Labour Migration

The Internal Geographical Mobility of Labour in the Developed World

James H. Johnson, John Salt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429676789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

First published in 1990. This edited work brings together a collection of studies, by an international team of contributors, on inter-urban migration, which is largely dominated by labour migration. The structure of the book reflects the interaction of the supply and demand of labour and the information flows that make this possible.

The book offers a multi-dimensional analysis of labour migration, including behavioural, economic and institutional approaches. It combines various scales of analysis, including the national scale, the occupational scale and the household scale. The study also examines labour migration in a variety of national contexts.

It will be of particular value to professional geographers, economists and sociologists with an interest in the distribution of population and the labour force, planners with responsibility for the development of policy and some final year graduate students.

CHAPTER 1

Labour Migration: The General Context

James H. Johnson and John Salt

Movements of population may be classified in many ways, since population migration is a complex phenomenon, with many dimensions and causes. Even if attention is focused on those movements which involve a relatively permanent change of home there are different types of migration involved, depending on the reasons for moving. This book is concerned with one broad type of movement - internal labour migration.

Population movements which take place within a nation state may be described as ‘internal’. Although in the developed countries of the world it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate internal moves of population from international moves because of the emergence of supra-national economic groupings of states and because of the freer movement of highly specialised workers, it still remains true that the great majority of migrants move within their own countries. In addition, an individual nation continues to provide a distinctive economic and political context for migration.

Labour migration consists of those moves of population where a change of residence is accompanied by a change of job. It might be assumed that labour migrants could be defined as those movers who are primarily motivated by job considerations and for many this would be certainly true; but other reasons for moving are also influential for those who are changing both home and job. Labour migration brings a change in the social environment of the people involved and in their housing conditions; it also has implications for the social and economic opportunities available to other members of a migrant’s household. These other factors may dominate the decision of some households to migrate (Johnson, Salt and Wood, 1974). Although there is abundant evidence that the further a migrant moves home the more likely it is that a change of job will also take place, it is better not to prejudge the deeper reasons for moving but simply to employ a definition which merely uses the coincidence of a parallel move of job and home as its basis.

The importance of labour migration

The scale of migration in a modernised country is immense. In England and Wales, for example, during the year before the 1981 census and in the middle of a period of severe economic recession, 9.6 per cent of the population moved home; and 10 years earlier, when the economy was booming, 11.8 per cent moved home. Many of these moves were over a short distance and probably did not involve a change of job, but 31 per cent of migrants in the year 1980-81 moved more than 10 km, and an estimate based on the Labour Force Survey for 1984 suggests that 450,000 heads of households moved for job-related reasons in the year before that survey (Owen and Green, 1989).

Some labour migrants form single-person households but many do not. As a result, other members of their households are drawn into the migration, so that the total movement of population involved is much greater than the number of jobs immediately filled by labour migrants. The person in the household for whose benefit the move is made is not necessarily the only employed person in the family; other members of the labour force as well as children and full-time housewives are involved, although perhaps with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Consequently labour migration results in relatively long-distance relocation of skills of a variety of kinds, not just those of the principal wage-earners. Since it involves a move from one community to another, it also makes a considerable impact on the social life of the families and communities involved, both in the departure and arrival regions. As a result, the act of moving often involves a household rather than an individual decision.

At a more general scale, in the countries of the modernised world labour migration forms the most important single force in the longer-distance relocation of population; and it is taking on much greater significance for two reasons. First, migration is becoming a more powerful demographic factor in producing changing regional population totals, partly because of declining rates of fertility and also because of related reductions in regional contrasts in natural increase. Second, migration may be developing a more direct role as a positive instrument in planning policy, since the redistribution of population to take advantage of available economic opportunities is of growing importance (Johnson and Salt, 1981).

Clearly labour migration appears to have policy attractions in a country like Britain, where skill shortages are becoming apparent in some parts of the country while unemployment levels are still unacceptably high elsewhere, although in fact numbers and types of vacancies do not always match up very convincingly with the pool of the unemployed (Green et al., 1986). The national importance of labour migration, however, is not restricted to its effects on general economic growth. The process also has a role in the development of settlement systems: for example, the planned growth of the British new towns around London depended on the out-migration of an effective workforce from the conurbation. It also contributes an important, if still only partly understood, role in counter-urbanisation, the process found in many developed countries since the early 1970s in which smaller towns and rural areas have experienced greater rates of population growth than the largest cities (see Chapter 7 for a specific example).

At a more detailed scale labour migration has even more direct relevance for individual employers, although the structure of the firm and the occupational type of the workers it employs are important considerations in shaping the role of the process in a particular case. Finally, but not least, labour migration is of the greatest significance to individual labour migrants, not merely because of its importance for their economic well-being, but also because of the other opportunities that it may open up for the households involved. Again, however, movement does not necessarily bring benefits to all the households involved; and, as will be shown later, in some cases there are logical reasons for rejecting the possibility of moving.

Moves of jobs and moves of home

The majority of moves of home take place without any job change, since the possibility of undertaking a flexible journey to work gives increased independence to the employee who is choosing an attractive residential location. There are times, however, when a change of job imposes such an awkward or expensive journey to work that a move of home appears inevitable. In considering internal labour migration it is convenient to think of the national labour market as being divided into various local labour markets, each based on concentrations of jobs and characterised by local clusters of information about employment opportunities and the availability of suitable workers. Each of these local labour markets can be thought of as roughly coinciding with a local housing market; and, in turn, labour migrants are likely to be those workers who move from one local labour market to another.

In practice there are detailed problems with this concept, largely to do with difficulties in the actual delimitation of local labour markets. In large conurbations, for example, there are a number of sub-markets, like the inner city and different parts of the outer suburbs, which have a complex relationship with the wider labour and housing markets that embrace the whole urban area. In addition, the precise outer limits of a local labour market area are likely to be unclear partly because of the greater flexibility in their journeys to work possessed by those workers who have access to their own transport, but also because different types of workers are likely to have varying levels of tolerance to the journey to work.

For example, those who are well paid and have predictable journeys to fixed locations may find it acceptable to engage in longer journeys to work, if the residential environment that they are able to obtain as a result gives them sufficient personal satisfaction. An extreme case, but one becoming increasingly common in modern Britain, is provided by workers who choose to commute to distant destinations on a weekly rather than on a daily basis, as an alternative to moving their permanent residences. Many, but not all, of these workers are in occupational groups which employers have not thought it worthwhile to attract by providing assistance with the costs of permanently moving a family into the highly competitive housing markets of flourishing employment centres. As a result they may have been driven by lack of work in their home regions to seek employment further afield, although they do not find it possible or worthwhile to move their permanent homes. A different situation exists where finance is not a severe problem, but where other members of a potential labour migrant’s household are unwilling to suffer the disruption to their lives and careers involved in moving home.

In considering the reaction of workers to their journeys to work probably the most important dimension is provided by the occupations involved. Those people employed in occupations without a fixed day-to-day location, like some building workers or various types of more mobile salespeople, are likely to be more tolerant of a longer daily journey simply because it is part of their normal expectations. At an individual level, too, some workers find themselves temperamentally more resilient to the rigours of long-distance commuting; and those women employees who are tied by their responsibilities for the running of their homes are often unwilling to accept a long journey to work, whatever their income.

This diversity of experience means that the limits of the labour markets in which individual workers operate may not coincide with the local labour markets which can be delimited using aggregate census information about commuting. As a result the outer limits of local labour markets are blurred and, especially in highly urbanised regions, show considerable areas of spatial overlap. It also follows that the likelihood of a move of home after a job change will be influenced not only by the distance between the old and new places of employment, but also by the personal circumstances of the individual household and the occupation of its principal wage-earner.

Occupations and labour migration

The classical economic approach to inter-regional migration stresses its role in the adjustment of the supply and the demand for labour. If supply of labour within a region exceeds demand either wages there will fall or unemployment will rise; but if demand exceeds supply a rise in wages will be produced. One result may be to encourage employers to relocate their enterprise in regions where labour is plentifully available and cheap. Another possibility is that migration will be encouraged, with unemployed workers moving to regions of labour demand and workers already in employment moving from areas of lower wages to areas where higher pay is available. There are obvious problems with such simple statements, since migration is induced by a mismatch in the supply and demand for particular occupations, not by the situation for the labour force as a whole. There are also various institutional arrangements, like trade union agreements and controls by professional organisations, which interfere with a free market in labour. In addition there are obvious non-financial social and behavioural dimensions which enter into decisions to move.

The economic argument can be taken further, however, by focusing on the characteristics of various types of occupation, which tend to react in different way to changing demands for labour. This is partly to do with the elasticity of supply of particular skills, since the occupational structure of the labour force contains barriers for a worker who may wish to change his or her occupational category. These barriers are largely based on the training and formal admission requirements needed for certain occupations and they are relatively fixed, in so far as formal education and training strongly determine the subsequent role of an individual in the labour force. As a result, if there are insufficient workers with specialised skills in a local labour market, it may well be easier to recruit workers from different areas than for local people to be put through the necessarily slow process of training. For relatively unskilled jobs, on the other hand, it may be simpler to employ local workers (possibly already in other types of employment if there is not a pool of unemployed) and give them the limited amount of training needed.

Hence labour migration would be expected to be less important for unskilled than for skilled and professional workers. Such considerations would also allow for one stream of migrants with a particular set of occupations to move into a region while another different occupational stream was moving in the opposite direction, thus providing an explanation for the apparently curious fact that labour migration both into and out of the same region often takes place simultaneously (Flowerdew and Salt, 1979).

There are also arguments to do with the functioning of society which would lead one to expect occupational differences in rates of labour migration. Migration produces a break in family and community ties, but the importance of these ties will vary among different social groups, thus influencing their attitudes to moving. Levels of resistance to migration may reflect differing values attributed to job advancement and community life. They may be a product of previous migration experience, with those who have moved before having less deep roots in local communities. They may be a reflection of educational experience, with highly trained workers having already abandoned the ties of home and local community by moving to a different location for further education. They may indicate varying levels of expectation that existing social ties can be maintained in the future despite increased physical distance. What these possibilities all have in common is that they are connected with social class and occupational type.

There are also relevant theories concerning individual human behaviour which stress the importance of the processes of search and decision-making. In some sense these provide a useful corrective to the cruder economic models by underlining the fact that no-one has perfect information about possibilities elsewhere. But they represent only a partial view of reality, when one recalls the variety of household circumstances (with the different mixes of considerations that must be involved in reaching a family decision to move) and the contrasting amounts of information available to different occupational groups. What they clearly indicate, however, is that the horizons of the more highly educated workers are likely to be broader, because of their access to sources of information which provide a national rather than a local perspective. Such ideas again offer a partial explanation of the higher levels of longer-distance labour migration found among professional and the more skilled technical workers.

This book provides a series of examples of some of the more important aspects of labour migration, chosen to highlight those dimensions of the process which have often received less attention than they may deserve in more general theoretical treatments. In most of these contributions research findings are emphasised in order to give specific empirical contexts for the ideas being advanced. The book falls into two broad sections.

In the first part (Chapters 2-7) attention is given to those aspects of labour migration which are strongly influenced by institutional factors, with material being drawn from France, Japan, the United States and the Netherlands as well as the United Kingdom.

The second part (Chapters 8-12) turns to behavioural dimensions of the process. After a theoretical discussion of personal search behaviour from an economic perspective, attention is given to specific examples of how different aspects of labour migration operate in the context of individual households.

What follows here is a survey of these two t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Labour Migration: the General Context
• Part 1 - Institutional Frameworks for Labour Migration
• Part 2 - Decision-Making and Information
• Index