Governing like a Business: The Privatization of State-Managed Labor in Era of Economization

Temporary labor programs have become the modal means of migrating to major destination countries (Cook-Martín 2024). Over the last quarter century, governments have privatized and/or run these programs "like a business" (Ferguson 2010). What has this meant for temporary workers and their already limited rights? Drawing on an examination of temporary programs and governance practices in Australia, Canada, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates, this paper shows how private actors (firms and labor brokers) have gained significant legal latitude to reduce workers' rights.

The analysis reveals the link between rising temporary admissions relative to permanent ones, the privatization of temporary labor recruitment and management, and worker precarity. In Canada, for example, the administration of the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program has been outsourced to employer-run organizations. In the U.S., au pair and cultural exchange programs are now managed by loosely monitored private firms.

Private firms are subject to the discipline of large retailers, brands, and financial investors which leaves little margin for the equitable treatment of workers whose rights cost money. The erosion of rights exposes workers to the extractive practices of an increasingly complex web of employers, government control, and labor migration intermediaries. This organizational complexity creates multiple profit opportunities at workers' expense.Moreover, labor emigration controls in sending countries like India can add bureaucratic hurdles and controls that further extract resources from temporary migrants and exacerbate their vulnerability to precarity (Agarwala 2022).

The paper argues that temporary migration programs have become a form of "gigification" of labor, extending the logic of time-limited, rights-constrained work arrangements to state-managed labor migration. The outcome is an increase in worker precarity. This trend has significant implications for labor relations, inequality, and concepts of national belonging in an era of sustained labor mobility.