Agency of labour in a flexible pan-European labour market : a qualitative study of migrant practices and trade union strategies in the Netherlands

摘要

Regulatory frameworks on intra-EU mobility and flexible cross-borderemployment relations have stimulated competition on labour costs by recruitingmigrants via cheaper labour market regimes. While it allows firms to remuneratemigrants under different terms and conditions, blurring regulatory boundaries alsogenerates opportunities for non-compliance, resulting in violations of migrantlabour rights across Europe. Against this background, this thesis explores theagency of labour, more specifically of temporary migrant workers and unions, andthe ways they cope with and respond to the competitive dynamics of the pan-European labour market. This study draws on 90 qualitative interviews withmigrants, local workers, trade union officials and employers and on participantobservations of union (organising) practices, in among others, the Dutchconstruction and supermarket distribution sector. It adds micro-level accounts ofunion practices with regards to mobile migrant labour and insights into the agencyand experiences of work of a group of workers that is often talked about, but rarelytalked with for academic or policy purposes. This contributes to our understandingof the dynamics of migrant employment and labour relations in contemporaryEurope.This thesis regards migrants as social actors who influence and shapeworking conditions and labour market structures through their actions. The varietyof ways migrants exercise agency, more often through undeclared small-scalesocial and oppositional practices than through overt, organised acts, are embeddedin and reinforce overarching oppressive employment relations. A discrepancyexists in the preferred ways migrants and unions exercise agency: small-scale andinvisible versus overt and organised, respectively. The empirical materialhighlights the difficulties unions experience in bridging this distance to protectmigrants from substandard employment conditions, but also points to somepotential pathways to enforce migrant labour rights, engage migrants in unionactivities and reregulate the labour market for migrant employment. This adds toindustrial relations literature a refined understanding of the multiple forms,intentions and effects of individual and collective agency and to migrantorganising literature insights on the limits and possibilities of representation andorganising strategies among fragmented and mobile workforces