Navigating Migration and Employment: Opportunities for Inclusive Futures

This event explores challenges and opportunities raised by migration, with a focus on employment issues.

Today's world is characterised by an unprecedented mobility where “portions of the planet are literally moving more quickly and more unevenly—around axes of gender, race, and class” (Nail, 2019: 375). The International Organization for Migration (IOM, 2024) states that more than the 3.6% of the world population is composed by international migrants. Employment remains one of the strongest motivations for migrating and according to the International Labour Organization (ILO, 2024), there were 168 million labour migrants worldwide in 2022.

In this scenario, the rising numbers of people moving across borders remains a highly debated topic, often driven by misconceptions about its impact on the economy and the job market, as well as on the wellbeing of local communities and wider society. The media contributes to this discussion by portraying migrants as a threat to native workers and host countries, while governments continue to focus their efforts on managing migration by restricting arrivals and disciplining individual mobility.

Recent reports from the ILO (2024) and the OECD (2024) highlight migrants’ pivotal role in global and local economies, noting that their contributions to host countries’ income exceed governments’ expenditure on their assistance and training. But despite research demonstrating that migrants contribute positively to their new countries, bringing skills, knowledges, and worldviews that enrich host communities, increasingly harsh migration policies hinder migrants’ experiences, leading to exploitative work relations, unemployment and marginalisation. Moreover, interlinked social issues such as wealth inequality, cost-of-living and housing crises, gender disparities, racism, and precarisation of work further exacerbate the barriers faced by migrants. In our post-global world, with poverty and inequality on the rise, such dynamics create fertile grounds for the uncontrolled proliferation of unethical and exclusionary social and organisational practices.

As we navigate these complex issues, we believe it is crucial to promote informed discussions and develop strategies to tackle one of the most pressing issues in our world. Driven by this idea, REEF seeks to craft equitable futures for work and societies in a changing world. Its research aims to contribute to a better understanding of advances and practices that re-imagine just organisations for the future.

This REEF event will feature expert academic speakers who will present their research exploring the challenges and opportunities presented by migration, with a specific focus on its relation to employment issues. Their talks will cover topics such as migrant entrepreneurship, supporting migrant motherhoods for work inclusion, and migrant labour exploitation.

The online event will be hosted by REEF co-directors Marco Distinto and Caroline Clarke, The Open University Business School (DPO), UK.

Attendees are invited to join the discussion and contribute with their insights. The aim is to initiate a productive debate and inspire new ideas on creating inclusive workplaces and societies in our ever-evolving world.

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Speakers:

Prof. Burcu Güneri Çangarlı is a Professor in Management and Dean of the Business School at Izmir University of Economics, Turkey. Her research area of interests includes workplace bullying, power and politics, culture, ethics, leadership and entrepreneurship. More recently, she has developed an interest in migration to better understand this complex phenomenon exploring entrepreneurship experiences of well-educated Turkish migrants who migrated to the UK and established their own small businesses in the last 10 years. Their motivation to migrate and experiences in UK entrepreneurship eco-system involve contradictory findings to the extant literature and indicate the empowering role of migration.

Dr Wenjin Dai is a Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Diversity at the Open University Business School. Building on her cross-cultural experiences, Wenjin's research contributes to the diversity of knowledge in leadership and organisation studies, especially through examining workplace experiences and intersectional influences such as gender, ethnicity, and motherhood. She is currently leading an Open Societal Challenge project titled 'Supporting Diverse New Motherhoods for Work Inclusion'. Through working with voluntary and community organisations, the project aims to improve the understanding and practices of supporting ethnicity motherhoods for work inclusion among employers and society.

Dr Francesca Calo is Senior Lecturer in Public Management at the Open University Business School. Francesca’s research focuses on the inclusion of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in the labour market, through among others the Horizon Europe funded project SIRIUS. In the last two years she worked with Wenjin on the Open Societal Challenge project titled 'Supporting Diverse New Motherhoods for Work Inclusion'. Francesca has widely published articles and books on the barriers and enablers of inclusion of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in the labour market and the role of third sector organisations in favouring inclusion.

Dr Margherita Sabrina Perra is Associate Professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Cagliari, Italy, where she teaches sociology of organisations and sociology of public administration. She has conducted research at the University of Essex, the Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW, Berlin), Brown University (RI, USA), and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (Rostock), among others. The main topics of her research are capitalism and the division of social labour in European countries; the processes of social regulation and the role of the State from a critical perspective; the system of industrial relations in European countries; labour exploitation and migration; family and the status of women.

Dr Norma Baldino is a researcher and lecturer in Sociology at the University of Cagliari, Italy. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and specialises in ethnography and participatory methods. She has conducted ethnographic studies on Romani communities and anti-Romani sentiment in Italy and Spain, particularly in relation to housing spaces. Her research interests focus on identity and the social construction of exclusion and inclusion processes, particularly concerning minorities, urban subcultures, labour migration, and media representations of risk and deviance. She has been involved in various research projects and has extensive experience in qualitative research methods.

Together Sabrina and Norma worked on the CASLIS project (Contrasto allo Sfruttamento lavorativo in Sardegna - Countering labour exploitation in Sardinia). The project aims at mapping and understanding the phenomenon of migrant (and non-migrant) labour exploitation to establish a Regional Observatory and tackle the issue by developing policies and multilevel governance practices. They are currently working on a paper that discusses the necessity of understanding the migration phenomenon in Sardinia to rewrite public policies against the emergence of labour exploitation.