Migration in search of paid employment can be either temporary or permanent. Temporary migrant workers engage in periodic commuting between their rural residences and largely distant labour markets where paid employment takes place. By contrast, permanent migrants change their residence and move more or less in permanent basis. The literature on rural migration and employment largely assumes that temporary migration represents the first stages of a more permanent move. However, empirical studies have shown that temporary migrants represent an even larger share of the migrant labour force and temporary migration might be adopted as and end rather than as the first steps towards a permanent move.
Rural workers represent a very diverse and heterogeneous sector of the paid labour force.
Indeed, rural workers enter paid employment with different levels of human capital and other socially recognised credentials and they have different expectations regarding employment and job-success. Rural workers also come from highly stratified rural societies and therefore race, ethnicity and caste become important determinant in their integration to paid employment. One of the fundamental problems with the identification of rural workers is the lack of appropriate statistics and data regarding both their size in relation to the rest of the paid labour force and their occupations in the labour market. The problem however is that most rural-urban migration is assumed to take place in permanent basis and thus there is a substantial share of temporary or itinerant migrant labourers that are either not taken into account or are counted as permanent migrants 1 . Equally problematic is the lack of employment statistics related to casual jobs and short-term employment.