Seasonal labour, mobility biographies and migrant social capital: the Oaxaca index and the re-integration of labor history.
Margaret Grieco, Professor of Transport and Society, Napier University, Edinburgh and Visiting Professor, Institute for African Development, Cornell University.
Abstract
This seminar will demonstrate the power of new information communication technologies to assist in the reintegration of fragmented histories. It will focus on seasonal migrant labour in a range of international locations and indicate the importance of developing mobility biographies in the explanation of the shaping of occupational identity and property. Social capital is often viewed as a fixed and local asset -this seminar considers the development of migrant social capital and identifies the additional social capital properties that migration on a seasonal and circulatory basis is likely to produce.
Introduction: developing the Oaxaca index.
The purpose of this seminar is to introduce the concept of new electronic tools in the field of the sociology and anthropology of labour migration: these are the hyperlinked indexing of migration streams and milieux sampling through migrant community resources and data 'captured' in such an indexing. The use of these tools enable us to access individual and collective migration or mobility biographies. The suggestion is not that these tools should replace conventional scholarship but rather that these tools should supplement and complement it.
Currently, there are strong taboos around the use of the new information communication technologies within scholarship activities, however, an honest scholar must necessarily talk to the lack of completeness in our previous practices of identifying social realities. Our tradition is one in which we shape a strong narrative disguising from the reader the gaps and discomforts in our knowledge base. Through the use of the new information communication technology world knowledge systems, and where we place our understandings on this system, we can surrender the traditional over-strong control on narrative. Through hyperlinks we can indicate anomalies and gaps, can identify competing understandings without overwhelming the reader and place ourselves in a global position of display (or viewed differently of accountability) so that our understandings can be accessed and our errors corrected.
The advent of the world wide web enables desk based tracking of complex social phenomena. Using simple google tools, a functioning and easily accessible index can be built around any specific topic - in our endeavours here, the topic is labour or migration streams. An initial index developed through google enables the development of more complex index-es which can complement and feed into other forms of scholarship. An example of such an index can be viewed at:
The highly distributed character of the new forms of information communication technology enable households to broadcast their experiences globally as well as permitting communities which are split over geographical distance to communicate with one another. Migrants are major users of the new information communication technologies - remittance arrangements which were historically attended by uncertainty can now with the advent of new technologies be conducted with certainty about outcomes and receipts. Familiarity with the technology gives rise to family web sites which operate to keep members in contact with one another and to record the history of labour itself.
The use of google enables the researcher from the desktop to enter the world of migrant households in their development of social capital which spans two or more local geographies. Google also puts the researcher into contact with press or media materials on migration streams as well as with more traditional scholarship sources, records or data bases.
In the migration context, the entry of a specific place name into google with a set of descriptors such as 'migrant' provides a good starting point for developing a tool for milieux sampling. The place/location/search word 'oaxaca' was chosen because the intent was to match a physical conference on organisation being held there with a set of virtual materials which indexed migrant experience from that location (Little and Clegg, 2005 in press.) In working with this tool, and with no previous knowledge of the 'braceros' labour migration, we built an index within two days which has major value as an anthropological and sociological tool. The instrument provides information right down to the statements of individual migrants on their experience culled from press reports or from family web sites.
Whilst neither myself nor my colleagues are presently envisaging any further research on the braceros and their experience, we are clear that the development of such a tool as a routine part of scholarly coverage of any migration stream would surrender benefits. Within the Oaxaca index, the materials gathered provided high quality information on labour circulation patterns which could be readily pursued within the arrangements of conventional scholarship.
The Oaxaca index is more than the simple representation of google links in a table: considerable search and selection has gone on as to what is to be contained. Within this selection, attention has been paid to identifying materials which can be used for the construction of migrant mobility biographies.
When constructing the Oaxaca index, we were in the process of organising a meeting on labour migration (http://www.geocities.com/odysseygroup2004) to be held at the University of Ulster. For this meeting, we had an interest in collecting materials on the social history of 'navvies': for this reason we began our development of the Oaxaca index with the search term 'navvies' coupled with 'Oaxaca'. This led us quickly to the 'braceros' (strong arms), Mexican labour which manned the agricultural sectors, amongst others, of the USA.
To appreciate the utility of this new tool - hyperlinked indexing of migration streams, of which the Oaxaca index is an example - the reader must visit it and interact with it. The scholar will use it to set boundaries and directions for research, one activity of which may be milieux sampling . Before moving on to other migration paths and patterns, I want to leave the reader with a brief summary of the benefits of hyperlinked indexing:
Finding a language to describe what has been done in web tracking this Mexican migration stream is not an easy business, but this seminar has provided the opportunity to develop the term hyper-linked indexing of migration streams . The tool now has a name - and a case example is the Oaxaca Index. The Oaxaca index combines access to a range of voices on Mexican migration including the voices of the Mexican migrants themselves. It is a work of scholarship as well as a tool for further scholarship. I believe we can now begin to talk of electronic anthropology and electronic sociology: as with conventional scholarship, there is a need to be systematic in the following of tracks of evidence - the difference is in the speed with which such tracks of evidence can be identified and can be processed.
Let me move on now to other paths and patterns.
Patterns and paths.
In terms of current patterns and paths of labour migration and the recording of that labour migration, recent research on the use of the Internet by the Malaysian labour movement (Grieco and Bhopal, 2005 in press) indicates new transparency in the situation of immigrant labour as a consequence of the use of these electronic tools. The maltreatment of migrant labour in Malaysia becomes readily visible as a consequence of the new technology and the recording and archiving of labour's experience through the new technology becomes a low cost and time efficient practice. The distributed character of the new information communication technology means that the destruction of labour's own records by the state is a more difficult enterprise. Historically, the seizing and destruction of labour's records attended its weaker position in relation to the state but the offshoring of records made possible by the new technology open up new domains for labour's own archiving of its history.
New patterns and paths of labour are made possible by the new information communication technology itself, attention has focused upon the role of these technologies in inducing new patterns of international Chinese migration:
The vulnerability of new streams of Chinese labour to Britain was underscored by the death of Chinese cockle pickers at Morecambe Bay - the press reportage of this sad event led to police, parliamentary and policy activity around the phenomenon of illegal gangmastering which has re-developed in Britain.
The Parliamentary discussion on this issue is enlightening:
There have been some excellent contributions to the debate so far. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (Geraldine Smith). All of us were deeply sympathetic to the position she found herself in after the appalling tragedy of the cocklers. It was a desperate human tragedy about which she had the courage to stand up and speak her mind. She said one or two things to Ministers that might have been unpalatable to them, but she did so because they were the right points to make, and we all admired her for that and for standing up for her constituents.
In my constituency, there is a very large arable, horticultural, food-packing and food-processing sector. My hon. Friend the Member for Boston and Skegness (Mr. Simmonds) gave some statistics. King's Lynn in my constituency is about the same size as Boston, and it has more light industry and manufacturing. However, I imagine that in the area between King's Lynn and Wisbech, and King's Lynn and Downham Market, roughly 60 per cent. of people who work on farms and in packing plants and houses are overseas labourers. Some come from the European Union; in fact, there is a large number of Portuguese working in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for South-West Norfolk (Mrs. Shephard). There is also a number of Chinese and people from further afield still, and that number has risen sharply.
I should point out that many gangmastering labour-providing organisations are totally reputable. They are run by long-established families, they are long-established businesses, and they pay the minimum wage. They look after their employees and provide transport that is legal and in good working order. Many provide good accommodation. They meet the needs of the arable food-processing sector in a way that is beyond stricture and are a vital part of the local economy. The end users go back to the same gangmasters year in year out for workers to pick soft and hard fruit and to be involved in packing.
Mr. Simmonds: My hon. Friend makes an excellent start. Perhaps he has found in his constituency, as I have in mine, that those gangmasters and labour providers who operate within the legislative structures are keen for Parliament to legislate so that they are not undercut by those gangmasters who operate outside the law.
Mr. Bellingham: My hon. Friend makes a good point. It is fair to say that until recently the legitimate gangmasters were against such a Bill, but the mood has changed. The amount of illegal gangmastering operations in our constituencies has increased significantly. For a long time gangmastering and labour-providing operations in my constituency relied on students from throughout the United Kingdom to work as seasonal employees. They then started to rely
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much more on eastern Europeans, many of whom came here to learn the language and to earn some money in the summer. More recently, there has been a large influx of Chinese in west Norfolk, south Lincolnshire and north-east Cambridgeshire, many of whom came to East Anglia legally and legitimately. In the past couple of years, however, the snakehead and triad gangs have used that part of the country to offload many illegal immigrants who have been people-smuggled and transported into this country. I imagine that one reason why they come to Norfolk and south Lincolnshire is that the areas that they used to be sent to do not have the same availability of jobs and opportunities. The gangs obviously want to move them to a part of the country where jobs are available.
The problem was brought into sharp focus for me in the summer when a fire broke out in a two-bedroom flat in Fairstead, a ward in my constituency that is just outside King's Lynn. Some 22 Chinese people were living in the flat. The fire was not caused by arson, but was the result of an accident caused by overcrowding. The occupants managed to get out of the flat and it was a mercy that no one was injured. The incident led to a great deal of local publicity and concern. The borough council, under the leader, John Dobson, set up a working party to bring in the different agencies to find out what was going on and to get data and information to determine the seriousness of the problem. Its purpose was also to discover what the different agencies were doing and how they were responding to the situation.
A number of illegal gang operations were being run by the triads and snakeheads. Not only had they moved people into north-west Norfolk, south Lincolnshire and north-east Cambridgeshire, but they had established gangmastering operations to provide labour to many end users. It was the first time that many of the agencies—the immigration service, health and safety, fire, police and environmental health—had got together to discuss the problem.
My hon. Friend mentioned Operation Gangmaster. It was interesting that representatives from the Department for Work and Pensions said at the meeting that although the operation had more momentum now, it had been almost a virtual operation, which was completely understaffed. There was not enough data and Ministers and officials in London had not provided sufficient leadership to get it moving.
Representatives of the immigration service explained that they did not have enough staff in Norfolk to begin to find out how serious the problem was and to take action. When I asked the local representative of the service how many staff he needed in Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, he said he wanted 150 or so if they were to carry out the necessary inquiries by visiting the gangmaster operations, some of the end users and some of the places where the supposed illegal immigrants were living. He told me that the service had five people available throughout the area to carry out that work, four of whom spent most of their time at Norwich airport. Admittedly, something is now being done; the immigration service is opening an office in Swaffham, in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for South-West Norfolk, which will make a difference. I gather that it will employ 14 people.
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The immigration officials made another pertinent point. I know that it does not come under the Minister's area of responsibility, but they said that they had stopped and interviewed a number of illegal Chinese immigrants. Few had legal or original documents. Many had forged documents and would not give their names. Those illegal immigrants knew that without legal documentation they could not be deported to the People's Republic of China because the Chinese Government have made it clear that they will not take back deportees who do not have legal documentation. One investigating officer made it clear to me that Chinese illegal immigrants often leave the People's Republic of China with identity cards and passports, but the snakehead and triad gangs advise them to destroy all documentation, which is replaced with false documents, including false names, when they arrive in this country. There is nothing the immigration service can do about that.
Those immigrants have my sympathy. They have paid king's ransoms to the people traffickers and triad gangs. Virtually all the money they earn goes back to their very poor families in China. I met some Chinese immigrants in the summer. I do not speak Chinese, but I had an interpreter. One has to admire them. They have travelled across the world to better themselves and to send money back to their home country. I understand from the local police that there may well be a connection between some of the Chinese in the part of the country that my hon. Friend the Member for Boston and Skegness and I represent and those who were so tragically killed at Morecambe.
I have always been tough on immigration, but what happened in Morecambe and the fire in my constituency, in which those Chinese people nearly died, make it clear that there is a human element to the issue. Those immigrants work hard. The ones who pick strawberries and other soft fruit and those who work in the food packing plants in my constituency work unbelievably hard. Some were working for well known, legitimate gangmastering operations that paid them the minimum wage and provided good accommodation and reliable transport. Others were undoubtedly working for illegal gangmastering operations. They were being paid a pittance, were exploited and lived in appalling accommodation. That situation in my constituency brought many things into focus for me.
My hon. Friend the Member for Boston and Skegness mentioned legitimate gangmastering operations. They realise that they are being undercut and that our local economies rely on a large number of labour providers who do not pay tax properly and who participate in a variety of VAT and benefit frauds. Above all, they realise that people are being exploited. That is why the mood has changed markedly. @http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmhansrd/vo040227/debtext/40227-06.htm
Although, I have not yet developed a hyperlinked index of these new Chinese migration streams into Britain, it is clear from a google scan that there are a significant body of resources which can be used to do so. This parliamentary text was identified through a google search on 'illegal' 'gangmaster' 'Chinese' 'Morecambe'. Importantly, the text alerts us to the use of Chinese labour in Britain in highly seasonal work. The destruction of their own documents by groups of Chinese workers in Britain reported upon within this text provides us with an indication of the importance of mobility biographies in a globalised world. Destroying official tracking capabilities through the destruction of personal documents is one migrant strategy.
Illegal gang mastering also takes us to the consideration of the market in mobility and mobility documentation - the construction of false mobility biographies. Within the Morecambe disaster, the use of mobility biographies and cell phones featured in the process of the identification of the dead - an identification made more problematic by the illegalities around entry of this occupational group. The globalised world of communications provides new paths for identifying the dead through the contact patterns of the living: the mobile phone has meant a pattern of reliable contact between migrants and their areas of origin and in the case of the Morecambe cockle pickers, families who had seen a break in the communication pattern of their kin members working in Britain and who were aware of the cockle picker disaster in Britain through globalised news contacted authorities http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2004/02/14/2003098703:
Sixteen families from eastern China's Fujian province have been without contact with their relatives in Britain since the tragedy on Feb. 5. A total of 19 men and women died when they were overcome by swirling tides during the black of night on a shoal in Morecambe Bay near the city of Liverpool.
Another 16 in the group, 14 of them Chinese, survived the incident, and are being questioned by police.
The government's Xinhua News Agency quoted a representative of Britain's Fujian Association, He Jiajin, saying the support group would help relatives retrieve bodies once they had been identified.
The official also said the association was willing to provide legal aid to victim's family members.
He said the association could help them bring lawsuits against organized crime leaders, suspected by authorities of employing the pickers illegally and paying them a pittance for their cockles, a kind of shellfish hotly sought after on European tables.
Earlier this week, British police said it was too early to know what caused the disaster and who, if anyone, was responsible. Authorities are still trying to identify the victims.
However, officials have confirmed a turf war had developed in the area, and the accident apparently involved illegal Chinese immigrants operating without permits.
Social capital and virtual community.
Social capital is often viewed as a fixed and local asset, however, the multi-local identity of migrants incurs the multi-local development of migrant social capital. It can be argued that seasonal, circulatory migration has additional social capital properties - migrants within these structures must take care to preserve relational resources at both ends of their experience. The globalisation of technology provides the infrastructure for migrant social capital developments and social capital reinforcement. The ease and readiness of low cost immediate synchronous and asynchronous communication permit a routine flow of even the most mundane of domestic information over continents. The streamlining of remittances through the use of the new information technology is paralleled by the streamlining of social information. The virtual channel provides a mechanism for maintaining and intensifying membership and identity of communities spread over distance: it is important to understand that the virtual is also a material reality. Virtual channels are important in scheduling and organising the calendar of labour and mobility biographies must necessarily encompass this aspect of labour's activities.
The use of the new information technology for the reuniting of old school friends has parallels in the reuniting of the distressed and dislocated after a disaster. On line search and personnel matching archives after disasters are now mainstream practice. These can be viewed, in one way, as the most basic of mobility biographies: the dislocation of a population by a disaster and the re-connection of that community over time through social network information and action and through identity/location data bases. At present, and in the context of a the major Asian tsunami disaster, we are witnessing the development of data bases which combine retrieved identity documents/dna from the dead/on line dna data bases of affected relatives: in effect, we are witnessing the development and use of mobility biographies on a mass scale. The protocols are far from established but the direction is already transparent.
Within the tsunami disaster it is the mobility biographies of western tourists which have been the major recipients of attention, the identification of the missing and the dead tourists relies on the reconstruction of mobility biographies and within this context, the interaction between mobile phones and kinship structures has been key. The date and place of the last mobile phone contact has alerted families to the prospect of their loved ones being missing or dead. Breaks in the pattern of mobile phone contacts increasingly provide signals of disappearance and danger in modern society.
Mobility biographies in the present can combine physical absence with electronic presence and this apparent tension plays its part in the shaping of occupational identity and property.
Returning from tsunami struck Thailand were British nationals who had been working in Thailand's leisure sector: the destruction and disorder around them produced an urge to be back on British soil, the mobile and globalised communications enabled a rapid return to the UK but the very same technologies keep them in contact with events and facilitate their return to Thailand. The desire to rebuild with colleagues in Thailand has been a frequently expressed intention - the return to Britain provides access to resources currently not available in Thailand, the return to Thailand after membership in the disaster is likely have consequences at the level of occupational identity and property. Mobility biographies matter.
At the other side of this equation, we have seen long standing migrants to Britain who have come from the affected areas moving into action and driving the popular development aid activities forward - faster it would seem than governments themselves. The loss of kin in the affected areas has been met by a focus on organisation for repair, remedy and redevelopment. These current social capital arrangements of migrant labour follow on from substantial histories of remittance from the wealthy west to Asia.
The re-establishment of the technical links to enable the restoration of routine communication between international multi-local communities is an urgent requirement - the poor require their access to remittances to be re-enabled.
Re-integrating history.
Researching the patterns and paths of migrant labour has often been bedevilled by the 'missing record'. The records which have been kept in societies where durable recording has been primarily the province of elites contain many gaps. The new American Labor History did much to create an awareness of the distortions around the record of women's labour history. Currently, resources on labour history which have been lost or are in the process of being lost at the institutional levels of an increasingly corporate education sector are present on the personal and community web sites of those whose lived experience it is.
The mediation of history by scholars and institutions such as galleries and museums is now rivalled by the ability of the interested and affected to directly and immediately communicate with one another and share resources through on-line fora. Historically, communication technology and the limits of a personal household budget precluded the extensive sharing of album contents and domestically held records of experience but the low cost of scanners and domestic information communication technologies with global reach changes the equation. The patterns and paths of shareable knowledge are no longer confined to the traditional institutions of education: indeed, my argument is that it is precisely the distributed character of the archive which can be utilised to more accurately record history.
Three areas of labour migration which I have recently been involved in researching through the hyper-linked indexing of migration streams - hop-pickers ( http://www.geocities.com/transport_and_society/hopping.html ), the herring girls ( http://www.geocities.com/transport_and_society/routine.html and the navvies ( http://www.geocities.com/the_navvies)- all demonstrate the benefit of using the new technologies to collect together the fragments which remain of once mass movements of labour. At present, there are problems of stability with the hyperlinks as museums and other institutions such as government departments frequently alter their pages bringing links down or changing their addresses. This has been a very great problem in respect of the Shetland Museum which had a large collection of photographs available on line which it brought down - the probability of the journey being made to the Shetlands to view these images by large numbers of people is small, whilst the centrality of this location to the labour migration of the Scottish herring girls was large. No electronic path to this archive results in the loss of history of a pattern.
There is a space for scholars to work with the materials displayed by wider communities on the world wide web and to weave these into bodies of stable scholarship. At present, the materials available on the web would allow us to tell a detailed story of the history and background of the Chinese cockle pickers who died and the labour context in which they worked. There is, of course, tremendous scope for following through from this milieux sampling to uncover larger and wider processes. My plea in this seminar is that we as migration specialists investigate these instruments and do not either ignore or discard them.
Conclusion.
This seminar has drawn attention to the existence of new electronic tools for scoping migration streams, mobility biographies and related social processes. We have argued that these tools complement and supplement traditional scholarship but do not substitute for it. We have provided working examples of such tools and indicated their utility in both sensitising to and preserving vulnerable bodies of evidence.
In addition, we have drawn attention to increased capability of the labour movement and of migrant communities to index their own experience on the world wide web. We have pointed out why both have a functional interest in doing so and drawn attention to the additional resources this creates for scholars in their endeavours to describe and record labour migration streams and processes. Finally, along with the rest of the world we reflected upon the importance of mobility biographies in Thailand in the wake of the giant Tsunami disaster. The thrust of this seminar is that both the world of migration and the world of scholarship are transformed by the new communication forms and we must find a new language and set of practices to meet the weight of this transformation.
The term 'mobility biographies' and the impetus to develop methodologies along this line in transport is being spearheaded by Professor Kay Axhausen of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (previously a colleague of mine from TSU, Oxford). He has joined with Professor John Urry, Britain's most distinguished professor of spatial sociology on a government funded project on social networks and travel - whilst they have not yet focused on migrant labour their research is likely to have consequences for new methodologies in this area.
Little and Clegg, 2005 in press. Recovering experience, confirming identity, voicing resistance: the Braceros, the internet and counter-coordination. Critical perspectives on international business.