A guest worker program is an arrangement under which foreign or guest workers, people who work in a country other than the one of which they are a citizen, are sent or invited to work outside their home country, typically having acquired a job before leaving, in contrast to migrant workers who often leave home without a specific job already arranged.
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Associated With
Some historical guest worker programs originated from state-organized labor recruitment schemes with echoes of the older corvee logic of government-directed labor allocation, though guest workers are formally free contractors rather than legally compelled subjects.
Recruitment fees and employer-controlled housing in many guest worker programs have produced documented cases of de facto debt bondage among the workers.
Guest worker programs and sharecropping both tie a worker housing or livelihood to a single employer or landlord, narrowing the worker real ability to exit the arrangement even where the relationship is nominally a voluntary contract.
Guest worker programs formalize a wage-labor relationship but tie the worker legal residence to the employer, constraining the ordinary freedom to change employers that wage labor otherwise assumes.
Sources
Foreign Worker (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationLead sectionQuote, Lead section
Some foreign workers use a guest worker program in a country with more preferred job prospects than in their home country.
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