Labour mobility in transnational Europe: between depletion, mitigation and citizenship entitlements harm

Abstract

This article examines how transnational labour mobility in uneven and combined Europe has emerged as a critical response to the problems of capitalist production and social reproduction. Analysing the interconnected mobilities of labour between Ukraine, Poland and the UK in the food production, care provision and housing construction sectors, the article examines how states benefit from lower unemployment and reduced labour shortages, employers profit from qualified and reliable workers, and households gain access to jobs and incomes. It argues that transnational labour mobility is constitutive of the inherently interdependent production–reproduction processes. In this constellation, transnational labour mobility becomes a form of mitigation of depletion through social reproduction. However, it further argues that such a mitigation strategy is unbalanced and unsustainable as its costs and benefits are unequally distributed, forestalling resource inflows that could attenuate outflows. Therefore, harms – in particular, the harm to citizenship entitlements – emerge despite labour mobility mitigating depletion.

Welfare as flourishing social reproduction: Polish and Ukrainian migrant workers in a market-participation society

“…Ukrainians working in Poland rely on a simplified visa procedure, expanded since its 2006 application in agriculture to other sectors, and on seasonal work permits aligning Polish and EU regulations. This controlled migration regime oriented to labour market needs provides Ukrainian workers with several routes to documented employment, ranging from short term (under 6 months), temporary (under 3 years) and permanent residence permits, but with truncated social security entitlements (Plomien and Schwartz, 2020). Polish workers access to EU labour markets came with the freedom of movement following the 2004 enlargement.…”

“…Specifically, the deterioration of labour market conditions and of public provision of welfare since the 1980s have compelled greater market-based participation, neglecting the contributions of social reproduction, depleting individuals, households and communities of their resources, and inflicting new (gendered) harms (Elson, 1998; Rai et al, 2014). Above all, they have redrawn the contours of the labour–welfare relationship, wherein mitigating depletion and attendant harms by recourse to markets has precipitated an international division of socially reproductive labour, recasting social citizenship not just through gender and class, but also through processes of migration and racialisation (Ferguson and McNally, 2015; Lutz, 2017; Parreñas, 2002; Plomien and Schwartz, 2020; Williams, 2012). It is the reconfiguration of the labour–welfare–mobility nexus, and the focus on the worker–citizen–migrant, that demands an analysis of migrant workers in their relationship to the expanded conceptualisation of work, workers and welfare.…”

“…Transnational labour mobility has become a widespread response to this challenge, accompanied by calls for transnational social protection (Deacon, 2004; Kaasch, 2019). However, given the ascendancy of social policy-as-investment (Deeming and Smyth, 2018), the informal or privatised transnational transfer of resources perpetuating inequalities (Boccagni, 2017; Plomien and Schwartz, 2020) and the conflicting (citizenship vs human rights) approaches to migrants’ social rights (Köhler, 2016), the attainment of welfare inclusive of the expanded notion of work and workers is uncertain.…”

Making Migrants’ Input Invisible: Intersections of Privilege and Otherness From a Multilevel Perspective

“…CEE migrants, like migrants in general, tend to work in economic sectors that have been come to be recognised as "systemically relevant" since the Coronavirus pandemic but are particularly affected by precarious employment (Khalil et al, 2020). In addition, especially in the area of reproductive work, workers are being systematically deprived of their citizenship rights (Plomien & Schwartz, 2020).…”

Forced labour in supply chains: Rolling back the debate on gender, migration and sexual commerce

“…In contrast to the law that draws the line between productive and reproductive work, capital has blurred the boundary between work and off-work time and space thus appending the traditional sexual division of labour and making manifest that for their very functioning, global supply chains are contingent on the appropriation of workers reproductive realm. How such appropriation is ‘depleting’ (Plomien and Schwartz, 2020) the conditions for social reproduction of migrant labour is best illustrated by the fact that dormitories host single workers rather than families and implement a strict no children policy, hence, placing migrant workers outside the regular cycles of the reproductive sphere and orienting all activity towards meeting the production needs of the firm.…”