Lisa Berntsen

De Burcht (Scientific Research Institute for the Dutch Labour Movement

This article explores the underexamined role of personal enablers in migrant entrepreneurship. Drawing on timeline interviews, the study relays the importance of entrepreneur enablers in migrants’ business endeavours over time, ranging from coincidental and ephemeral encounters to the development of supportive communities. In the absence of accessi...

Despite attempts by the Dutch government to combat and discourage unlawful residence, there are people who live in the Netherlands without a residence permit. However, little is known about the way they live (or survive) and work in the Netherlands. Although their residence is not legal, this does not mean that migrants without residence permits ha...

Purpose With a focus on the position of EU mobile workers in the Dutch meat industry, this article discusses the multi-level State efforts to enhance protection of workers who experienced limited protection of existing State and private enforcement institutions. The COVID-19 pandemic, with virus outbreaks at Dutch meat plants, fuelled public and po...

In an attempt to probe the nuanced processes of non-unionization, this article analyses the agency of migrant construction workers and the ways they negotiate and navigate an increasingly flexible and pan-European labour market. Drawing upon qualitative interview data, the article argues that the precarious employment context limits opportunities f...

freely available at: https://www.cnr.it/sites/default/files/public/media/attivita/editoria/EULab_2021_LABOUR_MIGRATION_IN_THE_TIME_OF%20COVID19.pdf

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought several structural labour mobil- ity issues to the fore. While the work of many migrants – suddenly coined essential workers – continued during the pandemic, their health and safety is not always well protected, thus leaving them at higher risk of COVID-19 infection. This working paper provides a ta...

This article analyses how highly skilled refugees experience barriers and enablers to entrepreneurship in the Netherlands. Using the welcoming talent model, the article claims that material and procedural norms as well as the governance of support for refugee entrepreneurship in the Netherlands needs a new design. Through socio‐legal research on th...

In this chapter, drawing on socio-legal re- search and qualitative empirical studies, we discuss these contradictory ‘broad’ and ‘narrow’ notions of ‘posting of workers’. We show that the narrow notion does not paint an adequate picture since it suffers from serious data quality problems. Therefore, it tends to mischaracterise the phenomena as more...

Dit boek gaat over de ervaringen van ondernemende migranten met recht en praktijk. Migranten* (humanitaire migranten, economische migranten, gezinsmigranten én Nederlanders met een zogenaamde migratieachtergrond) hebben baat bij betere afstemming tussen beleid en acties gericht op inclusie en ondernemerschap. Het is opmerkelijk dat migranten die w...

This article examines the causes of declining union membership. The first part analyses the decline of the union density rate in the Netherlands by means of time series regression analysis. The downward trend is related to employment growth, changes in the composition of employment, government policies and wage restraint. The fact that employment g...

Dit artikel onderzoekt de achtergronden van dalend vakbondslidmaatschap. In het eerste deel wordt met behulp van een tijdreeksanalyse de daling van de organisatiegraad in Nederland verklaard. De dalende trend hangt samen met de werkgelegenheidsgroei, veranderingen in de werkgelegenheidsstructuur, overheidsbeleid en cao-loonmatiging. Dat werkgelegen...

This chapter focusses on employer sanctions and examines the functioning of sanctions as a policy tool for migration control. Bernsten and De Lange challenge the idea that employer sanctions, as executed in the Netherlands, are a tool for migration control and analyse the extent to which they are tools for labour market regulation and/or a tool for...

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...

The posting of migrant workers has become an important employment channel for cross-border employment within the European Union (EU). Although posted workers are not formally excluded from labour rights, regulations are enacted in such a way that de facto they often are, as posted workers face many irregularities in their employment relations, whil...

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 article examines a union mobilization of Polish temporary agency workers in the Netherlands. The case study contributes to the migrant organizing literature a micro-level account of the dynamics of mobilization from the viewpoint of the migrants and organizers involved. The findings emphasize the importance of key actors in building solidariti...

The EU regulatory regime and employers’ cross-border recruitment practices complicate unions’ ability to represent increasingly diverse and transnationally mobile workers. Even in institutional contexts where the industrial relations structure and labour law are favourable, such as the Netherlands, unions struggle with maintaining labour standards...

The establishment of free movement of labour and services has facilitated an increase in short-term cross-border labour mobility within the European market. This has driven the growth of a transnational hyper-mobile labour force, particularly in the construction industry. Organizing these workers is challenging for unions, as few native union membe...