1. Asia’s Labor Migration and Employment Relations Regimes

Abstract

Scholars writing on temporary labor migration in Europe have long recognized that it is not only the broad socio-political context and migration policy that influence migrant workers’ experiences in a destination country. Equally important are the structures of that country’s institutional labor market and the readiness of its unions to engage with migrant workers (see, for example, Connolly, Marino, and Lucio 2014; Krings 2009). In the extensive literature on temporary labor migration in Asia, these insights are left largely unexamined and untheorized.1 While much of this work draws attention to the location of migrant workers in destination-country labor markets, there has been no systematic comparison of the ways in which employment relations regimes of different destination countries intersect with their labor migration regimes. Neither has there been any systematic consideration of how employment relations and the regulation of labor migration condition the responses of local unions to temporary labor migration.