I have this article manuscript that I’ve been working on for a couple of years. It’s on the backburner, because it would need work to make things fit. It is basically too all over the place, not necessarily for my taste, but for other people’s tastes. In any case, the angle that I started with, only to veer off from it eventually, was that you can’t see a lot of exploitation that goes on behind the scenes, because it’s not manifested in the landscape.
Now, this is something that Don Mitchell wrote about decades ago already. If you are interested in this topic in relation to landscape, I think his book ‘Lie Of The Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape’ well worth your time. It’s from 1996, but the topic is still highly relevant, perhaps even more relevant than it was back in the day, and not only in the context of California.
The gist of the book is indicated in the title. It’s a great title, because it plays on the scenic aspects, like how all the physical features that you see in the landscape, as the landscape, are the way they are, but we can’t see why they are the way they are. We are tempted to think that the Californian orchards and vineyards are just the way they are, situated in some gently sloping or rolling hills, and that it’s the local people who take pride in their work, producing the best fruit and wines in the country, perhaps in the world. That’s a lie. You won’t see many local people working on the land. It might not even be local people who own the land. It’s likely some migrant workers who live precarious lives, coming and going. They are the ones who do all the hard work. That’s why the landscape looks the way the way it looks. It’s also why the fruit and the vegetables, and the wines, cost as little as they do.
To be clear, this is not just about California. This also happens in Europe. Those fruits and vegetables from Italy and Spain aren’t picked by the locals. It’s typically immigrant labor that does all that hard work, so that your supermarket is stocked with cheap produce all over the year. The thing is, however, that you don’t see this in the landscape. It’s all nice and sunny over there: rolling hills, farm estates, little cutesy villages and what not.
This is also the case in Finland. Wild berries are no longer gathered by the locals. Instead, you have migrant workers or, to be more specific, seasonal workers who do all that hard work, so that your supermarket has fresh berries in the summer and frozen berries in other seasons. Also, as you might already guess, you don’t see this in the landscape, because this is seasonal work, involving numerous locations but only for a short period of time.
Oh, and this is not even something that comes as news to people. This is not a new phenomenon. It’s not like a report or a study comes out and it’s a shock to people. They are aware of it, but they just don’t like to think of it. I might be more aware of these things, sure, but I’d say that people do know about these things. They just prefer not think about it. I can’t remember the first time I read about the exploitation of immigrant labor Italy and Spain, but it must have been over a decade ago and it has probably gone on for way longer.
To connect this to that article manuscript, this also applies to construction and shipbuilding here. I was interested in how the local market square was renovated or I guess it’s more apt to say it was overhauled. There wasn’t much to see for the most part, because the area was excavated, to build a parking facility underground, and cordoned off, as you might expect as it was a construction site. You could only see the workers when they were working on the surface and the various surface structures, albeit largely behind fences, as you might expect.
To my knowledge, the ones you could occasionally see and hear were largely foreign workers. Again, this is not a recent phenomenon. It’s been like this for decades already. The thing is, however, that you don’t see this in the landscape itself. Once the work is done, it’s done. All those workers in their high visibility vests and hard hats are gone, as if they were never there, as if the market square simply just redid itself.
The only time you are prompted to think of the foreign labor is when the market square is crumbling. Oh, and crumble it does. It’s been the talk of the town, because it’s hard to miss how the paving is coming loose and slumping under the weight of heavy vehicles.
To be crystal clear, this is not to say that the foreign labor was somehow just incompetent. It’s rather that they had to do what they had to do, for this or that amount of money, in this or that amount of time. It’s hard to do a great job when you are working against the clock.
Would local labor have done a better job? Most likely yes, but not because they are somehow inherently superior workers, but because they’d ask for more money and more time, to make sure the work gets done properly. Why don’t the foreign workers as for more money and more time then? Well, because they only get to do the work if they are hired to do the work and they are hired to do the work because they are willing to do it cheaper and faster than the local workers. That’s the gist of it.
For the companies, procurement is all about who can get the job done the cheapest. You could have other criteria, yes, but it’s typically just about the money, because that money is typically or mostly tax payer money, which should be used wisely.
Some company gets the contract. It gets paid a certain amount. Now it must make sure that it gets the job done with that money. What’s left of that money is then their profit, minus taxes, of course. Now, the thing is that when you say you can do something cheaply, cheaper than the competition, you actually have get the job done cheaply, cheaper than the competition. This means subcontracting other companies to do the work for you. This process works the same way. You pick the cheapest option. They’ll subcontract their work as well, also picking the cheapest option, and so on, and so forth. I think you get the idea.
Okay, okay, I’m simplifying things there, but that’s the gist of it, how contracting and subcontracting works. The company has to do things cheaply, because if it doesn’t, some other company will do it cheaply and end up getting the contract.
Now, you should be asking yourself or, rather, me, how on earth can the foreign crews work faster and cheaper than the local crews, like aren’t the wages and work conditions defined in collective bargaining agreements? Isn’t the work unionized to a point where someone’s nationality, language or skin color makes no difference? The answer is yes, but there’s a catch.
Freedom of movement is one of the core values of the European Union, albeit largely only within its borders. The idea is that it should be easy to get a job in another member state if, for example, you don’t have work in the member state that you are currently residing. This makes sense.
It is, however, also possible work in another member state on a temporary basis. You can relocate yourself, temporarily, but that’s not at all different than permanent relocation. You can also be relocated temporarily by employer, to work in another member state. This is, of course, voluntarily and it benefits the worker if the company is unable to offer any work in the member state that workers reside. It can also be lucrative for the workers, because they make better money being shipped elsewhere.
This phenomenon is know as posted work and a worker who gets posted somewhere is known as a posted worker, as discussed by Nathan Lillie and Ines Wagner in ‘Subcontracting, insecurity and posted workers: evidence from construction, meat processing, and ship building’. The idea behind this is that it is highly beneficial to be able to move workforce from where it currently has little or no work to do to somewhere where it is currently needed, as Lillie and Wagner (158) point out.
This is also lucrative many parties involved. Firstly, this is lucrative to the member states as the country of origin gets to tax the posted workers, even though they do the work abroad, while the country where they are posted does not have to take care of their social security as that remains tied to the workers country of origin, as Frederic De Wispelaere and Jozef Pacolet (42) point out in ‘The Benefits of Posting: Facts and Figures on the Use and Impact of Intra-EU Posting’. Secondly, companies can save in labor costs as the arrangement allows work to be subcontracted to foreign companies that are responsible for the workers, according to the laws of foreign countries. Local laws and collective bargaining agreements are relevant only to the work that is conducted in the country where the workers are posted, as discussed by Jens Arnholtz and Lillie (8) in ‘European Integration and the Reconfiguration of National Industrial Relations: Posted Work as a Driver of Institutional Change’ and Jan Cremers (35) in ‘How Externalisation of Labour Recruitment Crosses Borders Origins, Evolution, and Features of Posted Work: Origins, Evolution, and Features of Posted Work’. Thirdly, this is also be lucrative for the posted workers. They are typically sent from a lower-income country to a higher-income country, meaning that they can earn much, much more than they would back home, while being taxed as if they were at home, as this is set up as a temporary arrangement, as explained by De Wispelaere and Pacolet (39).
It may seem like I’m contradicting myself: how can employing posted workers be a bad thing if everyone seems to benefit from the arrangement? The short answer to this is that it is a bad thing, because it is based the exploitation of workers. This arrangement is intended to short-term shortages of labor. It is not designed to address long-term shortages of labor. If the labor shortage persists, it should be addressed by training more people to do that work, or by attracting the workers to move to the country where there’s plenty of that work to do. The problem is that it is possible for companies to argue that they have a short-term shortage of labor, even though they have been in business for a long time, doing the same thing for decades. It is in their best interest to utilize posted workers because they are simply cheaper than local workers, regardless of their nationality. The already trained locals will have to find other work and the non-locals see no reason to train themselves to work in that field, whatever it may be, because they won’t be hired by the companies, because that work is taken by posted workers. This lack of local trained workforce can then be used by the companies to argue that there is a short-term shortage of labor.
To explain that another way, posted work no longer functions as a temporary solution to a temporary problem. Instead, it ends up (re)producing the conditions of that problem, the shortage of local labor, which it then solves with posted work, thus (re)producing the problem, the shortage of local labor, as the local workers cannot compete with the posted workers, because, one way or another, contracting posted worker is cheaper than local workers. The local workers give up and start doing something else, because they have to start doing something else. This then gives the impression that there is a labor shortage and legitimizes solving it with posted workers.
The long answer includes a whole host of other problems that the posted workers find difficult to solve. The gist of this is that posted work makes the posted workers vulnerable to being exploited, as pointed out by Davies (169) in ‘Labour Exploitation and Posted Workers in the European Construction Industry’. In his book chapter, Cremers lists a number of problems concerning the posted workers. In summary, the posted workers are basically on their own when it comes dealing with legal matters, because they don’t know the law of the land where they are posted and they cannot deal with these matters back home for the simple reason that they are not back home. This makes it difficult for them to deal with matters concerning disputes, liabilities and risks. They cannot rely on others to handle these matters for them either, because their posting is often fairly short. This is particularly problematic because some of the companies that employ the posted workers have been set up for the sole purpose of hiring foreign workers and offering them as posted workers. To be clear, posted work is not meant to involve hiring people to work abroad on a temporary basis. Instead, it is supposed to facilitate lending existing workforce of a company from one place where is a surplus of workers, but no work, to a place where there is work, but shortage of workers. These shady companies may also seek to hire people in the country where they are supposed to be posted, falsely posting them there, as this allows the local companies to save on labor costs by opting to use posted workers. They may also seek to take advantage of non-EU workers who do not know that they are not eligible for posted work, but are eager to do posted work because it is lucrative. Once they are posted, it is easy to exploit the workers as they may get deported if they take the matters to the authorities.
The posted workers may also become reliant on posted work, while they are easily replaceable. Demanding better wages or improvements in the working conditions will likely result in either losing your job, as discussed by Jane Wills (445) in her article ‘Subcontracted Employment and its Challenge to Labor’, or simply not getting rehired, even if you don’t lose your job, as noted by Lillie and Wagner (169) in their book chapter. Cremers (43) also points out that it can be difficult for the posted workers to even get their money from the companies that post them as some of them exist to exploit the workforce, simply disappearing as if they never existed in the first place or going suddenly bankrupt when their workers want their money.
Now, there are many other issues that I haven’t covered in this essay. So, don’t go thinking that’s all. Oh, no. It’s all way, way worse, way, way more exploitative and way, way more common than people think. It’s also not just something that happens in elsewhere, in some poor countries where there is hardly any rule of law. It’s everywhere. It’s just hidden away behind fences, scaffolds and tarpaulins. Some of it is totally legal as well, hidden behind legal constructs in western countries. To be clear, I’m not saying it should be the way it is, but it is the way it is.
References
- Arnholtz, J., and Lillie, N. (2020). European Integration and the Reconfiguration of National Industrial Relations: Posted Work as a Driver of Institutional Change. In In J. Arnholtz and N. Lillie (Eds.), Posted Work in the European Union: The Political Economy of Free Movement (pp. 1–30). New York, NY: Routledge.
- Cremers, J. (2022). How Externalisation of Labour Recruitment Crosses Borders Origins, Evolution, and Features of Posted Work: Origins, Evolution, and Features of Posted Work. In R. Cillo and F. Perocco (Eds.), Posted Workers: The Condition of Transnational Posted Workers in Europe (pp. 33–55). Venice, Italy: Fondazione Università Ca’ Foscari.
- Davies, J. (2021). Labour Exploitation and Posted Workers in the European Construction Industry. In N. Lord, É. Inzelt, W. Huisman and R. Faria (Eds.), European White-Collar Crime: Exploring the Nature of European Realities (pp. 163–174). Bristol, United Kingdom: Bristol University Press.
- De Wispelaere, F., and J. Pacolet (2020). The Benefits of Posting: Facts and Figures on the Use and Impact of Intra-EU Posting. New York, NY: Routledge.
- Lillie, N., and I. Wagner (2015). Subcontracting, insecurity and posted work: Evidence from construction, meat processing and ship building. In J. Drahokoupil (Ed.), The outsourcing challenge: Organizing workers across fragmented production networks (pp. 157–174). Brussels, Belgium: European Trade Union Institute.
- Mitchell, D. 1996. The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
- Wills, J. (2009). Subcontracted Employment and its Challenge to Labor. Labor Studies Journal, 34 (4), 441–460.