Workers Without Borders: Posted Work and Precarity in the Eu by Ines Wagner

Author:Ines Wagner [Wagner, Ines]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501729157
Google: 8faaswEACAAJ
Goodreads: 39396555
Publisher: ILR Press
Published: 2018-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Varieties of Re-territorialization

German industrial relations institutions are marked by a tension: the power of these institutions ends at the territorial border, while the free mobility of services and labor enables regulations to extend across these borders (Wagner and Lillie 2014). These shifting boundaries of regulation are a mechanism for firms to segment the labor market. While immigration generally tends to undermine industrial relations institutions by reducing trade union control over the labor market, in the past, trade unions have coped by integrating and organizing immigrant workers into their structures. This process has not been without its problems and tensions, but there has nonetheless been a trend toward integration of immigrants into the trade union movement (Marino, Roosblad, and Penninx 2017). In the expanding postwar economy, unions created a position of strength for themselves. While largely unskilled migrant workers were recruited to do the most arduous and worst-paid jobs (Pries 2003), they were working in sectors where unions were organizationally and institutionally anchored. However, today, the German economy and the German trade union landscape are not the same as they were a couple of decades ago. Trade union efforts to integrate and represent migrant workers are now embedded in industries that have experienced radical growth in precarious employment, rapid weakening of the unions in the industry, and widespread workforce segmentation of both native and migrant workers (Wagner 2017). Actors play a major role in defining these spaces through their ongoing interactions. It is a mutually constitutive relationship between the material facts of the EU legal framework, the ideas held by actors about the organization of these spaces, and actors’ practices manifesting those ideas.

Searching for ways out of this situation, the DGB and its sectoral unions have undertaken various initiatives aimed at integrating migrants into worker representation structures. For example, IG BAU has responded to increasing numbers of posted workers by attempting to organize and represent them. One well-known effort was the establishment of the European Migrant Workers Union (EMWU), which attempted to create a transnational structure, separate from the national trade union structure, from which workers could receive representation in both home and host countries. The idea was to create a structure in which workers, who may be represented by trade unions in their home country, could move to another country and be represented by the trade union in that country without switching membership or paying double fees; the goal, then, was to overcome the boundaries that exist between worker representation in the EU. The IG BAU proceeded to create this structure by establishing a separate institution as a sort of daughter of the IG BAU (interview with IG BAU representative, 2011). The idea was that trade unions in different EU countries would support this organization with a fee contribution that would help create a network in which workers could be represented when crossing borders. For example, a Polish worker who moves from Germany to the Netherlands would be represented under the framework of the EMWU regardless of the national union structure.

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