The Right Not to Have Rights: Posted Worker Acquiescence and the European Union Labor Rights Framework
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Nathan Lillie
Abstract
The emergence of the European Union citizenship agenda has mainly taken place along the evolution of mobility rights, with the goal of creating a pan-European labor market. Mobility undermines the nationally embedded notion of industrial citizenship. Industrial citizenship protects workers’ rights and secures their participation in national political systems. The Europeanization of labor markets severs the relationship between state, territory and citizen on which industrial citizenship has been built, undermining worker collectivism and access to representation. This is legitimated in terms of building market-citizenship, i.e., enabling mobile workers as market actors. However, the way mobility is regulated in the EU has the purpose and effect of weakening collective labor institutions, which also undermines workers’ ability to act as autonomous market actors. The same factors which undermine the industrial citizenship of mobile workers also prevent them from being effective free market agents: i.e., they can neither negotiate nor enforce individual contracts effectively in the face of systematic employer fraud and wage theft. The “Arendtian dilemma” of the “right to have rights” — a dilemma that derives from the claim that rights depend on the existence of a political community, which until now is the territorially exclusive nation-state, rather than universal personhood — emerges as industrial citizenship is internationalized. By disembeddeding workers from host-country industrial relations systems, EU regulation provides the social context in which workers’ rights become alienable.
© 2016 by Theoretical Inquiries in Law
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Theoretical Inquiries in Law
- Research Article
- Introduction: Labor Scholarship in an Era of Uncertainty
- Research Article
- Reframing the New Deal: The Past and Future of American Labor and the Law
- Research Article
- The Right Not to Have Rights: Posted Worker Acquiescence and the European Union Labor Rights Framework
- Research Article
- Organizing: Should the Employer Have a Say?
- Research Article
- Workplace Democracy and Democratic Worker Organizations: Notes on Worker Centers
- Research Article
- Organizing Workers in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico: The Authoritarian-Corporatist Legacy and Old Institutional Designs in a New Context
- Research Article
- Organizing Workers in “Hybrid Systems”: Comparing Trade Union Strategies in Four Countries — Austria, Germany, Israel and the Netherlands
- Research Article
- Trade Union Ambivalence Toward Enforcement of Employment Standards as an Organizing Strategy
- Research Article
- Unionizing Subcontracted Labor
- Research Article
- The Untamed Politics of Urban Informality: “Gray Space” and Struggles for Recognition in an African City
- Research Article
- Informal Workers’ Aggregation and Law
- Research Article
- Active Industrial Citizenship of Domestic Workers: Lessons Learned from Unionizing Attempts in Israel and the United Kingdom
- Research Article
- Organizing in the Shadows: Domestic Workers in the Netherlands
