Abstract
In 1956, Xavier Lannes argued that the six founding members that signed the Treaty of Rome had little to learn from the Nordic countries’ common labour market. He argued that the idea of freedom of movement was ‘out of the question as long as the marked unbalance in the economic structures and social conditions of Western Europe persists’ (Lannes, 1956, quoted in Wagner, p. 10).
Since the integration of east and west began in 2004, many lessons have been learned about the difficulties that arise when workers from countries with low labour standards, low wages and often a fairly hard-nosed scepticism towards unions, collective agreements and anything reminiscent of state socialism, join labour-intensive labour markets in which competition on wages quickly descends into a race to the bottom. Portrayed by some in 2004 as an opportunity for low cost workers to use their competitive advantage, we can now conclude that the migrant workers themselves have usually been the losers in this race. Nowhere is this more visible than in the question of life and death. For example, immigrant workers living in Norway are much more likely to be injured at work than other workers. They are also more prone to bullying and harassment. In 2017, the Work Environment Institute (Arbeidsmiljøinstituttet) and the National Institute of Health and Safety at Work (STAMI) declared that foreign workers are one and a half times more likely to die from work accidents than Norwegians. The study concluded that the main explanations are that foreign workers do more dangerous jobs than Norwegians and have shorter career spans at each employer and less stable employment.
Many studies have been written about policies, structures and statistics, but surprisingly few have bothered to write about the migrant workers themselves. In her new book, Ines Wagner breaks this pattern. She goes to the workplace level, in meat packing facilities and on construction sites in Germany. Her study is a close examination of how posting of workers and labour mobility have changed the construction and meat industries. Her findings are by no means restricted to these sectors, however. Posting of workers has become commonplace in many other sectors, such as shipyards, and even in Amazon’s distribution centres (or ‘fulfilment centres’, as the company insists they be called). One such example, mentioned by Wagner herself, is the Bad Hersfeld plant in Germany, which recruits few local workers but hires workers from Spain, Hungary, Romania and Poland through temp agencies.
Even in countries with strong social partners and coordinated market economies, such as the Nordic countries, hardly a day goes by without stories emerging about exploitation of migrant workers, forced labour and cases that can only be characterised as modern (and all too often reminiscent of premodern) slavery. By taking as her starting point not the policy level, but the ‘largely still unexplored lived experiences of mobile workers in the pan-European labour market’, at the micro level, Wagner aims to teach the reader: (1) how and under which conditions the regulatory posting framework is implemented differently at the workplace than at the policy level, (2) the extent to which posted workers are constrained from exercising voice through collective channels of representation in the host country, (3) the conditions under which transnational action can occur, and (4) how firm and state borders interact in a pan-European labor market to create differentiated membership for workers. (p. 116)
Wagner addresses several serious flaws in some of the most important tools that have been developed nationally to combat social dumping and exploitation. One example is the German collective bargaining committee whose task is to decide whether to make collective agreements generally binding. In Germany, the BDA employers’ confederation refused to accept universal applicability until the wage bracket was lowered, resulting in a minimum wage significantly lower than the existing lowest wage bracket in the collective agreement. One can ask whether this reduces the tool de facto to a rubber stamp on social dumping, rather than a means of combating it.
The consequences have been dramatic. In Germany, 50 per cent of native construction workers were replaced with workers employed at foreign service firms between 1995 and 2010. In 1996, IG BAU (the construction workers’ union) had 700,000 members; in 2015, numbers were down to 273,000. On top of that, the Hartz IV reform package and Agenda 2010 reforms, in which atypical employment was liberalised, lowered the age threshold for the application of repeated fixed-term contracts, encouraged bogus self-employment through subsidies for start-ups (‘Me Inc.’) and lifted the requirement of a master craftsman’s diploma in many crafts. The impact of deregulation, combined with free mobility and weak counter-measures against low wage competition, has led to what Wagner describes as a ‘paradigm shift’ in the labour market. A local, but probably representative example of this is the slaughter house she writes about, in which more than 50 per cent of the over 10,000 workers were employed via temporary employment agencies or subcontractors.
Wagner writes that ‘Europeanization can be regarded as an opening up of exit options. It is a threat to territorially bounded, collective solutions insofar as it challenges the territorial control of nation-states. Firms can exit from the industrial relations system without having to actually exit the geographic territory’ (p. 39). It can be described as freedom for capital, but not for workers: ‘European integration opens up exit options for capital but isolates posted workers from collective channels of worker representation’ (p. 15).
These imbalances in the labour market reinforce other instabilities, including political ones. Wagner correctly points out that ‘the politics of differentiation between mobile workers themselves and between mobile workers and native workers has a strong influence on stability in the process of EU integration. Perceived or existing levels of inequality can spur an anti-EU backlash’ (p. 129).
Wagner’s book is well researched and a convincing argument for the need to ‘re-embed mobile workers into structures of social inclusion and collective resistance’. Her book is an argument not so much for institutional as ‘functional’ change, in which a new set of policies could and should be based on the everyday experience of mobile workers. Some of her advice, such as limiting long subcontracting chains and upgrading sanctions for non-complying firms, are already being implemented in Norway, at least at municipal level. She also argues that systems of legal collective redress should be established through which workers can file cases without revealing their identities, and that trade unions should be given a formal role in the design and processes of labour inspectorates. Another proposal is to establish a transnational measure to strengthen effective enforcement. The last recommendation may be on its way to fulfilment, although it is too soon to conclude whether the European Labour Authority will evolve into an effective tool or become a paper tiger.