Labour market hierarchies within and beyond the EU: Poland’s politics of migration

Abstract

This article shows how the hierarchised nature of the EU mobility regime is underpinned by member states’ policies in a major country of emigration such as Poland. Drawing on historical institutionalism, this paper documents the path-dependent approach regarding policies that have contributed to the outflow of Polish workers and simultaneously to meet the demand for labour at home. While concerns about the consequences of emigration were raised already in 2005, Polish governments have kept defending the EU policies that underpin this outflow and its hierarchised nature. Rather than to improve the rights of Polish mobile workers, Polish governments have defended companies’ rights to use ‘wage competitiveness’ as a method of increasing mobility. In response to the increasing demand in the domestic labour market, governments first tried return campaigns, but they have since turned to importing labour, especially from Ukraine. In this way, the policies of the Polish state have helped reaffirm the hierarchised nature of the EU mobility regime by exporting workers to be subjected to poor conditions abroad while importing Ukrainian workers to experience poor conditions at home. Thus, Poland occupies an unusual place in the ‘migration chain’, being, simultaneously, a source of as well as a destination for migrant workers.