Migrants and the Unequal Burdening of “Toxic” Risk: Towards a New Global Governance Regime

The article addresses the changing discourse that frames the neo-liberal regulatory agenda, in the context of the current financial crisis and related, system-threatening ‘toxic’ risk. In this, the authors claim that a flexible mix of regulation/deregulation and self-regulation is reflected in an asymmetric architecture of multilevel governance that is based on an unequal burden-sharing of risk, involving the commodification of risk and an imposition of this burden on the socially weakest groups. Migrant workers are identified as being most vulnerable to the condition of precariousness due to ‘double asymmetry of hyperprecarity’. The article identifies class-biased practices of regulatory failure and the counter-movements that they have generated around the demand for “decent work”. It is claimed that the present systemic failure has created only a ‘window of opportunity’ for the working class and civil society actors to promote de-commodification of labour and equalization of risk-burdening in the inception of a new regulatory contest on both national and transnational level.