Migrant workers

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Migrant workers in the United States

Migrant workers are economically active people who have to go to work far away from their place of residence. As agricultural harvest workers, they migrate from one region to the next, depending on the harvest season of the respective vegetable and fruit species, and mostly live in temporary housing (in southern Europe) .

In a narrower sense of the word, it also refers to people who (have) left their country of origin to take up work or who (have relocated) their place of residence abroad and commute as cross-border commuters to work in their country of origin .

Definitions

International Convention for the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families

For the purposes of the International Convention for the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families of December 18, 1990, a “migrant worker” is a person who “exercises or has exercised an activity for remuneration in a state of which he / she is not a national . ". This includes

  • Cross-border commuters,
  • Seasonal workers,
  • Seafarers,
  • Workers on an offshore installation,
  • traveling workers,
  • project-related employees,
  • employees approved for a specific occupation and
  • Self-employed.
  • but also irregular residents and illegal workers

International Organization for Migration

According to a definition by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the term migrant workers includes migrant workers , contract workers , seasonal workers , cross-border commuters, but also illegally employed workers, as long as they stay at the place of work for the duration of their employment.

European Association for Migrant Workers Issues

According to the definition of the European Association for Migrant Workers Issues , it does not refer to the “ righteous journeymen who travel abroad ” according to the traditional craft guild rules, nor to migrants who usually leave their home country with their families, but rather those employees who keep their family ties in their home country and more or less often return home from work abroad.

China

For China, the term is defined with reference to the Hukou system of registered residences, to which public services such as childcare, health care or access to education are linked. The system served to control the settlement of the cities. Migrant workers are therefore those Chinese who have decided to work outside of the district registered for them. Their number was estimated at around 250 million in China in 2007, and 277 million in 2015.

history

In Germany there has been a stable sub-bourgeois social milieu for generations since the restoration period , which - driven by social hardship - roamed around looking for work from economically weak areas. So-called “people hardship” in agriculture as well as “workers hardship” in industry, in road and canal construction and in agriculture (the latter especially in northern Germany) caused the seasonal migration to increase sharply since the 1890s. For example, up to 3,500 migrant workers were deployed on the island of Fehmarn with a population of around 10,000 people at harvest time (according to Thomsen 1982). Before the First World War there were 1.2 million foreign migrant workers in the German Reich . Conversely, German migrant workers found seasonal work as so-called Holland - goers in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Switzerland. Another example were the Saxons . Such so-called “ cross-border commuters ” were defined by Peter Meusburger as “interstate commuters who live in Germany and are subject to income, but are gainfully employed abroad and who visit their domestic place of residence daily or at least once a week”.

In the United States were mostly homeless and itinerant migrant workers Hobos known that in times of economic crisis during the late 19th century after the Civil War and in the early 20th century during the Great Depression searched for work as a seasonal worker in construction or forestry workers.

Significantly influenced by British colonial policy in favor of industry and the agricultural sector in southern Africa, the extent of migrant labor increased to a considerable extent around 1900. The Prime Minister Cecil John Rhodes , a magnate of the coal and steel industry in what was then the Cape Colony , created a legislative instrument with the Glen Gray Act in 1894, which exerted inevitable pressure on the black population to take up work through tax regulations and the award of real estate without sufficient economic viability has been. In this way, the prosperous mining centers as well as the large farms of the British and Boers in southern Africa received a rich selection of freely available migrant workers, who formed a solid economic factor of the "white" industry until the apartheid epoch.

present

According to the International Organization for Migration, the number of migrant workers worldwide is estimated at around 200 million. It expects an annual increase of 2.3 million by 2050. This growth rate is 40 percent higher than that between 1960 and 2005, when around 1.6 million people in search of work crossed borders every year. 70.6 million immigrants from other regions live in Europe , followed by North America with 45.1 million and the Arabian Peninsula with 18.8 million.

China

A large proportion of migrant workers according to the above Definition - Chinese citizens - are farmers who move to urban regions in order to benefit from the higher standard of living, and who often work in civil engineering. The proportion of skilled workers, engineers and service providers is increasing, however, and a number of districts are differentiating the Hukou rules and allowing the official influx of new citizens.

For your rights u. a. the Ministry of Labor and Social Security in charge, and in some provinces higher rates apply at the minimum wage . Again, some payments are made late, which increases the call for state control.

As a result of the financial crisis from 2007 onwards , around 20 million migrant workers lost their jobs, which, according to official information, affected around 15 percent of the around 130 million migrant workers from rural regions. By 2015 the total number rose again to 277 million.

Literary adaptations

literature

  • Jan Carstensen, Josef Mangold (Ed.): People - Ideas - Migration. New perspectives on building culture in the Rhineland and Westphalia-Lippe. with contributions on historical migrant work, knowledge transfer and labor migration by Anke Asfur, Kai Reinbold, Wilfried Reininghaus, Sabine Thomas-Ziegler, Anne Wieland u. a. Essen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8375-0355-5 .
  • Ernst Thomsen (1982): Agricultural migrant workers and servants in Schleswig-Holstein 1880 - 1914. Dissertation at the University of Kiel.

Web links

Wiktionary: Migrant workers  - explanations of meanings, origins of words, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Duden entry on "Migrant workers" in Duden-Online, accessed on December 25, 2008
  2. ↑ Christoph Lehermayr: Europe's new slaves , at news.at
  3. ↑ Gilles Reckinger : Bitter oranges. A new face of slavery in Europe , Edition Trickster by Peter Hammer Verlag, Wuppertal, 2018, ISBN 978-3-7795-0590-7
  4. ↑ International Convention for the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families. Art. 2, paragraph 1
  5. ↑ Katharina Spieß: The United Nations Migrant Workers Convention, An Instrument to Strengthen the Rights of Migrants in Germany. German Institute for Human Rights , January 2007, accessed on January 18, 2018 . ISBN 978-3-937714-32-5 . P. 11.
  6. ↑ Hans-Günther Homfeldt, Wolfgang Schröer and Cornelia Schweppe: Social work and transnationality: challenges of a tension-filled relationship. Juventa 2007, p. 81,82 here online
  7. ^ Mathias Kirchner in New Trade Union Ways
  8. ^ Spiegel Online: Crash course for China's disenfranchised from December 31, 2007
  9. ↑ a b de.statista.com: Number of migrant workers in China from 2010 to 2015 , accessed December 31, 2016
  10. ^ Die Zeit: Drehscheibe Deutschland ( Memento from April 6, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) from February 15, 1991 No. 08
  11. ↑ Textbook of General Geography, Vol. 8, General State Geography by Erich Obst, Josef Schmithüsen and Martin Schwind , Gruyter 1972, p. 101, here online
  12. ↑ Hartmut Häußermann and Walter Siebel: Urban Sociology: An Introduction, Campus Verlag 2004, p. 51 here online
  13. ↑ The Story of Gold Recruiting Migrant Workers ( Memento from April 20, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) originally on www.newhistory.co.za (English)
  14. ^ Lionel Cliffe: Ruth First: Black Gold: The Mozambican Miner, Proletarian and Peasant . (PDF; 250 kB) Book review in: Sociology. Durham Vol. 18 (1984) No. 1
  15. ↑ Half of the migrant workers are women Frankfurter Rundschau of December 2, 2008
  16. ↑ Migrant workers are waiting for wages in the billions FAZ of August 17, 2005
  17. ↑ Netzeitung: 20 million migrant workers in China without a job ( memento of February 5, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) of February 2, 2009