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This paper aims to analyse the factors influencing migration, the labour migration process and the status of migrant laborers in the informal sector, particularly those working in brick kiln factories. It will shed light on the precarious nature of their work, often characterized by informal and verbal contracts. The paper examines occupational and environmental health hazards affecting the labourers and their impact on their well-being, the vulnerability of women in the precarious work environment and the associated health risks in brick kiln factories in India.

The study relies primarily on primary data collection, supplemented by secondary literature and documents. Balangir district was chosen as the research region due to its historical deprivation, underdevelopment and the historical prevalence of environmental distress, leading to distress-driven migration. To gather primary data, 40 respondents were selected from five selected blocks in Balangir district, resulting in a total of 200 respondents. In addition, in-depth interviews were conducted with 35 individuals across the selected blocks, with approximately seven participants from each block. In addition, interviews of 10 kids were taken and around 10 key informants including the trade union leaders, intellectuals and civil society activists.

Migrant labourers, including men, women and children, face significant health issues and are exposed to similar occupational health hazards. Internal migrant women workers are more vulnerable as they face critical health risks during pregnancy in host areas due to unfavourable working conditions and limited access to health-care services. Factors such as strenuous work, long working hours, poor nutrition and inadequate maternal care contribute to adverse outcomes such as spontaneous abortion, premature delivery and abnormal postnatal development.

The brick kiln industry presents a distressing reality for men who are highly vulnerable to occupational accidents, and women workers are exposed to sexual abuse, exploitation and violence. The prevalence of physical harassment, ranging from leering to rape, is alarmingly high among women. These incidents not only inflict physical harm but also cause severe psychological trauma and increase the risk of sexually transmitted diseases. Despite the existence of laws aimed at protecting women’s rights and addressing sexual offences, the workers often remain unaware of their rights. This lack of awareness further compounds the vulnerability of women workers and perpetuates their exploitation in the workplace.

To address health issues comprehensively, interventions should encompass the entire migrant population, including men and children. Strategies should focus on improving access to health-care services, promoting occupational health and safety measures, ensuring proper immunization and nutrition for children and addressing the broader social determinants of health. Empowering women with knowledge about reproductive health and rights, raising awareness about available health-care services and strengthening health-care providers’ capacity to cater to migrant populations are crucial steps towards addressing health disparities.

Urgent interventions and policies are needed to address the health vulnerabilities of internal migrant workers and women workers. It is required to ensure health-care accessibility, improving working conditions, ensuring access to maternal care and essential supplements and providing health-care services for both pregnant women and their children, regardless of migration status.

The study focused on precarious health and occupational hazards and accidents faced by migrant workers. It highlights women migrant labourer’s and children’s vulnerability in the Brick Klin sector, which is a value addition to the existing knowledge in social science.

Purpose – The chapter studies gender occupational segregation of rural-urban migrant workers in China based on 2006 survey data from five Chinese cities.

Methodology – The multinomial logit (MNL) model is used to analyze migrant workers' occupational attainment by gender. The Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition method is employed to analyze factors affecting gender occupational segregation, which can be classified into observed factors and unobserved factors, including gender discrimination.

Findings – The index of dissimilarity based on the data shows that gender occupational segregation for migrant workers exists. The result of Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition shows that the unobserved effects account for more than three-fourths of the total gender occupational segregation.

Research limitations – The “index problem” and the assumption of the same occupational preference between men and women of the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition need to be addressed further.

Social implications – The existing gender equality policies and social protection confined to urban workers should be extended to migrant workers. Increasing training investment in migrant workers is also recommended.

Temporary and circular migration programs have been devised by many destination countries and supported by the European Commission as a policy to reduce welfare and social costs of immigration in destination countries. In this chapter, we present an additional reason for proposing temporary migration policies based on the characteristics of the foreign labor-effort supply. The level of effort exerted by migrants, which decreases over their duration in the host country, positively affects production, real wages, and capital owners' profits. We show that the acceptance of job offers by migrants results in the displacement in employment of national workers. However, it increases the workers' exertion, decreases prices, and thus can counter anti-immigrant voter sentiment. Therefore, the favorable sentiment of the capital owners and the local population toward migrants may rise when temporary migration policies are adopted.

The influx of migrant workers from Central and Eastern Europe over the last decade represents the largest migratory flows to Norway in history and an unprecedented supply shock to parts of the Norwegian labour market. This article reviews existing research and summarises the findings in terms of (1) the volume, direction and temporal patterns of migration flows; (2) the economic integration of new labour migrants; (3) the impacts of labour migration on wages, employment, skills, and social organisation of work in affected industries and (4) the political and institutional responses to rising labour migration. The article concludes by discussing the overall long-term consequences of labour migration, particularly with regard to social inequality in Norway.

The study aims to study the effect of non-cognitive ability in human capital on the wages of rural migrant workers in China. The study also examines the mechanisms by which career choice, career development and social capital influence.

Based on the new human capital theory, this paper empirically investigates the effects and mechanisms of rural migrant workers' non-cognitive ability on wages using the 2018 China Family Panel Studies database and Stata 17.0 for construct validation and hypothesis testing.

The results showed that non-cognitive ability has a significant positive effect on rural migrant workers' wages. Subsequently, the mechanism of non-cognitive ability was examined. In further analysis, the study found that non-cognitive ability has a greater effect on the wages of vulnerable individuals (females, low and medium skills) among the rural migrant workers.

The originality of this study is to break through the existing research perspectives, overcome the limitations of scholars' existing research perspectives focusing on the employment and competitiveness of rural migrant workers in China and explore the factors affecting the rural migrant workers' wages from the perspective of non-cognitive ability as a new entry point by combining psychology. At the same time, the study design is more rigorous, avoiding the measurement error of variables.

Turkey has witnessed the mass migration movement of Syrian citizens fleeing the Syrian civil war. These people have been defined as ‘foreigners under temporary protection’. However, the UN Convention does not include temporary protection or similar definitions in relation to migrants, refugees, and asylums and accepts them as migrant workers. In our country, people under temporary protection, whose majority is composed of Syrians work in informal jobs. The most important document aiming at granting legal rights to people who are found in a country without any legal position or who is identified as an irregular worker, not as an employee and migrant worker, is the International Convention for the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Their Families. Turkey has become a party to this document. The UN Convention gives immigrant workers and family members a wide range of protective rights, such as work, settlement, education, and trade union rights. In this chapter, the positions of foreigners in temporary protection who are trying to make a living by collecting recyclable materials such as mostly paper, etc., which is defined as a part of the street economy, will be discussed in terms of the provisions of the UN Convention.

This paper aims to explore the determinants of the livelihoods of return migrant workers in Vietnam. The findings will help authorities updating their regulations on migration, thus grasping the economic benefit from documented but low-skilled return migrant workers.

The sample is collected when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the Vietnamese economy severely. The author considers six issues of income and employment, including total income, stable income, financial pressure experiences, unemployment, stable job and time to find a job. For this purpose, through a pre-structured questionnaire, the primary data is collected from 258 Vietnamese return migrant workers in various foreign countries. Notably, all respondents in the sample are documented but low-skilled return migrant workers. The author uses various empirical regression analyses to conclude that personal traits, family characteristics and their characteristics before and after migration play a critical role in determining the livelihood of migrants returning to Vietnam.

The author finds that personal traits, family characteristics and their characteristics before and after migration play a critical role in determining the livelihood of migrants returning to Vietnam.

The findings are critical for Vietnamese authorities in finalizing and updating their regulations on migration, thus grasping the economic benefit from documented but low-skilled return migrant workers.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to exploit the drivers of the livelihoods of return migrants in Vietnam, a rich, two-wave panel survey of respondents in Vietnam aimed at characterizing the history of migration of low-skilled and documented migrants back to Vietnam and to use these histories to gain insight into Vietnamese return migrants’ economic status, access to financial, welfare and health insurance benefits and employment prospects.

Since the opening of China (aka, reform and opening-up), a great number of rural residents have migrated to large cities in the past 40 years. Such a one-way population inflow to urban areas introduces nontrivial social conflicts between urban natives and migrant workers. This study aims to investigate the most discussed topics about migrant workers on Sina Weibo along with the corresponding sentiment divergence.

An exploratory-descriptive-explanatory research methodology is employed. The study explores the main topics on migrant workers discussed in social media via manual annotation. Subsequently, guided LDA, a semi-supervised topic modeling approach, is applied to describe the overall topical landscape. Finally, the authors verify their theoretical predictions with respect to the sentiment divergence pattern for each topic, using regression analysis.

The study identifies three most discussed topics on migrant workers, namely wage default, employment support and urban/rural development. The regression analysis reveals different diffusion patterns contingent on the nature of each topic. In particular, this study finds a positive association between urban/rural development and the sentiment divergence, while wage default exhibits an opposite relationship with sentiment divergence.

The authors combine unique characteristics of social media with well-established theories of social identity and framing, which are applied more to off-line contexts, to study a unique phenomenon of migrant workers in China. From a practical perspective, the results provide implications for the governance of urbanization-related social conflicts.

The purpose of this research paper is to examine the integration of an increasingly diverse workforce in the UK following the EU expansion of 2004 to incorporate the accession countries of Central and Eastern Europe, at a time of increased migration from other areas of the EU such as Portugal.

This paper presents data from five case study companies. The key methods of data collection were 88 semi‐structured interviews coupled with lengthy time spent on observation at each company, leading to an ethnographically‐informed method.

The key contribution of this paper is to analyse the relationships between migrant workers and the British workers they work alongside in the context of the EU expansion. It shows how low levels of English language skills lead migrant workers into low skilled roles, and that in the workplace this leads to hostility from British workers. However, as migrant workers had mainly sought employment through an agency, the case study companies actually accentuated differences between workers, and this paper examines why they act in this manner, and analyses the effects this has on workplace relations.

This paper provides an original contribution to the equality and diversity literature as it analyses workplace relations in the context of the EU expansion of 2004. In addition to providing new empirical data for academics, it will also be of value for policy makers, particularly with regard to legislation relating to agency work, and also to management practitioners who have a diverse workforce.