers are admitted and the
demand for labour in the host-state. Empirical analysis suggests that not all
guestworker contracts are the same; not only do they vary from country to country but
they also depend significantly on the kinds of jobs that temporary workers are required
to perform. The higher the demand for labour in the host-state, the more attractive the
contracts offered to guestworkers, the better the occupational conditions under which
they are admitted. As many authors suggest, the international market for skilled and
highly skilled workers is characterized by “excess” demand for labour (S. Castles 2006;
Ruhs and Martin 2008) see also (Findlay 1995). An increasing number of developed
countries compete with each other for a relatively small pool of highly qualified
workers, for example specialists in management, information and communication
technology and people working in the health sector (S. Castles 2006: 749). In this case
economic exclusion does not always follow recruitment of temporary labour, and
freedom of occupational choice may or may not be curtailed. The answer will depend on
the kind of labour force a country is looking for. In the case of skilled labour workers
can often decide whether or not to accept the contracts offered to them. Qualified
migrants can to choose among a number of potential host-states, and their choice of
destination depends both on prospective earnings and future terms of employment in
the receiving states.
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Some examples might be useful to illustrate this point. Canada and Australia, two
countries that have traditionally focused their admissions’ policy on the recruitment of
skilled workers provide qualified them with rights associated to permanent residence
immediately upon arrival. Likewise, the UK’s Highly Skilled Migrant Programme offers
qualified migrants the right to apply for permanent residence after only five years of
residence in the UK. Ireland has also recently been involved with the introduction of a
long-term residence status to attract migrants with skills in short supply in the Irish. In
contrast, Germany’s “Green Card” programme designed to attract IT workers offered a
five-year work permit rather than permanent residency status, and did not succeed in
obtaining similar numbers of applications compared to countries with more flexible
policies (these examples are taken from (Ruhs and Martin 2008: 254) who also provide
more references to the relevant data). States and employers seeking to employ skilled
migrant workers are likely to offer them not only high wages but also comprehensive
entitlements, often resulting in migrants having more rather than less freedom of
occupational choice.
These examples illustrate that there are no clear-cut conclusions to be drawn
from an all-purpose comparison of temporary workers to domestic workers regardless
of their position in the domestic and global economy. The relationship between
exclusion and inclusion in the economic sphere is itself dependent upon the prior
evolution of the process of supply and demand that governs the admission of temporary
workers. Yet if one takes seriously that process, it is not clear how we can justify an
obligation to provide all temporary workers (regardless of their skills and without
consideration for the jobs they are supposed to perform) a comprehensive package of
economic membership rights. If (as in the argument above) we try to distinguish
economic from political membership and say that we are only interested in the former
but not the latter, on what grounds can we interfere with market processes upon which
the contracts and wages offered to guestworkers depend? If a country seeks to recruit
high-skilled workers and the demand is relatively high but the supply is low, chances
are that guestworkers will be admitted on very inclusive terms. If a country is facing
labour shortages in a low-skilled work sector, employers will only be interested in
temporary work if they can make offers at rates lower than domestic ones. As with all
market-based processes, the nature of this transaction is spontaneous, voluntary and
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hard to criticize precisely for that reason. The higher the cost of foreign labour, the less
beneficial it would be from the host state’s perspective to fill shortages through
temporary worker programmes. The lower the supply of workers, the more
advantageous the terms and conditions on which temporary migrants are admitted to
perform their jobs. Even though wage parity might be desirable to ensure guestworkers
and domestic workers compete on equal terms, the process of supply and demand
governing the admission of guestworkers de facto limits the numbers of those to whom
full economic inclusion can be offered (Chanda 2001: 635) (S. Castles 2006).
One might of course fault such programmes for prioritizing the needs of
receiving states. But this is not necessarily the case. As many studies emphasize, the
more entitlements guestworkers obtain in host states, the more settled they feel, the
less likely they are to return to their home countries. This is not good news for the
citizens of these countries who might benefit from guestworker schemes in the form of
remittances and regeneration of a stagnant labour market. It also explains why
important limitations to temporary work contracts are often introduced with the full
support of sending states whose anxiety for the potential permanent loss of critical
workforce is no less relevant than their fear for the drop in remittances or the
consequent decline in economic growth. To give just one example, the Canada-Mexico
Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program is based on a memorandum of understanding
between Mexico and Canada, in place since 1974 which established that only married
men with children could participate, leaving their families behind. Restrictions were not
only endorsed but actually increased by the Mexican authorities, who required
temporary migrants to even bring back evaluations from their employers, in order to
ensure being kept in the eligibility lists for the next work season (Ruhs and Martin
2008). Of course, we can still argue that guestworkers are vulnerable to being taken
advantage of as a result of deprivation from the benefits of socio-economic inclusion in
the host state. But the background context is one of competing considerations of supply
and demand with a view to the stakes of all affected parties. The conditions of labour
exchange in the global economic sphere are established by states who act more or less
unconstrained by extra-market factors. Once we understand by “market” a global rather
than simply domestic market, the equilibrium price of labour appears consequently
affected, and the egalitarian case for exploitation appears harder to make.
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To sum up, the arguments in this section illustrated two important issues. The
first is that the egalitarian theory fails to show that all guestworkers are exploited.
Exclusion from the socio-economic sphere is not an intrinsic feature of all guestworker
programmes neither is the exploitation of all foreign workers its unavoidable outcome.
The second, and more problematic issue for the view we examined, is that even if
unequal access to socio-economic benefits did follow such programs, it would occur
within a framework of voluntary transactions between actors whose negotiations
depend on the employment needs and labour supply in both sending and receiving
states. From the classical liberal perspective to which the egalitarian theory ties itself,
one would have no reason to interfere with how the global markets work. Relatedly, and
importantly for the point this theory tries to make, the consequent price paid for
temporary labour could not be said to be unfair.
5. Guestworkers and sufficiency
One final strategy for reflecting on the exploitation of guestworkers is to think of the
baseline for qualifying a transaction as fair or unfair with reference to a sufficiency
criterion. Many guestworkers, it is often said, are typically employed to perform jobs
that are difficult, dirty and dangerous. They lack the security and welfare guarantees
that would allow them to cope with such hazardous occupational circumstances, and
they are vulnerable to being taken unfair advantage of because they have nothing else to
opt for. According to the sufficientarian account exploitation takes place when the
following two conditions occur. Firstly, an agent is made an offer that he could not
refuse, on pain of being left with not enough resources to lead a minimally decent life.3
Secondly, the transaction is less beneficial or more costly than it would be if the agent
started to bargain from a position of sufficiency (i.e. he had enough to begin with) (see
(Mayer 2005: 321ff) for a more thorough discussion).
As defenders of sufficientarian accounts often admit, establishing how much is
“enough” in this case is far from trivial. There seem to be two candidate options: one
Resources is here a generic term employed to refer to whatever unit of distribution we might prefer, i.e.
primary goods, opportunities, capabilities etc.
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which focuses more on the sending state, and one which focuses more on the receiving
state. Since guestworkers are only employed for a specific amount of time and typically
enter host-states with the intention of returning home at the end of their contract, it
might seem that the appropriate baseline to start with is the position of a worker in the
sending state. If agents have enough in their own country, they can choose whether to
accept an offer of work abroad or to remain in that country. If their decision to move is
constrained by not having enough to survive in the home country then it does not seem
to constitute a genuine choice. And if one accepts an offer because he has no other
choice, then we might say that someone is vulnerable to being taken advantage of in the
host state. The prospective temporary worker in this case accepts an offer he could not
refuse, on pain of being left with an insufficient amount of resources to survive.
If on the other hand, someone already has sufficient resources at their disposal in
the home state, they are free to decline the offer if they do not find it acceptable. Their
agreement to the terms of the contract in this case might be considered mutually
beneficial. For defenders of sufficientarian accounts, the relevant counterfactual to
consider is what a worker earning above the threshold of sufficiency in the labourexporting nation would choose to do. As one author puts it “we judge their exploitability
by whether they will have enough if they do not migrate, and we judge exploitable
workers to be exploited if they gain less than one with enough at home would likely
accept” (Mayer 2005: 322).
Interestingly, however, when we raise the issue of guestworkers’ exploitation
with a sufficientarian criterion in mind, empirical evidence leaves us with very few
relevant cases. Prospective temporary workers, studies show, do not represent the
bottom social strata in sending societies. The lowest-earning citizens often lack the
knowledge, skills and means necessary to even take the risk of emigrating. Those that
fall below the threshold of sufficiency typically rule themselves out of the prospective
pool of candidates, a pool which involves citizens normally placed in the middle of the
social stratification hierarchy. Unable to afford the transportation costs and risks
involved in leaving everything behind, the poorest citizens of poor states are much more
likely to starve at home. This also explains why, for example, in a continent like Africa,
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with rampant poverty and the highest concentration of absolutely poor citizens in the
world, emigration rates recently have in fact declined.4
All this implies that real life temporary workers negotiate from a position in
which sufficientarian criteria are met. Even though they are prepared to waive some
rights for a period of time in exchange for better pay, they do not act so on pain of
continuing to lead a life in which their own survival is at risk. As some of the evidence
from the West German guestworker programme of the Sixties and Seventies indicates,
Turkish temporary workers who moved to Germany had on average better skills,
comparatively higher levels of education and more financial means available than their
fellow-citizens who were left behind. The standard guestworker earned four times more
than domestic workers before departure and six times as much as them during his stay
((Paine 1974) see also the discussion in (Mayer 2005)).
A similar trend reveals itself also in some of the more recent guestworker
programmes. Empirical studies in the female migrant population of two of the major
labour-exporting nations, Mexico and the Phillippines revealed that a majority of their
temporary workers had decent high school education, and occupied clerical, retail, or
professional positions prior to leaving these countries ((Momsen 1999), see also the
discussion in (Stilz 2010)). In both these countries, despite much hope that guestworker
programmes
would
provide
a
win/win
solution
helping
relieve
domestic
unemployment in sending societies and fill labour shortages in host states, this did not
turn out to be the case. Prospective guestworkers already had jobs in their home states
and their skills were not easy to replace. Unemployment rates remained the same
(Ghosh 2005). Those most vulnerable citizens who would have most desperately
needed temporary contracts to ensure the survival of themselves and their families
tended to stay where they were.
This is perhaps the most troubling feature of the relation between migration and
poverty: the more extreme the conditions of deprivation, the less people tend to move.
Emigration rates are lowest in the least developing countries, and the phenomenon of
In 1970 Africa supplied 12 per cent of the world’s migrant population but by 2000 that share had
declined to 9 per cent of the global migrant stock, see International Organization For Migration,
'International Migration Trends', World Migration 2005 : Costs and Benefits of International Migration,
(2005), 379-404 at 391.
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survival migration of the poorest is local and regional at most, but hardly involves
changing states (Skeldon 2005). Historical examples also confirm this point: in the case
of the Irish potato famine taking place between 1845 and 1850 which triggered one of
the greatest migratory flows experienced in Irish history, the most deprived families
tended to starve where they were (Miller 1985). Typically, only those who have
something: skills, savings, foreign contacts or all of these in combination can afford the
risks that transport and the costs of settlement in a completely different environment
involve. And whilst the conditions of temporary workers are not optimal, their starting
position does not appear as one of desperation. Their choice is not constrained by
unavoidable necessity. To be sure, temporary workers are still required to make
significant sacrifices, be them living away from their families, having to integrate in a
new country or getting to know a foreign labour market. But their decisions are made in
the context of a plurality of options available, and they are not threatened with not
having enough to survive.
A similar predicament has led some to conclude that unless guestworkers fail to
access sufficient resources to lead a minimally decent life in their home countries, the
offers they receive are not of an exploitative kind (Mayer 2005; Stilz 2010). But we need
to distinguish two questions here. The first is whether guestworkers are exploited. The
second is whether guestworker programmes are exploitative. If we keep these two
questions separate, the answer to them might well end up being different. Even if not all
guestworkers are exploited, domestic workers might be. And even if not all workers are
exploited distributively, as individuals, they may still be exploited collectively, as
members of the working class.
6. Taking workers as a class
To explore the possibility of class exploitation as a result of temporary worker
programmes, we need to reflect on their impact on workers’ wages in labour-importing
nations. A number of empirical studies suggest that guestworkers accept to exchange
their labour for wages and employment conditions that are normally higher than than
16
those prevailing in their countries of origin but, as we saw earlier, small by the
standards of host countries . Employers themselves often acknowledge that the kinds of
wages and employment conditions offered to guestworkers are often too low to be
considered acceptable by most local workers (see (Ruhs and Anderson 2010) for a
review of the literature). Now, even if we find unproblematic the fact that temporary
workers agree to exchange their labour for wages that improve their conditions
compared to the country of origin, the effect of these contracts on offers received by
domestic workers represents a rather concerning trend. If temporary workers make
their decisions in a context of choice sufficient to undermine the view that offers made
to them are of an exploitative kind, the same cannot be said for domestic workers. The
context of choice for them ends up being significantly restricted as a result. Unless we
take sufficiency thresholds to overlap perfectly, what is enough in one context may not
be enough in another. After the admission of guestworkers, domestic workers have to
choose between wage-offers significantly lower compared to what they might have
previously considered enough. Even more worrying is that their acceptance of such
offers could mark the beginning of a nasty trend towards levelling down.
Does this mean that domestic workers are exploited? I suggest that it does. To
see this point we need to apply the same analysis of exploitation through which we
assessed the case of guestworkers to workers in receiving societies. We emphasized
earlier that a person is vulnerable to being exploited if he is made an offer which he
could not reject, on pain of being left with not enough. In the case of guestworkers, the
relevant counterfactual with reference to which to assess the threshold of sufficiency
was their position in home states. If they reject the offer of employment in a new state
and are still left with a sufficient amount in their home country, then they have some
margin of (genuine) choice and therefore cannot be considered exploited. But what
should be the counterfactual situation with reference to which to assess thresholds of
sufficiency in the case of domestic workers?
There seem to be two options here, one which includes guestworkers in that
assessment and one which ignores them. The first one implies that the threshold should
be the same for both temporary and domestic workers. If a guestworker accepts the
offer given the sufficiency constraints mentioned above, then a domestic worker should
accept it too. But as we saw, the main consideration in the case of guestworkers is based
17
on their position prior to entering the host state and the threshold of what is considered
enough applies to how they fare before they make a decision to migrate. Yet it would be
unfair to hold domestic workers to the same standard. Sufficiency thresholds vary from
country to country, and what is enough in one context may not be enough in another.
To see the point, consider the following example. Compare the position of two
students who attend German language courses at the same school but at two different
levels: a basic level and an intermediate level. At the end of the year there is an exam
and the pass mark for progressing to the next level is the same for both students, say 55.
Even though the mark is the same, the level of competency in German required by
students attending these different classes is completely different. One has to show that
he can construct simple sentences, be able to ask for directions in the street, orient
themselves with a restaurant menu and so on. The other has to be able to understand a
more complex television programme, show that they are able to grasp the main ideas
being discussed, and articulate an opinion in however simple terms. Clearly what is
considered “enough” knowledge of German in these two groups is likely to display a
great deal of difference. And it would be absurd, as well as unfair, to expect the student
from the basic level class to obtain a pass at the end of an exam which has been
designed to test the knowledge of members in the intermediate course.
A similar argument could be made with respect to the situation of domestic and
temporary workers. Life in different countries means that expectations of what might
be considered sufficient in each of them are likely to differ significantly. A wage that
might contribute to significant savings in one state could barely sustain a family in a
different market environment. It would therefore be as absurd to conclude that wages
that are acceptable to a Philippine worker because they are more than sufficient to
conduct a minimally decent life in say, Manila, are also sufficient to survive in London,
for example. The counterfactual circumstances should be constructed in a different way.
A more plausible alternative might therefore be to assess the sufficiency
threshold of domestic workers whilst abstracting from the impact of guestworkers in
host societies. In this case, the relevant counterfactual evidence might require
comparison with the typical wages of similarly placed domestic employees prior to the
admission of temporary workers. All other things being equal, we could then define an
offer as exploitative if a domestic worker accepts a job which is paid less than it would
18
have been before temporary workers entered the job market. A domestic worker is
subjected to unfair treatment if he has to negotiate his wage from a position with less
resources than what a worker with equal skills and ability, and performing the same
job, would have received prior to the admission of temporary workers. An offer could
then be considered exploitative if the agent who makes the offer benefits from it, and if
the agent to whom the offer is made loses more or benefits less than he might have done
in those counterfactual circumstances. As in the case of guestworkers, we judge an offer
to be exploitative by whether the agent will be left with enough if he does not take the
job. But in contrast to how we proceeded in the guestworkers case, we establish the
sufficiency threshold by looking at what a domestic worker would have earned prior to
the admission of guestworkers (all other things being equal). If we see that domestic
workers earn less, we can say that they are exploited.
We can conclude from this discussion that guestworker programmes may be
exploitative even if they don’t actually exploit all guestworkers, as such. What makes
guestworker programmes exploitative is that they contribute to a global competition for
labour of those who have only their labour to sell. They help employers and firms
increase profits at the expense of adverse effects on local wages and by levelling down
sufficiency standards. Guestworker programmes play workers against each other,
ensuring that what expands options for some workers at the same time increases
constraints for others. In the end, even if workers are not exploited distributively, as
citizens of different state, they may be exploited collectively, as members of the working
class.
7) On workers and guests: some objections
One objection to the argument we have just tried to advance might be that it relies on
the existence of a competitive dynamic between foreign and domestic workers, which in
reality might be absent. Temporary workers, one often hears, are admitted to fill labour
shortages for jobs that local workers typically don’t want, jobs such as catering,
agricultural labour, the building sectors, cleaning services or caring for the sick and the
19
elderly. Since there are not enough domestic workers interested in taking up
employment in either of these occupational spheres, so the argument goes, the issue of
their exploitation does not arise at all. If there simply aren’t enough local workers
earning similar wages to compare with temporary workers, the idea that guestworker
programmes might contribute to lower sufficiency thresholds could safely be put to one
side.
The standard answer to this objection is that since labour demand is socially
constructed, the poor wages, degrading work conditions and lower social status
typically associated to jobs performed by guestworkers is precisely what causes locals
to distance themselves from such jobs. If the conditions and status associated to them
were substantially improved, local workers would be more willing to take offers of
employment in similar sectors (Carens 2008; S. Castles 2006). This would in turn also
contribute to sending marginal employers out of business, to increase investment in
labour-saving technologies and to benefit producers (especially agricultural producers)
in developing countries who would no longer compete with large companies deploying
cheap labour (S. Castles 2006: 761).
Although this answer is plausible, it does not really confront the objection we are
examining. That objection insists that where competition between domestic and foreign
workers is absent, we have no reason to be concerned for what happens to local
standards of sufficiency. In this sense, reflecting on what might occur in the future, if
and when wages rise, is irrelevant to address a challenge that only applies to present
circumstances. A better strategy for answering this objection might therefore be to
confront head-on the evidence upon which it is grounded: the claim that domestic
workers and foreign temporary workers do not compete with each other for the same
dirty, dangerous and difficult jobs. To criticize that assumption, we might appeal to
examples from two paradigmatic guestworker cases with which the empirical literature
is often concerned: the Bracero programme in the United States and the employment of
temporary workers in Germany. Both provide important insights into the relationship
between domestic and temporary labourers in low-skilled work sectors. And both are
helpful to reveal the upsetting effect of differential contracts on unionized workers and
the sufficiency standards on the basis of which they negotiate.
20
In the case of the Bracero programme, the costs of hiring cheap Mexican labour
to work in the Californian agricultural sector became increasingly clear after1964, when
the programme officially came to an end. Although unions had always voiced concerns
about the effects of importing foreign labour on local earnings, the extent to which the
Bracero programme had depressed wages was evident from the unprecedented rise in
agricultural workers wages that was experienced between 1964 and 1980 (when illegal
immigration became a new threat) (P. Martin 2002). To mention but one prominent
example, in the San Joaquin Valley of California, near Delano, Cesar Chavez and his
United Farm Workers Union conducted an extremely effective campaign against local
table grape growers culminating in a 40 percent increase, bringing wages from $1.25 to
$1.75 an hour. In the days where Bracero workers were available to break the grapepickers strike, this would have not been possible (P. L. Martin and Teitelbaum 2001124).
The difficult relationship between temporary foreign workers and local labour
unions is also illustrated in a number of studies involving labourers employed in the
Germany in the years following the country’s reunification. A study of the Berlin
building industry showed that even though 25 per cent of unemployed people in Berlin
had been construction workers by 1996, employers preferred to hire foreign contract
workers to maximize profit. This competition had adverse effects especially on
unionized building workers, many of whom were long-term foreign residents ((S.
Castles 2006: 751). In contrast to the model of long-term employment, where the
workplace and the trade union were sites of interethnic communication and integration,
domestic and guestworkers were now competing against each other (S. Castles 2006).
Similar outcomes could be observed also in other contexts. As recent studies of the
American job market indicated, the wages of workers without high-school education
declined as a result of low-skilled immigrant pressure, and that those most affected are
resident immigrants in low-wage jobs and less-educated American workers, including
the unemployed (Ghosh 2005: 169).
It is therefore hard to maintain that because guestworkers and domestic workers
are not interested in the same jobs, the latter are not vulnerable to exploitation.
However, one could still object at this point that our argument focuses too much on the
short-term negative impact of guestworker programmes without considering their
21
long-term positive effects. These typically include contributing to economic growth in
host states, helping sending societies through remittances and other forms of support
and providing temporary workers with chances to increase their earnings and gain
skills and experiences through work in a different state. Notice however that all these
allegedly positive features rely on the long-term promise of economic growth. Yet
growth and exploitation are perfectly compatible with each other. Even if one takes the
long-term view economists might prefer us to take, there are no guarantees that a fair
distribution of the extra-wealth generated by migration will follow economic growth.
And absent that distributional perspective, what is the guarantee that those at the very
bottom of the social hierarchy will not continue to be exposed to exploitation? If
improved opportunities for some come at the price of others being deprived of the
same, indeed can develop precisely on that assumption (recall that short-term sacrifices
are required for long-term gains) even if some individual workers might benefit, the
structural conditions of collective exploitation will likely remain the same.
8. Conclusion
Guestworker programmes pose many dilemmas. Conspicuous among those is the issue
of whether guestworkers are exploited. A cursory look at the daily newspapers
indicates that they are treated dismally: guestworkers work long hours, carry out
difficult jobs and receive very little recognition (both financial and social) for the
services they perform.5 Yet, when we turn to the issue from a normative perspective we
seem to have trouble capturing what is the moral standard with regard to which we
consider guestworkers to be taken unfair advantage of. If we rely on a domination
theory of exploitation, lack of access to the benefits of citizenship does not seem
For a very recent report of the conditions in which guestworkers are employed all over the European
Union see an article just appeared in the Belgium daily newspaper “Le Soir”, entitled: “Les nouveaux
esclaves sont parmi nous” (The new Slaves are among us) http://archives.lesoir.be/les-nouveauxesclaves-sont-parmi-nous-20-euros_t-2011101801MG25.html?query=traite+des+%EAtres&firstHit=0&by=10&sort=datedesc&when=1&queryor=traite+des+%EAtres&pos=1&all=37299&nav=1 .
5
22
sufficient to distinguish between collective political entitlements one should always
have access to and others that it is acceptable to waive, at least for a time. If we rely on
an egalitarian theory, we neglect how global processes of supply and demand might
respond differently to different skills under offer, changing the equilibrium price for
labour, and making exploitative practices often very hard to identify. If we rely on a
sufficientarian theory we hit against considerable empirical evidence suggesting that
guestworkers negotiate their employment offers from positions well above the
threshold of sufficiency, and that it is either those who stay at home or those who are
affected in host societies who are normally left with not enough.
However, this last point is crucial for our purposes. Even if exploitation does not
involve guestworkers as such (or at least not everywhere and at every time)
guestworker programmes can still be considered exploitative. They may not exploit
individual temporary workers as such but they take unfair advantage of the position of
workers in both sending and receiving societies. Even if each individual guestworker
has enough employment-choice to rule out that they can be taken unfair advantage of,
this is only possible on condition that others don’t exercise the same choice.
The case of guestworkers therefore provides a good empirical lens
through which to examine a problem that has long been discussed in political theory:
the issue of proletarian unfreedom (Cohen 1983). As many authors have shown, what
makes the proletariat unfree as a collective is the fact that the freedom of each
individual worker is contingent upon others not exercising their similarly contingent
freedom. The structural conditions under which workers are forced to sell their labour
are such that the offers one agent is individually free to pursue necessarily restrict the
space for others taking advantage of similar options. Therefore, even if each worker is
individually free to exit their collective exploitative condition, he suffers with others in
circumstances that have often also been defined as circumstances of “collective
unfreedom” (Cohen 1983, 11).
The implications of this point are important for the kind of normative framework
in which we choose to place the issue of guestworkers. So far, the question has been
raised in the context of theories reflecting on the issue of justice in migration, i.e. the
distribution of benefits and burdens between migrants (in this case temporary
workers), citizens of sending societies and citizens of receiving societies. But if the
23
problem with guestworker programmes is not so much the condition of individual
temporary workers but the way in which such programmes narrow the options of
workers in general, the fact that workers happen to be separated by boundaries and
that they belong to different states is a matter of secondary importance. Taking
seriously the distinction between residents and aliens and asking members of one
group to make sacrifices for the sake of members in the other is unlikely to be a very
productive route for ending the exploitation of workers as a collective. The questions
we should be asking instead are those that focus on the status of workers in general, the
circumstances in which they are forced to accept certain wages, the sort of incentives
that reward employers and firms seeking to hire cheap labour, and the institutional
arrangements that govern the trade of labour and the accumulation of capital in the
global market. Even if guestworker programmes don’t exploit each individual
guestworker, they operate in a global institutional structure that exploits workers as
members of a collective: the collective composed by all those who sell their labour for a
living or, to put it in more familiar terms, that collective we often refer to with the term
“working class”. To reflect on the remedial principles required to end their exploitation,
is to engage with a radically different way of arranging the economy, and a new
distribution of global benefits and burdens.
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