European Integration and Transnational Labor Markets

Abstract

In January and February 2009, a wave of wildcat strikes swept across the United Kingdom, as British workers protested the employment of Italian and Portuguese workers at construction contractors at power plants. These protests erupted spontaneously from workers who were angered at foreign contractors bringing their ‘posted’ workforce from abroad to work on UK sites while local workers remained unemployed.¹ The result was a compromise settlement, in which some jobs were made available to British workers. More important, it set off a debate in the United Kingdom about the role of ‘obscure European law’ (Winnet and Squires 2009) in opening Europe’s labor markets. The issue of posted workers is not confined to the United Kingdom; all over Europe worker posting is becoming a standard way for employers in some industries to access cheap, unregulated labor (Menz 2005; Felini et al. 2007; Lillie and Greer 2007). The European public is gradually awaking to the realization that national labor market institutions are a thing of the past. This transnationalization of labor markets is likely to have as much influence on national political economies in coming years as the transnationalization of capital had in the past two decades.