Regional Case Study. From Ukraine to Finland and Estonia via Poland : Migration and posting of third country nationals. Work package 4

This report gives an overview of the Con3Post project1 research that analyses a new and understudied phenomenon of posting third country nationals (TCNs) in the European construction sector, with a special focus on the posting flow involving workers from Ukraine being posted to Finland and Estonia through Poland. The research highlights severe regulatory challenges related to the phenomenon. These include posted TCNs being exposed to multiple vulnerabilities that are even more extreme than intra-European Union (EU) posted workers are usually exposed to. These are: lack of occupational safety and health training and having no accident insurance coverage, not receiving wages and other employm…

Legal Issues Affecting Labour Market Integration of Migrants in Finland

AbstractFinland has only relatively recently become a country of immigration, and as a result most immigration and integration policy legislation is also relatively recent. Since the 1990s, the number of migrants to Finland has increased steadily, motivating the adoption of various policy measures to regulate migration and support integration. From the perspective of migrant labour market integration, the two most important legislative acts are the Aliens Act (FINLEX 301/2004) and the Act on the Promotion of Immigrant Integration (FINLEX 1386/2010), which lay out basic labour market integration supports for migrants, and determine who can work in Finland and on which grounds. Finland’s comp…

Overcoming Barriers to Transnational Organizing Through Identity Work : Finnish-Estonian Trade Union Cooperation

This article analyses a project by Finnish and Estonian unions to adopt ‘organizing model’ strategies through establishing the transnational ‘Baltic Organising Academy’. Initially aimed at Estonian workplaces, successful campaigns inspired Finnish unions to copy the model in Finland. This cooperation was originally motivated by labour market interdependence between the two countries, and the failure of past social-partnership oriented union strategies in Estonia. The willingness of Finnish and Estonian unions to commit resources to transnational cooperation around an ‘organizing model’ marks a dramatic departure from the unions’ previous strategies. This change was accomplished by transnati…

Posted Migration and Segregation in the European Construction Sector

Worker ‘posting’ or temporary migration of manual workers sent by their employers to work on projects abroad has become increasingly prominent in the European construction industry. It is now normal to find groups of workers from all around Europe on construction sites, living in nearby temporary accommodations, moving on to other projects or back home when the project is complete. This article highlights the interaction between the social and spatial segregation and transnational mobility of these workers in the European Union construction labour market. We argue that the work-focused and employer-dominated nature of the posted workers' social world abroad contributes to their segregation …

Enhancing Economic Democracy for Posted Workers : The Case of Finland

This report is based on two focus group interviews with three Finnish Construction Trade Union (Rakennusliitto, RL) representatives and two Industrial Union (Teollisuusliitto, TL) representatives and on individual interviews with Finnish Electrical Workers´ Union (Sähköliitto, SL), and the Federation of Finnish Enterprises (Suomen Yrittäjät, SY) representatives. Interviews were conducted between April and May 2018. It also relies on interviews with Estonian construction workers working in Finland conducted between 2011 and 2017, under other projects: TWES, ERC grant #263782 and Academy of Finland, Industrial Citizenship and Labour Mobility in the EU, a Migrant Centered Study of Estonia-Finl…

Integraatiopolitiikalla halvennettu työ : lähetetyt työntekijät EU:n "vapaiden" työmarkkinoiden armoilla

A Comparative Analysis of Union Responses to Posted Work in Four European Countries

Resistance Is Useless! (And So Are Resilience and Reworking): Migrants in the Finnish Labour Market

AbstractIn Finland, integration is discussed in terms of labour market success. Finding work tends to occur in the ‘secondary’ labour market as migrants have difficulty accessing the more secure jobs of the ‘primary’ labour market. This chapter draws on 11 qualitative biographical narratives of migrants and refugees, looking for turning points and epiphanies about their job-seeking experiences. We classify these as agentic acts of resilience, reworking, and resistance, borrowing from Cindi Katz’s framework. Interviewees exhibited resilience in revising downward their expectations of what sort of job they would accept and how their career would develop. ‘Reworking’ was also often attempted, …

Welfare regimes and labour market integration policies in Europe

This chapter discusses migrant labour market integration policies and services in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, Finland, Italy, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, and thus we present a wide variety of different national contexts. In addition, it also details EU-specific policies and programmes. The empirical work underpinning this chapter emanates from two main research tasks: policy discourse analysis; and assessment of existing policies and their outcomes. A policy discourse analysis was conducted across the selected countries to identify and analyse how issues of labour market integration are discussed by policymakers and policy actors. By analysing the findings of the discourse …

Migrants’ economic integration : problematising economic citizenship

Labour market policies to include migrants in their host societies through strategic integration activities usually relate host country belonging to labour market success, commodifying citizenship. Labour market success, however, is not “belonging;” raising the question of whether “economic citizenship” is a misnomer. National citizenships embed territorial, social and ethnic hierarchies in unequal ways. Migrants at the moment of their mobility are outside these national solidarities, and thus are commodified, with their rights depending on their labour market value. Access to national citizenship rights is an important structuring element in segmenting globalizing labour markets. peerRevie…

Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity, by Kathleen Thelen. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014, 264 pp., ISBN: 978 1 10767 956 6, £16.99, paperback.

Determinantes industriais da solidariedade transnacional: política intersindical global em três setores

Introdução: Oaumento da concorrência global prejudica o poder dos sindicatos pois enfraquece seu controle sobre a competição no mercado de trabalho. Os sindicatos, por vezes, combatem essa ameaça mediante cooperação além das fronteiras nacionais. Apesar do interesse crescente por atividades sindi - cais transnacionais, existem poucas comparações sistemáticas entre setores. Este artigo compara exemplos de cooperação transnacional de sindicatos na indústria automotiva, no transporte marítimo e na indústria têxtil e de vestuário. Argu - mentamos em seguida que os sindicatos adotam diferentes tipos de estratégias internacionais por causa de: (1) diferentes manifestações da competição entre trab…

Practicing European Industrial Citizenship : The Case of Labour Migration to Germany

Industrial citizenship developed as a way to socially regulate markets in democratic societies. However, EU regulation and one form of labour mobility unique to the European Union, namely posted work, undermines national industrial citizenship through constitutionalizing markets. This chapter examines the contradictions between industrial and market citizenship concepts, and traces their implications in practice. It focuses on how posted work introducies into the German industrial relations system a class of workers with tenuous relations to the system’s regulatory jurisdiction. This undermines industrial citizenship in Germany. Use of posting avoids contesting the validity of labour rights…

The Crisis of Free Movement in the European Union

L’articolo argomenta che la costruzione istituzionale del processo di integrazione dell’Unione europea ha promosso la libera circolazione, producendo pero un effetto boomerang a causa delle dinamiche meccanicistiche che la caratterizzano. La reazione contro la liberta di movimento si manifesta nella riduzione dei diritti sociali riconosciuti ai cittadini , che a sua volta produce un incremento della precarieta dei migranti interni. Considerato l’elevato numero di cittadini UE mobili, limitare il loro accesso alla cittadinanza significa creare una vasta sottoclasse, poiche gli individui possono muoversi da un posto all’altro per lavorare, ma hanno un accesso differenziato ai diritti sociali …

The Right Not to Have Rights: Posted Worker Acquiescence and the European Union Labor Rights Framework

AbstractThe emergence of the European Union citizenship agenda has mainly taken place along the evolution of mobility rights, with the goal of creating a pan-European labor market. Mobility undermines the nationally embedded notion of industrial citizenship. Industrial citizenship protects workers’ rights and secures their participation in national political systems. The Europeanization of labor markets severs the relationship between state, territory and citizen on which industrial citizenship has been built, undermining worker collectivism and access to representation. This is legitimated in terms of building market-citizenship, i.e., enabling mobile workers as market actors. However, the…

European Integration and the Disembedding of Labour Market Regulation: Transnational Labour Relations at theEuropeanCentralBank Construction Site

European integration through mutual recognition has facilitated the growth of a pan-European labour supply system in which transnational subcontractors ‘post’ workers from low-wage areas to higher wage areas. This allows employers to create spaces of exception in which the national industrial relations system of the country where work occurs does not fully apply. Drawing on interviews with managers, workers, unionists and works councillors at the European Central Bank construction site in Frankfurt, Germany, this article shows how transnational subcontracting allows employers to access, and create competition between, sovereign regulatory regimes. It concludes that high-cost, high-collectiv…

Hyper-mobile migrant workers and Dutch trade union representation strategies at the Eemshaven construction sites

The EU regulatory regime and employers’ cross-border recruitment practices complicate unions’ ability to represent increasingly diverse and transnationally mobile workers. Even in institutional contexts where the industrial relations structure and labour law are favourable, such as the Netherlands, unions struggle with maintaining labour standards for these workers. This article analyses Dutch union efforts to represent hyper-mobile construction workers at the Eemshaven construction sites. It shows that the nexus of subcontracting, transnational mobility, legal insularity and employer anti-unionism complicate enforcement so that even well-resourced unions can, at best, improve employment c…

From dualization to solidarity : Halting the cycle of precarity

European Integration and the Reconfiguration of National Industrial Relations : Posted Work as a Driver of Institutional Change

Enhancing Economic Democracy for Posted Workers : PROMO report

The PROMO project is based around a series of policy workshops and conferences from 2017 and 2018. The project aims to make recommendations to improve: • national labour protection systems for posted workers; • institutions, practices and channels for promoting industrial democracy for posted workers; • the collection of data relevant to making informed posted worker policy decisions. Our method is to take existing research knowledge and improve on it through policy workshop discussions with experts and stakeholders. The first PROMO report (Kall and Lillie 2017), based on an extensive literature review, established that posted workers more often than not are not represented collectively and…

Minding the Gaps : The Role of Finnish Civil Society Organizations in the Labour Market Integration of Migrants

AbstractThe growing role of civil society organizations (CSOs) in welfare service provision is sometimes portrayed as a threat to welfare state universalism in Nordic societies. In Finland, CSOs co-produce integration services alongside comprehensive official integration programmes, compensating for gaps and shortcomings in those services. We identify three “gaps”, which are (1) limited availability of services in terms of time and target group, (2) lack of direct labour market contacts and (3) limited flexibility to serve individual needs. We assess how CSOs target these gaps with their service offerings through qualitative interviews with policy implementers, CSO workers and migrants. How…

Breaking the law? Varieties of social dumping in a pan- European labour market

Industrial Citizenship, Cosmopolitanism and European Integration

Abstract. There has been an explosion of interest in the idea of European Union citizenship in recent years, as a defining example of postnational cosmopolitan citizenship potentially replacing, or at least layered on top of national citizenships. We argue this form of EU citizenship undermines industrial citizenship, which is a crucial support for the egalitarianism and social solidarity on which other types of citizenship are based. Because industrial citizenship arises from collectivities based in class identities and national institutions, it depends on the nation state erritorial order and the social closure inherent in this. EU citizenship in its current ‘postnational’ form is realize…

Essential? COVID-19 and highly educated Africans in Finland’s segmented labour market

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to characterise the position of highly educated African migrants in the Finnish labour market and to examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on that position.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based on the biographical work stories of 17 highly educated African migrant workers in four occupation areas in Finland: healthcare, cleaning, restaurant and transport. The sample was partly purposively and partly theoretically determined. The authors used content driven thematic analysis technique, combined with by the biographical narrative concept of turning points.FindingsUsing the case of highly educated African migrants in the Finnish labour market, …

Round Table. Nordic unions and the European Minimum Wage Directive