Practicing European Industrial Citizenship: The Case of Labour Migration to Germany

This paper shows how one form of labour mobility, unique to the European Union - namely posted work - undermines industrial citizenship in Germany. Posted workers move abroad as part of a dependent work relationship, rather than moving as individuals to take up a job in the host country. Although originally intended as a way for firms to send employees abroad for short periods, posting has become a way to avoid labour regulation and employ low wage migrants in precarious jobs. While industrial citizenship is under pressure in Germany generally this chapter focuses on how posted work introducing into the German industrial relations system a class of workers with tenuous relations to the system’s regulatory jurisdiction undermines industrial citizenship in Germany. Use of posting avoids contesting the validity of labour rights and industrial citizenship concepts directly, but instead asserts that specific workers under exceptional circumstances are outside those concepts’ realm of application. This works because labour rights, like human rights generally, are exercised via national systems, and posted workers are partially outside of these systems. Our approach is to examine the contradictions between industrial and market citizenship concepts, and to trace their implications in practice. We make the case that industrial citizenship developed as a way to socially regulate markets in democratic societies. We then show that EU regulation, and specifically posted work, undermine national industrial citizenship through constitutionalizing markets. We conclude that dominance of market concepts in the EU regulation of posted work circumvents and undermines Germany’s industrial citizenship institutions.