1 Lea Ypi Taking Workers as a Class: The Moral Dilemmas of Guestworker Programmes Abstract: It is often argued that guestworkers are exploited, and that unfair advantage is taken of their vulnerable position in host societies. This chapter assesses the accuracy of this claim by examining three different theories of exploitation: a domination theory, an egalitarian theory and a sufficientarian theory. It argues that neither the defenders of these theories nor their critics manage to fully capture what is normatively problematic about guestworker programmes. Analysing the shortcomings of these positions shows that guestworker programmes exploit workers taken collectively (as a class) rather than distributively (as individuals divided by citizenship). The chapter concludes by examining the remedial principles to which this perspective gives rise and by outlining its implications. Keywords: guestworkers, exploitation, justice, migration, social class. 1. Introduction: workers and guests A worker is someone who exchanges his labour for money. A guestworker is someone who exchanges his labour for money, as a guest. A guestworker therefore belongs, at the same time, to two distinguishable but related sets: the set of workers, who typically exchange their labour for money, and the set of migrant workers, who exchange their labour for money for a specified amount of time and in a foreign labour market. It is often said that guestworkers are exploited, i.e. that unfair advantage is taken of the position of foreign workers in domestic labour markets. 1 But are guestworkers exploited in virtue of being workers or of being guests or both or neither? 1 In what follows I shall deploy a broad definition of exploitation as taking unfair advantage on which most existing accounts seem to rely and then proceed to illustrate their specificities. For some relevant discussions in the context of guestworker programmes, see Daniel Attas, 'The Case of Guest Workers: Exploitation, Citizenship and Economic Rights', Res Publica, 6 (1) 73-92 (2000); Joseph Carens, 'Live-in Domestics, Seasonal Workers, and Others Hard to Locate on the Map of Democracy', Journal of Political Philosophy, 16 (4), 419-45 (2008); Patti Tamara Lenard and Christine Straehle, 'Temporary labour migration, global