Navigating Vulnerability and Opportunity: An Assessment of Migrant Workers in Kerala’s Labour Market.

Abstract

Migration is considered as an activity of changing one’s own social conditions by a movement from the present location to a new one. Usually, people move from areas of less economic opportunities and retarded social development towards the developed and fast developing areas where they can expect greater pecuniary gains and consequently better socio economic status. Recently, the labour market of Kerala is characterized by the superfluity of interstate migrant workers in every sector. Their presence is explicit in construction sector, manufacturing sector, service sector including hotels, restaurants, retail and even in agriculture. They are the part and parcel of the blue collar jobs where the local labour is abstinent and unwilling to exert physical efforts needed for its completion. Of course, there exist some factors or forces that initiated this flock movement to every nook and corner of the state of Kerala on one side and it might have created some issues in the present labour market after the inclusion of the migrants in the domestic labour market. This paper is intended to study the problems, prospects and post- inmigration issues in the domestic labour market of Kerala.