Employers' Interests in International Labour Migration - A Comparison of Four European Countries

This presentation is based on three chapters of the book “Do Employers Matter? Their Impact on Labour Migration” (editor: Marek Okólski, to be published in the IMISCOE Springer Series). The book provides a novel theoretical framework for researching employers’ impact on labour migration, drawing from New Institutional Economics, particularly the concept of the institutional environment and Williamson’s four-level approach to analysing social phenomena. We understand the institutional environment as a dynamic ensemble of informal and formal rules and their enforcement, in which institutions interact with each other and with various players, and are shaped by powerful organisations, for example, trade unions or intermediaries. This approach is necessary in migration studies, since existing theories provide a fragmented picture of the impact of employers’ interests on labour migration, often reducing their role to creating labour demand. Our approach enables the analysis of employers’ interests on the micro, meso and macro scale, from hiring decisions to their impact on policymaking. We used this approach to research employers in four European countries: Germany, the UK, Italy, and Poland, which represent different varieties of capitalism – a coordinated market economy, liberal market economy, Mediterranean mixed-market economy, and dependent market economy. The presentation will focus primarily on Poland, whose post-communist development depended on foreign investments and was facilitated by a relatively well-qualified and abundant labour force. Since European Union accession in 2004, the country transformed from having few labour immigrants into the leading EU labour-importing destination. We examine the central role of employers in shaping Poland’s liberal labour migration regime between 2006 and 2025. This regime would not have materialised were it not for pressure from employers, especially farmers. Based on a combination of government archival materials and expert interviews, we reconstruct employers’ lobbying strategies across six critical periods of legal or on-the-ground change. Ukrainian citizens dominate the migration flows, but in the last decade, employers have been supported in recruiting foreign workers by intermediaries, who not only facilitate administrative procedures but also open new geographical channels of immigration into Poland. The key role of farmers in Polish migration policymaking inspired us to investigate the same sector in the UK, Germany and Italy. A comparative chapter analyses how differences in the varieties of capitalism and other elements of the institutional environments influence agricultural employers’ strategies regarding migrant workers. Exceptional regulations for agriculture exist in all four countries, but crucial details diverge. In Germany and post-Brexit UK, seasonal migration is strictly regulated, and migrants must depart after completing work. In Italy and Poland, lax enforcement leads to irregular employment and facilitates non-EU agricultural workers’ movement to other sectors. Different varieties of capitalism also led to dramatically different roles of intermediaries, who operate within defined legal frameworks in Germany and the UK, but circumvent regulations or co-shape the environment in Italy and Poland. Enforcement is thus the key element of the institutional environment determining the pursuit of agricultural employers’ migrant-related interests. Nevertheless, employers can effectively shape labour migration, irrespective of the country’s variety of capitalism and other path-dependencies.