Nathan Lillie

Industrial Relations, Migration, and Neoliberal Politics: The Case of the European Construction Sector

Transnational politics and labor markets are undermining national industrial relations systems in Europe. This article examines the construction industry, where the internationalization of the labor market has gone especially far. To test hypotheses about di ferences between “national systems,” the authors examine the United Kingdom, Finland, and Germany, alongside European-level policy making. Regardless of overall national institutional framework, employers seek to avoid industrial relations rules, while unions attempt to relocalize labor relations. Both use shop-floor, national, and European power resources. The authors argue that comparative industrial relations should take seriously the connection between action at the national and transnational levels.

Subcontracting, Posted Migrants and Labour Market Segmentation in Finland

Using evidence from the shipbuilding and construction industries in Finland, this article shows how trade union responses to the introduction of migrant workers can be conditioned by product markets. Growing numbers of ‘posted workers’, or intra‐European Union work migrants employed via transnational subcontractors, are segmenting the labour market, by competing with domestically domiciled workers whose employment is more tightly regulated. In Finland, the construction workers union has had a far more assertive and successful approach to enforcing wage norms than the union in shipbuilding. This appears to be related to the greater exposure of shipbuilding to international product market competition.

European Integration and the Disembedding of Labour Market Regulation: Transnational Labour Relations at the European Central Bank Construction Site

European integration through mutual recognition has facilitated the growth of a pan-European labour supply system in which transnational subcontractors ‘post’ workers from low-wage areas to higher wage areas. This allows employers to create spaces of exception in which the national industrial relations system of the country where work occurs does not fully apply. Drawing on interviews with managers, workers, unionists and works councillors at the European Central Bank construction site in Frankfurt, Germany, this article shows how transnational subcontracting allows employers to access, and create competition between, sovereign regulatory regimes. It concludes that high-cost, high-collective good national systems such as the German one, which depend on territorial boundedness for their integrity, are likely to be destabilized by this aspect of European integration.

The European Migrant Workers Union and the barriers to transnational industrial citizenship

Despite the rapid increase in cross-national labour migration since EU enlargement in 2004, there has been little research on transnational union efforts to organize migrant workers. This article examines the European Migrant Workers Union, created by the German union IG BAU in a shift away from national protectionism towards transnational organizing. The initiative largely failed, primarily because of decisions by other unions to reject the transnational approach and instead to defend existing institutional arrangements. We argue that this inaction constitutes a setback for union reassertion of control over markets and for bringing industrial citizenship to Europe’s hyper-mobile workers.

National unions and transnational workers: the case of Olkiluoto 3, Finland

This article argues, through analysing industrial relations at the Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant construction site in Finland, that national unionism is inappropriately structured for the transnational construction industry. Olkiluoto 3 is being built by a French/German consortium employing mostly posted migrants via transnational subcontractors from around Europe. Despite the strong Finnish unions, contractors successfully contested the right of Finnish actors to regulate the site, placing labour relations in a deregulated space between national systems. Although the posted migrants eventually self-organized, Finnish unions remained unresponsive, reluctant to act outside the normal Finnish social partnership industrial relations paradigm. The case illustrates how the nationally based structure of the labour movement is ill-suited to represent a pan-European labour force.

Hyper-mobile migrant workers and Dutch trade union representation strategies at the Eemshaven construction sites

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.

Rollerball and the spirit of capitalism: Competitive dynamics within the global context, the challenge to labour transnationalism, and the emergence of ironic outcomes

Purpose – Capital, through its practices and narratives of global competition, is able to play unions in different locations off against one another through the construction and exploitation of difference. Trade unions and their activists have responded through formal institutional responses and with new forms of network‐based cooperation which is, at best, limited to action supported by the interests of union actors involved at a given juncture. This article seeks to argue that these forms of organizational responses are in themselves insufficient to allow unions to overcome the prisoners dilemma inherent in their operating at a lower geographic level than capital.Design/methodology/approach – The paper brings together ideas and insights from various interventions made by the authors and is a based on a review of a large part of the literature.Findings – To regain control over labour markets would require either more systematic and structured union organizations of a transnational scope or a more concer...

Industrial citizenship, cosmopolitanism and European integration:

There has been an explosion of interest in the idea of European Union citizenship in recent years, as a defining example of postnational cosmopolitan citizenship potentially replacing or layered on top of national citizenship. We argue this form of EU citizenship undermines industrial citizenship, which is a crucial support for social solidarity on which other types of citizenship are based. Because industrial citizenship arises from collectivities based on class identities and national institutions, it depends on the national territorial order and the social closure inherent in it. EU citizenship in its ‘postnational’ form is realized through practices of mobility, placing it in tension with bounded class-based collectivities. Though practices of working-class cosmopolitanism may give rise to a working-class consciousness, the fragmented nature of this vision impedes the development of transnational class-based collectivities. Industrial and cosmopolitan citizenship must be re-imagined together if European integration is to be democratized.

Determinantes industriais da solidariedade transnacional: política intersindical global em três setores

Este artigo compara formas de transnacionalismo do trabalho em tres setores: industria automotiva; transporte maritimo; vestuario e industria textil. Em cada caso, os sindicatos se envolvem em atividades transnacionais muito diferentes para reassumir o controle sobre o mercado de trabalho e a concorrencia. Conforme as instituicoes de cooperacao transnacional se tornam mais complexas, os sindicatos continuam a lutar com as tensoes competitivas (trabalhador a trabalhador e sindicato a sindicato) que variam de uma industria para a outra.

European Integration and Transnational Labor Markets

In January and February 2009, a wave of wildcat strikes swept across the United Kingdom, as British workers protested the employment of Italian and Portuguese workers at construction contractors at power plants. These protests erupted spontaneously from workers who were angered at foreign contractors bringing their ‘posted’ workforce from abroad to work on UK sites while local workers remained unemployed.1 The result was a compromise settlement, in which some jobs were made available to British workers. More important, it set off a debate in the United Kingdom about the role of ‘obscure European law’ (Winnet and Squires 2009) in opening Europe’s labor markets. The issue of posted workers is not confined to the United Kingdom; all over Europe worker posting is becoming a standard way for employers in some industries to access cheap, unregulated labor (Menz 2005; Felini et al. 2007; Lillie and Greer 2007). The European public is gradually awaking to the realization that national labor market institutions are a thing of the past. This transnationalization of labor markets is likely to have as much influence on national political economies in coming years as the transnationalization of capital had in the past two decades.