How the European Union handles posted workers is a growing issue for a region with borders that really are just lines on a map. A 2008 story, dissected in Ines Wagner's Workers without Borders, about the troubling working conditions of migrant meat and construction workers, exposed a distressing dichotomy: how could a country with such strong employers' associations and trade unions allow for the establishment and maintenance of such a precarious labor market segment?
Wagner introduces an overlooked piece of the puzzle: re-regulatory politics at the workplace level. She interrogates the position of the posted worker in contemporary European labour markets and the implications of and regulations for this position in industrial relations, social policy and justice in Europe. Workers without Borders concentrates on how local actors implement European rules and opportunities to analyze the balance of power induced by the EU around policy issues.
Wagner examines the particularities of posted worker dynamics at the workplace level, in German meatpacking facilities and on construction sites, to reveal the problems and promises of European Union governance as regulating social justice. Using a bottom-up approach through in-depth interviews with posted migrant workers and administrators involved in the posting process, Workers without Borders shows that strong labor-market regulation via independent collective bargaining institutions at the workplace level is crucial to effective labor rights in marginal workplaces. Wagner identifies structures of access and denial to labor rights for temporary intra-EU migrant workers and the problems contained within this system for the EU more broadly.
Industry Reviews
A good read for those who want to understand the difficulties in defining a regulatory floor for new types of work in fragmented arenas of crossborder industrial relations. Similarly, those looking for inspiration about options to engage with the obstacles in practice are well-served here. In addition, the pages are filled with many important observations regarding the more fine-grained realities that posted workers face: from their temporary status and lack of embeddedness in foreign host countries to the organizing difficulties they confront. Also, the explanations of regulatory details of posted work are informative, especially those about the political and legal rationales for defining posting within the framework of the European treaties as an economic freedom of service providers. This relevant observation points to the ideological cleavages around decent work more generally.
* ILR Review *
Ines Wagner's Workers without Borders provides a good example of the kind of scholarship which the precarization trend requires, focusing in particular on the dark underside of labor market integration among European Union economies. It is a message which policy elites and the public writ large badly need to hear.
* Social Forces *
