Transnational Employment Strain In A Global Health Pandemic

The 2020-22 COVID-19 pandemic reinforced inequalities between the global North and South, amplifying pre-existing disparities between national workers and migrants, many of whom sustain food supplies far from home through their work in agriculture. Leah F. Vosko, FRSC, is Professor of Political Science and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair at York University, Canada. Tanya Basok is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Windsor, Canada. Cynthia Spring is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at York University, Canada.

The 2020-22 COVID-19 pandemic reinforced inequalities between the global North and South, amplifying pre-existing disparities between migrant and citizen/permanent resident workers in receiving and sending states worldwide. In contexts such as Canada, it also underscored that many workers in occupations and sectors deemed “essential” enough to be exempt from stay-at-home orders and other public safety measures are migrants, a sizeable number of whom sustain Canada’s food supply through their work in its agricultural industry. This book explores the dynamics behind the pandemic’s deleterious outcomes for this vital group of workers, highlighting migrant farmworkers importance to the Canadian economy, society, and the world of work alongside the conditions they endured before and during the global health pandemic through policy and media analysis and open-ended interviews with workers enrolled in two streams of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) as well as migrants without legal status employed in agriculture located in Ontario and Quebec. Advancing the notion of transnational employment strain, the authors derive insight from the employment strain model, a framework for understanding risks to the physical and psychological well-being of workers, and expand it to account for migrants’ relationships across transnational space.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted every domain of life. Migration and human mobility in general are not exceptions. Since March 2020, researchers, policy makers and many others have channelled their efforts to understand this new coronavirus, its impact and prospects. Many scholars were thinking and writing on the pandemic from its onset and many blog essays quickly appeared. One of the earliest peer-reviewed research articles Sirkeci and Yucesahin (2020) is reproduced here. This article and its focus on mobility and travel data showed that it was possible to predict the spatial spread and concentration of COVID-19 cases. Not only was this finding crucial to developing appropriate policies and strategies to counter the spread of the virus, it reminded us that the pandemic is a social disease and not simply a biological threat. The contributions in this book should be considered in this regard tackling the social and policy aspects as we leave the biological and medical side to the experts. | “Covid-19 introduces new uncertainties for everyone. For agriculture, the longer term effects of the pandemic include faster mechanization, more guest workers, and rising imports. Responses are likely to vary by commodity and be shaped by government policies.” – Philip L Martin, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Davis, USA “The COVID-19 pandemic reminds us of just how many people across the world rely on mobility for their livelihood: taxi drivers, delivery workers, street vendors, maintenance technicians of long-distance operation systems, all employees in the hospitality sector… not forgetting the most vulnerable at this time, the homeless, beggars and street kids, especially in the global South, who have to move from place to place to get food, to find a place to sleep through the night, and to run away from police.” – Biao Xiang, Professor of Anthropology, University of Oxford, UK Contents: CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION – Ibrahim Sirkeci and Jeffrey H. Cohen | CHAPTER 2. COVID-19 AND INTERNATIONAL LABOUR MIGRATION IN AGRICULTURE – Philip L. Martin | CHAPTER 3. HOSTAGES OF MOBILITY: TRANSPORT, SECURITIZATION AND STRESS DURING PANDEMIC – Biao Xiang | CHAPTER 4. MODELING AND PREDICTION OF THE 2019 CORONAVIRUS DISEASE SPREADING IN CHINA INCORPORATING HUMAN MIGRATION DATA – Choujun Zhan, Chi Kong Tse, Yuxia Fu, Zhikang Lai, Haijun Zhang | CHAPTER 5. THE STUDY OF THE EFFECTS OF MOBILITY TRENDS ON THE STATISTICAL MODELS OF THE COVID-19 VIRUS SPREADING – David Gondauri and Mikheil Batiashvili | CHAPTER 6. HUMAN MOBILITY, COVID-19 AND POLICY RESPONSES: THE RIGHTS AND CLAIMS-MAKING OF MIGRANT DOMESTIC WORKERS – Smriti Rao, Sarah Gammage, Julia Arnold and Elizabeth Anderson | CHAPTER 7. ‘UNWANTED BUT NEEDED’ IN SOUTH AFRICA: POST PANDEMIC IMAGINATIONS ON BLACK IMMIGRANT ENTREPRENEURS OWNING SPAZA SHOPS – Sadhana Manik | CHAPTER 8. LABOUR MARKET AND MIGRATION OUTCOMES OF THE COVID-19 OUTBREAK IN MEXICO – Carla Pederzini Villarreal and Liliana Meza González | CHAPTER 9. REFLECTIONS ON COLLECTIVE INSECURITY AND VIRTUAL RESISTANCE IN THE TIME OF COVID-19 IN MALAYSIA – Linda Alfarero Lumayag, Teresita C. Del Rosario and Frances S. Sutton | CHAPTER 10. FACING A PANDEMIC AWAY FROM HOME: COVID-19 AND THE BRAZILIAN IMMIGRANTS IN PORTUGAL – Patricia Posch and Rosa Cabecinhas | CHAPTER 11. MIGRATION AND IMMIGRATION: UGANDA AND THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC – Agnes Igoye | CHAPTER 12. IMPACT OF COVID-19 HUMAN MOBILITY RESTRICTIONS ON THE MIGRANT ORIGIN POPULATION IN FINLAND – Natalia Skogberg, Idil Hussein and Anu E Castaneda | CHAPTER 13. REMITTANCES FROM MEXICAN MIGRANTS IN THE UNITED STATES DURING COVID-19 – Rodolfo García Zamora and Selene Gaspar Olvera | CHAPTER 14. THE COVID-19, MIGRATION AND LIVELIHOOD IN INDIA: CHALLENGES AND POLICY ISSUES – R.B. Bhagat, Reshmi R.S., Harihar Sahoo, Archana K. Roy, Dipti Govil | CHAPTER 15. THE FUTURE OF MOBILITY IN A POST PANDEMIC WORLD: FORCED MIGRATION AND HEALTH – Monette Zard and Ling San Lau | CHAPTER 16. MULTILATERALISM FOR MOBILITY: INTERAGENCY COOPERATION IN A POST-PANDEMIC WORLD – Daniel Naujoks | CHAPTER 17. COVID-19, REMITTANCES AND REPERCUSSIONS – Melissa Siegel

Every nation in Asia has dealt with COVID-19 differently and with varying levels of success in the absence of clear and effective leadership from the WHO. As a result, the WHO's role in Asia as a global health organization is coming under increasing pressure. As its credibility is slowly being eroded by public displays of incompetence and negligence, it has also become an arena of contestation. Moreover, while the pandemic continues to undermine the future of global health governance as a whole, the highly interdependent economies in Asia have exposed the speed with which pandemics can spread, as intensive regional travel and business connections have caused every area in the region to be hit hard. The migrant labor necessary to sustain globalized economies has been strained and the security of international workers is now more precarious than ever, as millions have been left stranded, seen their entry blocked, or have limited access to health services. This volume provides an accessible framework for the understanding the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in Asia, with a specific emphasis on global governance in health and labor.

Every nation in Asia has dealt with COVID-19 differently and with varying levels of success in the absence of clear and effective leadership from the WHO. As a result, the WHO's role in Asia as a global health organization is coming under increasing pressure. As its credibility is slowly being eroded by public displays of incompetence and negligence, it has also become an arena of contestation. Moreover, while the pandemic continues to undermine the future of global health governance as a whole, the highly interdependent economies in Asia have exposed the speed with which pandemics can spread, as intensive regional travel and business connections have caused every area in the region to be hit hard. The migrant labor necessary to sustain globalized economies has been strained and the security of international workers is now more precarious than ever, as millions have been left stranded, seen their entry blocked, or have limited access to health services. This volume provides an accessible framework for the understanding the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in Asia, with a specific emphasis on global governance in health and labor.

As the culminating volume in the DCP3 series, volume 9 will provide an overview of DCP3 findings and methods, a summary of messages and substantive lessons to be taken from DCP3, and a further discussion of cross-cutting and synthesizing topics across the first eight volumes. The introductory chapters (1-3) in this volume take as their starting point the elements of the Essential Packages presented in the overview chapters of each volume. First, the chapter on intersectoral policy priorities for health includes fiscal and intersectoral policies and assembles a subset of the population policies and applies strict criteria for a low-income setting in order to propose a "highest-priority" essential package. Second, the chapter on packages of care and delivery platforms for universal health coverage (UHC) includes health sector interventions, primarily clinical and public health services, and uses the same approach to propose a highest priority package of interventions and policies that meet similar criteria, provides cost estimates, and describes a pathway to UHC.

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

Transnational Mobility and Global Health spotlights the powerful and dynamic intersections of human movement, inequality, and health. The book explores the interacting political, economic, social, cultural, and climatic drivers of health and migration, proposing innovative ways to enhance global health and care provision in an era of transnational mobility. As health security continues to rise up the agenda in international politics, the book also analyses the political determinants of health and migration. Within the framework of key drivers of unequal mobilities, this book treats interconnected health and migration themes not covered elsewhere under one cover: health tourism, conflict-induced and other vulnerable-population movements, humanitarian crises, human rights, the health-development linkage, migrant health-care, and health-competency education. The book also considers global health vulnerabilities in the wake of climate change, and the biomedical, ethical, and governance challenges of emerging and reemerging infectious diseases. Finally, the book suggests ways of evaluating mobility-influenced health outcomes and equity impacts, and explores how the global circulation of health expertise could help to rectify care-provider shortages. The challenges to global health considered in this book are only likely to become more intense as the 21st-Century surge in transnational migration continues. Readers will gain interdisciplinary appreciation for the relevance of health for migration and of migration for global health. Researchers, students, practitioners, and policy makers interested in individual and population health, sustainable development, and migration studies will find this book a useful and inspiring guide to contemporary global challenges.