Author: Antonella Ceccagno
Co-Authors ⁄ Presenters: Devi Sacchetto
Accommodations at work and workers mobility. Perspectives from Europe
Based on extensive fieldwork in Europe, we offer a new approach to the mobility of workers living at work.
In the last 20 years the phenomenon of workers living at work has reemerged. Mostly, workers accommodations at work have been discussed for factories in China and other Asian countries. The dormitory labour regime in China has specific traits due to the huge dimensions of the plants, widespread availability of industrial dormitories, and to dormitories being available to all workers and industries to the point that it has been described as ‘systemic’.
Nowadays different kinds of accommodation for workers controlled by the management and organized in a way that they fit into the organization of production are increasingly widespread worldwide across productive sectors especially in countries that use migrant workers, a category of labour that is increasing globally.
In Europe, the diffusion of accommodations at work for workers is slow, but growing, and it is affecting different kinds of labour processes in different countries.
We explore two cases in Europe – the Chinese migrants in Italy and European and Asian migrant workers in Czech Republic.
The ‘mobile regime’ of the Chinese workers within the network of fashion workshops in Italy and the exit strategies enacted by the migrant workers employed at the Foxconn plants in Europe show a pattern of workers mobility different from most literature.
In fact, while most scholars, mainly focusing analytical attention on Asia, conceptualise the mobility of workers living at work as only directed from above, our cases enable us to point at forms of workers’ self-tailored mobility that take place outside of the established and often policed tracks.
We are therefore able to conceptualise the mobility of workers living at work in Europe as the outcome of the interplay of both employers’ strategies and workers’ agency and thus unpack an established framework that, in Europe, does not reflect actual processes.
Moreover, we discuss the outsourcing of the social reproduction linked to the dormitory regime both as a form of dispossession and a condition workers increasingly take advantage of as it increases their potential for mobility in and out of the European labour markets.