The mobility of workers living at work in Europe

Abstract

Scholars, mainly focusing on Asia, consistently describe the im/mobility of workers living at work as orchestrated from above. This article bring to the forefront forms of workers’ mobility that take place outside of the established and often policed tracks. Focusing on Europe, the article shows that the mobility of workers is the outcome of the interplay of both employers’ strategies and workers’ agency. Based on extensive fieldwork among migrant workers in Europe – Chinese migrants in the Italian fashion industry, and Eastern European migrant workers at the Foxconn electronics plants in the Czech Republic – the article offers a new approach. Instead of focusing on the single workplace at a certain point in time, it adopts a perspective that considers the multiplicity of accommodations at work for workers across Europe along the time dimension. By extending the study of the dormitory regime to the European Union, the article highlights the way the growing frequency of factories cum dormitories to a certain extent empowers the workers as their horizons extend to other sites within Europe and are not limited to a single firm.