Inequality in the 21st Century

The London School of Economics & Political Science

London, UK

July 02 - 04, 2015

The panel addresses the development of cross-border labour markets in two world regions, and aims to understand how labour transfers from low-wage transformation economies to high wage advanced economies may be contributing to new fissures of supra-national regional inequalities in the world. In particular, the movement of migrant labourers into temporary and non-standard forms of employment, enabled by deliberative attempts to facilitate mobility, as in the European Union, or by state-led policies to recruit labor, as in East Asia, represent an ethnicization of non-standard employment forms. In the European context, the deliberative creation of EU employment institutions through a series of directives has launched a process of harmonization, that better enables cross-border mobility of labour. Little attention has been paid however, to how this mobility is enacted, regulated and the consequences for transnational inequalities. The role of transnational temporary staffing agencies are one focus in the context of both sending and receiving member states. The making of cross-border labour markets however, is not restricted to the EU. Also in East Asia, where similar dynamics of well-skilled and willingly mobile labour from low-wage countries are in demand by leading economies with shrinking labour markets, cross-border labour is an increasingly important source of labour. In these cases however, the state rather than transnational actors are playing a more important role, much in line with developmentalist economic policies in the region, but with similar consequences for labour market dualisation.