Saturday, March 15, 2014
Calvert (Omni Shoreham)
Within the EU, there has been an effort to construct an internal labour market through free mobility of labour, supported by the extension of certain rights and protections to member state citizens outside their home country. While European Union mobility and citizenship rights have positively affected the lives of millions across the EU, the dynamics created by this mobility is also creating a hypermobile underclass. In certain industries, such as construction and meatpacking, hypermobile workers working and living in a substantially deregulated social space, now dominate the labour market. They use mechanisms such as “posting”, individual migration, (false) self-employment, and agency work to navigate this transnational and weakly regulated job market. This paper, based on in-depth interviews with several dozen hyper-mobile workers in three EU countries, discusses the job market and income earning strategies of these migrants in terms of the “new economic man”, perfectly suited to the neo-liberal ideals of the European Union. These workers survive by behaving as rational economic actors, conforming to the market norms of their employers, going where they are needed, and never complaining or asking for more than they are given. This paper reveals how these workers perceive the labour market in which they operate, and how they make and justify their economic decisions. For many, the personal cost of economic survival has also been quite high, raising concerns about the social impact and long term sustainability of having an ever larger proportion of the EU’s labour market dominated by hyper mobile workers.
