Reworking labour practices Berntsen, Lisa
Work, employment and society,
06/2016, Letnik:
30, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In an attempt to probe the nuanced processes of non-unionization, this article analyses the agency of migrant construction workers and the ways they negotiate and navigate an increasingly flexible ...and pan-European labour market. Drawing upon qualitative interview data, the article argues that the precarious employment context limits opportunities for effective collective action (and unionization), and that workers employ a wide range of strategies to ‘get by’ and ‘get ahead’ instead. This analysis contributes to an understanding of the resilience of current employment relations by extending the discussion of agency with the category of reworking. Instead of challenging the way cross-border employment relations are organized, migrant construction workers employ various strategies that rework existing conditions to their advantage. On a broader scale, however, these practices contribute to the continuation of current employment relations.
The EU regulatory regime and employers’ cross-border recruitment practices complicate unions’ ability to represent increasingly diverse and transnationally mobile workers. Even in institutional ...contexts where the industrial relations structure and labour law are favourable, such as the Netherlands, unions struggle with maintaining labour standards for these workers. This article analyses Dutch union efforts to represent hyper-mobile construction workers at the Eemshaven construction sites. It shows that the nexus of subcontracting, transnational mobility, legal insularity and employer anti-unionism complicate enforcement so that even well-resourced unions can, at best, improve employment conditions for a limited set of workers and only for a limited period of time.
This article examines a union mobilization of Polish temporary agency workers in the Netherlands. The case study contributes to the migrant organizing literature a micro-level account of the dynamics ...of mobilization from the viewpoint of the migrants and organizers involved. The findings emphasize the importance of key actors in building solidarities within and between different groups of workers in fragmented workplaces, with implications for unions seeking new ways to respond to changing employment practices. This study highlights some of the possibilities and limitations of organizing among contractually fragmented workforces.
This article explores the underexamined role of personal enablers in migrant entrepreneurship. Drawing on timeline interviews, the study relays the importance of entrepreneur enablers in migrants’ ...business endeavours over time, ranging from coincidental and ephemeral encounters to the development of supportive communities. In the absence of accessible business support structures, the role of chance in migrants’ entrepreneurial trajectories increases, leading migrants to become self-employed, often against the grain of their own expectations or those of their inner circle of contacts or the wider society. The timeline interviews are a helpful method to capture how particular people, in conjunction with broader societal and smaller personal developments, influence entrepreneurial choices and progression over time. The study adds a dynamic and agentic perspective to migrant entrepreneurship literature underlining the importance of personal enablers to support migrant entrepreneurial developments over time.
While the definition of these essential sectors slightly varied across countries, many of them could be defined as secondary segments of the labour market, characterized by precarious and flexible ...conditions of work and employing a significant number of migrant workers 1 (European Commission, 2020b; Fasani and Mazza, 2020). ...an important dilemma faced by governments across Europe was how to recompose the need for migrant labour and thus the need for continued mobility of deemed “key” workers on the one hand, with the protection of public health and thus with measures such as lock-down restrictions and border closures to curb within-country and across-country mobility, on the other hand. Nonetheless, attention to the needs and conditions of these workers, in terms of protections of their labour and social rights and of their health, including access to care, received far less attention (Mantu, 2022; Szelewa and Polakowski, 2022) and differed on the basis of their migration status (documented/undocumented) and category of entry (e.g. EU mobile workers; refugees; posted workers; student workers; TCN workers), creating narrowly defined divides between “insiders” and “outsiders”. MacKenzie and Forde (2009), for instance, stress that savings associated with employing migrant workers do not only benefit employers, but might be also a direct interest of the State which redistributes the costs of labour reproduction onto external social systems. ...supranational regulation, as in the case of the European-level regulation, also provides resources and constraints to employers, which affects national industrial relations systems (Lillie and Greer, 2007) and creates different State regulatory responses to develop and govern national labour markets (Lillie, 2012; Wagner, 2015).
There is considerable evidence that employers are violating the labour rights of mobile EU workers. However there is disagreement as to whether the lack of enforcement of these rights is caused by ...poor EU-level or weak national-level potential to oversee and sanction infringing companies and to enforce the rules. This poses the following three questions. Which enforcement gaps exist in relation to EU labour mobility? Which circumstances lead to these particular enforcement gaps? And what is being done to close those gaps? To answer these questions we examine the behaviour of institutions key to these processes, interviewing the respective labour enforcement agencies and trade unions in the German and Dutch construction sector as well as mobile EU workers themselves. We discuss three distinct difficulties encountered in enforcing labour standards: 1) disparities between enforcement institutions in different EU Member States; 2) enforcement challenges faced within the national context; and 3) representation gaps between host country collective representation channels and mobile EU workers.
This article analyses how highly skilled refugees experience barriers and enablers to entrepreneurship in the Netherlands. Using the welcoming talent model, the article claims that material and ...procedural norms as well as the governance of support for refugee entrepreneurship in the Netherlands needs a new design. Through socio‐legal research on the experiences of highly skilled Syrian refugees, private support structures and municipalities with migration, integration and welfare policies and practices, we reveal that financial independence through entrepreneurship requires not just entrepreneurial skills but meeting the right people and not running into municipalities propagating work first. Policies and practices need to be developed in which welcoming entrepreneurial (highly skilled) refugees is key. Welcoming policies and practices are to offer refugees nationwide, equally accessible, transparent support structures, and access to finance instead of barriers towards financial independence.
Worker 'posting' or temporary migration of manual workers sent by their employers to work on projects abroad has become increasingly prominent in the European construction industry. It is now normal ...to find groups of workers from all around Europe on construction sites, living in nearby temporary accommodations, moving on to other projects or back home when the project is complete. This article highlights the interaction between the social and spatial segregation and transnational mobility of these workers in the European Union construction labour market. We argue that the work-focused and employer-dominated nature of the posted workers' social world abroad contributes to their segregation from host societies and reinforces a nationally based labour market segmentation of the European construction labour market. This is because posted workers do not have the same opportunity or interest to build political, social and economic resources in host societies and workplaces as more permanent migrants.
Despite attempts by the Dutch government to combat and discourage unlawful residence, there are people who live in the Netherlands without a residence permit. However, little is known about the way ...they live (or survive) and work in the Netherlands. Although their residence is not legal, this does not mean that migrants without residence permits have no rights. On the contrary, this book connects the legal legislation and regulations on the national and international level with the socio-economic reality of this vulnerable group of migrants. Based on unique empirical material, this study shows the discrepancy between the rights that also apply to migrants without residence permits, for example as workers, as patients or as residents, and shows the absence of protection in everyday practice. The book concludes with an exploration of possibilities for improving the vulnerable position of migrants without residence permits in the Netherlands.
Failure to regenerate the gradient tendon-bone interface of the enthesis results in poor clinical outcomes for surgical repair. The goal of this study was to evaluate the potential of composite cell ...sheets for engineering of the tendon-bone interface to improve regeneration of the functionally graded tissue. We hypothesize that stacking cell sheets at early stages of differentiation into tenogenic and osteogenic progenitors will create a composite structure with integrated layers. Cell sheets were fabricated on methyl cellulose and poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) thermally reversible polymers with human adipose-derived stem cells and differentiated into progenitors of tendon and bone with chemical induction media. Tenogenic and osteogenic cell sheets were stacked, and the engineered tendon-bone interface (TM-OM) was characterized
in comparison to stacked cell sheet controls cultured in basal growth medium (GM-GM), osteogenic medium (OM-OM), and tenogenic medium (TM-TM). Samples were characterized by histology, quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction, and immunofluorescent staining for markers of tendon, fibrocartilage, and bone including mineralization, scleraxis, tenomodulin,
,
,
, osteonectin, and osterix. After 1 week co-culture in basal growth medium, TM-OM cell sheets formed a tissue construct with integrated layers expressing markers of tendon, mineralized fibrocartilage, and bone with a spatial gradient in RUNX2 expression. Tenogenic cell sheets had increased expression of scleraxis and tenomodulin. Osteogenic cell sheets exhibited mineralization 1 week after stacking and upregulation of osterix and osteonectin. Additionally, in the engineered interface, there was significantly increased gene expression of
and
, indicative of endochondral ossification. These results highlight the potential for composite cell sheets fabricated with adipose-derived stem cells for engineering of the tendon-bone interface. Impact statement This study presents a method for fabrication of the tendon-bone interface using stacked cell sheets of tenogenic and osteogenic progenitors differentiated from human adipose-derived mesenchymal stem cells, resulting in a composite structure expressing markers of tendon, mineralized fibrocartilage, and bone. This work is an important step toward regeneration of the biological gradient of the enthesis and demonstrates the potential for engineering complex tissue interfaces from a single autologous cell source to facilitate clinical translation.
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