An Indonesian domestic care worker in London is paid £400 a month, well below national minimum wage requirements because of a regulatory exemption that considers her to be a “member of the family.” Four construction workers in Toronto fall to their deaths on Christmas Eve after the poorly built swing stage that they are standing on without safety harnesses collapses. Ten Filipino restaurant workers employed on temporary work visas in Australia are subjected to systematic underpayment and wage theft while putting in over 60 hours of work per week. An undocumented Mexican worker in California is fired for engaging in trade union activities. These are a few of the real-life stories that animate the broader discussion of challenges faced by migrant workers in Anna Boucher’s Patterns of Exploitation: Understanding Migrant Worker Rights in Advanced Democracies.

Boucher, a lawyer and Associate Professor of Comparative Politics and Public Policy at the University of Sydney, is interested in making sense of the patterns of workplace rights violations faced by migrants in four Western countries with similar industrial relations systems. Her focus is on Australia, England, the U.S. state of California, and the three Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario. The book adopts a mixed-methods approach, combining interviews with legal practitioners and quantitative analysis of 907 court cases brought by migrant workers in all six legal jurisdictions over a 20-year period (1996–2016), ranging from lower-level tribunals to the highest courts of appeal. The Migrant Worker Rights Database (MWRD) captures cases involving 1,912 migrants who alleged 2,640 workplace violations ranging from unpaid wages and the denial of workplace safety, to discrimination based on sex, race, religion, or political conviction, as well as criminal infringements such as sexual assault. Given the considerable barriers that migrant workers face in bringing litigation—whether due to the fear of reprisal, financial constraints, evidentiary burdens, or compulsory arbitration mechanisms that limit litigation opportunities—Boucher concedes that the database is only a partial record, but one which provides an “indisputably objective evidence base of workplace violations” (p. 13). This underscores the point that the exploitation of migrant workers is a problem that is far greater in scale than what is reflected in the public record.

In seeking to operationalize exploitation, Boucher relies upon a “positivist, legal approach” (p. 17), defining exploitation as the violation of existing labor laws. In other words, a worker is deemed exploited when employment standards are transgressed. Readers who adopt a more critical approach to the law may take issue with this framing since existing labor laws and protections might arguably reflect the asymmetrical power dynamic between employers and workers, favoring the interests of the former over the latter. While Boucher is well aware that the legal standards for what is considered exploitative have changed over time—in no small part because of agitation from below—the decision to sidestep normative debates about the nature of labor exploitation in favor of measurable instances of exploitation as captured by legal transgressions is a missed opportunity to contribute to ongoing debates about the neoliberal reconfiguration of labor, welfare, and immigration policies in Western economies. The absence of any substantive discussion of social reproduction is puzzling in this respect, especially given the book’s attention to economic sectors such as domestic and care work. In the spirit of exchange, I would invite Boucher to theorize exploitation more expansively, to reflect upon how it operates structurally and to address how the labor of immigrants (and immigrant women in particular) in social reproductive sectors such as childcare and elder care facilitates the ease of entry of native men and especially native women into the wage earning workforce by providing the care that neoliberal reforms have commodified. While this is beyond the book’s stated aims of explaining how labor laws and their broader industrial settings have impacted patterns of exploitation, it would enrich the discussion to hear Boucher’s views on these issues.

The book itself is organized around seven legal case studies that speak to different aspects of migrant work, such as domestic and care work, unsafe health and safety standards, discrimination, government enforcement, temporary work visas, the effects of undocumented status, and representation by trade unions or other collective bargaining units. Each chapter opens with an illustrative vignette that nicely sets the stage for the discussion that follows, which includes cross-national comparison based on a thorough review of legal statutes, national regulatory environments and secondary literature, as well as interviews with legal practitioners, policymakers, union representatives, and police officers. Every chapter also includes a section devoted to statistical analysis based on the MWRD as well as a brief set of policy recommendations. The organization of the book will be especially useful for readers interested in honing in on a specific court case or issue area, as each chapter can be approached as a standalone case study. When read cover to cover, however, some variation in the narrative structure would have helped enliven the text.

Throughout the book, Boucher develops two core claims. First, she argues that country-level factors—especially the nature of industrial relations and enforcement systems—play a larger role in explaining variation in the litigation brought by migrants against workplace violations than individual-level attributes, such as a migrant’s ethnic background, language capacity, or visa status. Second, contrary to those who might see the courts as a bulwark against unfair or exploitative employment practices, Boucher maintains that courts are far from uniformly protective. At times, courts issue rulings that serve to reinforce exploitative workplace practices, leading to a deterioration of working conditions for migrants—rulings that have broader implications for the rights of all workers. As Boucher points out, migrants might be seen as a canary in the coalmine with respect to workplace rights violations, portending exploitative patterns that could impact other categories of workers in the future.

Although Boucher places less causal weight on individual-level attributes when accounting for patterns of exploitation, undocumented migrant workers and migrant workers on temporary visas appear frequently in the court cases she analyzes, including those where the primary focus pertains to issues such as antidiscrimination law, health and safety regulations, and trade union representation suggesting fruitful avenues for further study. An undocumented worker may have entered the country clandestinely without authorization or may have become undocumented as a result of a lapse in visa status (i.e., overstaying their visa). Workers on temporary visas may have some flexibility with respect to employment, but if they are on an employee-sponsored visa, will not be able to change jobs so easily. Boucher acknowledges intersecting forms of disadvantage that can “compound and heighten the risk of exploitation” (p. 63), including visa or undocumented status, but also nationality, race, gender, and class. Furthermore, she also notes that “there is strong evidence that migrants without legal status experienced lower adherence of their labor rights than those on visas” (p. 137). Given that workers with unlawful status are less likely to seek legal redress for the violation of their rights out of fear of reprisal or deportation (p. 138), does the impact of legal or visa status actually play a much larger role in explaining patterns of violation? Boucher suggests the need for better data so that governments can more accurately appraise the scale of the issue, “from a labor rights but also, arguably, an enforcement perspective” (p. 149). But how should researchers or government agencies collect data about populations who may very well prefer to remain unseen? In a political climate marked by the rise in anti-immigrant sentiment and threats of mass deportations, migrant workers in legal limbo face credible fears that heighten the challenges of data collection even when information sharing across government agencies is legally limited. Depending on who holds power, governments may well choose to prioritize immigration enforcement over labor rights.

That said, Boucher’s focus on national systems is underpinned by the understanding that systems can be reformed and allows for the development of useful policy recommendations that are informed by the variation in labor laws, regulations, and enforcement mechanisms across four countries. Scholars, practitioners, and activists alike will find value in her analysis. Those pursuing litigation efforts will gain a macro-level view of strategies that have been successful or unsuccessful in the courts, such as the important finding that claims related to economic violations (i.e., wage theft and underpayment) were by far the most victorious, representing 81% of cases successfully adjudicated in favor of migrant workers. While a book on the exploitation of migrant workers would have benefitted from the perspectives of migrant workers themselves, Boucher has written a comprehensive account of the structures and institutions that shape the lived experience of work and given her readers a useful guide on how they might be reformed to elevate working conditions for all.