INTENSIVE COURSE: MIGRANT WORKERS LIVING AT WORK: EAST AND WEST

Prof. Antonella Ceccagno (University of Bologna)

This lecture series will help the students familiarize with issues pertaining to migrant labor by focusing on migrant workers living at work and discussing different forms of workers mobility in Asia and Europe.

The mobility of workers living at work is often described as orchestrated by employers, states, and intermediaries, especially as far as dorms in Asia are concerned. We will first discuss some papers on migrant workers in China, Japan, Jordan and other Asian countries where migrant workers are described as moved by others.

Second, we will move to Europe where we will adopt a gaze different from most literature. Focusing on two cases in Europe – Chinese migrants in Italy, and Eastern European and Asian migrants in the Czech Republic– the series will offer a novel approach. Instead of focusing on the single workplace at a certain point in time, it will adopt a perspective that considers the multiplicity of accommodations at work for workers across Europe along the time dimension. It will thus show that this condition favors forms of workers self-tailored mobility beyond the employers’ expectations.

Against such a background, the series will discuss the workers’ separation from families as both a form of dispossession and a condition workers increasingly take advantage of as it increases their potential for mobility in the European labor markets.

On the last day, students will be offered the opportunity to meet with and interview a Chinese migrant with previous experiences as a worker and as a small entrepreneur in the Italian fashion industry.  Through the interview, students will gain first hand information on the multilayered mobility experienced by transnational migrant workers.

Lecture 1. Dorms for Migrant Workers: What is at Stake
Lecture 2. Workers Mobility in Asia: Employers, States and Intermediaries
Lecture 3. The Mobility of Workers Living at Work in Europe
Lecture 4.  Dispossession or Advantage? Workers’ Perspectives on the Outsourcing of Social Reproduction (+ Interview)

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•  Azmeh, S. (2014) ‘Labour in global production networks: workers in the qualifying industrial zones of Egypt and Jordan’, Global Networks, 12 (2), 495-513.
• Caro, E., L. Berntsen, N. Lillie and I. Wagner (2015) ‘Posted Migration and Segregation in the European Construction Sector’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 41 (10), 1600-1620, doi: 10.1080/1369183X.2015.1015406.
• Ceccagno, A. (2015) ‘The Mobile Emplacement: Chinese Migrants in Italian Industrial Districts’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 41 (7), 1111-1130.
• Ceccagno, A. (2017) 'New Insights on Global Care', Sociologia del lavoro, 146, 72-88.
• Pun, N. and J. Chan (2012), Global Capital, the State, and Chinese Workers: The Foxconn Experience’, Modern China 38(4), 383–410.
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• Pun, N. and C. Smith (2007) ‘Putting Transnational Labour Process in its Place: the Dormitory Labour Regime in Post-socialist China’, Work, Employment and Society, 21 (1), 27–45.
• Yea, S. (2017) ‘The Art of not Being Caught: Temporal Strategies for Disciplining Unfree Labour in Singapore’s Contract Migration’, Geoforum 78, 179–188.
• Xiang, B. (2012) ‘Labor Transplant: “Point to Point” Transnational Labor Migration in East Asia’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 111 (4), 721- 739.