Posting and agency work in British construction and hospitality: the role of regulation in differentiating the experiences of migrants

Abstract

This article engages with IHRM debates on the transnational regulation of labour, exploring how migration policy and work fragmentation affect employment dynamics in multi-employer settings. It draws from two qualitative case studies on migrant workers in British hospitality and construction, focusing on regulatory outcomes of the Agency Worker Directive, the Posting of Workers Directive and the Tier System of immigration. The findings illustrate how workers’ experiences are critically shaped by the combination of their migration and employment statuses in the context of firms’ restructuring strategies and transnational labour mobility. Temporal employment constraints and exclusion from equal treatment linked to migrant status, combined with labour subcontracting across the sectors, produce intensification of work, inferior terms and conditions, greater insecurity and dependence for migrant temporary workers. The main argument is that increasing differentiation between categories of migrant workers goes beyond the simple distinction of EU and Third Country Nationals, and is produced by the exceptional regulatory spaces into which these migrants are locked. Highlighting the combined influence of migration regulation and management restructuring practices, the article proposes a re-theorisation of IHRM that includes migration perspectives into the study of management changes and labour regulation.

Keywords:

• Migration
• regulation
• EU
• agency workers
• fragmentation
• posting
• hospitality
• construction

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Erratum

Acknowledgments

The research on the construction case studies was supported by the European Research Consortium [grant number TWES 263782]. The authors would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their comments and the editor of the special issue for the very constructive guidance throughout the whole process.

Notes

1. Working Time Regulations in the U.K. set the limit to working time hours, rest breaks and paid leave for almost all categories of workers including the majority of agency workers. They establish a maximum average of 48 h a week that workers can be expected to work, and yet the U.K. is the only EU member state allowing workers to ‘opt out’ from the 48-h threshold (ACAS, 2017).