Patterns of Exploitation: Understanding Migrant Worker Rights in Advanced Democracies

Are there similarities in the way that migrant workers are (mis)treated in self-styled advanced democracies?This is the question that Anna Boucher, a political scientist based at the University of Sydney, sets out to answer in Patterns of Exploitation.There is a growing labour law literature that considers the situation of migrant workers-this includes, just in the last decade or so, several monographs, numerous articles and at least three edited collections on this topic. 1This interest is driven in part by the growing number of migrant workers in particular industries and occupations, such as social care, agriculture, and construction.These workers often bear the brunt of efforts to deregulate and restructure labour markets, weaken state enforcement capacity, and limit the power of unions.It is also motivated by a growing realisation that the plight of migrants reflects the experience of a growing segment of citizen workers.Boucher shares many of these concerns, but the issue that exercises her most is the legal violations that migrant workers routinely suffer: wage theft, denial of leave entitlements, health and safety violations, discrimination at work and, in some cases, a variety of criminal infractions.In fact, Boucher prefers to conceptualise labour exploitation as the violation of employment standards, which she argues set the parameters of socially acceptable conditions.She dismisses theoretical accounts that either privilege the existence of consent (in the liberal tradition) or the absence of unfreedom (in the Marxist tradition) as being 'difficult to operationalize empirically' . 2 Similarly, Boucher finds only limited value in the popular 'continuum approach', which sees labour exploitation as existing on a spectrum between decent work and 1 In terms of edited collection, see, e.g.,