Purpose
Accompanying the casino liberalization in Macau has been the massive increase in the importation of migrant workers to drive the labour-intensive, service-oriented economic growth there. Nevertheless, the employment of migrant workers has become an intensely contentious issue. The traditional pluralist approach to migration policy has highlighted a mismatch between restrictive policy pronouncements and actual expansive outcomes. This mismatch has resonated strongly in Macau, where the number of migrant workers skyrocketed in the last decade in spite of repeated guarantees from the government of the adoption of a protectionist labour policy. The pluralist approach has attributed the mismatch to strong constituencies supporting more immigration. The purpose of this paper is to dispute this and maintain that the Macau Government is a capitalist state committed to increasing labour importation to facilitate wealth accumulation.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper uses a qualitative approach based on extensive research of news and media reports, facilitated by a close observation of political developments.
Findings
The Macau Government started, in 2005, to talk about reforming its labour importation programme by adding a migrant worker levy, a ratio mechanism and a six-month waiting period. This paper investigates how the capitalist state navigated the reform process by promising changes and building consent with the working classes. The author maintains that “a game of protection” has been constructed and played to secure the consent of the local working classes for the migrant worker programme.
Originality/value
Very little literature is available that has studied the changes made to the migrant worker system in Macau. This paper will help to close this gap.
is also grateful to an anonymous reviewer who raised many interesting issues. Finally, he wants to acknowledge his debt to Vivian Hung who has rendered unfailing help over the years. Nicholas Owen's widely read article, &dquo;Economic Policy in Hong Kong&dquo;, is renowned for its critique on the functioning of the self-regulating market in the colony (Owen 1971b). A less noted aspect, however, is the discussion on the relation between industrial upgrading and export-oriented industrialization (EOI), and the inconsistency in Owen's treatment of Hong Kong. Typical of his generation of writers, Owen was unreservedly optimistic about EOI. His optimism was founded on the argument that this form of industrialization provided &dquo;the opportunity of 'manufacturing up', that is moving into the better quality end of a product range through experience, better design and improved quality control&dquo; (p. 153). But in a later section of the same article, he contradicted his own expectation by providing a list of figures showing that industrial deepening had not taken place in Hong Kong. He concluded that, we would expect industry to become more capital-intensive as the economy develops ... the surprising result ... is that there is no evidence of any capital deepening in the seven-year period 1960-7. (pp. 189-190, emphasis in the original) Although Owen did not explain why there was no capital deepening, it should be pointed out that his expectation of a more mature industrial structure for Hong Kong was largely justifiable and widely shared.' By the time of his writing, Hong Kong had gone through two full decades of rapid industrialization, and signals for the need for industrial upgrading, such as labor shortage, protectionism and foreign competition, had been flashing for almost ten years since the end of the 1950s. But
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