Migrant worker

“ Strengthen and expand temporary labor migration pathways, as feasible, that benefit countries across the region, including through new programs promoting connections between employers and migrant workers, robust safeguards for ethical recruitment, and legal protections for workers’ rights. Improve access to public and private services for all migrants, refugees, and stateless persons to promote their full social and economic inclusion in host communities. ”

“ They will prohibit any discrimination in remuneration and working conditions between national workers and immigrant workers, without prejudice to special measures concerning frontier workers; in particular, they will work out among themselves any arrangements necessary so that social security measures do not stand in the way of the movement of labor. ”

“ Some organizations raised concerns with regard to the administration of justice and barriers faced by migrant workers to gain redress, inter alia: the length a migrant arrested under Immigration Act may be held before being brought before a Magistrate; indeterminate detention pending removal ”

“ Second, we will expand employment opportunities for rural migrant workers in cities while stabilizing their existing jobs. We will stimulate their employment through government investment and the launch of major projects. We will encourage and help enterprises that are in a difficult situation to prevent layoffs by renegotiating wage levels with their employees, adopting flexible employment and work hours, or providing job training for them. We will increase the export of organized labor services and guide the orderly flow of rural migrant workers. ”

“ The incidence of wage arrears continued to increase early in the year as many of the country's export-oriented manufacturers, facing a sharp decline in orders from overseas, began to lay off large numbers of workers.
The estimated 230 million migrant workers faced numerous other obstacles with regard to working conditions and labor rights. Many were unable to access public services such as public education or social insurance in the cities where they lived and worked because they were not legally registered urban residents. ”

“ New measures were undertaken to protect migrant workers, especially the sacadas in the sugar industry. The Department of Labor now operates regional employment offices in Panay and Negros islands, which closely supervise the activities of labor contractors and the movements of migrant workers. Labor contractors are now required to file cash and surety bonds, of which P281,500 has been filed covering 13,079 sacadas. Our ultimate goal is to eliminate the labor contractors. ”

“ In 2007 the ACWF reported that female migrant workers, comprising more than 30 percent of all migrant workers in the country, faced numerous challenges in the workplace. The survey found that female migrant workers lacked legal protection (more than 50 percent had no labor contract, compared with 40 percent of male migrants) , had long working hours (more than 40 percent worked nine to 10 hours a day while 24.8 percent worked more than 11 hours a day) , earned low wages, and did not have access to safe and sanitary work environments. ”

“ It has now eighteen branches in cities to which this migration has been directed. Through a local worker these migrants are approached, properly placed and supervised until they can adjust themselves to the community without apparent embarrassment to either race. The League has been able to handle the migrants arriving by extending the work so as to know their movements beforehand.
The occupations in which these people engage will throw further light on their situation. About ninety per cent of them do unskilled labor. Only ten per cent of them do semi-skilled or skilled labor. ”

“ There is at least some reasonable basis for the belief that if the absence of immigration to this country had resulted in a smaller laboring force, the greater pressure on employers to secure machinery, and the greater intelligence of the machine worker, would together have brought about such a betterment of labor-saving machinery as would have resulted in a total production equal to what we have actually witnessed. ”

“ A labor camp at its worst is not an argument against immigration, but an indictment of the brutality of the contractor who cares only to force a maximum of work out of the workmen, and cares nothing for their lives ”

“ It seems paradoxical that the migratory worker should patronize the private labor agent whom he regards as an exploiter and a parasite rather than the free employment office, yet there are good reasons for his behavior.
In the first place, the office of the public agency, although little more than a block away, is not on the “main stem.” Strangers in the city find their way to the “slave market” without difficulty but may never become aware of the existence of the free employment office. A migratory worker likes to do a little “window shopping” before he takes a job. ”

“ The workers are as transient as the institutions themselves: migrating back and forth between cities, and affiliating themselves first with one mission and then with another. Often they are rural folk who, through urban mission work, find expression for the wishes of adventure and recognition. The fascination of the city has an attraction for the migratory mission worker as for the migratory laborer. ”

“ Those who have investigated and studied the lower strata of American labor have long recognized the I.W.W. as purely a symptom of a certain distressing state of affairs. The casual migratory laborers are the finished product of an economic environment which seems cruelly efficient in turning out human beings modeled after all the standards which society abhors. ”

“ We're increasing the number of immigration enforcement agents and criminal investigators, enhancing work site enforcement, and going after smugglers and gang members and human traffickers.
Finally, comprehensive immigration reform requires a temporary worker program that will relieve pressure on our borders. This program would create a legal way to match willing foreign workers with willing American employers to fill jobs that Americans will not do. ”

“ The standard contract law requires employers to provide foreign domestic workers with housing, worker's compensation insurance, travel allowances, and food or a food allowance in addition to the minimum wage, which together provided a decent standard of living. Foreign domestic workers can be deported if dismissed. After leaving one employer, workers have two weeks to secure new employment before they must leave the SAR. Activists contended this restriction left workers vulnerable to a range of abuses from employers. ”

“ We have used great numbers of aliens in building the railroads of the country, in mines and steel mills, in workshops and factories. On the other hand the flood of immigration has at times proved too strong. It has on occasions served to produce an over-supply of labor and this, in turn, has caused wages to fall. Labor leaders claim that the steady stream of immigrants has prevented the rise in the American workman’s standard of living which otherwise would have taken place. Organized labor would like to place a protective duty upon immigrants. ”

“ The same signal which produced upon the workers this effect, caused a different impression upon the males and females; as soon as one of the labourers had informed them of their danger, they sought an asylum, and re-entered precipitately the trunk of the tree;—not one thought of quitting its temporary shelter, until a worker approached and gave them the signal for flight. The solicitude of the labourers in their favour, is manifested in the activity they display, in giving them advice or intimating to them the order for their departure ”

“ The man who continues as a migratory worker is likely, therefore, to be a person who is either unable to find or unable to hold a permanent job. Some workers become restless after a few weeks or months in one place. ”

“ As the distances are great, the laborers are peculiarly migratory. The railroad tracks are their highways and one may here see at almost any time these migratory workers walking the railroad ties, and always with blankets rolled in bundles on their backs. The blanket pictures symbolically their crude home conditions and social life. These conditions breed the I. W. W. Here is a great need for the state to extend its functions to bring a real liberty and tolerable living conditions. Much depends on the possible success of these unskilled migratory workers in organizing. ”

“ The foreign laborer has been called home to bear arms for his country. The daily death toll and waste and the recently enacted immigration law make it certain that he will not soon return in great numbers. ”

“ A temporary worker program would meet the needs of our economy, and it would give honest immigrants a way to provide for their families while respecting the law. A temporary worker program would reduce the appeal of human smugglers, and make it less likely that people would risk their lives to cross the border. ”

“ Scarcely any industry can grow fast enough to reabsorb into skilled or semi-skilled positions the displaced workmen.
Employers observe a tendency for employment to become more fluctuating and seasonal because of access to an elastic supply of aliens, without family or local attachments, ready to go anywhere or do anything. In certain centers, immigrant laborers form, as it were, visible living pools from which the employer can dip as he needs. ”

“ The MWG-JUMP raised concerns regarding the impact of the ‘outsourcing’ recruitment system introduced in 2006, which contributes to labour trafficking, as well as to the vulnerability and lack of protection by foreign workers.91 HRW expressed concern about the situation of migrant domestic workers and recommended to the Government, inter alia, to strengthen regulations governing recruitment agencies; institute screening procedures and support services at its borders, in cooperation with trafficking experts, SUHAKAM and nongovernmental organizations ”

“ To thousands of workmen the immigration problem is a question of holding a job against a constantly lowering standard of living, and to withstand this stream of “raw labor” means to them the maintenance of industrial efficiency and of life itself. Workingmen are engaged in a desperate struggle to maintain a standard of wages against the constant arrival of unskilled immigrants at the rate of three-quarters of a million a year, at the [Pg 94] very period when the elaboration of machinery permits the largest use of unskilled men. ”

“ A distinct deterioration of the masses displaced by the cheaper labor has marked the advent of the new immigration. While some of the workingmen thrown out of employment by immigration rise with the increase in the number of superior positions, the great mass are obliged to accept the lower standard or are forced out of the industry into misery, pauperism, and crime. The greater tendency of immigrants, by reason of their poverty, to permit or encourage the employment of their wives or children, still further increases the intensity of the competition for employment. ”

“ In regard to the recent emigration they say in the same address: “The migration of the colored people now going on has assumed such proportions as to demand the calm and deliberate consideration of every thoughtful citizen of the country. It is the result of no idle curiosity or disposition to evade labor. It proceeds upon the assumption that there is a combination of well-planned and systematic purposes to still further abridge their rights and reduce them to a state of actual serfdom. If their labor is valuable it should be respected. ”

“ By extreme division of labor and marvellous application of machinery it makes possible the wholesale employment in factories of the farm laborers of Europe and their children, and then depends on Europe for the better-trained types of the skilled mechanic, who, on account of the farm laborer, have not been able to learn their trade in America.
Not only does immigration bring to America the strongest, healthiest, and most energetic and adventurous of the work-people of Europe and Asia, but those who come work much harder than they did at home. ”

“ Competition to obtain employment is in consequence cruelly severe. The inevitable results are, the evasion of the law respecting factories and workshops, the reduction of wages to the lowest minimum, and the extension of the hours of work to the utmost limits of human endurance.
The effect of foreign immigration upon our labouring [77] population is far greater than might at first be supposed. Its inevitable effect is the degradation of all the native labour employed, to the level of the foreign labour which is brought into competition with it. ”

“ It may even be possible, under the federal employment service, to develop the long wished for national registration of casual and migratory labor. Need for some such system has been felt by all agencies trying to deal constructively with vagrants and homeless men. ”

“ Despite the hardships which many of the migrants have undergone, and those which numbers of them are undergoing at present because of unemployment, since sufficient time for adjustment has elapsed, the migrants have so wrought in industrial affairs as to furnish ground for reason to believe that the migration has, at least from that standpoint, been a success. This view is firmly taken by a representative of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. ”

“ The Contracting States shall give sympathetic consideration to assimilating the rights of all refugees with regard to wage-earning employment to those of nationals, and in particular of those refugees who have entered their territory pursuant to programmes of labour recruitment or under immigration schemes. ”