Alberto Ganis
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Even though its existence has been a constant throughout human history, the use of the term labor migration gained traction in post-World War Two Europe as a response to the need of a new workforce to replace the one lost during the war. In general, this term refers to the movement of able-bodied men from former colonies and developing countries to West European countries that suffered a great loss of lives during the World Wars and that were dealing with an economic boom boosted by aid policies like the Marshall plan. According to Rita Chin (2002), in Germany, Austria and other European countries, young laborers would be allowed to stay one or two years and due to their fleeting status, they were called “guest workers” or migrant workers. According Article 2(1) of the 1990 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families defines the term “migrant worker” as: “a person who is to be engaged, is engaged, or has been engaged in a remunerated activity in a State of which he or she is not a national”(IOM Report, 2018). As we are seeing, there is some uncertainty surrounding the specific definition of labor migration and migrant workers. This is principally due to the fact that such categories are contingent on geographic, legal, political, temporal, etc. contexts that are specific to the country that defines them and the policies that address them, including in relation to place of birth, citizenship, place of residence and duration of stay (IOM Report, 2018[LV1] ).

It is important to point out that the term labor migration exists in part outside traditional trade and economic theory because “owners of labor have both feelings and independent wills. Indeed, most aspects of human behavior, including migratory behavior, are both a response to feelings and an exercise of independent wills” (Stark & Bloom 1985, 173). The social aspect of this matter is at the core of social science research regarding issues of multiculturalism and integration. Due to the demographics of the countries involved in the migration routes of today and the past, race and diversity are the central nexuses of social attrition. As Balibar (1991) puts it, “collectivities of immigrant workers have for many years suffered discrimination and xenophobic violence in which racist stereotyping has played an essential role” (1991, 20).

Having briefly addressed the migration part of the term, it is crucial to explain the concept of labor and its relation to the worker: The term labor became common starting in the nineteenth century, around when the revolutionary “labor theory of value” was developed. The idea is that the value of goods/commodities is determined by the labor/work put into their production. (Smith 1776; Marx 1887). In Marx’s terms,

A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labor in the abstract has been embodied or materialized in it. […] Plainly, by the quantity of the value-creating substance, the labor, contained in the article. The quantity of labor, however, is measured by its duration, and labor-time in its turn finds its standard in weeks, days, and hours. As values, all commodities are only definite masses of congealed labor-time. (Marx 1877, 11)

Relying on this definition of labor, Smith discusses the importance of the division of labor in order to achieve maximum wealth/productivity. He proposes that rather than have laborers taking care of the whole production of a single good, dividing the labor among specialized “mono-taskers” would prove itself more fruitful and efficient. This efficiency is related to the skills of the laborer and therefore to the time and resources needed to produce the finished commodity. Smith (1776) goes on by stating that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market, since “when the market is very small, no person can have any encouragement to dedicate himself entirely to one employment” (35). His idea holds true also in the case of labor migration, specifically in post-World War II Europe. The economic boom implied an enlargement of the market and the lack of workforce could not fulfill the demand for unskilled labor that is characteristic of the theory of division of labor. To remedy such need, many European countries developed legislation and other programs aimed at fostering the influx of cheap, unskilled, specialized labor from their colonies, former colonies, and other developing countries.

The division of labor is important because its diffusion in the developed economies opened the doors to the need of large quantities of relatively unqualified labor that could quickly specialize and become integrated within the production chain. In Germany for example, the “guest workers found employment as unskilled or semiskilled laborers, especially in areas that required heavy or dirty work, shift work, and repetitive production methods. This allowed German nationals to move into more desirable kinds of tasks” (Chin 2002, 47). The specialization of labor caused by its division creates “‘undifferentiated human labor’, that is ‘like all other commodity producing labor, it is . . . labor in its directly social form’” (Marx 1887; Marx 1990 as cited in Tomba 2009, 50). Labor becomes an exchangeable good removed from the means of production where owners of labor must usually move along with their labor, uprooting themselves and their families with sociocultural implications that end up affecting the individuals involved as much as the hosting country. On the other hand, the  owners of production inputs or commodities, can simply trade their end products abroad so as to maximize profits or utility (Stark & Bloom 1985; Smith 1776). The commodification of labor affects the decision making of the owners of labor in a manner that is foreign to the owners of the means of production. In fact, according to Marx, the worker as an economic entity is directed to activities chosen by the bourgeoisie in order to profit by extracting the maximum surplus value possible through the exploitation of the worker.

(See Labor, Europe, Enclosure/Border, Sovereignty, Capital)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chin, Rita. “Imagining a German Multiculturalism: Aras Ören and the Contested Meanings of the ‘Guest Worker,’ 1955–1980.” Radical History Review 2002, no. 83 (2002): 44–72. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2002-83-44. 

Marx, Karl. “Capital: a Critique of Political Economy.” Economic Manuscripts: Capital:
Volume One, 1887. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/. 

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry in the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. MetaLibri Digital Library, 2007 [1776]. https://www.ibiblio.org/ml/libri/s/SmithA_WealthNations_p.pdf. 

Stark, Oded, and David E. Bloom. “The New Economics of Labor Migration.” The American Economic Review 75, no. 2 (1985): 173–78. 

Tomba, Massimiliano. “Historical Temporalities of Capital: An Anti-Historicist Perspective.” Historical Materialism 17, no. 4 (2009): 44–65.
https://doi.org/10.1163/146544609×12537556703115. 

“World Migration Report 2018.” World Migration Report, 2019.
https://worldmigrationreport.iom.int/2018.