Posted Work As a Migration Industry: The European Union and Asia Compared

Subcontractors or temporary work agencies who ‘post’ workers to another country emerged as part of a significant ‘migration industry’ in both the EU and Asia. In this migration industry people do not move because of pre-defined mobility networks but because border-spanning businesses actively recruit and facilitate the employment of workers across borders. One example of this phenomenon is worker posting in the EU via the free movement of services. Prior research on posting mainly examined transnational work within the EU context and its impact on national and subnational contexts. The aim of this paper is to take a more global take on the politics of posting in the EU. Through the lens of ‘labour brokers’ this paper examines how the strategies of subcontractors or temporary work agencies challenge the ability of states to regulate their national labour markets in two regional contexts: in the EU and in Asia. The paper shows that transnational employment in the form of worker posting in the EU challenges established industrial democracies to enforce labour rights within their territory. In the Asian context, labour brokers – firms that facilitate transnational employment and taken here as a functional equivalent to posting – add to the increasing liberalization of emerging labour markets instead of challenging the ‘normal’ state of affairs. Even though the context in which this transnational form of labour migration takes place differs, the endpoint is the same: highly segmented pockets of low status foreign labour emerge as part of migration industry.