Work related rights of foreign migrant workers in Viet Nam

Viet Nam today is deeper integrating into the global economy. In 2012/2013 the new Labour Code and amended Trade Union Law were promulgated and enacted. Numerous implementation Decrees and Circulars were introduced and enacted accordingly, which directly relate to the lives and work of the workers including foreign migrant workers. This article aims at examining and discussing the issues on foreign migrant workers in the contemporary Viet Nam. It is shown that despite positive changes in the new policies and laws the Vietnamese authority bodies have remain ineffectively responded to the issue of foreign labour in the context of significant economic growth

You Can Take it with You! The Returns to Foreign Human Capital of Male Temporary Foreign Workers

The research on immigration has found falling labor market outcomes of immigrants in many Western countries. In Canada, one of the major causes has been the decline in the returns to foreign work experience. Using the 1991, 1996 and 2001 Canadian Census Master Datafiles and applying both parametric and semiparametric techniques, it is found that unlike recently landed male immigrants, temporary foreign workers have no difficulty transferring their human capital to the Canadian labor market and in particular, they obtain very high returns to their foreign work experience. This is even true for temporary foreign workers from non-traditional backgrounds, a group that has had particular difficulty receiving returns to their foreign work experience for recent immigrant cohorts and now composes the majority of Canada’s immigration. It is likely that this premium can be partially attributed to the different selection process that temporary foreign workers and immigrants enter Canada under. While immigrants for the most part are selected by the government, the selection process for temporary foreign workers is driven by employers and employers may be better able to assess the transferability of the worker’s foreign human capital.Immigrants, Earnings, Temporary Foreign Workers, Partial linear models, Nonparametric regressions, Canada, Nonpermanent residents, semiparametric

How Do Trade, Foreign Investment, and Technology Affect Employment Patterns in Organized Indian Manufacturing?

The present study investigates into the impact of trade, foreign investment, and technology on three different employment patterns in India’s organized manufacturing sector. These employment patterns cover three disadvantage categories of workers viz., women vis-à-vis men workers, contract vis-à-vis regular workers and unskilled vis-à-vis skilled workers. A conceptual and empirical framework has been developed linking these employment patterns to trade, foreign investment, and technology, and tested for a sample of Indian industries. The research suggests that trade has been employment promoting for women and unskilled workers while it has remain neutral between contract and regular workers. The impact of foreign investment has been observed to be negative for contract and unskilled workers. The overall impact of technology encompassing in-house R&D, foreign technology imports, and capital-intensity has been mostly negative for women and unskilled workers but positive for contract workers.Employment Patterns; Trade; Foreign Investment; Technology

Visas, Inc: Corporate Control and Policy Incoherence in the U.S. Temporary Foreign Labor System

This report provides the first comprehensive analysis of the many visas that employers use and misuse to bring foreign workers into the U.S. in every field, from low-wage jobs in agriculture and domestic work, to specialty occupations in health care, education or information technology. The system is vulnerable to misuse by employers who use foreign labor to undermine established wages and working conditions in the U.S. The result is that U.S. workers are losing out on opportunities, and foreign workers have almost no protection from exploitation, unpaid wages, unsafe conditions and even trafficking and other abuses

Labor Certification for Permanent Immigrant Admissions

[Summary] The foreign labor certification program in the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) is responsible for ensuring that foreign workers do not displace or adversely affect working conditions of U.S. workers. DOL handles the labor certifications for permanent employment-based immigrants, temporary agricultural workers, and temporary nonagricultural workers as well as the simpler process of labor attestations for temporary professional workers. This report is organized into five sections: a brief history of employment-based immigration; a summary of the role of the DOL in employment based immigration; an overview of current law on employment-based immigration; an analysis of trends in employment-based admissions and labor certification applications (LCAs); and a discussion of the recent funding history for labor certification

ARE FOREIGN WORKERS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE INCREASING UNEMPLOYMENT RATE IN TAIWAN?

This paper investigates the current important issue in Taiwan that the impact of foreign workers on the rising unemployment by a dynamic intertemporal general equilibrium model. The results show that the introduction of foreign workers plays a complementary role and reduces unemployment rate at the early stage, defined as the first period after the shock. However, over time, the importation of foreign workers robs jobs from local unskilled labor and lifts the unemployment rate. In contrast to existing literature, this paper supports the view that immigration increases the unemployment rate for nationals in the long run. An appropriate policy regarding foreign workers for a small open economy like Taiwan needs to consider the state of the global economy. By considering the current ambiguity of world economic recovery and the high unemployment rate, a cautious policy for the Council of Labor Affairs to adopt is to maintain the current level of imported foreign workers.

Foreign Corporations and the Culture of Transparency: Evidence from Russian Administrative Data

Foreign-owned firms from advanced countries carry the culture of transparency in business transactions that is orthogonal to the culture of hiding and insider dealing in many developing economies and economies in transition. In this paper, we document this using administrative data on reported earnings and market values of cars owned by workers employed in foreign-owned and domestic firms in Moscow, Russia. We examine whether closer ties to foreign corporations result in the diffusion of transparency to private Russian firms. We find that Russian firms initially founded in partnerships with foreign corporations are twice as transparent in reported earnings of their workers as other Russian firms, but they are still less than half as transparent as foreign firms themselves. We also find that increased links to foreign corporations, such as hiring more workers from them, raise the transparency of domestic firms. An important channel for this transmission appears to be the need to keep official wages and salaries of incumbent workers close to wages domestic firms have to pay to their newly hired workers with experience in multinationals.

Rethinking the Gains from Immigration: Theory and Evidence from the U.S.

The standard empirical analysis of immigration, based on a simple labor demand and labor supply framework, has emphasized the negative impact of foreign born workers on the average wage of U.S.-born workers (particularly of those without a high school degree). A precise assessment of the average and relative effects of immigrants on U.S. wages, however, needs to consider labor as a differentiated input in production. Workers of different educational and experience levels are employed in different occupations and are therefore imperfectly substitutable. When taking this approach, one realizes that foreign-born workers are “complements” of U.S.-born workers in two ways. First, foreign-born residents are relatively abundant in the educational groups in which natives are scarce. Second, their choice of occupations for given education and experience attainments is quite different from that of natives. This implies that U.S.- and foreign-born workers with similar education and experience levels are imperfectly substitutable. Accounting carefully for these complementarities and for the adjustment of physical capital induced by immigration, the conventional finding of immigration’s impact on native wages is turned on its head: overall immigration over the 1980- 2000 period significantly increased the average wages of U.S.-born workers (by around 2%). Considering its distribution across workers, such an effect was positive for the wage of all native workers with at least a high school degree (88% of the labor force in year 2000), while it was null to moderately negative for the wages of natives without a high school degree.Foreign-Born, Skill Complementarities, Wages, Gains from Migration

More Harm than Good: Responding to States' Misguided Efforts to Regulate Immigration

This year's state legislative sessions have seen a large number of anti-immigrant worker legislative proposals, ranging from state-level employer sanctions bills, legislation requiring employers of immigrants to register and pay fees, taxes for employers of "aliens", proposals to deny workers' compensation to certain immigrants, and proposals requiring state agencies to act as arms of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).These proposals are misguided. They will result in increased discrimination against workers who are perceived to be "foreign", drive already vulnerable workers further underground and divert scarce state and local resources away from activities that benefit local communities.There is a better way: more effective enforcement of labor and employment rights to eliminate exploitation of immigrant workers and unfair competition against good employers. Shutting down the sweatshops will benefit all workers, whether US- or foreign-born, and create a climate of good jobs for all

Highly-educated immigrants and native occupational choice

Economic debate about the consequences of immigration in the US has largely focused on how influxes of foreign-born labor with little educational attainment have affected similarly-educated native-born workers. Fewer studies analyze the effect of immigration within the market for highly-educated labor. We use O*NET data on job characteristics to assess whether native-born workers with graduate degrees respond to an increased presence of highly-educated foreign-born workers by choosing new occupations with different skill content. We find that immigrants with graduate degrees specialize in occupations demanding quantitative and analytical skills, whereas their native-born counterparts specialize in occupations requiring interactive and communication skills. When the foreign-born proportion of highly educated employment within an occupation rises, native employees with graduate degrees choose new occupations with less analytical and more communicative content. For completeness, we also assess whether immigration causes highly educated natives to lose their jobs or move across state boundaries. We find no evidence that either occurs