Constructing Mobilities: The Reproduction of Posted Workers’ Disposability in the Construction Sector

Introduction

A posted worker is ‘an employee who is sent by his employer to carry out a service in another European Union (EU) Member State on a temporary basis, in the context of a contract of services, an intra-group posting or a hiring out through a temporary agency’ (European Commission, 2022). Within the EU, firms can post their workers abroad thanks to the freedom of movement of services. Western European countries generally benefit from posting since it is often used as a ‘business strategy to channel cheap labour from low-wage countries into labour-intensive sectors in high-wage countries’ (Arnholtz, 2021: 1151). Indeed, under EU law, posted workers are primarily considered service providers rather than mobile EU workers per se (Novitz and Andrijasevic, 2020). They maintain the social protection of their sending country but benefit from terms and conditions of employment (remuneration, health and safety, leave, rest periods, etc.) in line with the regulations of the host member state whenever these are more favourable than the ones established in the sending country. Therefore, despite the principle of ‘equal pay for equal work’ that underlies the EU Posted Work Directive 2018/957, posted Workers are actually covered by different social protection rules as compared with local and migrant labour.

The literature frames posted work alternatively as a necessary step towards the integration of the EU market, a source of regulatory opacity that impairs enforcement of labour rights (Berntsen and Lillie, 2016), a zone of exception within national labour regulatory systems (Lillie et al., 2014), a tool for institutional arbitrage or evasion at firms’ disposal (Wagner, 2015; Wagner and Berntsen, 2016) and a driver of institutional drift and conversion (Arnholtz and Lillie, 2020a). Alternative analyses show that the temporariness of posted work arrangements and posted workers’ isolation in the receiving country undermine trade union activity (Caro et al., 2015; Voivozeanu, 2019). More fine-grained studies of posted workers’ actions perceive their enhanced mobility as a form of agency in its own right that is aimed at reworking exploitative employment conditions (Alberti and Danaj, 2017; Berntsen, 2016; Caro et al., 2015; Lens et al., 2022; Matyska, 2020).

This literature, however insightful, generally focuses on traditional actors of industrial relations and regulatory institutions in the receiving countries, the enforcement challenges they face and the consequences these have on labour standards and broader regulatory enactment. It emphasises the role of rule evasion and arbitrage and it examines the processes through which firms and enforcement actors (i.e. trade unions and inspectors) continuously shape regulatory enactment (Arnholtz, 2021; Arnholtz and Lillie, 2020b; Wagner, 2015). However, it rarely investigates how management and labour negotiate regulatory evasion in the workplace (for an exception see Ahlstrand, 2022). Moreover, although part of the literature emphasises the barriers to collective mobilisation and posted workers’ preferences for individualised reworking and coping strategies (Bernsten, 2016; Matyska, 2020), existing studies remain generally focused on the host country’s institutions and actors (Arnholtz and Lillie, 2020b; Wagner and Bernsten, 2016).

Instead, this article contends that although posting companies engage with regulatory arbitrage and evasion as long as enforcement actors fail to monitor and sanction them, they ultimately need to ensure a continuous supply of workers who accept, or at least fail to resist, such irregular practices. By examining posted workers’ trajectories from their sending country’s perspective, and focusing on the construction sector, the study mobilises the concept of labour regime to tease out the mechanisms that actively create and reproduce a segmented supply of a relatively cheap and disposable mobile workforce. We draw on biographical interviews with Italian construction workers posted abroad and semi-structured interviews with non-posted workers, unionists, managers and other stakeholders of the sector in Italy. The article underlines that posted workers are relatively isolated from the host country’s unions and institutions, but that they also remain embedded in the Italian labour regime. Indeed, the constraining elements of the Italian labour regime stick with workers in their experience abroad and enable the reproduction of a segmented, hierarchically ordered workforce. Such a sticky labour regime reproduces Italian posted workers abroad as cheap and disposable: cheaper than locals, highly mobile and ready to accept intense and precarious working conditions at their employers’ demand. The article also highlights that even though the sending country’s labour regime shapes workers’ agency during their postings, the elements of such a regime can be actively mobilised to escape or subvert exploitative and disciplining forces. The study, therefore, attempts to recentre the posting literature on the perspective of workers beyond formal enforcement actors. By focusing on the everyday practices of labour control and disciplining, it teases out how informal rules and actors, recruitment networks and dormitory regimes emanating from the sending country ensure a supply of disposable, acquiescent workers. It also shows that, at times, labour regime elements can be reworked by workers to their own advantage.

In the following sections, we present the literature debate on posted work and explain how the labour regime concept can contribute to it. Then, we illustrate the research method adopted and present our data on the construction sector’s labour regimes in Italy and during the posting. Lastly, we discuss the results emerging from the fieldwork and how a labour regime approach can enrich the debate on posting and mobile labour.

Debating posted work

For Arnholtz and Lillie (2020a), posting amounts to a business model based on cheap labour that allows firms to escape the regulatory constraints of the countries where they operate at the expense of workers’ rights. Posting arrangements create zones of exceptions where rules can be more easily circumvented. This can trigger dynamics of institutional drift and conversion that ultimately reshape the industrial relations institutions that set collective bargaining, representation and rights at work in the receiving countries.

Posting firms’ circumvention of local regulatory constraints is generally understood as the result of their inherent foreignness and unruliness. As foreign actors, posting firms are extraneous to the employment relations’ system and spirit of the host country (Arnholtz, 2021; Lillie and Wagner, 2015) or are simply put off by the complexity and opacity of overlapping regulations in their compliance with labour standards (Houwerzijl and Bernsten, 2020). Moreover, as with any other economic enterprises, posting firms strive to maximise profits even when this entails circumventing poorly enforced formal rules (Arnholtz and Lillie, 2020a). Investigating posted work, therefore, is about comprehending the widespread dynamics of rule arbitrage and evasion (Bernsten and Lillie, 2015). If legal inconsistencies favour the creation of fragmented sovereignty zones (Iannuzzi and Sacchetto, 2020), their reproduction ‘depends on company practices and a labour force willing to accommodate such practices’ (Arnholtz and Lillie, 2020a: 9; Theunissen et al., 2022). In other words, the literature on posting increasingly emphasises the need to shift from a focus on formal regulations towards one on the everyday practices of noncompliance and enforcement. At the same time, while recognising the crucial role of workers’ consent to (or their inability to resist) regulatory avoidance practices, research on posting has usually focused on enforcement actors, overlooking exactly those everyday practices through which workers’ disposability is constructed.

Labour-centred analyses find that posted workers are generally isolated from trade unions in the host country, often segregated in remote areas, highly dependent on employers for housing and other services, and afraid of retaliation (Berntsen, 2016). The temporariness of their project-based working arrangements and the fuzziness of regulations impair unionisation and collective action (Bernsten and Lillie, 2015; Caro et al., 2015; Cillo, 2021). Workers’ agency, therefore, remains individualised and informal. Berntsen (2016) considers job jumping (i.e. quitting to be enrolled by another company) a reworking strategy and Matyska (2020) attributes the lack of mobilisation to the result of a well-engrained distrust of unions in sending countries and the fear of losing the job. Moreover, for many workers, posting remains a favoured alternative to unemployment or contingent work in the country of origin. Furthermore, posting arrangements are often based on trust and workers, consent to multiple forms of employers’ noncompliance as long as a verbal agreement on work and pay is maintained (Matyska, 2020).

Overall, while some studies have focused on trade unions and institutional actors, others have brought workers’ actions into the enquiry but failed to systematically connect their forms of agency to the reproduction of corporate noncompliance practices. The lack of collective resistance to exploitative practices is imputed to short-term employment arrangements, spatial segregation and workers’ dual frame of reference. Yet, posted workers need to be continuously integrated into the labour process and their acquiescence vis-a-vis substandard employment relations must be constantly reproduced to maintain rule evasion and arbitrage a widespread corporate strategy. In other words, companies must actively seek their workers’ acceptance or secure their inability to challenge their own practices of rule evasion. So, how is the discipline of posted workers maintained amidst widespread noncompliant practices? What are the actors, practices and institutional elements that reproduce such discipline?

An analysis of everyday processes of labour control obliges us to shift the focus from firms, the host country’s institutions and enforcement actors, towards the complex, formal and informal regulatory dynamics that reproduce a disposable workforce and make the noncompliance of posting companies possible. To investigate such processes, this study draws on labour process theory (LPT) and the recent renewal of the concept of labour regime.

Posted work through the labour regime lens

LPT scholars frame employment relations as the result of an inherently antagonistic relationship between parties with conflicting interests: whereas managers need to make sure workers participate in a disciplined fashion in the labour process and maximise their work effort, workers rather try to increase their returns and fulfilment at work (Thompson and Smith, 2010). Yet, if managerial control over labour is imperative, the ways of achieving it are open to continuous negotiation between management and workers. Factory regimes, that is, the set of rules and practices that stabilise the capital–labour antagonistic relationship in the workplace, can be based on coercion, consent and multiple combinations of the two (Burawoy, 1985).

Although LPT approaches often stress how factory regimes are embedded in broader institutional contexts that end up shaping the management–labour relations within the workplace, their focus tends to be on shopfloor dynamics and risks overlooking what happens beyond production. This connectivity gap has been addressed in the literature in multiple ways (Thompson and Vincent, 2010) that endeavour to read workplace dynamics in their interactions with ‘other loci of social relations’ (Taylor, 2010: 51). The literature on local labour control regimes (Jonas, 1996) (hereafter labour regimes) offers a useful conceptual toolbox to address the connectivity problem and to investigate how institutions, actors and discourses developed in and beyond the workplace deeply influence the relations of control and resistance within production. A labour regime encapsulates ‘the combination of social relations and institutions that bind capital and labour in a form of antagonistic relative stability in particular times and places’ (Baglioni et al., 2022: 1). A regime includes actors, practices and discourses that favour managerial control over workers within and beyond the factory gates. It comprises social institutions (e.g. family, labour markets, gender regime, migration regime), different actors (e.g. workers, employers, recruiters), dynamics of social reproduction (e.g. sexual division of reproductive labour, welfare transfers) and stratifications of past and current workers’ struggles and adaptation strategies. Drawing on the labour regime perspective, Baglioni (2018) disentangles labour control as the interplay of exploitation and disciplining. Exploitation refers to the process through which, within the labour process, workers are made to produce value that exceeds their remuneration. Disciplining, on the other hand, refers to ‘the mechanisms of mitigation, containment and prevention of conflict inherent to production’ (Baglioni, 2018: 112). Whereas exploitation includes workplace dynamics that produce goods and commodities, disciplining embraces also wider dynamics unfolding beyond the immediate point of production that produce a disposable workforce fit for the specific needs of production.

Exploitation and disciplining often overlap and are mutually shaping. Yet, the former refers primarily to the multiple processes of intensification, prolongation and flexibilisation of the labour process, as well as the dynamics of employment informalisation, noncompliance with safety and health regulations for productive maximisation purposes, remuneration compression and underpayment of social security contributions. Disciplining, by contrast, pertains to the processes through which cheap and disposable workers are made. These include the dynamics, discourses and practices that contribute to the emergence, normalisation and reproduction of different segments of the workforce that are hierarchically ordered along demarcations different from class (gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, age, country of origin in our case, and so on), on the basis of which different workers are exposed to differential levels of exploitation and disposability (Baglioni, 2022; Bair, 2010; Tsing, 2009). An analysis of the disciplining elements of the labour process, therefore, entails examining institutions, labour markets and workers’ social reproduction dynamics through which workers are reproduced and normalised as cheap and disposable. Such an analysis, in our case, includes investigating regulatory constraints and opportunities for firms’ breach of employment rules, as well as recruitment networks, housing arrangements, gender and family relations, and practices and discourses that actively reproduce labour’s acquiescence vis-a-vis informalised and exploitative posting strategies enacted by the firms employing them.

Although labour regimes are territorially situated, their mechanisms of control can also operate on mobile labour (Tang and Zhang, 2019). Migration studies emphasises that institutions, actors and networks in the country of origin continue to shape mobile workers’ employment opportunities and conditions abroad (Rodriguez, 2010; Xiang, 2012; Xiang and Lindquist, 2014). The focus of this literature, however, has generally been on mobility infrastructures; that is, formal recruitment actors, migrant networks, and sending state agencies and policies (see Shire, 2020 for a similar critique). Instead, this study focuses on the situated everyday dynamics of labour control as experienced and reported by posted workers. The article shows that multiple elements of the sending country’s labour regime, both formal and informal, are sticky and travel with mobile workers during their posting. We use the concept of the sticky labour regime to refer to the case in which the elements of a sending country’s labour regime continue to constrain and discipline workers throughout their mobility trajectory abroad. While this concept could be applicable to different forms of labour mobility, the regulatory exceptionality of posting makes the sticky elements of the sending country’s labour regime particularly relevant in the reproduction of workers’ disposability. At the same time, while labour regimes are strategically mobilised by companies to enhance labour control, they remain inherently contested and only temporarily stable. As mentioned, any labour regime is the result of past workers’ struggles and at the same time it keeps shaping – without annihilating – the agency of workers (Anner, 2015). Drawing on these strands of literature, the article teases out the main elements of the sticky labour regime that make posted workers disposable abroad to explain how corporate regulatory evasion is concretely reproduced in posting arrangements.

Researching Italian construction workers posted abroad

The study draws on qualitative interviews and the analysis of secondary literature, statistical data and reports issued by sectoral stakeholders. Between February and November 2021, we conducted 42 individual and group interviews with 54 participants. Thirty of these were semi-structured interviews with representatives of the main business organisation – the Associazione Nazionale Costruttori Edili (ANCE), the Construction Workers Fund (Cassa Edile), representatives of sectoral trade unions at the national and regional levels, and Italian and migrant construction workers with working experience in the sector in Italy but without ever having been posted. In addition, 12 biographical interviews were conducted with construction workers with posting experience. The majority of the interviews were conducted online or on the phone. The interviews were then recorded (with the explicit verbal consent of the workers), transcribed and coded.

Interviewees were recruited using a chain referral sampling technique (Ram et al., 2007). We first conducted semi-structured interviews with representatives of different trade union federations at the national and regional levels, the national office of the main business organisation and the Construction Workers Fund’s national directorate. Through trade unions and the Fund’s representatives, we recruited blue-collar posted workers, whereas posted site managers and engineers were recruited through companies and the employers’ organisation. We asked each interviewee for contacts of colleagues with posting experiences. Workers with no posting experience, on the other hand, were recruited mainly through different trade unions and personal networks. The fieldwork relied on multiple gatekeepers to recruit workers with posting experiences to capture differences and avoid bias within our sample. Heterogeneity rather than any possible statistical representativeness was our main concern in sampling (Ram et al., 2007). The posted workers interviewed held different specialisations – from site-managers/engineers (four) to various skilled and unskilled workers (eight); they were all Italian and were all men except one.

Biographical interviews started with a request to narrate the worker’s school and work trajectory, asking him/her to pay attention to the factors and contexts that had caused them to seek employment in the sector, the reasons for moving from one company to another, and then the circumstances leading to posting. Additional biographical and probing questions followed to clarify particular aspects where necessary and to enquire more about what workers considered turning points in their careers; for example, a specific formative working experience, the birth of a child, the first posting or the decision to relocate in another region. A series of additional questions followed to ensure that all the themes we identified as relevant were covered with all interviewees. Biographical interviews are a particularly well-consolidated enquiry technique when it comes to investigating mobile subjects and workers (Apitzsch and Siouti, 2007; Mrozowicki, 2011; Xhaho et al., 2021). They allow the researcher to reconstruct the mobility history of each individual and link it with work trajectories and other dimensions of the life course, such as family and gender relations. In our case, biographical interviews allowed us to gain a worker-centred understanding of mobility (Andrijasevic and Sacchetto, 2016), to put posting experience in the broader context of workers’ work–life trajectories, and to detail commonalities and differences of labour processes in Italy and abroad. This was crucial to developing an actor-centred perspective (cf. Alberti and Però, 2018) of workers’ agency vis-a-vis their mobility and employment trajectory. The data collected through interviews with domestic stakeholders and other non-posted workers, on the other hand, aimed to gain a more in-depth understanding of the sector and its labour regime in Italy and were crucial for validation and triangulation of the accounts provided in biographical interviews. Our data are particularly relevant to the posting literature because, even though Italy is a net sending country of posted workers, outgoing workers – especially in construction – have rarely been studied (exceptions are Cillo, 2021; Sartor, 2022).

Labour regimes in the Italian construction sector

Since the great financial crisis (2008–2011), the construction sector in Italy has declined. In the decade 2010–2020, the number of active enterprises fell by 18.5% (from 1,125,499 to 916,808 enterprises) and the number of employed persons decreased by 29.8% from 2010 levels (from 2,905,356 to 2,039,046 persons) (European Construction Sector Observatory, 2021a). In 2021, however, the sector bounced back due to massive public investments and fiscal incentives (European Construction Sector Observatory, 2021b). In that year, the sectorial annual growth reached 16.4%, registered working hours increased by 26.7% and the number of construction workers grew by 11.8% (ANCE, 2022). The unionisation rate in the sector is relatively high (according to the trade unionists we interviewed, it ranges between 60% and 80% in different provinces); collective agreements are highly centralised and virtually applicable to all workers; and the Construction Workers Fund bilateral agency is in charge of collecting and distributing crucial wage elements (holiday pay, 13th monthly salary, seniority pay, bonuses) favouring unionisation (Frangi et al., 2021).

Italian construction companies, however, remain generally small and financially fragile (European Construction Sector Observatory, 2021a). Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) absorb the majority of workers (Figure 1) but maintain high mortality rates and are usually positioned at the end of long subcontracting chains. Although most employment contracts in the sector are formally permanent (FILLEA-FDV, 2018), they are de facto linked to the duration of a single construction project because they can be terminated when the project ends. High levels of bogus self-employment (De Angelis, 2018; EU Post Lab, 2018), dependent employment informalisation, precarisation and segmentation persist in the sector too, especially in smaller firms (Dimitriadis, 2022; Fellini et al., 2007; Frangi et al., 2021). This also emerged in our fieldwork as summarised by a trade unionist:

There is not one way only [to circumvent regulations]; there are many. One is by registering you as first-grade in the pay scale. The great majority of workers in Milan and in Italy, I think, are first-grade. Moreover, often they [employers] under-declare the hours you work. There is contractual dumping, too: the worker is not hired under a construction collective agreement but rather with a metalworker contract or a transportation and storage contract because these contracts are cheaper. Also, they might ask you to return part of the salary you earned. Often, you find all these things together. The payslip says 1200 Euros, but workers actually get 800 and often have to give 200 Euros to their recruiter, too. (Trade unionist, Milan, I-1)

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Figure 1.

Number of employees (annual average value) per firms’ size and workers’ origin, 2017.

Aggregate data show that, in the last decade, the weight of regular employment in the sector declined in favour of undeclared employment (Figure 2). As our interviewees also confirmed, formalised employment relations shrunk while workers were brought back into the sector through partially or totally unregistered employment arrangements.

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Figure 2.

Variation indexes of regular and irregular labour units, 2007–2018 (base 2007 = 100).

Risks and accidents in construction are particularly frequent. According to Eurostat data, in the period 2008–2019 in Italy, the construction sector’s average incidence rate of fatal accidents at work was the third highest after mining and agriculture. Italy also ranked consistently above the EU average, and monitoring institutions predicted an increase in accidents due to the temporary boost in the sector (INAIL, 2021). As the workers explained, taking risks and generalised work intensification are linked:

The problem with safety is that [. . .] you have the boss breathing down your neck who says: ‘Fast! Quick!’. So, for example, when you are on the scaffolding, you don’t hook your safety belt well. To hook and unhook it, you waste 30 seconds, which you could have used to advance faster. (Carpenter, Cosenza, I-27)

Construction workers in Italy are also highly mobile. They might remain predominantly in their local labour markets – usually if they are engaged in residential construction – or commute to other regions, especially in the case of work in large infrastructure projects. In this case, workers’ housing is arranged and controlled by employers, either in base camps or low-cost hotels, and workers travel back home at the end of the week or once per month, depending on the distance from their household. As the dormitory regime literature stresses (Ceccagno and Sacchetto, 2020; Schling, 2022; Smith and Pun, 2006), settling workers in dormitories generally prolongs working hours and maximises control over free time. Informal recruitment networks play a crucial role in finding employment, in infrastructure projects and residential construction alike. Moreover, construction workers are often the main income earners of the household, while commuting to distant worksites puts the entire burden of family social reproduction on female partners. Indeed, labour reproduction in the Italian construction sector is generally entrenched in traditional gender relations and a family model based on a strict sexual division of labour (Naldini and Saraceno, 2022). Workers generally recognised that their work would not be possible without allocating the care and social reproduction burdens entirely to women: ‘I have always been away for work [both in Italy and abroad]. How could my wife work too?! She looked after the babies, the family and the house’ (Davide, foreman, posted). ¹ These reproductive dynamics are part and parcel of the labour regime and contribute to discipline workers by making them the main breadwinner who provides alone for the whole family income (Warren, 2007).

Last, as in the rest of the economy, marked territorial differences persist in the Italian construction sector (Gigio et al., 2021). Southern regions host a tighter labour market, lower shares of migrant workers and generally fewer ongoing infrastructure projects than in northern regions. Southern Italian workers, therefore, make up the large bulk of the mobile workforce deployed in infrastructures all over the country (Baldanzi, 2011) and are also more likely than others to be posted abroad. Indeed, the posted workers we interviewed were predominantly born and raised in southern regions and had experience working on infrastructure projects in Italy before being posted.

To summarise, notwithstanding geographical differences, similar patterns of employment informalisation, intensification and prolongation of the labour process, the role of informal recruitment networks, enhanced mobility, employer-controlled housing arrangements and the male breadwinner model are the main elements of the labour regime in which Italian construction workers are embedded. Many of these elements, as shown in the next sections, amount to a sticky labour regime that follows workers in their posting arrangements abroad.

Sticky labour regimes and Italian posted workers

Italy is a net sender of posted workers, especially in the construction sector (Cillo and Perocco, 2021), even though incoming posted workers are growing (Bagnardi et al., 2022; Dorigatti et al., 2022). In the first half of 2021, Italian firms posted 4250 workers for a total of 6862 posting arrangements; the construction sector accounted for 24.8% of these workers (Osservatorio Distacco, 2021).

The workers interviewed reported diverse paths and levels of satisfaction with their posting experience, yet some commonalities emerged. Being posted rarely seemed to be a choice for workers and the terms and conditions of posting were rarely negotiable with the employer. As the workers explained: ‘They don’t offer it. There is a vacancy there; they look into those working in projects close to being completed and they send you in this new site’ (Aldo, manual worker, posted). Moreover, specific informalisation practices characterising the labour regime in Italy – such as infringing working hours and remuneration rules – emerged consistently in posting. As Gioele, a specialised machine operator with multiple posting experiences, put it:

In the construction sector, there is the rule that the working day should last a maximum of eight hours, but nobody complies with it, neither in Italy nor abroad. [. . .] They do pay your extra working hours . . . some pay you the right amount, some pay a bit less, maybe by accounting for them [the extra hours] under other labels: like bonuses, expenses and stuff like that. (Gioele, specialised worker, posted)

While the regulatory complexity of posting might make rules on taxes and social security difficult for workers to verify, violations of time and remuneration rules were well recognised. Nonetheless, the posted workers interviewed reported that resisting these practices was hardly an option. For some of them, posting was perceived as just another gig within an employment career that, in Italy, is already structurally precarious and fragmented. For others, especially from southern Italian regions, posting was the main alternative to unemployment or to highly precarious and often undeclared work:

I found myself in this sector only because of the [economic] crisis in Italy. I was a welder, and I used to work in [mechanical] workshops [in Italy]. But in Italy, there is really a big crisis . . . especially in the south. In the north, it is already a bit better, but in the south, it is hard to find a job. (Luca, machine operator, posted)

Continuities with the Italian labour regime also pertained to recruitment relationships. To find a job in the sector in Italy and to access posting opportunities, personal connections and networks were of the utmost importance. A skilled cement injection machine operator with several years of experience in Italy and abroad described the situation as follows:

I knew a site manager who lived in my town [in Italy], and he used to take workers with him. He asked if I wanted to go work with his company [abroad]. [. . .] The thing that works best in the construction sector is being a friend of a site manager. This is the first thing. (Gioele, specialised worker, posted)

Foremen, surveyors and even small entrepreneurs can be crucial in putting workers in touch with companies that look for posted workers. Especially in small towns, the role of these gatekeepers is fundamental to finding employment in companies active in infrastructure projects both in Italy and abroad. Once the workers are enrolled, however, these recruitment relationships follow them during their postings and exert continuous disciplinary pressure. As Enrico, a skilled worker from southern Italy with a few years of posting experience in northern Europe, described:

If you refuse [to do something because it is unsafe] . . . you won’t find a job anymore [either in Italy or abroad]. [. . .] And once you are out of the network, you are done; you can’t get in anymore. It is like a closed club. This is also because the same workers and the same engineers do these kinds of [infrastructure] projects and maybe they warn each other: ‘Look this person is ok, this one is not’. [. . .] It is normal you work a lot to show yourself to that person [i.e. the recruiter or the site manager, that hired you]. You do overtime, do the shittiest activity that exists to not lose your job, because you know that person counts. (Enrico, machine operator, posted)

Further, posted workers live on camp sites or housing arrangements managed by the company. Dormitories synchronise workers’ time with companies’ production needs by keeping them available to work (Andrijasevic, 2022; Schling, 2022). Workers’ relative isolation from the local context and their distance from home make them more inclined to work longer hours to maximise the returns of their time spent abroad. This condition seems in continuity with the experience of mobile workers deployed in far-from-home infrastructure projects in Italy, but it is exacerbated by language barriers and cultural differences. Thus, ‘you go out, get in a bar, but you don’t know the language, so maybe you get a beer and then go back [to the camp site] because there is no one to talk to’ (Luca, machine operator, posted). Living in dormitories isolates workers and intensifies the labour process, leaving little space for any activity except work.

In line with the labour regime in Italy, therefore, informalisation practices, constraining recruitment networks and housing arrangements become tools to maximise posted workers’ effort, lengthen their working day and compress their remuneration. Indeed, for Italian workers, posting really unfolded as a prolongation of their labour experience in the country of origin. Either posted or in Italy, ‘the work is the same’ (Gianni, specialised worker, posted), and in their accounts, posted work felt ‘like we were still in Italy, it was the same’ (Enrico, machine operator, posted). The elements of the Italian labour regime that follow workers during their postings also contribute to normalising noncompliant practices and persuading workers not to challenge them. Posted workers were aware of being considered by their employers as cheaper and more disposable versions of local workers, yet they remained generally acquiescent. Speaking about local workers of a country in northern Europe where he had been posted for a few years, Enrico succinctly put it:

The few locals working with us [in a consortium of local and Italian firms] earned twice our salary. Twice exactly! They [the management] had to give them [the local workers] a good contract, otherwise they could have some trouble with the [local] unions. We also had a contract. We were employed in the most dangerous job in the whole country, and our income had to be high, too. But since we were Italians, they basically gave us the same pay they would pay in Italy. They paid the minimum wage here [in the host country]. [. . .] They exploited the fact that in Italy there were no jobs and there was lots of supply. It was take it or leave it! (Enrico, machine operator, posted)

Italian managers discursively represented Italians as being flexible and reliable, and posting was framed as a clear strategy to contain costs, enhance flexibility and maintain high control over the workforce. This was a crucial competitive advantage and the main reason to post Italians abroad. As Franco, a young Italian site manager with a few years of posting in northern Europe, explained:

In these countries [abroad, where the company posts its Italian workers], there is much more life–work balance. Workers want to do their seven and a half working hours. [. . .] If you want to convince a local worker to do overtime, it is a nightmare. You need to have a [relief] team that makes you work eight hours [per shift] always, but this requires you to do the same kind of work every day. [But we] do special kinds of work with a lot of unforeseen changes. If you start the concrete pouring, you cannot stop it [before completion]. You need to be flexible in terms of working time. Nordic workers won’t give you such flexibility. (Franco, site manager, posted)

Endurance and adaptability became crucial characteristics of Italian workers posted abroad, which matched firms’ competitive needs. Workers, on their side, recognised that their enhanced disposability vis-a-vis local workers was a winning business strategy for their employers. As Davide, a foreman with multiple posting experiences all over Europe and beyond, explained:

We do certain works that cannot be interrupted. If you need to start at 11, what do you do? Do you start, or do you call the lunch break? In Italy, you would say, ‘You start and have the break after you are done, or half people work and half have the break’ and try to never stop the activities. In X [northern European country], you won’t find a worker who gives up the break at 11:00 and at 15:00. Even if they have to do some work that lasts three hours, they find a way to slice it up into two parts to maintain their break [. . .]. [For Italians], it is different. (Davide, foreman, posted)

A clear hierarchy of Italian posted workers and locals also emerged in the distribution of risks and compliance with safety rules. Workers in Italy are often pressed to sacrifice safety to maintain high working rhythms. The same pressures continue to make them more prone to risk when they are posted. Stricter implementation of safety and health rules were, therefore, generally the consequence of local institutions or client firms and were likely to be circumvented whenever possible. The vignette Enrico reported is illustrative of these dynamics:

Once, we were lifting certain heavy materials. The health and safety rep [from the local client firm] was walking by; he spoke to us in English. He asked, ‘What are you doing?’. ‘We need to move these’. He says: ‘Stop it. Do something else’. He went into the office and set up a mini-crane to lift the materials. These things were so heavy that we could have broken our backbones. He made us stop for this reason. In Italy, we would have done it [manually]. [. . .] Sometimes, however, you must do some work, even if safety is not the highest. If we always had to work safely, we would not do many of the things we do. (Enrico, machine operator, posted)

Italian workers posted abroad are therefore constructed by their employers – and end up considering themselves to be more accustomed and inclined than locals to work longer, more intensely and to take more risks. Being posted makes workers aware of the existing hierarchies between them and the locals, but this often leads to normalisation and acceptance rather than contestation. Companies bank explicitly on the normalisation of such dynamics to secure labour discipline and reproduce noncompliance with local regulations.

A final crucial dimension of the labour regime refers to the social reproduction dynamics in which workers are embedded. Like workers commuting to far-from-home worksites in Italy, posted workers reported the importance of specific family roles and duties. One of the posted workers, Gioele, explained that working abroad with three children and a wife who does not have a job (so as to take care of the children) implied that he had to earn alone enough for the whole household. Given the lack of well-paid alternatives in the local labour market of the southern Italian region where he was based, he felt constrained to keep working on long distance, but better paid, projects. As he described:

Well, we have been jumping through hoops. Since I have been working abroad the situation is a little bit better because I earn more money and it’s almost like two of us are working . . . Well, it is no, not really like [having] two salaries but, at least, in this way my wife can devote herself to children, so she’s a full-time mom. (Gioele, specialised worker, posted)

Recruitment networks, dormitory regimes, tight local labour markets, family duties and gender relations, therefore, are crucial elements of the Italian labour regime that continue to shape workers’ trajectories and agency abroad. Such a sticky labour regime normalises firms’ noncompliance with posting rules and the overexploitation of Italian posted workers that are constructed as being more productive, risk-taking and hard-working than locals. Nonetheless, spaces for workers’ constrained agency remain. In the next section, through the accounts of two interviewees, the article illustrates how posted workers navigate and subvert the constraints of the sticky labour regime in which they are embedded.

Constrained agency and the reworking of the labour regime

Workers are disciplined by informalisation practices, constraining networks, dormitory settlements, internalised hierarchies and gender and family relations. The labour regime constructed in Italy reproduces them as disposable and acquiescent abroad, matches the productive needs of employers, and allows firms to keep evading posted work regulations. However, any labour regime is just the temporary stabilisation of inherently antagonistic relations (Baglioni et al., 2022), and it can be challenged by workers who seek to renegotiate or find better employment arrangements. Workers’ agency, in other words, remains embedded and constrained but not overdetermined by the labour regime.

The trajectories of Luca and Carlo illustrate this dynamic exactly. Luca had been working for many years on big infrastructure projects around Italy when he was offered a posting gig abroad on a project where Italian and local firms cooperated in a consortium. After months of working as posted, he decided to accept a job offer from one of the local construction firms of the consortium and was hired by a temporary agency in the host country. After a while he relocated abroad with the whole family who agreed to join him. As he put it:

[In the country where I live now I face] . . . less taxes, more money, higher hourly pay. Work is well paid here, unlike in Italy [. . .]. This is the thing: if I had to choose where to live, I would stay in my hometown. I moved because I have a family – a wife, and a daughter. (Luca, machine operator, posted)

Although he gave up a permanent contract in Italy for a temp-agency contract abroad, he was satisfied with pay, working conditions and employment continuity. He did not consider his working arrangements in Italy safer or more stable than working for a foreign temp-agency and he reported having worked continuously for the agency since he took up the job a few years before the interview. To find a job abroad, he initially banked on the very same networks built during posting but described this choice as liberating from the disciplinary pressures of Italian recruiters:

Here [where I live], it works differently; it is not all about the recommendations. [In Italy] if someone recommends you, you work; if not, you stay home. Here, it is all another system. I know nobody but the agency just finds gigs for me. First, I was working in City A, and then they found a job for me in City B. At the end of this [project], I will return to City A again. It is not like in Italy, where you should bust your ass just to find a job. (Luca, machine operator, posted)

The use of postings as springboards for migration has been widely documented in the literature (Lens et al., 2022; Matyska, 2020). The transnational linkages built as mobile workers turned out to be crucial to relocation. Even the networks primarily developed as a disciplinary tool, therefore, can be reworked to escape exploitative posting experiences. However, posted workers remain embedded in the labour regime of their place of origin. Indeed, Luca’s decision to move was also shaped by the grim prospects of alternative employment in the local labour market of his home region in southern Italy.

The trajectory of Carlo, on the other hand, sheds light on the interplay between the opportunities that posting opens abroad, the continuous role of local labour markets in the country of origin and the role of social reproduction dynamics. Carlo lives in northern Italy, has no children and is an experienced and skilled construction worker, and a good mechanic specialised in operating and fixing different machines. This skillset and the relative freedom from family responsibilities have made him a very mobile worker, always ready to move from one employer to another to gain better employment conditions. He found himself constrained to accept a posting gig because his employer of the time had just started a project abroad. Although initially he did not refuse the gig, working conditions abroad quickly deteriorated, leading him to threaten to quit if the company did not transfer him back to Italy. He got transferred after a few months of posting, but he quit anyway as soon as he had another job opportunity. His local network of past colleagues was crucial to finding out about new work opportunities:

When the winter came, the municipality of City X [close to my hometown in Italy] offered me a job as snowplough operator for six months. I accepted and quit [the job at the company that posted me]. The employer was pissed again. [. . .] After the snowplough work, I found another company working in the field of the maintenance of railroad foundations, tunnels, and so on. I worked with them for three and a half years [in Italy]. (Carlo, machine operator, posted)

When we interviewed Carlo, however, he was again in a posting contract with yet another company that he had encountered through personal networks, and he was satisfied with how things had worked out. He successfully leveraged his networks to exit unfavourable working conditions and he was not against posting per se. As he put it:

This man who had offered me the job earlier called me and told me, ‘Would you like to join us now?’. ‘Where?’, I asked him. ‘In Foundations.inc.’, he said. I know that Foundations.inc does specifically foundations; they tell you: ‘Do these hours and you will get this money’. You know that you need to work your 11 hours per day, and you get a certain amount per month. I told him, ‘Okay!’. ‘The problem’, he said, ‘is that they want you to work abroad too’. ‘No problem’, I told him. (Carlo, machine operator, posted)

Being embedded in a relatively dynamic local labour market in northern Italy, having accumulated skills and a good reputation among colleagues, and being free from family duties, Carlo could bank on networks and use mobility to gain better employment conditions. If, for Luca, reworking the labour regime meant taking advantage of his networks abroad and undertaking a family migration, Carlo would rather juggle both the opportunities of the local labour market in Italy, and his experiences and contacts built up as a posted worker.

Concluding discussion

Companies’ noncompliance with host country regulations is a crucial feature of the posted work business model (Arnholtz, 2021). Far from being just a matter of deviant firms and challenges for enforcement actors, however, regulatory evasion in posting requires the constant making of a disposable and acquiescent workforce (Arnholtz and Lillie, 2020a; Theunissen et al., 2022) and these are the dynamics our article aimed to investigate. Drawing on LPT and the labour regime perspective, we underline how sub-standard employment for Italian posted workers is constructed in a matrix of control that precedes and goes beyond the workplace abroad. The article draws on the concept of labour regime (Baglioni et al., 2022) to analyse how labour markets, gender and family relations, recruitment networks and dormitories shape the capacity of posted workers to resist or just cope with their firms’ drive to escape host countries’ regulations. At the same time, the article contributes to the debate on labour regime, articulating the concept of the sticky labour regime, which is particularly useful to analysing the disciplining processes of mobile workers. The concept emphasises that the constraining elements of the labour regime in which workers are embedded in Italy continue to bind them during their posting experiences. The sticky labour regime is therefore crucial to reproduce the breaching of posting regulations as it secures Italian workers’ disposability to endure extra working hours, riskier tasks and a more intensive labour process than host countries’ regulations allow for. Despite the structuring force of the sticky labour regime, however, workers maintain agency and can turn its elements to their own advantage.

The article’s contribution to the debate is therefore threefold. First, it contends that the literature on posting explains firms’ noncompliance and workers’ exploitation by focusing on the traditional actors of industrial relations and the institutions of host countries (Arnholtz, 2021; Arnholtz and Lillie, 2020a). Such a perspective marginalises the role that workers have and overlooks the importance of their agency in the reproduction of rule evasion practices. On the contrary, by adopting a labour regime analysis and a worker-centred perspective, our article sheds light precisely on the mechanisms through which workers are coerced or convinced to accept firms’ noncompliance. The reproduction of noncompliance in posting, therefore, is reframed as a contested process that involves firms, institutions and enforcement actors as much as employers’ and their workers’ everyday practices of control and resistance. This perspective confirms but integrates existing accounts that explain posted workers’ overexploitation as the result of opaque regulations (Berntsen and Lillie, 2016; Houwerzijl and Bernsten, 2020) or the separation from local enforcement actors (Arnholtz, 2021; Arnholtz and Lillie, 2020a). Indeed, Italian posted workers are aware of their rights being violated and do not reach out to local unions and institutions because of the concrete constraining force of the labour regime in which they are embedded. Recruiters and networks, tight local labour markets (especially in southern Italian regions) and the pressures to fulfil their breadwinner role, develop as disciplinary forces that secure workers’ disciplined participation in the labour process. Moreover, living in dormitories directly facilitates work prolongation and managerial control on non-working time.

Second, while posting unfolds in zones of regulatory exception (Iannuzzi and Sacchetto, 2020; Lillie et al., 2014), our research highlights that it does not develop in a vacuum. The posted workers interviewed stress that, even if they are mobile, the labour regime of their sending country sticks with them with its disciplinary constraints and exit opportunities. In addition to isolation from host countries’ enforcement actors (Caro et al., 2015; Voivozeanu, 2019; Wagner and Bernsten, 2016) and the regulatory exception of posting arrangements (Arnholtz and Lillie, 2020a; Iannuzzi and Sacchetto, 2020; Lillie et al., 2014) often emphasised in the literature, our article underlines that the stickiness of the sending country’s labour regime is a crucial driver of workers’ acquiescence and, therefore, of regulatory evasion. The concept of a sticky labour regime is particularly relevant to analyse posted work, but it can contribute to research on mobile labour in general because it provides a toolbox to trace how disciplining elements from the place of origin might keep constraining workers that embark on a path of mobility.

At the same time, the investigation of the constraining power of a sticky labour regime cannot neglect the persistent role of workers’ agency. Our third contribution lies in the analysis of posted workers’ agency even when this develops in individualised forms beyond the radar of trade unions, inspectors and courts. Through a worker-centred perspective, the article highlights that the labour regime and the transnational linkages can be used to reject and escape exploitative relations and posting arrangements can be used by workers as a springboard to secure better employment conditions in Italy or abroad. The country and region of origin, however, continues to count. As the article shows, a divergence emerges between workers that can bank on favourable local labour markets (in the regions of northern Italy) and others that use posting as a first step to migrate. Through their mobility strategies, therefore, workers continuously contest the rule evasion of their firms, even though the labour regime and the labour markets in which they are embedded in the country of origin remain crucial in shaping their responses and trajectories. In other words, where top-down approaches see mere acquiescence, the worker-centred perspective we adopt can identify molecular conflict and generative pathways of subversion.

More research is needed to assess how unions could build upon workers’ individual agency to generate more effective forms of collective action and representation. Further empirical investigation can also provide a more comprehensive understanding of how gender and nationality influence workers’ agency in posting. Finally, comparisons across sending countries could provide better insights on how local labour regimes differ in the EU and how sticky they are in different settings. A labour regime perspective is a useful starting point in this endeavour.

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