State legal frameworks render Gulf labor migrants an expendable racialized class

Evidence

These risks clearly are mobilized according to the workers’ status in relationship to the state. As wards of the state, migrant workers hold a legal status that accords them certain contractual guarantees from employers. However, it is up to the government to enforce the regulations, and because trade organizations and demonstrations are illegal, workers have few outlets to bargain collectively with employers and resolve grievances. The government, in fact, promotes a system in which workers are exploitable and does little to protect them, even though labor laws and international standards exist to regulate such basic labor conditions as minimum wages and rights to bargain collectively, to associate, and to strike. This double bind establishes a relationship of migrant illegality in the labor diaspora that acquaints workers with the dilemmas of the legal frameworks of the state, and also creates labor migrants as a class of workers within a rubric of racialization that deems them as expendable in a biopolitical calculation of useful life and death. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 643

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies ‘biopolitical calculation of useful life and death’ as the mechanism by which legal frameworks deem workers expendable.