The mobility of workers living at work in Europe

Abstract

Spanish

French

Scholars, mainly focusing on Asia, consistently describe the im/mobility of workers living at work as orchestrated from above. This article bring to the forefront forms of workers’ mobility that take place outside of the established and often policed tracks. Focusing on Europe, the article shows that the mobility of workers is the outcome of the interplay of both employers’ strategies and workers’ agency. Based on extensive fieldwork among migrant workers in Europe – Chinese migrants in the Italian fashion industry, and Eastern European migrant workers at the Foxconn electronics plants in the Czech Republic – the article offers a new approach. Instead of focusing on the single workplace at a certain point in time, it adopts a perspective that considers the multiplicity of accommodations at work for workers across Europe along the time dimension. By extending the study of the dormitory regime to the European Union, the article highlights the way the growing frequency of factories cum dormitories to a certain extent empowers the workers as their horizons extend to other sites within Europe and are not limited to a single firm.

Keywords

Dormitories European labor market labor migrant workers workers’ mobility

Introduction

Living in accommodation provided by employers has a long history worldwide. In the last 20 years, workers’ accommodation at work has been mostly discussed for factories in China and other Asian countries (Azmeh, 2014; Pun, 2005). The dormitory labor regime in China has specific traits due to the huge dimensions of the plants, widespread availability of industrial dormitories being available to all workers and industries to the point that it has been described as ‘systemic’ (Pun and Smith, 2007).

With migrant labor increasing globally, the provision of different kinds of accommodation for workers controlled by management and organized in a way that fits into the organization of production is increasingly widespread, across productive sectors. Dormitories can be found in the construction sector in Persian Gulf countries (Buckley, 2012); in agriculture in the US and Canada (Strauss and McGrath, 2017); and in the logistic sector among truck drivers (Viscelli, 2016). They exist across Africa, especially in the mining industry, although the traditional compound system has been in decline (Bezuidenhout and Buhlungu, 2011).

In Europe, the spread of accommodation at work is slow, but growing, and it is affecting different kinds of labor processes in different countries. Accommodation provided by the employers is the norm among ‘dispatched workers’ (Caro et al., 2015), in slaughterhouses and Amazon plants in Germany (Altreiter et al., 2015), electronics plants in Czech Republic (Andrijasevic and Sacchetto, 2016), Chinese-run manufacturing workshops in the Italian fashion industry (Ceccagno, 2017a), and some agricultural areas of Italy and Spain (Corrado et al., 2017). In order to account for this phenomenon, Chris Smith (2003) introduced the concept of ‘dormitory labor regime’ as an overall form of production that has political effects on the labor process and the political apparatus of production. We share with this author concern for the political implications of apparatuses of production that bind the workers to the workplace thus shaping the borders within which workers’ mobility as agency can extend.

At the same time, we adopt a gaze different from most scholarship by questioning the single workplace and dormitory as a site of study. Instead of focusing on the single workplace at a certain point in time, we adopt as unit of analysis the multiplicity of accommodation at work for workers across Europe and we analyze them in relation to each other along the time dimension. A methodology that considers dormitory-based employment in relation to different sites not only discloses a multi-sited dormitory landscape but also sheds light on the impact this has on the workers and their subjective perceptions of it. By extending the study of the dormitory regime to the European Union with its regimes of mobility (Schiller and Salazar, 2013) we highlight how the growing presence of factories cum dormitories empowers the workers to a certain extent as their horizons are not restricted to a single firm but extend to other sites within Europe.

Free movement and mobility have been described as the most remarkable features of an integrated Europe (Favell, 2008). While various policies have been put in place in order to restrict the entry of migrants from outside Europe, and even though some researchers underline that there is ‘too little mobility’ in the EU (Zimmermann, 2016), a regulated freedom of movement for European citizens has undoubtedly prevailed within Europe. The mobility of people within Europe is far from matching that within the US. And yet, in 2016, about 36.7 million foreign citizens lived in EU countries, and, of these, about 44%, or 16 million, were citizens of another EU member state (European Union, 2017).

Acutely aware of the possibilities for mobility available, many workers perceive Europe (or parts of it) as a chessboard across which to move in search of better opportunities. We discuss this subject in relation to two specific case studies in Europe: Chinese migrants in the Italian fashion industry, and Eastern European migrants working at the Foxconn plants in the Czech Republic. Our analysis of the two cases relies on our primary, ethnographic data gained through long-term fieldwork in both countries.

While most cases discussed in the literature, mainly focusing analytical attention on Asia, conceptualize the mobility of workers living at work as only directed from above and often policed by the state, the employers, and intermediaries (Azmeh, 2014; Xiang and Lindquist, 2014), our cases enable us to bring to the forefront forms of workers’ self-tailored mobility. We argue that the patterns of worker im/mobility described in most literature, do not reflect actual processes in Europe. By highlighting the interplay between employers’ strategies and workers’ agency in Europe, we thus provide a more nuanced picture of living at work in Europe.

In the next section we discuss the literature on the dormitory labor regime focusing on the main concepts put forward in the last 20 years. After sketching the research methods in the third section, we present and analyze our case studies in the fourth section. A concluding discussion on the mobility of workers in Europe follows.

Mobility and immobility of workers living at work

The literature has dwelt on workers’ accommodation in dormitories organized by the employers and the implications of this practice, showing that living at work can be crucial in order to maintain, manage, and control a stationary – yet temporary- workforce (Pun and Chan, 2013; Smith, 2003). Overall, the dormitory labor regime is analyzed for its political effects on labor processes. While the different aspects that make up the dormitory regime are not easy to disentangle as they are intrinsically connected, we single out three main points that are prominent in the literature: (1) the rationale for firms and the involvement of states in making such choices; (2) the detrimental effects the dormitory regime has on workers and their bargaining power; (3) the im/mobility of workers as orchestrated from above.

First, the literature considers ‘the concentrated nature of the spatiality of work and residence integral to capital accumulation’ (Pun and Chan, 2013: 179). Dormitories enable employers to manage vast labor markets, thus expanding recruitment beyond the limits of the local labor market. Secluding workers is analyzed as a powerful labor management tool that enables the management to take advantage of the unrestricted availability of a migrant workforce (Smith, 2003: 345), shelters employers from high labor turnover rates, and depresses wages demands (Pun and Smith, 2007). Workers confined in dormitories are controlled more tightly and often compelled to work overtime (Pun, 2012; Schling, 2014). Spatial proximity in fact helps meeting just-in-time production deadlines, as in the case of footwear and sportswear subcontracting factories in China and Thailand discussed by Smyth et al. (2013: 395).

A second issue highlighted in the literature is the coercive nature of the dormitory labor regime through which employers actively maneuver the forms of accommodation in ways that weaken both social bonds and the bargaining power of the workers (Pun and Smith, 2007; Smyth et al., 2013: 401). Isolation and the absence of social networks, it is argued, play a crucial role in the control of workers. Employers’ strategies rely on spatial tactics making it difficult for unions and civil society organizations to access the workplace and provide support to workers. For example, in her study on migrant workers in Singapore, Yea (2017) shows that workers are segregated to designated dormitory accommodation in remote areas where civil society organizations cannot reach them. Dormitories are therefore discussed as ‘the cornerstone of the social control of workers in the workplace’ (Azmeh, 2014) and often analyzed as total institutions (Lucas et al., 2013).

Third, mobility and immobility of the workforce are often described as the outcome of managerial choices (Caro et al., 2015), as the management may retain or move workers according to production needs. Dormitories are analyzed as part and parcel of a regimented order. Pun (2005) shows that in much the same way as at the production site, control in the dormitories in China is overt and often punishment-oriented. The regimental approach is evident in the spatiality of the dormitories, which are mostly described as fenced by walls, with entrance gates guarded around the clock by security guards.

In short, scholars point out that workers are moved by others. Xiang and Lindquist (2014) argue that, increasingly, the mobility of international migrant workers is orchestrated by states, their agencies, and other actors on the basis of the employers’ needs. ‘Labor transplant’ of Chinese workers to Japan, South Korea, and Singapore consists not only of just-in-time migration controlled by states and agencies but also ‘to the point allocation’ of individual migrants to the exact place where they will start working immediately upon arrival, in order to satisfy the demands of a static capital (Xiang, 2012; see also Seo and Skelton, 2017).

Employer-driven workers’ mobility on the basis of a gridlocked capital is a key element also in the analysis of posted (or dispatched) workers in Europe that are employed in construction, shipbuilding, and meat processing (De Wispelaere and Pacolet, 2017), in jobs that can last from a few months to several years (Engbersen et al., 2013; Wagner, 2015). Furthermore, scholars point to the inability of workers to escape from the modes and the timing of the mobility into which they are coerced. Practices of withholding passports and salary and threats to deport the workers back home are also widely used to restrict the workers’ mobility.

To be sure, some scholars point at forms of workers’ mobility that the management is not able to control. Dormitories produce conditions for the mobility of workers between different plants and also in different countries. For instance, Azmeh (2014) underlines that some migrant workers in Jordan escape from the clothing factories and look for employment in other sectors, even when this entails leaving their passports with the firms. In the analysis of dormitories in China, Pun and Smith (2007) stress that dormitories have a ‘continued ubiquitous nature’ in that they not only reinforce management control but also nurture forms of resistance.

We take this line of research one step further by illustrating how the multiplicity of sites in Europe not only testifies to management’s growing recourse to temporarily stationary migrant work but also significantly increases the ability of migrant workers to both access a wider labor market and choose how to move across this vast chessboard. We shed light on the opportunities now available for workers’ self-tailored forms of mobility across the increasingly rich landscape of factories cum dormitories widespread across Europe or in single European countries.

Research methods

We offer the cases of migrant workers living at work in the Italian fashion industry and at the Foxconn plants in the Czech Republic. We are not interested in comparing the two cases, as the differences between them are macroscopic in terms of industry, dimensions of the plants, organization of production, workers’ background, and types of accommodation for workers. Nor do we intend to compare two national cases (for a critique of methodological nationalism see Amelina and Faist, 2012; Wimmer and Schiller, 2002). The two cases are relevant because they offer a somewhat similar pattern of workers’ mobility which is different from the cases discussed in the literature. In fact, in both cases, high numbers of workers regularly adopt exit strategies that go beyond the employers’ expectations. In turn, employers are forced to resort to ad hoc measures to stem the hemorrhage of workers.

Chinese migrants have been making inroads into the Italian fashion industry since the late 1980s, establishing small subcontracting businesses mainly in Italian industrial districts. Chinese nationals holding a permit to stay numbered 334,000 in 2017. Entrepreneurship is widespread: Chinese-run businesses total 50,737 units, one third of which are active in the industrial sector (Ministero del lavoro, 2017). In Prato, around 4000 Chinese firms are active in clothing and textiles (Camera di commercio, 2017).

The research in Italy is based on participant observation by providing services and consultancy to immigrants at the Immigration Research and Services Center in Prato, Italy – the hub of Chinese migration to Italy – for more than 10 years (1994–2007). We came into contact with women and men, mainly in their twenties, and thirties, working as small entrepreneurs, and as experienced and inexperienced workers. Given the length of time, the researcher happened to meet the same person more than once and was thus able to follow their change of fortune. Further fieldwork was conducted in the years 2012–2014 and 2017 which involved participating in a series of public events and interviewing Chinese workers and employers in their forties and fifties, children of Chinese employers, in their twenties, working in their parents’ workshops, the head of the local union of industrialists and the representative for the garment industry, local government officials, and the members of a cultural organization.

Foxconn is a Taiwanese company with 1.3 million employees and a manufacturing center in China, where it employs around 1 million people (Pun et al., 2014). Over the last 15 years it has also developed a territorial diversification strategy investing in various countries. In Europe it has now plants in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. In the 1990s, the Czech Republic was considered a migratory buffer zone between the West and the East (Wallace et al., 1996). However, international migrant workers in the Czech Republic grew in the 2000s, reaching more than 500,000 in 2017 and making up 10–11% of the workforce, working mainly in the manufacturing sector.¹

In the Czech Republic research was conducted from 2012 to 2018, focusing on the Foxconn factories of Pardubice and Kutna Hora. We carried out 70 interviews: 14 with key informants (job centers, labor inspectorates, job agency managers, union officials, and local NGO members), and 56 with workers directly employed by Foxconn (23 with Czech, Mongolian, Vietnamese, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, and Slovak workers) as well as migrant agency workers (33 with Romanian, Bulgarian, Slovak, and Polish workers). Interviewees worked on the assembly line, in quality testing, packaging and administration. Workers were predominantly male (37 against 19) with an average age of 38 years, with women younger than men; half of the interviewees were married but only 40% of them had children.

Unless stated otherwise, all information is drawn from the authors’ primary field research.

Workers’ mobility in Europe

Mobility of Chinese workers in the Italian fashion industry

Since the mid-1980s, when China began reopening its frontiers to those who wanted to emigrate, large numbers of Chinese migrants hailing from the southeastern coastal areas of Zhejiang and Fujian provinces, and later also from northeastern provinces, have chosen Europe as their destination. In Italy, Chinese migrants were able to enter the fashion industry en masse mainly becoming contracting entrepreneurs and workers employed by co-nationals.

Some 30 years later, the Chinese-run workshops active in the Italian fashion industry are small productive units, ranging from the larger ones that employ some 30–40 workers, to the majority of workshops that employ 5–15 workers. Both male and female workers are employed. The workforce includes the so-called skilled workers (chegong), less skilled workers (shougong), and odd job workers (zagongs) (see Ceccagno [2017a] on salary differentials for different working positions).

In Chinese workshops workers live at work, a condition that we term the ‘sleeping regime’ as workers are hosted in places much smaller than the larger dormitories described in literature. In fact, workers mostly eat, sleep, and spend their idle time in the shop premises, or else are housed in small numbers in apartments close to the workshop. Within the sleeping regime workers often work at night as employers routinely accept orders in the evening that need to be completed by the next morning. This organization of production entails the removal of the worker’s personal life, as husband and wife may work in different workshops and, in principle, workers’ children are not permitted to stay with their parents.

The role played by the sleeping regime is similar to other dormitory regimes in that these arrangements help in meeting just-in-time production deadlines. However, by working and living inside small workshops the workers experience forms of control that are different from those often described in the literature. Paternalism is widespread in much the same way as in large dormitories across the globe but relationships are informal and ‘family-like’ as, especially in the past decades, employers tended to perceive themselves as ‘the mums and the dads’ of the workers. In the cases in which bedrooms are inside the workshop premises and both workers and employers live in the shop, control over the workers is unfettered and there is no privacy whatsoever.

Scholars highlight the vulnerability of Chinese migrants and their total dependency upon their employers (Wu and Sheehan, 2011). While we are aware that forms of extreme exploitation of workers’ vulnerability do exist, we link the sleeping regime to a more comprehensive reconfiguration of the workplace that, to a certain extent, empowers the workers more than could have been expected. Over time, in fact, a ‘mobile regime’ has prevailed in the networks of Chinese contracting businesses according to which workers also experience short-term inter-workshop mobility. Workers temporarily move to other Chinese workshops that urgently need to complete orders, with the understanding that they will move back to their previous employer as soon as they are needed there. This form of short-term mobility is the result of an informal agreement between employers and employees.

I work in my parents’ workshop; besides myself and my parents, four workers work in the workshop. . . . The workers . . . live in an apartment that my parents have rented for them, near the workshop. These workers have been working with us for three years. They left when orders were fewer and there was not much work. That they moved elsewhere was good for my parents because if there is little work and the workers stay with you, you still have to feed and provide lodging to people who are idle, or only work a few hours a day. One of the workers went to work in an ironing workshop, and came back later, when new orders arrived. Another worked elsewhere for one and a half months, he too came back. I do not remember how long the other two worked elsewhere, but I do know that this was agreed upon with my parents. If there are not enough orders, to temporarily move to another workshop is good also for the workers as they work on a piece-rate system. (Male worker son of the employers, 22 years old, July 2012)

Together with the sleeping agreements, this form of workers’ inter-workshop mobility is structurally intrinsic to the organization of production. In fact, employers can count on workers’ unrestricted availability exactly because the workers live in the workshop premises or nearby; at the same time they also count on workers’ short-term mobility in order to meet fluctuating orders (Ceccagno, 2015). In the last decades, an informal nationwide network of Chinese contracting firms has routinely resorted to occasional workers for completing urgent orders.

The workers’ mobility takes place within a horizontal network of loosely connected workshops and the single employer’s authority over the workers is limited, especially in a situation where the latter do not have a regular contract. Our findings show that control over the workers’ mobility has increasingly slipped out of the hands of the employers. Contrary to the employers’ initial expectations, the sustained short-term mobility from one workshop to another has resulted in a nationwide form of workers’ networking whereby workers can compare the conditions offered by different employers. Further, the mobile regime has nurtured workers’ relational bonds and facilitated the weaving of information exchanges and social networks by exposing them to a kaleidoscope of information and opportunities.

As a result, another extreme form of workers’ mobility has tended to prevail over short-term mobility: workers increasingly tend to shape their self-tailored mobility by quitting their job and hopping from one employer to another much more than employers would like them to do:

If I am not satisfied with the boss and they do not pay me as much as I want, I can leave. It’s simple. Finding another job is easy. Years ago, it was customary to give a week or so of notice, but now everyone leaves overnight if they wish, they wait until they get paid and then they leave. The workers I know do the same, they leave when they are not satisfied. Or they ask for more money. (Male worker, 34 years old, July 2012)

Compared to the 1980s and 1990s, the mobility of workers has increased since the 2000s because changed historical contingencies have opened up new spaces of agency. In the late 1990s a new national law enabled Chinese workers to open their own small businesses. With many more workshops needing labor, workers had more opportunities for choosing their Chinese employers based on working hours, lodging, and salary. The possibility of moving to new employers was increased in the late 2000s by other structural changes. The previous constant influx of migrant workers from China has almost come to a halt, as better opportunities could be found in China. Further, Chinese migrants living in Italy increasingly look for less demanding jobs outside manufacturing, choosing import, wholesaling, and retailing or opening coffee bars and beauty salons. In a contest where, until recently, Chinese-run workshops tended to only employ Chinese workers, the multiplicity of workshops run by co-nationals greatly increased the opportunities for moving to employers who offered better conditions. Hence, today, the demands of employers are not met by an available supply of Chinese labor. This imbalance is particularly striking in relation to experienced workers, but it is evident also in relation to inexperienced workers. Against such a background, employers complain that with the new situation they are losing the grip on their workers:

Everybody becomes a small entrepreneur, who wants to be a worker anymore? And . . . the workers can make more demands: they want to eat well, sleep well. (Owner of a garment workshop, male, 45 years old, July 2012)

Nowadays, each potential employer, in competition with many others, tries to attract experienced workers. During the peak months, many offer them a fixed monthly wage (baoding) 20% higher than the salary based on the average piece-rate in exchange for a guarantee that the worker will not quit the job in the middle of the season. In their search for experienced workers, employers offer conditions that were unthinkable only a few years ago such as daytime-only work and no rush to complete orders, sleeping quarters close to but physically separated from the workplace, and Wi-Fi available for all workers. In recent years, some employers even offered to experienced workers the possibility of bringing their children with them.

The threat to quit, thus, functions as a lever that workers use for imposing demands that the management must accommodate, if only for the sake of retaining experienced workers and in general an increasingly scarce workforce. Thus, to a certain extent, salaries and working and living conditions are an open and contested process. All this change takes place in a context where the line separating experienced workers and employers is a fine one. In fact, since the early 2010s the effects of the economic crisis have pushed many small subcontractors back into the position of workers (Ceccagno, 2017a).

All in all, the mobile regime emerging from this study is a reconfiguration of the space of production – and workers’ lives – that, like many other cases described in the literature, coerces the workers into an unrestricted availability. And yet, the sleeping regime – in a context characterized by the paucity of Chinese workers – facilitates the workers’ self-chosen mobility.

To sum up, the spatiality of work and residence in the network of fashion workshops offers workers more strategies than their employers had in mind when they started promoting the short-term inter-workshop mobility.

Migrant workers’ mobility in the Czech Republic

In the Czech Republic Foxconn owns plants in Pardubice (since 2000) and Kutna Hora (since 2007) where it produces laptop and desktop computers, servers, and printer cartridges for brands like Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, and, until a few years ago, Apple. Moving to the Czech Republic was a strategic choice as Foxconn was able to avoid the EU’s high tariff barriers and move closer to its customers’ end markets in Western Europe (Evertiq, 2007).

Around 4000–5000 workers are employed in Pardubice and 1500–2000 in Kutna Hora. Foxconn employs a multinational workforce made up of local and migrant workers from Bulgaria, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Vietnam, and Ukraine. Czech and non-EU workers are usually hired directly by Foxconn; alternatively, EU migrants, who make up 40–50% of the workforce, are predominantly employed by temporary work agencies (TWAs) (Bormann and Plank, 2010) and accommodated in dormitories outside the factories.

A large portion of the workers in the factories are men (60–65%), but the proportion of women is higher on the assembly lines (migrants) and in the offices (Czechs). Until 2010, Foxconn hired workers aged between 20 and 40, but the high labor turnover has pushed the company to enlarge the labor market also employing workers over 40 years old. Core workers have different shifts (8 hours for 2–3 shifts and 12 hours for 2 shifts), while agency workers are employed only on 12-hour shifts, day and night (Andrijasevic and Sacchetto, 2017). Differences are also visible in wages: Foxconn operators are paid around 4 euros per hour and earn 650–700 euros per month, but agency workers are only paid when they work and have to make do with 3–3.5 euros per hour and a monthly pay packet of 480–560 euros. Czech workers are mainly hired for better tasks in terms of working conditions and wages, while migrants usually work on the assembly line and in packing, where they are deployed according to their nationality.

TWAs recruit workers from their countries of origin, transport them to Pardubice and Kutna Hora, and accommodate them in dormitories. Further, when production orders fall for short periods, workers may wait for days or even a week in the dormitory without working and without pay. When the waiting period is longer, agencies are likely to temporarily return the migrants to their countries of origin. Workers will be called back as soon as the production orders are up again.

Dormitories are not far away from the plants. They vary in size and can host from some dozens to 600 people sharing four-bedded rooms and in some cases also a bathroom with other male and female workers. As in Italy, usually no children are permitted but recently some workers were able to take their children to live in the dormitory. Agencies rent out a fixed number of rooms and pay the private owners of dormitories 3.20–5.60 euros per day per worker depending on the quality of the dormitory and its location.

TWAs’ coordinators of production and accommodation manage both the daily work and personal life of workers. In fact, they can enter the workers’ rooms and pressure them to go to work even when they are sleeping after a work-shift. Control by agency coordinators is not over-intrusive but it is continuous and aims to suppress behaviors that are considered dangerous (such as smoking in the rooms) or that can decrease productivity (excessive drinking) or encourage camaraderie (hosting friends). Thus, in many respects, the dormitories in the Czech Republic are similar to those discussed in the literature (Pun and Smith, 2007) with the workers’ mobility organized from above in order to capture and manage workers. However, if the workers’ point of view is taken into consideration, some critical facts emerge.

First, EU migrants at the Foxconn plants – in much the same way as those circulating between Poland and the Netherlands described by Pijpers (2010: 1083) – view TWAs as ‘anchors’ as they enable them to find accommodation and start working and earning a salary immediately upon arrival, and without bearing any direct costs for intermediary fees, transport, or accommodation. To move through TWAs, therefore, is perceived more as a self-chosen strategy than as a burden imposed by the management:

I worked in mines for 19 years and for 3 years as social worker in Bulgaria. In Bulgaria I made bad money, 140 euros per month . . . [I moved] in Plzeň [Czech Republic], where I worked for Panasonic, through a contract with Danč agency, a really good agency. We had a 6 month contract . . . I came here together with my husband, we learned about the job from the internet. I will see how it works in the coming months and then maybe I will go back to Bulgaria to find a better job, or maybe go to another agency. Maybe I will go to another country. (Bulgarian agency worker, female, 43 years old, September 2012)

Living at work is a practice that is gaining ground in Europe, although it has not (yet) become a regular feature of the European manufacturing landscape and it does not have the systemic characteristics of the dormitory labor regime in China.

I used to sleep in many dormitories. It’s not good but I like to change. All the time I found new people and something new. But it’s true that the dormitories are noisy places. You know, when you are four people in one room you have to take care also of the needs of those that share the place with you. (Slovakian agency worker, male, 50 years old, Pardubice, September 2012)

Second, most migrants, particularly the young ones, show little attachment to the firm and leave often within a few months. Because of poor career prospects, repetitive jobs and low wages, the yearly labor turnover of agency workers is 60–70% (Andrijasevic and Sacchetto, 2017). Labor turnover needs to be considered in the context of the large EU labor market where European migrants enjoy the right to freedom of movement:

I worked for six years in an Italian-owned garment factory at Ploiesti at the sewing machine, eight hours, normal, no problems, . . . in Romania I was fine but I wanted something more. In 2006 I moved to Spain where I had friends. . . . In Madrid I worked as a cleaner and in a bakery in Burgos. My partner worked in construction and then as an assistant cook. With the crisis, we lost our jobs and we lived on the unemployment allowance; when this was over, we came here. Some Romanian friends, who had been living here in Pardubice, told us how things were, and we thought it was fine and we came here . . . . I think people are moving because they have been out of work or because they are unemployed or because they want to see another country . . . it’s not a specific country’s fault, for example Spain or the Czech Republic. It’s because of the global economy, when we become unemployed here we go to Romania, we see what happens there and if all goes well we can stay there or we move to another country that’s open for us to go, isn’t it? (Romanian agency worker, female, 29 years old, September 2012)

While staying in the dormitories produces social-spatial segregation (Caro et al., 2015), it also guarantees the workers a certain degree of sociability and exchange of information, as migrants are often gathered on the basis of the country of origin. In fact, workers also make the decision to stay in or quit a job assessing the different employment opportunities across Europe while staying in the dormitories.

Third, migrant workers can move to private apartments, and a small number of them actually do, in order to free themselves from the control and pressure in the dorms. Private houses are rented directly by workers but TWAs may help in the search. Living in a rented apartment offers the possibility of greater inclusion in local society, but entails additional costs, and a minimum knowledge of the local institutions and Czech language. When workers move into flats, agencies contribute approximately 115 euros for the rent and the workers have to pay the rest, namely an additional 150–250 euros. While this may be seen as an advantage, accommodation costs are often perceived as a burden that increases the workers’ vulnerability. A large part of the agency workers choose not to rent a flat and prefer to stay in the dormitory (Andrijasevic and Sacchetto, 2017) as they consider their job and their presence in the Czech Republic as temporary:

We talked [my partner and I] about renting a flat. But now, it’s ok here in the dormitory. To move to a flat we need someone to help us to find it, we need a little bit of money. We know few words of Czech. The agency can give us some money if we rent a flat, 3000 crowns [115 euros] per person. If you don’t work at least 150 hours a month you have to pay the full rent but they usually call you at work to make sure we work at least 150 hours. (Romanian agency worker, female, 27 years old, September 2012)

What is worth emphasizing here is that workers’ mobility is facilitated by the growing number of factories in Europe that accommodate workers in dormitories. Counting on their previous work experiences, and driven by the goal of looking for ever better opportunities for themselves and their families, temporary workers at the Foxconn Czech plants devise their own mobility strategies based on their knowledge of the labor markets and working conditions in different workplaces, comparing wages, hourly standards and production quotas. They are thus able to jump from one job to another in search of better conditions. Further, the high labor turnover is reinforced by the workers’ widespread perception that unions are ‘useless’ as unionists mainly promote better working and living conditions for local workers (Andrijasevic and Sacchetto, 2016).

Concluding remarks

Evidence from our fieldwork suggests that the mobility of workers living at work in Europe is the result of the interplay of employers’ strategies and workers’ self-tailored mobility. In fact, as much as capital considers the workforce living at work as temporary, migrant workers themselves hold a temporary perspective of the workplace that facilitates their exit strategies in search of less exploitative conditions. If looked at from the single workplace perspective, at a certain point in time, dormitories do fulfill the role attributed to them by the employers of capturing the workforce and ensuring that it meets the needs of production in an unrestricted way. However, if the multiplicity of accommodation at work increasingly widespread in the EU – in a context of a regulated freedom of mobility – is considered, a growing potential emerges for workers’ mobility in terms of exit strategies.

This process is better grasped when the workers’ subjectivity is taken into account against the background of changing structural labor conditions in Europe. Counting on a host of conditions and actors, including TWAs, social networks, their own previous international working experiences, and the growing interests of employers in Europe in having workers living at work, the migrant workers discussed in this article increasingly look at the experience of living at work from a different perspective: they see employers less as gatekeepers and more as providing the opportunity to get a foothold in the labor market, access higher wages and/or better living conditions. In sum, workers consider the multiplicity of accommodation at work, increasingly widespread across Europe, as a chessboard where they can jump from one square to another in search of better conditions. This kind of mobility, in turn, shows that the dormitory regime in Europe in itself opens up unexpected spaces of self-tailored mobility that researchers tend to neglect.

The time dimension is of paramount importance for gaining insights into this phenomenon. Our study takes into account the experience gained by workers over time and the role it plays in increasing or reducing workers’ confidence that a better job can be found in the growing number of live-in firms. We suggest that the mobility of workers between different workplaces should be considered a specific ability that workers acquire over time and use to their advantage. As shown, Chinese workers in Italy moving from one workshop to another learn either from co-workers or by direct experience that other employers offer more comfortable living arrangements, better food and/or wages or that in other workshops night work is not the rule. Similarly, EU workers living at work in the Czech Republic are able to gather information on different opportunities in Europe and move quickly from one workplace to another.

The subjective reasons that drive migrant workers to accept long and sporadic working hours, and at times substandard accommodation, are repeatedly overlooked in most literature that tends to label migrant workers only as victims (for a critique see Rogaly, 2009). However, without including the workers’ subjectivity, the analysis remains incomplete and is unable to identify the multiplicity of drivers that explain the workers’ mobility. While we are aware that workers in dormitories live in hyper-precarious conditions (Lewis et al., 2015), our findings suggest that the workplace itself contributes to creating the conditions for some form of workers’ transnational mobility power (Alberti, 2014; Andrijasevic and Sacchetto, 2016; Smith, 2006). We thus agree with the body of literature that considers labor’s free mobility as a form of power and highlights the role played by migrant workers in the regulation of labor markets (Lusis and Bauder, 2010).

Our findings show that not only young, single workers, but also older male and female workers are mobile. In particular, the workforce in the Chinese-run workshops is made up of both female and male workers of ages ranging from around 20 to 50. In the Czech Republic, dormitories host both EU women and men of any age although the majority of workers are men. We argue that this social composition of the workforce is made possible by the combination of two crucial elements: the provision of dormitories for the workers together with a systematic outsourcing of social reproduction. Production and reproduction are closely connected and co-constituted. In both research cases, the daily reproduction of workers is strictly connected and subordinated to production needs, as workers are subjected to the capital productive cycle (Schling, 2014), while social reproduction in terms of care for family members is externalized, either to the country of origin or to other workers. A mainly intra-ethnic organization of reproductive work prevails among the Chinese migrants in Italy whereby Chinese migrant women take care of other Chinese migrants’ children day and night in their own homes (Ceccagno, 2017b). This practice is paralleled by the long-standing practice of sending babies back to their grandparents in China. In the case of the workers at Foxconn, social reproduction is shouldered by family members – especially women, including grandmothers – in the countries of origin, as having children in dormitories is usually forbidden.

The combination of dormitories and the outsourcing of the social reproduction thus contributes to shape the social composition of migrant workers and facilitates a self-tailored mobility from one factory cum dormitory to another. The virtual exclusion of social reproduction is both a form of dispossession imposed by the dormitory labor regime on the workers and a condition workers increasingly take advantage of as it increases their potential for mobility in and out of different labor markets in Europe. Moreover, dorms – and also TWAs in the case of the Foxconn workers – are subjectively perceived by the workers as making their transnational lives easier. Our interviewees repeatedly stated that living in a dormitory at the workplace, or in a flat provided by the employer, favors their (transnational) mobility plans as they do not need to spend energy and money in searching for a place to live or taking care of everyday chores.

The different organization of production and tasks for workers in the two research sites impacts on the horizons workers develop vis-a-vis the job market: being required to perform simple tasks that rarely provide valuable skills, migrant workers in the Czech Republic can potentially look for a job across different industries throughout Europe. Experienced Chinese workers in the Italian fashion industry, on the other hand, count on skills that are in high demand and easily marketable, and therefore – unless the opportunity arises in jobs that are perceived as less demanding such as those in the service industry – do not actively look for a job in other industries. Skills in this case tend to favor an intra-industry mobility of workers. Furthermore, agency workers at Foxconn tend to perceive themselves as precarious and replaceable (Schling, 2014); Chinese workers, on the other hand, are increasingly aware of their bargaining power.

To sum up, different elements point to situations in the European Union which are quite different from those often portrayed in the literature. We contend that in Europe dormitories cannot be viewed only as structures to coerce workers into forms of mobility devised and implemented from above: the multiplicity of sites needs to be considered because this spatiality helps the workers to expand their horizons and their perception of the opportunities available. While this tends to empower the workers, their mobility power can be unstable.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Ferruccio Gambino, Gabriella Alberti and Chris Smith for their insightful comments on an earlier version of the article. They are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for helping improving the article. The authors would also like to acknowledge that the research at Foxconn plants in the Czech Republic was conducted from 2012 to 2018 by Rutvica Andrijasevic and Devi Sacchetto. The authors would also like to acknowledge that the research on Chinese migrants in Italy was conducted by Antonella Ceccagno.

Funding

The work described in this article has been partially supported by ‘From China to Europe. Migration and Gender in the Global Production Network’, Research Grant from the University of Padova (BIRD165471/16).

ORCID iD

Antonella Ceccagno

Notes

Author biographies

Antonella Ceccagno is Professor teaching Sociology of East Asia at the University of Bologna, Italy. For more than 10 years she worked as the Director of the Center for Immigration Research and Services in Prato, Italy. She is interested in the emergence of new labor regimes and the role of migrants in processes of urban, regional, and industry restructuring. She is the author of the book City Making and Global Labor Regimes (2017). Her current research interests revolve around the mobility of migrant workers and processes of workforce ethnicization.

Devi Sacchetto is Associate Professor of Sociology of Labor at the University of Padova, Italy. He has published on the impact of migration on labor relations and labor markets focusing on changes in Eastern Europe where he has conducted longitudinal and ethnographic research. His current research projects are on the social relations between local and migrant workers in Italian slaughterhouses, and on the ways in which ‘Chinese’ modes of production and management are impacting on work and employment relations in Europe.

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