‘What is exploitation and workplace abuse?’ A classification schema to understand exploitative workplace behaviour towards migrant workers

Migrant workers and domestic workers more broadly, suffer multiple forms of exploitation but the interaction of these forms lacks theorisation. The scholarship on exploitation includes modern slavery studies, Marxism and aligned accounts of unfreedom that help clarify the position of migrant workers. Yet, none of these accounts exhaust the array of exploitative practices that migrant workers face and these approaches often privilege economic violations over other types. This paper argues that a five-type classification schema – adding criminal infringement, denial of leave entitlements, safety violations and discrimination to economic violations – best encompasses the exploitation that migrant workers experience. Drawing upon a new database of 907 court cases litigated by 1912 migrant workers in four countries, it demonstrates that while economic violations predominate they often interact with these other four types of abuse. It suggests that both policy analysis and theoretical accounts of exploitation and abuse should address a broader array of workplace violations, which may provide a jumping-off point for further empirical studies of exploitation.