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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.

Although entrepreneurial capacity building is a keenly debated topic in migration and diaspora research, the concept of female entrepreneurial capacity and the framing of highly skilled migrant women has remained underexamined. This chapter, therefore, addresses knowledge gaps related to migrant women entrepreneurs (MWEs) by focusing on the entrepreneurial experiences of highly skilled female migrants from both developed and developing countries. Specifically, we turn the ‘disadvantage’ lens towards migrant women’s inherent entrepreneurial dimension, an issue that deserves greater research attention, linking migrant women and their entrepreneurship to the entrepreneurial host context and business environment. Building on rich qualitative data collected via six semi-structured interviews with MWEs based in Finland, we also make practical suggestions for how MWEs can best engage with their entrepreneurial ecosystem as well as suggestions to policy-makers regarding how to improve gender awareness and migrant inclusivity aspects of entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Purpose – Integrating a gender perspective with a world-system theory, we examine how the recent global economic crisis in China has differential impact on female and male migrant workers. We analyzes how this gendered impact is compounded by intersectionality that results in multiple inequalities shaping their work, identity, power relationship, agency, and family lives.

Method – Our analyses were primarily drawn from 14 surveys of major provinces with higher migration rates, and were supplemented by personal narratives and interviews of migrant workers.

Findings – The political-economic analysis of the world-system demonstrates how the intricate linkages among declines in trade, finance, and production led to the economic crisis in China, with more detrimental effects on women migrant workers than their male counterparts. The intersectionality of gender, class, age/generation, and regional differences has played out in the state-regulated process of migration, configuring and reconfiguring the organization of capital, labor, and production and determining unequal gender relations, class dynamics, citizenship, employment, and family life. Conditioned by complex inequalities, some affected migrant workers, far from being victimized, have demonstrated agency, resilience, and a spirit of resistance.

Research and practical implications – More disaggregated data by gender are needed to understand the full range of differential crisis effects on diverse women and men workers.

Originality/value of the study – This study suggests the importance of considering gender-sensitive policies and a gender mainstreaming approach to addressing gender inequality and improving migrant workers’ lives for their empowerment.

Invisibility and inequality in the subjective experiences of Albanian migrant women in the Greek labor market have not been sufficiently studied. In times of crisis, mechanisms and social processes of marginalization are being strengthened and push women to new roles, expectations, and social positions. This chapter investigates how migrant women understand invisibility within their occupation, to what extent they feel relative deprivation and injustice when comparing their situation with others, and what this means for the reproduction of inequalities and the boundaries of social stratification. Qualitative research is conducted through a case study and 10 work history biographical interviews with Albanian migrant women, living and working in the Artemis community. Findings are analyzed in light of the socio-historical context of invisibility of migrant women workers in Greece, while the statistical analysis of changes in the occupational distribution provides a picture of the social landscape. Findings show evidence of the ethnic and gender segregation of the Greek labor market and a significant increase of informal and temporary work in low-status jobs in services. Invisibility is mainly experienced through the degradation of working conditions, flexibility, insecurity, and the concealed process of alienation. The economic crisis increases the dependencies; meanings and perceptions change towards reduced expectations. Comparisons with reference groups show increasing inequalities within the same social group, but feelings of injustice are felt more due to administrative barriers and discrimination. The chapter offers insights on the process of invisibility of migrant women and its significance for social stratification.

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.

Migrant women face unique difficulties, such as labour discrimination, limited sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services, obstacles to family reunification, gender-based violence (GBV) and human trafficking. ¹ The European Commission's labour integration approach currently fails to account for these difficulties. Civil society organisations (CSOs) and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) attempt to fill these gaps but lack capacity and funding. The European Commission's current approach does not respect human dignity and impedes the migrant community's integration and inclusion. This chapter discusses sexual assault and gender-based violence, which may be disturbing to some readers.

This issue is relevant and important because migrant women comprise a large portion of the migrant population ² and are a vital part of the migrant community. The methodology used in this chapter is a human security framework with a people-centred approach to policy that empowers those impacted by it. Research for this chapter was conducted using news articles, academic articles, UN reports and publications. Based on this, the European Commission must take a holistic and binding approach that protects the rights and dignity of migrant women.

There are multiple approaches that the European Commission can take to incorporate human dignity into its policies towards women and migration, such as applying international conventions and implementing policies that account for migrant women. All approaches must be realistic and required of all member states.

Scholars have found that transnational migrant women fulfill their role of mothers despite geographical distances. Researchers, however, focus on women in their country of destination, and thus have neglected to look at the experiences of women who get “stuck” in transit countries during their migration journeys. This chapter fills that gap in the literature by examining the experiences of Sub-Saharan African women in Morocco en route to Europe. Interviews with 20 Sub-Saharan African women show that unlike transnational mothers in their country of destination, which are mostly more affluent nations, these women neither have the financial means to provide for their children nor can maintain their relationships with them via telecommunication. Although the women acknowledge that they cannot fulfill their role of mothers in Morocco, they maintain a sense of themselves as mothers by emphasizing that they will financially provide for their children once they reach Europe.

The Russian Federation is the scene of one of the fastest-growing HIV epidemics in the world. In dialogue with the scholarship on gendered connections between migration and HIV/STIs, this study employs unique survey and qualitative data to examine HIV/STI-related risks and attitudes among working migrant women from three Central Asian countries and their native counterparts in three Russian cities. The analyses focus on involvement in risky sexual relationships, negotiation of trust and safer sexual practices in permanent partnerships, worries about HIV infection, and experience of HIV testing by comparing natives and migrants as well as migrants of different legal statuses. The results suggest that while migrant women are generally less likely to engage in risky behavior, they are also less able to establish trust and to negotiate safer sex within their permanent partnerships, compared to native women. Migrants are less worried about HIV risks than are native women. Finally, migrant women are less likely to get tested for HIV than natives, but the analyses also point to a particular disadvantage of migrants with temporary or irregular legal status. The findings are interpreted within the structural and cultural constraints that shape migrant women’s lives in Russia and similar migrant-receiving contexts.

The economic literature on labor migration has incorporated insights from various disciplines with regard to content and method, although the representation of migrants has not fully moved away from the neoliberal, market-dominated framework. This paper addresses the issue of women migrant workers using the particular example of Sri Lankan migrant women workers to the Middle East. It aims to highlight the need for more diversity in economic research without which conceptual representation, as well as empirical reach, is limited.

After a brief overview of the representation of migrants in economic literature, I develop the concept of vulnerability. I refer to qualitative and quantitative analyses on Sri Lankan migrant women workers to the Middle East from a variety of disciplines in order to differentiate the “vulnerable,” that is, the workers in need of protection, from the “vulnerabilities.” The latter concept refers to the debilitating effects on workers, produced by market forces, which are often perpetuated by underlying assumptions, as well as policies. A broader, inter-disciplinary perspective, which considers the agency of women, can go a long way toward removing some of the limitations and preconceptions ingrained in most economic representation. This in turn could help to improve the protection of the vulnerable and empower them to better face market forces.

Romanian women migrant entrepreneurs (RWMEs) are amongst the largest EU migrant communities in the UK and make significant socioeconomic contributions to both their host and origin nations, but academic research and policy discussions have ignored them. Intersectionality raises complex contextual issues that require comprehensive examination and inclusive policies and programmes. This study is aimed at exploring how Romanian women migrant entrepreneurs experience their transnational intersectional journeys of belonging, as they create, negotiate and enact their intersectional identities of the country of origin, gender and being entrepreneurs in the UK and Romania.

This Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) draws on draws upon Crenshaw's (1991) intersectional and Social Identity theories (Tajfel and Turner, 1979) to investigate how nine interviewed RWMEs have experienced their transnational journeys of acculturative belonging in the UK and Romania.

The study findings show how RWMEs undo and negotiate their intersecting identities to adhere to socio-cultural standards in both their host and native nations. In the UK, they feel empowered as women entrepreneurs, but in patriarchal Romania, their entrepreneurial identity is revoked, contradicting the prescribed socio-cultural roles.

This study responds to the call regarding inequalities in entrepreneurship opportunities (Vershinina et al., 2022). By focussing on the understudied community of RWMEs and exploring new intersectional and transnational contextual insights, it contributes to the literature and practice of migrant entrepreneurship. These empirical findings are essential for the development of evidence-based, disaggregated entrepreneurship programmes and policies.

This study responds to the call regarding inequalities in entrepreneurship opportunities (Vershinina et al., 2022). By focussing on the understudied community of RWMEs and exploring new intersectional and transnational contextual insights, it contributes to the literature and practice of migrant entrepreneurship. These empirical findings are essential for the development of evidence-based, disaggregated entrepreneurship programmes and policies.