Temporary Agency work at the periphery of the EU: The experience of non-EU workers employed in big industrial plants

Event Date: 1 November 2017

Speaker: Dr Olena Fedyuk, Research Fellow, Center for Policy Studies, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

Time: 4-5pm
Location: Strathclyde Business School, Cathedral Wing, CW507a

This seminar will cover two interrelated working projects that explore the experience of Temporary Agency (TA) work in the Visegrad Four countries, and in particular, the work of Ukrainian temporary agency workers in electronics plants in Hungary. While there is a considerable critique of the TA in the core EU countries, in small urban and rural settings of countries like Hungary, Slovakia and Czech Republic, this type of employment acquires a different meaning due to lack of other forms of employment prospects and low salaries. Similarly, for non-EU (Ukrainian) workers TA work often offers the only legal way of obtaining employment in the EU. Far from celebrating the TA’s form of employment, this research tries to map out a more complex picture of TA employment in the context of the EU periphery and the role it plays in non-EU migrants’ lives.

The seminar will discuss research findings focused on the state of Ukrainian labour protection in Ukraine as a sending country, the role of Ukrainian Trade Unions and associations in attempting to protect workers transnationally and to secure standards of employment at the TAs recruiting for work abroad. Also presented will be the first fieldwork findings concerning the role of TA employment in the professional trajectories of the Ukrainian migrant workers, common labour rights violations at the workplace, mechanisms used to defend rights at the workplace, and the role of the TA as a guarantor of both employment and legality in the EU.

Project titles:

Temporary Agency Work as a Form and Channel of Labour Immigration (AnBlokk Association for Cultural and Social Sciences, Hungary supported by Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (Germany/Hungary) та Foundation for Population, Migration and Environment (Sweden))

Towards stronger transnational labour enforcement cooperation on labour migration (Hosted by: Multicultural Center Prague, Supported by Visegrad Fund)

For further information please contact:Dora Scholarios

Published: 24 October 2017