‘Slaves’ without coercion? Work-related classification patterns among Romanian migrant workers

Abstract

Tens of thousands of Romanian migrants work in the German construction sector. Their work is often characterised by unpaid wages, long working days and the withholding of sick or holiday pay. The risky and exploitative nature of the conditions under which they work is reflected in their negative evaluation of their engagements as ‘slave labour’. Starting from such a clearly negative evaluation, this article asks how such workers classify their work and what role such classifications have within the context of labour exploitation. Based on qualitative interviews with and participant observation among Romanian construction site workers in Germany and in Romania, the article reconstructs four work classifications, each of which offers a different reason to make hard work plausible in the eyes of workers, while employers actively turn such interpretations into a mechanism of vulnerability. Without direct physical coercion, these ideas motivate workers to take on work that they themselves criticise as ‘slave labour’. The paper concludes by arguing that the recognition of such classifications and their social effects are crucial for an understanding of labour exploitation.