Precarious Migrant Labour: What Prospects for Migrant Integration?

Mojca Pajnik, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Solvenia

Summary

Productivity rates in the aging societies of the EU member states are increasingly possible to maintain due to migrant labour force filling up positions of undervalued and low-paid work, especially in construction, manufacturing, and the feminized sectors of care and domestic work. Migrants tend to increasingly occupy precarious jobs, often related to black market economies with no or low level of security and with poor recognition of their skills.

Migrants who perform low-skilled jobs on the basis of various types of work permit or those who moonlight in the black market find themselves in the grips of the flexibilization of the market reality where they are forced to accept vulnerable, short-term and low-paid jobs. Since the labour market conditions have worsened in general during the economic crisis, they have become even worse for migrant workers. To add to this, the crisis is used as a backdrop in intolerant and xenophobic public discourses across Europe that emphasise the need to 'protect' the interests of the 'nationals'. The actual demand for migrant labour remains poorly reflected in state policies, which, in turn, define and regulate the migrants’ positions primarily in terms of limitations and closure.

The paper questions the contemporary rationale of European migration and labour market policy and of inequalities it produces. The assumption is that current policies are to a large extent devoid from migrants’ own perceptions and needs, and closely follow the alleged 'national' interests. The paper provides visibility of migrants and discusses migrants’ living and working experiences which is achieved by consulting numerous interviews with migrants (conducted within projects PRIMTS and FeMiPol).

Attention is devoted to discuss the themes that emerge in migrant narratives, analysing European economies that are largely sustained by migrant workforce. By exploring precarious labour market experiences of migrants the paper questions validity of the concept of integration that remains an important objective of current EU migration regimes.

Biographical note

Mojca Pajnik is a senior research fellow at the Peace Institute, Institute for Contemporary Social and Political Studies in Ljubljana and as assistant professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences in Ljubljana (Slovenia). Her recent publications include Prostitution and Human Trafficking: Gender, Labor and Migration Aspects (2008) and Precarious Migrant Labour Across Europe (edited with G. Campani, 2011). She has been a project coordinator to several national and international initiatives on migration, citizenship and gender, the recent being the project PRIMTS: Prospects for Integration of Migrants from “Third Countries” and their Labour Market Situations: Towards Policies and Action (EC, 2008-2010).

Further info:

Tanya Kingdon (kingdon@remove-this.iss.nl)