Introduction

Abstract

As evoked through the above quotes, this edited book explores issues of vulnerability and exploitation in the labour market, drawing on material from across the world. It does this through a broad-reaching analysis of the lived experiences of exploitation in different geographical contexts. In cataloguing these experiences, we range across global neoliberalised economies and emergent supply chains, states’ management of migrants’ mobility and the structural production of immigration statuses, characteristics of enclave economies for migrants and their co-ethnic/co-language networks, and national/international responses and interventions designed to tackle migrant exploitation.

Precarity is something that isn’t reserved for a small specialised group of people — the precariat or whoever. It spreads, it affects us all. The whip of insecurity disciplines even those who were recently comfortable … We are all zero hours.(Richard Seymour, Guardian, 1 May 2014)

One in five workers in this country have no idea what days they will work or even if they will work from week to week … zero hours are not a rarity, they are a trap of low wages, anxiety and utter uncertainty.(Len McCluskey, Unite Union, BBC News, 9 September 2013)

Firms are almost obliged to treat workers on zero hours contracts badly — for example, avoiding making offers of work on a regular basis — if they want to make sure that the employment status of the individual remains that of a worker [rather than an employee].(Ian Brinkley, The Work Foundation, August 2013)