This article examines how the social skills of migrants are moulded in workplaces and employment-related situations. It surveys literature on social skills, workplaces, social remittances and relational learning. It devotes attention to destination workplaces as spaces where people who left their comfort zones experience disjuncture between origin and destination. This can bring insights, noticing differences and making comparisons. On return to their workplaces in their origin countries, migrants are able to reflect upon and eventually remit these experiences, packaged as social remittances. Three categories of social skill were distilled from biographical interviews with returnees to Poland: (1) the capability for cross-cultural communication; (2) the capability for dealing with emotional labour; (3) the capability for taking initiative and acting independently. The study analysed situations of disjuncture as a result of migration which led to learning, non-learning and alienation. By bringing migration to the forefront, we consider social skills as social remittances.
The article explains the impact of working and living abroad on informal human capital of two generations of Poles: the 'Generation of Change' who was born in 1970s and the beginning of 1980s and the 'Generation of Migration' who was born in mid-1980s and at the beginning of 1990s. Our contribution to this Special Issue brings the umbrella concept of human capacities with the interplay of its individual (cognitive and intrapersonal) and social (interpersonal) domains. We use data from quantitative (migrants = 4040; non-migrants = 67,174) and qualitative studies (n IDI = 160). In the qualitative data, we found out that international migration has the strongest impact on human capacities of the 'Generation of Change', mostly born 1968-1972. In general, the effects of migration on informal human capital connected to employment persisted in birth cohorts born till the symbolic 1989. We also established that the younger cohorts were, the more the work abroad impacted on their individual, rather than social domains of human capacities. Especially for young Polish migrants, working abroad went far beyond the impact on formal qualifications and competences connected to work and employability only. It related to human capacities connected to life skills of self-making, being, communicating, relating to people and understanding society.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Poland became the main sending country in Central Europe. Despite the lack of institutional barriers to settling in member states of the European Union since 2004, many Polish migrants continued to undertake temporary labour mobility including repetitive, back‐and‐forth moves. This article examines the relationship between migrants' back‐and‐forth international mobility and their activity in the labour market of the sending country. It describes changes in the labour market status of migrants engaging in repetitive migration, based on two surveys conducted in Poland in 2001 and 2007, complemented by qualitative follow‐ups. The results show that migrants deploy various economic strategies: reconcile employment in both countries; abandon jobs in Poland; or only remain economically active abroad. In many cases back‐and‐forth migration led to being unemployed in Poland, which constitutes an important challenge for labour market policy.
Local Public Employment Services (PES) should be able to distinguish unemployed persons who undertake repetitive, back‐and‐forth migration. Local PES should include profiles of unemployed persons and questions about migration experience and its character: labour/non‐labour migration, short‐/long‐term, single/repetitive, etc.
For each unemployed person, the process of career guidance provided by the local PES should assess the possible impact of back‐and‐forth migration on the labour market situation in Poland.
The back‐and‐forth migration should be taken into account at the level of career guidance supplied by Career Centres at high schools and universities.
This paper, based on the case study of job migration from Poland to Ireland, is focused on changes in the international mobility of labour. The study is undertaken with a broad term of reference: (a) to consider factors of changes in the international mobility of labour in a macro-sphere; (b) to examine the social and personal factors which might motivate individuals to migrate; (c) to ascertain socio-demographic characteristics of those who migrate; (d) to document some experience of Polish people working in Ireland, to identify the extent of migration among young emigrants and the nature of their difficulties in Poland.
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