[P2P-F] Fwd: [NetworkedLabour] Fwd: [New post] Expats, migrants and the global division of labour

Mon Feb 1 10:25:58 CET 2016

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Orsan Senalp <orsan1234 at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 4:02 AM
Subject: [NetworkedLabour] Fwd: [New post] Expats, migrants and the global
division of labour
To: "<networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org>" <
networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org>

Begin forwarded message:

*From:* Ursula Huwss Blog <comment-reply at wordpress.com>
*Date:* 29 Jan 2016 09:27:46 GMT+1
*To:* orsan1234 at gmail.com
*Subject:* *[New post] Expats, migrants and the global division of labour*
*Reply-To:* "Ursula Huws's Blog" <
comment+e3bb7b911py580cy1k-pf3a at comment.wordpress.com>

site administrator posted: "Earlier this week, while waiting for the dinner
to finish cooking, I turned on the television and caught a programme that
seemed to say so much about the international division of labour in the
world today that I felt I had to write something about it. In"
Respond to this post by replying above this line
New post on *Ursula Huws's Blog*
<https://ursulahuws.wordpress.com/author/ursulahuws/> Expats, migrants and
the global division of labour
<https://ursulahuws.wordpress.com/2016/01/29/expats-migrants-and-the-global-division-of-labour/>
by
site administrator <https://ursulahuws.wordpress.com/author/ursulahuws/>

Earlier this week, while waiting for the dinner to finish cooking, I turned
on the television and caught a programme that seemed to say so much about
the international division of labour in the world today that I felt I had
to write something about it. Inspired by the success of the film *The Best
Exotic Marigold Hotel*, the programme makers had taken a group of British B
list celebrities to an up-market former private mansion ('The Real Marigold
Hotel') in Rajasthan with the ostensible aim of helping them decide whether
they would like to retire to India.

Shown on a day when it was being reported that asylum-seekers entering some
European countries were having their jewellery confiscated while those
being refused entry to Britain were being tear-gassed in Calais, the
contrast was vivid. These British migrants were waved easily across the
border, with nobody questioning their right to enter the former colony and
help themselves to the benefits of living there.

This comes at a time when the baby-boomers in the UK are entering
retirement, boosting the elderly population, while social care budgets are
being savaged. The question of how to survive in old age has come into
sharp focus for a generation brought up to believe they'd never had it so
good. In an era of globalisation, if politically-imposed constraints on
immigration make it increasingly difficult to bring the world's poor to
Britain to care for them in their old age, why not export the elderly to
their home countries instead, where they can be looked after in a state
where somebody else picks up the cost of bringing up the next generation?

India has long been swelling the ranks of the global servant class: it's
call centre workers patiently taking abuse from irate English-speaking
customers of global corporations, its hotel workers providing tourists with
luxuries they could never afford at home, its ex-pats providing nursing,
child-care and cleaning services as well as a myriad technical and
professional services across the world. But, as this programme clunkily
underlined, it also has a special place in the baby boomer imagination as a
site of spirituality and exoticism, romantically counterposed to the
consumerism and materiality of the West.

In the part of the programme I watched, this was voiced most explicitly by
the dancer Wayne Sleep who said that, after a brush with cancer, he 'wanted
to get in touch with his spiritual side'. The group was taken to a temple
and introduced to a guru, traipsed round various beautiful and exotic
locations and and taken to meet, first a poor but upwardly mobile man from
a Dalit caste and then a Maharaja who had cashed in on the family history
by turning the family palace into a luxury hotel. They were then encouraged
to mouth platitudes about the extreme contrasts between rich and poor and
how different this was from the egalitarian society they were used to back
home in Britain. No mention, of course, of how that imagined equality,
which had some basis in reality in the post-war period when they were
young, has now given way to growing social polarisation back home in
Blighty too (and may in fact be diminishing in India with its growing
middle class - though India too has a large share of the world's
billionaires).

Thus was denial piled on denial. Airbrushed out of the story was not only
the appalling contrast between the free movement of capital, services and
rich tourists across national borders on the one hand and, on the other,
the savage constraints placed on the free movement of workers and refugees,
but also the dramatic growth in inequality within the developed world. And
no mention of the destruction of the welfare state and how that might form
their choices about seeking alternative places to be cared for in their
declining years.

I did not watch to the end of the episode and will miss future instalments
because I will be travelling pretty continuously for the next few weeks,
and I am not sure anyway that I could contain my anger long enough to see
the series right through, but if any readers of this blog have enough self
control and semiotic curiosity to do so, I would be interested to learn how
it turns out.

*site administrator <https://ursulahuws.wordpress.com/author/ursulahuws/>*
| January 29, 2016 at 7:27 am | Categories: Uncategorized
<https://ursulahuws.wordpress.com/category/uncategorized/> | URL:
http://wp.me/p14K0k-sq

Comment
<https://ursulahuws.wordpress.com/2016/01/29/expats-migrants-and-the-global-division-of-labour/#respond>

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