The Migrant Personal Work Relation: A New Category of Employment

ABSTRACT The relationship between UK immigration law and labour law is increasingly intertwined and complex. Migrant workers are regularly incorporated into the labour market on an unequal and instrumental basis as economic commodities. A central aim of this paper is to expand our conceptual understanding of the legal nature and form of migrant employment. I contend that the regulatory integration of immigration law with labour law into a distinct, intermediate legal framework of 'migrant labour law' challenges and disrupts existing categories of employment classification and orthodox conceptions of modern employment. It does so by constructing ‘migrant personal work relations’ with a unique hybrid legal character of private contract and public immigration status, using migrants’ private capacities to regulate their relationship with the state and vice versa. Central to this endeavour is an idea of labour regulation that incorporates immigration norms of conditionality, deportability, deterrence and immobility into the construction of the migrant personal work relation. Five elements of the migrant personal work relation illustrate its hybrid character: formation, structure, content, variation, and termination. The interplay of public and private law doctrines exhibits immigration status distorting the employment contract and shows that migrant employment cannot be explained on a contractual basis. As a result, we start observing a juridical divide between migrant workers and citizen workers as separate legal subjects allocated to different regulatory regimes. It constitutes a whole new category of employment. Finally, the article examines the implications of its construction and legal character for its power dynamics. I argue that vulnerability to exploitation is a structural feature of the ‘migrant personal work relation’, such that it is a vulnerability-inducing legal institution. It exacerbates the pre-existing asymmetrical distribution of power and creates special vulnerabilities additional to those ordinarily present.