Trade Unions and Migrant Workers: The Challenges of Inclusion

The chapter analyses the relationship between trade unions and migrant workers in an historical perspective. It starts highlighting how labour migration has created important challenges to trade unions which are rather similar across time and countries and that have often resulted in exclusionary practices and outcomes in various contexts. Against a background of continuous challenges, however, trade unions have adopted a variety of strategies to represent the rights of migrant workers. These strategies have varied across countries and across unions, in terms of the resources and transformational efforts employed in their initiatives as well as their political significance for the migrant communities and the labour movement as a whole. The chapter will also discuss the explanations provided by the literature to understand cross-country and cross-union differences in the attitude towards migration and migrant workers. It will point to the varieties of union inclusive efforts and problematize the multi-faceted way in which the term ‘inclusion’ is understood and used in the debate on trade unions engagement with migrant workers.