Over the past 20 years, numerous studies on the development of global scale care migration have shown that its generalized representation and labelling as migration from the Global South to the Global North is inaccurate: neither does it apply to migration movements between Asian countries (see Michel and Peng 2012), nor to transnational migrations in Europe where the majority of migrant care givers are Europeans, many of them are circular migrants. They move from a location in post-socialist Europe southwards or westwards to a household in a more affluent European country for a certain period of time (6 weeks to three months or more). There, they take care of seniors, children, and whole families in private households. During their absence form their own homes, family members (grandmothers, daughters, cousins, sometimes fathers) take care of their remaining dependents. My contribution to this debate deals with the current multi-faceted situation in Europe where the terms East and West are shifting: A majority of senior care-givers migrates to private household in Western and Southern Europe, but there are also those who start this work by moving into a post socialist rich upper-class household in a relatively richer neighboring country of the former Eastern Bloc. Triggered by the liberalization, softening or trimming of state care obligations, the involvement of brokers/placement agencies is boosting the marketization of care work. At the same time, the perception of the workers; cultural closeness; concerning religion, and race (here: whiteness) play a role in the multi-faceted and, multi-scalar perception of care-workers from Eastern Europe. If one wants to understand this development, then a debate about the preference of senior households for 'white' and 'Christian' migrant carers is as much a part of it as a look at the history of racialization in Europe.

Why are essential workers so often migrants? Are migrants recruited for jobs with difficult working conditions that are shunned by citizens? How is the use of migrant labour linked to structural factors in the provision of essential services? Using micro data from the EU Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) 2011-2020 for 17 countries, this paper investigates the reasons for the over-representation of migrant workers in essential services relative to the rest of the economy. We use a two-step procedure. First, we capture at the country level the relative probability for migrant workers to be employed in an essential occupation compared to natives, controlling for worker characteristics such as age, education and marital status. While some characteristics are critical for explaining employment in essential occupations (notably being a non-EU migrant and low-skilled), some unexplained over-representation remains. Secondly, we regress this residual over-representation on indicators for industrial structure, job characteristics, and labour market structure. Finally, we investigate whether such structural factors matter more in essential occupations with a relatively high share of lower-skilled workers, and we conduct the analysis at a regional level in order to explore differences within countries.

Labour mobility, posting of workers, and intra-corporate transfers of employees are sensitive social and policy issues in the European labour market, but at the macro level they may appear as manageable because affecting relatively small minorities of workers. The paper examines them in the extreme critical case of the ‘global workplaces’ of the Italian shipbuilding Fincantieri group, which in 2013 took over the Norwegian shipbuilding multinational Vard and is now one of the largest producers of ships in the world, with yards in Italy, Norway, Romania as well as in Vietnam, USA, Brazil. Given the weight of geographically-tied capital, Fincantieri has engaged in so-called ‘reverse relocation’, by moving workers rather than sites, leading to a situation where up to 80% of production workers are non-nationals. Given that labor markets are increasingly connected, international mobility for employers as well as for workers creates opportunities for both to enter but also exit the labor market in different employment regimes across countries. Yet, there is limited research on how international migration affects working conditions for workers on standard and non-standard contracts in sectors where both production and workers are mobile. Employers’ “exit” opportunity is thought to decrease the power of workers. However, if both employers and workers are able to “exit”, how does this affect the terms and conditions of workers on standard and non-standard contracts in the sending and receiving countries?Through a multi-sited case study covering the European yards, the paper looks at how the different regimes of labour mobility for EU and non-EU workers interact with ethnic hierarchies and labour segmentation, and at the challenges they raise for social regulations and collective organisation at local and transnational level.