Labour Mobility as Method

Description

In November 2022, Romanian Government approved a series of legislative changes concerning the rights and obligations of non-EU employees, among them the obligation to obtain the written agreement of their first employer before they can change jobs during their first year under contract. A key reason for this is that once brought to Romania from non-EU countries, especially from Asia, foreign workers tend to abandon their first employer and change jobs. Hungary followed suit shortly afterwards and several other EU countries are debating similar measures. Starting from the above legislative changes, this paper forefronts mobility of labour as a lens through which to rethink the relationship between the state and migrant labour as currently conceptualised. It is tempting to interpret the above measures, once again, as further forms of states’ control and regulation over labour migration. This, in fact, is the line of argument commonly advanced by migration scholars: it is the states and their border and migration policies that shape transnational labour mobility, guarantee the supply of cheap labour, and assure migrant labour’s controllability in the workplace. As Manuel Castells famously put it in by now the classic text on migrant workers and class struggle, the advantage of migrant labour for capital stems from the legal-political status of migrants, a status that opposes migrant workers not [emphasis mine] directly to capital but rather to the state and to the political status migrants are ascribed by state institutions (1975: 53).

My argument in this paper is that while migration studies approach rightly picks up on the role of the state in fostering the vulnerability and exploitation of migrant workers, the primacy that this strand of scholarship gives to state-migrant labour nexus hides the relevance of industry/business in both shaping of the migration flows and the very concrete working and living conditions of migrant workers. Moreover, the persistent privileging of the state as the main analytical standpoint also blackboxes the firm: we still know exceptionally little about the ways in which industry structure and firm business model shape migratory flows as well as worker agency. With this in mind, I suggest to consider the above legislative changes not as a manifestation of state-labour migration but rather as an expression of capital-labour migration nexus. Building on labour studies (Smith 2006) scholarship as well as the scholarship that bridges labour and migration studies (Alberti 2014; Alberti & Sacchetto 2024), I deploy mobility of labour as method to show how states’ migration measures enable firms to recruit a heterogeneous workforce much needed to front the variable market demand as well as the worker-driven turnover. I then use the mobility of labour to challenge the notion of a singular employer and show how mobility ‘fragments capital’ (Theunissen et al 2023) into client and subcontractor capital, thereby resulting in the client firm substantially losing control over workers on the shopfloor and opening space for worker agency. In sum, it is by deploying the mobility of labour as method to unbox the firm/business, that this paper attempts to shift the attention from states to capital and provide a novel perspective on researching labour migration.

Period	11 Feb 2025
Held at	University of Padua, Italy
Degree of Recognition	International