When strong unions meet precarious migrants: Building trustful relations to unionise labour migrants in a high union-density setting

Bjarke Refslund

Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2021, vol. 42, issue 2, 314-335

Abstract: Based on case studies in a fish processing plant and a demolition company, this article shows how strong and institutionally embedded unions interact with migrant workers in a precarious labour market position in order to safeguard their working conditions and organise them. It shows how strong unions are in a good position to include migrant workers and thereby resist labour market segmentation. The strong Danish unions, faced with the serious challenges of intra-European labour migration, have increased their attention and resources devoted to organising migrant workers and including them in the IR model. The dynamic relation between migrant workers and national unions in this high-density setting is discussed, emphasising the need for building a trustful relation between the migrant workers and the unions in order to empower the migrants to better navigate the national labour market and increase the workers’ workplace power vis-a-vis employers.

Keywords: Collective bargaining; labour migration; migrant workers; union organising; unionisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0143831X18760989 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecoind:v:42:y:2021:i:2:p:314-335

DOI: 10.1177/0143831X18760989

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic and Industrial Democracy from Department of Economic History, Uppsala University, Sweden
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().