„Posted Workers“: Zwischen Regulierung und Invisibilisierung / „Posted Workers“: Between regulatory efforts and invisibility

Abstract

Entsandte Arbeitnehmer stellen kein grundsätzlich neues Phänomen auf dem Arbeitsmarkt dar. Historisch sind , Wanderarbeiter

The Transnationalization of Labor Mobility: Development Trends and Selected Challenges Involved in Its Regulation

“…The number of posted workers has also been growing steadily, although reliable figures are difficult to obtain (Staples et al, 2013). Since the 1990s, workers coming to Germany have been posted on the basis of bilateral agreements, most notably with countries in Central and Eastern Europe and with Turkey.…”

“…Posted workers are a hybrid of expatriates and circular migrants (Staples et al, 2013). The members of this group are hired by a service provider that is located in a poorer EU country and sent on short-time assignments in various different locations in richer EU countries, usually in occupations that do not require a high level of qualification, such as meat packing, working on large building sites or seasonal harvest work.…”

“…The commissioning and the contracting firms involved systematically exploit the wage differentials between the EU countries. The majority of posted workers are marginalized in the society of arrival and experience isolation, a precarious residence status and discrimination (Staples et al, 2013). The fact that posted workers are paid according to the wage structure of their home country has often led to demands for minimum wages in the past.…”

“…This is due to a lack of information and alternatives for the employees and to loopholes that undermine the implementation of the regulation on the national levels (cf., Staples et al, 2013; on the situation in Finland, see Lillie, 2012). "Worker posting facilitates the undermining of national industrial relations systems through the introduction of alternative firm practices and regulatory regimes into spaces where they are foreign, fueling direct competition between (national) groups of workers" (Lillie, 2012, p. 148).…”

Theorizing transnational labour markets: a research heuristic based on the new economic sociology

“…employment still have to be scrutinized within the framework of national employment orders (Heidenreich 2004: 212). However, neither of these approaches provides a sufficient analytical framework for the many examples of the so-called transnational labour markets -for instance care workers from the Philippines or central and eastern Europe working in western European or other wealthy countries (Bludau 2015;Choy 2003;Connell 2010;Jaehrling 2008;Kingma 2006;Trubek 2003), meat cutters from central and eastern Europe working in the German meat industry (Czommer 2008;Wagner 2015), or construction workers (Staples et al 2013). In these cases, national employment systems and governments retain their importance as the providers of the institutional contexts in which the labour markets are embedded.…”