Introduction: Migration, Precarity, and Global Governance Challenges and Opportunities for Labour

Abstract

This introductory editorial chapter paints the background to current issues of international migration, unfree labour, racialization, and changing frameworks of citizenship. The theoretical basis for this chapter is drawn from a modified view of the writings of Karl Polanyi. Using the notion of 'precarity' as a central concept, the editors analyse the prospects for a contemporary 'double movement' which challenges the commodification of labour under conditions of neoliberal globalization. The introduction summarizes and discusses the content of the book's fifteen chapters in the light of this perspective, and posits a discussion of human rights as a stratagem for today's labour movements. It makes a case for bringing the labour movement back in, through debates on migration, migrants' working conditions, the organization of labour, and the utopia of social justice in a post-neoliberal era.