Racialized Labour in Romania by Enikő Vincze Norbert Petrovici Cristina Raț & Giovanni Picker

Author:Enikő Vincze, Norbert Petrovici, Cristina Raț & Giovanni Picker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Conclusion

The logic of the Romanian welfare state at the margins is neither a logic of class compromise via social insurance, nor a logic of targeting benefits to the most needy as a last-resort safety net embroiled by the moral unacceptability of poverty. Even less so is it a universalistic logic of societal cohesion and equality through extensive redistribution and public services. Instead, we see increasingly conditional access to a limited number of provisions and subsidized services that ultimately facilitate the commodification of work through maintaining employability (via financial benefits, vocational training, counselling, etc.) and subsidizing the costs of living and raising children (via social assistance benefits, family allowances and provisions tied to schooling). In other words, we assist at the neoliberalization of the welfare state that is most visible at the margins. Roma and non-Roma families living in segregated, impoverished settlements, labelled as Țigănii, provide productive workforce for labour-intensive, weakly regulated sectors of basic services (sanitation, reparations, gardening, etc.), manual work in construction sites, or selective waste collection in polluted and often dangerous settings. The possibility of contracting day labourers in these sectors, and by that exempting them from the payment of social contributions, opened up a parallel system of relations between workers, capital and the state, the latter basically subsidizing deregulated labour for private capital via social aid and health insurance. New forms of local-level discretion emerged in the administration of welfare, revealing bureaucratic contradictions and diverging views over “deservingness”.

“Social inclusion” policies obscure the adverse forms in which precarious workers from segregated and severely deprived urban peripheries participate in productive labour and relate to a strictly conditional and disciplinary social assistance framework, which is nonetheless obstructed by local-level discretion, at times in favour of those rendered impoverished for generations, at times blaming them as undeserving, but most often racializing them as Tsiganes. As their work and needs enter processes of commodification outside of the historically institutionalized labour rights and social insurance, their effort and plight remain discarded.

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