Ines Wagner

Institutt for samfunnsforskning, Oslo

This article examines the role of the media in the EU freedom of movement debate through the lens of high-circulation German and UK newspapers during the first half of 2014. It explores how the media problematised migration from Eastern European member states and its influence on national host country labour markets and welfare systems. It also ana...

Job evaluation systems have a history of being critiqued as upholding gender inequality. Paradoxically, however, the Icelandic Equal Pay Standard (IEPS), a novel and publicly praised gender equality policy, is based on a job evaluation tool. The aim of this article is to stipulate an initial analysis of how key stakeholders in the Icelandic context...

The aim of this chapter is thus to demonstrate how posting is part of a much broader process of employment institutional change. We underline the inter-regional similarities by engaging in a systematic comparison of how posting in Europe and transnational labour mobility practices in East Asia have become functionally equivalent business strategies...

The formulation of common political positions from the trade union movement at the European Union (EU) level mainly takes place at the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC). In the case of the Enforcement Directive of the Posting of Workers Directive, a central cleavage line runs between neither countries nor political parties, but between diff...

How the European Union handles posted workers is a growing issue for a region with borders that really are just lines on a map. Ines Wagner’s Workers without Borders exposed a distressing dichotomy: how could a country with such strong employers’ associations and trade unions allow for the establishment and maintenance of such a precarious labor ma...

In 2018, Iceland introduced a statutory certification process for companies and institutions with over 25 employees, which, through this process, must prove that they pay men and women the same for the same job. This mechanism moves the burden of proof from employee to employer and forces companies to develop a more transparent system for the way t...

The chapter scrutinised how German and Danish unions are navigating in the increasingly integrated slaughterhouse industry within a large Danish multi-national slaughterhouse company with operations in both Denmark and Germany. In particular, the German slaughterhouse industry is highly affected by increasing fragmentation of production and widespr...

Germany and Denmark are among the world’s largest exporters of meat products. Two decades ago their labour markets were similar, but since then they have diverged significantly. The industry in Denmark has maintained high wages and good working conditions, while in Germany there has been a rapid growth in precarious employment, with widespread use...

There is considerable evidence that employers are violating the labour rights of mobile EU workers. However there is disagreement as to whether the lack of enforcement of these rights is caused by poor EU-level or weak national-level potential to oversee and sanction infringing companies and to enforce the rules. This poses the following three ques...

In the course of European integration, national trade unions in Europe founded the umbrella organization of the European Trade Union Confederation in order to establish common political positions. Drawing on the case of supranational politics of services regulation, this study shows how cleavages within the EU’s multi-level system of labor regulati...

The reconfiguration of political space lies at the heart of the European project and is the subject of manifold studies on the new shape of the European Union, but relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which borders are de- and reconstructed in a pan-European labour market. In a pan-European labour market, state borders shift. Po...

Worker ‘posting’ or temporary migration of manual workers sent by their employers to work on projects abroad has become increasingly prominent in the European construction industry. It is now normal to find groups of workers from all around Europe on construction sites, living in nearby temporary accommodations, moving on to other projects or back...

This paper traces a moment of transnational action in the German meat industry through an alliance of transnational posted workers, a local civil society organisation and the trade union NGG (Gewerkschaft Nahrung Genuß Gaststätten). As labor's channels of influence have broken down and low-wage worker posting has intensified trade unionists have re...

Die Entwicklung eines europäischen Arbeitsmarktes, eine Reihe am Europäischen Gerichtshof (EuGH) verhandelter Fälle und die sich daraus ergebenden Konsequenzen für industrielle Beziehungen auf nationaler Ebene haben dem Thema Arbeitnehmerentsendung zu unrühmlicher Prominenz verholfen. Fragen, wie sich die Lebenswelten, die Arbeitsbedingungen und di...

Mindestlohn: Für erfolgreiche Umsetzung noch einiges zu tun Damit der allgemeine Mindestlohn ein Erfolg wird, ist noch einiges zu tun. Das zeigt eine neue Studie des Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Instituts (WSI) in der Hans-Böckler-Stiftung. Wichtig sind nach Analyse der Forscher klarere Regeln in einigen wichtigen praktischen Fragen,...

This article analyses the micro-level rule enactment of the posting of workers framework in the German construction sector. I examine how actors draw on different power resources in order to influence policies without formal negotiation within transnational workspaces and thereby initiate institutional change. Drawing on interviews with posted work...

European integration through mutual recognition has facilitated the growth of a pan-European labour supply system in which transnational subcontractors ‘post’ workers from low-wage areas to higher wage areas. This allows employers to create spaces of exception in which the national industrial relations system of the country where work occurs does n...