This article uses migrant precarity as a lens through which to analyse the issue of mobilization for migrants' rights by civil society. Such mobilization efforts are vital in light of the emergence of global migration governance, which tends to actively constrain considerations for migrants' human and labour rights. Asia's temporary migrants have been identified as a particularly precarious group of workers due to their specific position within the international division of labour, one that is defined by poorly-or unregulated work with insecure legal and residential status. Moreover, with local employment in countries of origin often characterized by informal employment, poor working conditions and unsustainable livelihoods, migrant workers are caught within a protracted precarity that spans life at home and abroad. Stronger normative and organizational links between global migration governance and migrant rights movements are needed to advance decent work agendas within countries of destination, as well as in countries of origin.

There has been a qualitative shift in the character of international labour migration with increased temporary labour migration. With circumscribed employment rights, the increased significance of temporary migrant workers underscores arguments that globalisation has engendered a more profound commodification of labour. The instrumentalist approach, especially of international financial institutions in promoting temporary labour migration as a panacea for development, reinforces this impression. Encapsulated in migration-development discourse, labour migration, like other commodities, is presented as a means of generating export revenue for the South. Karl Polanyi's critique of this market-defined construct of labour as a commodity, when labour can only ever be a fictitious commodity, provides a basis for contesting the representation of labour in the migration-development discourse. However, recourse to a Marxist method is held to be essential if we are to move beyond an appreciation of the process in order to interrogate the rationale that is driving the transformation of labour.

The initial prosperity of the 21st century’s first decade was accompanied in Australia by a skills shortage. Despite a relatively brief hiatus created by the ‘global financial crisis’, significant skills shortages have re-emerged. Drawing on multi-scalar insights into the construction industry in Australia and worldwide, and qualitative research in Australia, this article highlights the geographically constituted nature of the construction industry and the contradictory interplay of local labour force formation with increased recourse to the global labour market to meet workforce needs. More broadly, the article demonstrates how an appreciation of the geographical nature of an industry can yield new insights into work and employment.

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Growing migrant worker remittances are regarded as an important and more reliable source of capital to finance development in South and Southeast Asia than international aid and foreign direct investment. International financial institutions (IFIs) have proselytized based on this promise and have represented the feminization of labor migration as injecting more momentum into developmental potential. Many Asian governments have been won over by this promise, establishing labor-export policies to generate overseas earnings. This promise has also colored feminist interventions, especially within international agencies focused on migrant women workers' rights, which emphasize the need to redress labor market disadvantage for migrant domestic workers in particular. Insofar as labor-export programs are based on temporary migration, this study argues that the focus of support for migrant women workers fails to address the systemic disadvantage associated with temporariness.

Over the past few decades there has been extensive reorganization of the construction industry in many developed countries including removal of head contractor companies from direct operational construction, elongation of the subcontracting chain, rising self‐employment, casualization of work and reduced investment in training. These trends are the subject of a prescriptive, industry literature directed at industry ‘improvement’ and an important British‐based critique of the underlying drivers of ‘leanness’ and organizational ‘re‐engineering’. Drawing primarily upon interviews with organizations across the breadth of the industry, this paper provides evidence concerning such key changes in the Australian context, revealing both ‘leaning’/‘re‐engineering’ tendencies but also counter‐tendencies necessitated by the goal of sustaining enduring enterprise and a viable labour force. A more reflexive approach by major companies to competitive pressures and risk shifting is revealed. Further, this evidence provides grounds for challenging the re‐engineering/lean construction critique which is discerned as succumbing to the unitarist and unilinear discourse which it seeks to challenge.Business process re‐engineering, lean production, Australia,

Throughout much of the advanced industrial world the building and construction industry has been extremely reliant upon migrant workers to meet industry labour force needs. However, changes to work organisation in this sector, such as extended subcontracting chains and the increased significance of ‘phoenix’ operators, have reinforced greater recourse to migrant workers, especially temporary and undocumented workers. Considered in the broader context of the widespread embrace of labour market flexibility and state engagement with neoliberal-oriented labour market policies that include less-restrictive labour migration programs, organised labour has been confronted by new and quite different industrial challenges in responding to migrant workers. This article evaluates the significance of this shifting terrain in the construction sector for unions at the national, international and transnational level in engaging and organising migrant labour.

The International Labour Organization's Domestic Worker Convention, resolved in June 2011 and soon to come into force, is regarded as a watershed in the struggle by a host of civil society groups to get paid domestic work formally recognised, draw such work out of the shadows and secure employment rights and protections for this overwhelmingly female workforce. In covering all paid domestic work, the Convention can also be seen as an important initiative in promoting decent work for migrant workers and especially the many recruited from Southeast Asia and South Asia. However, improvements in employment rights and conditions will likely be frustrated by the inadequacies of the ILO as a global institutional force able to engage member nation states as well as by the entrenched structural inequities in international labour markets marked by barriers based on gender, race and ethnicity, nationality and religion and irregular employment. Progress will depend on the effectiveness of those civil society groups which were instrumental in the negotiation of the Convention to maintain the momentum to break down the barriers and states' reluctance to implement measures that abolish labour market disadvantage.