Welfare through migrant work: what if the Romanian ‘safety valve’ closes?

Abstract

The Romanian work migration system came as an answer to the increased individual welfare risks caused by a particular form of Romanian neoliberalism. The system acts as a transnational labour market built up from the grassroots. Through its maturing, this migration system has acted as a 'safety valve' in Romania: neoliberal principles could be built into the Romanian welfare system. As such, migrant work abroad became a structural aspect of the Romanian welfare system. The austerity measures that are currently imposed on Mediterranean economies hosting Romanian migrants, and on Romania itself, therefore, create a double pressure on welfare in the latter, since they undermine the 'safety valve' capacity of the migration system.

Migration, Ethnicity and Solidarity: ‘Multinational Workers’ in the Former Soviet Union

“…They firmly located their migration decisions in the context of a lack of collective action possibilities to contest re-structuring (Meeus 2013;Morrison et al 2014). Initial experiences in host-countries match the negative outcomes predicted by institutionalist models (Doellgast et al 2018).…”

“…Nor are they simply and immutably individualistic. Participants firmly located their migration decisions in the context of a lack of collective action possibilities to contest re‐structuring (Meeus 2013; Morrison et al . 2014).…”

“…‘Mobility power’ has been used to analyse mobility as a ‘possible terrain of resistance’ (Alberti 2014: 866) and ‘a political field to investigate the making of the figure of the multinational worker’ (Andrijasevic and Sacchetto 2016: 221). We examine the possible emergence of ‘multinational workers’, construing migrants as potentially resistant to capital's logics and nation states’ politics (Meeus 2013). The nature of migrant worker subjectivities has been indicated but requires further specification.…”

The Romanian white-collar immigrants in Brussels: a transnational community under construction

“…Referring to the Romanian migration to the Brussels-Capital Region in particular, this division into temporal stages does not mean that when a new wave forms, the others have ceased. On the contrary, the three waves intertwine and interact, while exhibiting different features and behaviour within the Romanian community in the host country, and employing new integration strategies (Meeus, 2013). Low-skilled workers continue to come from Romania to Brussels, which proves the continuation of historical waves (Hermia, 2015).…”

Social Upheaval, Poverty and the Latvian Demographic Crisis

“…The consolation of unrestricted emigration is that it has served (and continued to serve) as a "safety valve" in avoiding massive social unrest inside Latvia, in the absence of any apparent concerted effort to provide enduring employment, especially to the educated youth. Recent mass migration of Romanians to escape homeland poverty is a case in point (Meeus 2013). In the present day, it is the EU "free market" policy that will affect the fate of the Latvian demographic status in future years.…”