Migrant worker

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Migrant farm worker, New York

2003 USPS stamp featuring Chávez and the fields that were so important to him

A migrant worker is someone working on a regular basis away from their home, if indeed they have a home.

The term overlaps with 'foreign worker', and some official definitions treat the two as identical. The "United Nations Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families"^[1] defines migrant worker as follows:

“

The term "migrant worker" refers to a person who is to be engaged, is engaged or has been engaged in a remunerated activity in a State of which he or she is not a national.

”

This Convention has been ratified by Mexico, Brazil and the Philippines (amongst many other nations that supply foreign labour) but it has not been ratified by the United States, Germany and Japan (amongst other nations that depend on cheap foreign labour).

In the United States, the term is most commonly used to describe low-wage workers performing manual labor in the agriculture field. Today in Europe and the United States these are often immigrants who are not working on valid work visas. The United States has enacted the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act - 29 U.S. Code Chapter 20to remove the restraints on commerce caused by activities detrimental to migrant and seasonal agricultural workers; to require farm labor contractors to register; and to assure necessary protections for migrant and seasonal agricultural workers, agricultural associations, and agricultural employers.

However, the term migrant worker may also refer to any person who works at seasonal jobs and moves around from one job to another. Although, the term is not as often used to describe those who work in those higher-wage fields, possibly because the term "migrant worker" has a stigma attached to it because of its extensive use to describe low-wage farm laborers and illegal immigrants. Examples of professions which could be called migrant workers, some of them quite lucrative, include: Electricians in the construction industry; other construction workers who travel from one construction job to another, often in different cities; wildland firefighters in the western United States; temporary/roving consulting work; and possibly even interstate truck drivers.

In America's history, starting at the end of the American Civil War, hobos were the migrant workers who performed much of this agricultural work, using freight railroads as their means of transportation to new jobs. During the collapse of capitalism in the Great Depression, so-called Okies who fled the dust bowl were a significant source of temporary farm labor. Cf. The Grapes of Wrath.

It is also used currently for workers from China's impoverished west who go to work in the more prosperous east. People like Wang Binyu, whose case became newsworthy in 2005.