On 13-14 November 2025 RUNOMI will host the IMISCOE event Labor markets and the “migrant worker” in light of technological transformation: an interdisciplinary dialogue in collaboration with CMR at Radboud University (NL).
The development of digital technologies has not only affected the nature of work, but also is impacting transformations of labor market structures, institutions and functioning. In tandem with the labor market’s digital transitioning, human mobility is also undergoing dynamic shifts and remains inextricable from global markets and labor, and evidently experiences digitalization’s impacts. Given the realities of these advances and fluctuations in migration, labor markets and access to welfare resources, scholars across disciplines are challenged to better grasp their impacts or consequences, whether positive—or uneven and unequal. We posit that facilitating and improving dialogue between experts across disciplines can foster improved understanding.
Under the auspices of this aim, we invite colleagues to reflect on, inter alia, the following themes, in light of technological change and new, different or reconstituted forms of labor
mobilities.
Key themes of the conference:
- How do we define, and who is defining, jobs, tasks, occupations, and the migrant’s role in labor markets? In shaping this, to what extent and how do institutional actors, policies or investments, legislation, social regulation of work and employment (industrial relations) or systems of accreditation and training play a role?
- What is the current terminology or normative language linked to categories of work and mobility, privilege and disadvantage (among others, the precariat, digital nomadism, etc.)? Are there avenues to reconceptualization?
- From the legal perspective, how do we define the migrant worker or simply the worker, and what are the understudied social and tax implications in the current transitions?
- How is technology reshaping labor market structures and composition, and how do these changes affect the migrant worker? How does it transform procedures of recruitment and promotion? How does it affect processes of production and what is its relative impact on workers’ tasks, required skills, status; moreover, how does this relate to simultaneous processes of white-collarization and de-skilling in the same segments of the labor market?
- Do migration studies fit into the current examination of structural changes and sectors in labor market technological transformation? How does the literature relating to positive and circular relation between segmentation and increasing migration flows fit into the theme of technological transformation? Do automation and digitalization decrease the demand for migrant workers, or do they modify the type of migrant workers needed?
- How can we foster debate as to the polarization of the labor market, and inspect more carefully the linkages and pathways between low salaries and the buying power of high salaries (again, with reference to the migrant worker)?
- In the increasingly visible domain of skilling and reskilling, who is responsible for funding reskilling, and how does this affect migrants and their employment? What
are comparative examples of reskilling of migrants in the welfare state? - What evidence is there that migrant jobs are being eliminated or repositioned, or that these transformations are coming at a social cost for migrant workers?
- How does technology affect the contractual position and conditions of migrant workers? In what way is this linked to processes of externalization and the rise of informal labor at the bottom of labor market secondary segments (either in terms of outsourced labor or platform work)?
Interested scholars are asked to submit their abstracts by June 22, 2025 to
All the information here