Labor Migration and the Role of the State

Abstract

Previous chapters have discussed the two major corporate strategies for reducing labor costs under the new international division of labor: (1) the peripheralization of some stages of production for the world market to countries or regions with comparatively cheap nonmilitant labor; and (2) lowering skill requirements of the work process, which permits increasing bifurcation of labor markets into high-wage and low-wage sectors (see, especially, chapters 8 and 9). In many Western European countries, the second strategy has faced the obstacle of severe shortages of cheap, unskilled labor, given the long history of industrial unionism and rising educational levels of the population. Corporations have addressed this problem not only by relocating some of their production activities to lower-wage countries in the Mediterranean but also by organizing large-scale but regulated migrations of workers from that area. Although corporations have used such migration flows since World War II to satisfy their labor needs — first in mining, later in construction, industrial sectors, and services — it is only since the middle to late 1960s, under the impetus of the new international division of labor, that the pressure for such migration became widespread across industrial sectors and services.¹