Branka Likic-Brboric

Labour migration and informalisation: East meets West

Purpose – Against a theoretical discussion of informalisation, the purpose of this paper is to trace wider commonalities and migratory interconnections that are leading to informalised or deteriorated employment conditions both East and West in the enlarged Europe. Design/methodology/approach – The paper examines the ways in which informalisation has come increasingly to typify employment relations both East and West via contrastive case studies from Sweden and Latvia. Findings – The paper illustrates how a growing tendency towards informalisation of work and economy comes about as a consequence of dual tendencies towards informalisation both “from above” and “from below”. Migrant labour has a part in this process, especially in the post-EU enlargement period, increasingly enabling free movement of labour from the former socialist countries to the West. Research limitations/implications – The implications of the paper are that the harmonisation of labour standards in the enlarged EU is not necessarily in ...

Migrants and the Unequal Burdening of “Toxic” Risk: Towards a New Global Governance Regime

The article addresses the changing discourse that frames the neo-liberal regulatory agenda, in the context of the current financial crisis and related, system-threatening “toxic” risk. In this, the authors claim that a flexible mix of regulation/de-regulation and self-regulation is reflected in an asymmetric architecture of multi-level governance that is based on an unequal burden sharing of risk, involving the commodification of risk and an imposition of this burden on the socially weakest groups. Migrant workers are identified as being most vulnerable to the condition of precariousness due to “double asymmetry of hyperprecarity”. The article identifies class-biased practices of regulatory failure and the counter-movements that they have generated around the demand for “decent work”. It is claimed that the present systemic failure has created only a “window of opportunity” for the working class and civil society actors to promote de-commodification of labour and equalisation of risk-burdening in the inception of a new regulatory contest on both national and trans-national level.

Successful But Different: Deliberative Identity and the Consensus-Driven Transition to Capitalism in Estonia and Slovenia

Praised by international organizations, Estonia and Slovenia have long been considered among the most successful post-communist states. Estonia quickly transformed itself into one of the most liberal economies in the world, whereas Slovenia opted for a social justice-oriented market economy. Still, the roots of their success coincide in that consensus played a crucial role. We argue that the public sphere was never as repressed in Estonia and Slovenia during the communist period as it was elsewhere. Distinct national identities continued to be formed and re-formed by intellectuals during the decades of communist rule, who assumed roles as political leaders when the transition started. Consensus based on these national identities legitimized reform policies for the entire decade of the 1990s.

Global migration governance, civil society and the paradoxes of sustainability

ABSTRACT Against the presentation of an asymmetric global governance, this article analyzes the formation of global migration governance with its focus on the politics of migration and development. It traces the marginalization of a rights-based approach to migration and the streamlining of migration governance into business-friendly migration management and a geopolitical securitization agenda. It also reviews the trajectory towards factoring migration into a global development policy discourse as formulated in the UN 2030 Development Agenda. Specifically, it indicates that the inclusion of migration into the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) may promote migrant workers’ rights because several of these invoke universal human rights instruments, social protection and the observance of the ILO decent work agenda. However, this will only be possible if civil society critically engages powerful state and non-state actors in the process of monitoring the SDGs’ implementation, and resists their streamlining into investment and free trade neoliberal development regimes.