Saturday, March 15, 2014
Blue Room (Omni Shoreham)
Labor mobility is not only one of the fundamental freedoms of the Single European Market but also a key precondition for the future of the Eurozone. Within the EU, circular migration is an increasingly important pattern of labor mobility. Migrant workers in the EU often move from low wage countries into highly regulated labor markets of Northern European member states which have comprehensive welfare states. Because most circular migrants move between social security systems and labor market regulations, they very often have very little social protection. The influx of cheap labor into developed welfare states poses a major challenge for the hosting countries. The paper investigates the interaction of standard employment, labor regulation and migrant labor in the process of liberalizing highly regulated labor markets in continental Europe. Cheap labor migration from Eastern Europe has added to an already substantial rise of low paid standard employment in the context of a highly regulated setting of labor law and social partnership. The assumption of the paper is that the use of cheap labor reinforces the dualization between labor market insiders and outsiders and potentially weakens the position of social partners as the cheap conditions of migrant work disseminates into the core workforce. The paper will examine evidence from the meat processing and construction industries in Germany and Denmark.
