Nathan Lillie

Verified

Nathan verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

Verified

Nathan verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

• PhD
• Professor at University of Jyväskylä

Freedom of movement in the EU is much more developed in terms of economic freedoms than in terms of social and welfare policies. Social insurance arrangements for mobile workers are handled within a reciprocity-based regulatory framework. This article analyses the intra-EU social insurance system from the point of view of highly mobile construction...

Transgovernmental cooperation is an important European Union (EU) regulatory method, but it imposes transaction costs on the organizations involved. Regulatory requirements under conditions of European free movement drive transgovernmentalism, but transaction costs also shape transgovernmental regulation and regulatory outcomes. We investigate coop...

This paper examines strategic enforcement approaches relying on co-enforcement and transgovernmentalist. It examines three cases in the construction industry in Austria, Asturias (Spain), and Poland, as well as three cases in maritime shipping in Finland, Spain, and Poland, focussing on Labour Inspection’s (LI)s motivations for engaging in co-enfor...

This article draws on a range of case studies to explain how worker posting can cause hierarchised labour mobility, involving nationality-based hierarchies in pay and conditions between workers in the same labour markets or work sites. This hierarchisation is most apparent on large construction sites, where companies systematically use posting for...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to characterise the position of highly educated African migrants in the Finnish labour market and to examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on that position. Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on the biographical work stories of 17 highly educated African migrant workers in four occupation area...

In Finland, integration is discussed in terms of labour market success. Finding work tends to occur in the ‘secondary’ labour market as migrants have difficulty accessing the more secure jobs of the ‘primary’ labour market. This chapter draws on 11 qualitative biographical narratives of migrants and refugees, looking for turning points and epiphani...

In this brief, we discuss how posted and other hypermobile migrant construction workers suffer from marginalization in both the labour market and in access to social insurance, with variations between biographically different groups of posted workers. Sectoral experts and researchers have presented posted workers as people who are reluctant to...

The report describes how the functioning of the labour market for intra-EU mobile construction workers, which are commonly thought of as 'posted workers', results in economic insecurity and social risk for these workers. However, this risk is much greater for those from poorer countries, or from outside the EU, and is much less for those from wealt...

Finland has only relatively recently become a country of immigration, and as a result most immigration and integration policy legislation is also relatively recent. Since the 1990s, the number of migrants to Finland has increased steadily, motivating the adoption of various policy measures to regulate migration and support integration. From the per...

The growing role of civil society organizations (CSOs) in welfare service provision is sometimes portrayed as a threat to welfare state universalism in Nordic societies. In Finland, CSOs co-produce integration services alongside comprehensive official integration programmes, compensating for gaps and shortcomings in those services. We identify thre...

Access to national citizenship is an important structuring element in access to rights for migrant workers in globalizing labour markets. Migrant integration, or conversely, exclusion, should be interpreted in light of this struggle to extend or restrict citizenship. Integration is often seen as occurring along a spectrum or timeline; migrants move...

The growing role of civil society organizations (CSOs) in welfare service provision is sometimes portrayed as a threat to welfare state universalism in Nordic societies. In Finland, CSOs co-produce integration services alongside comprehensive official integration programmes, compensating for gaps and shortcomings in those services. We identify thre...

Report of the SIRIUS project's WP 3 on policies for migrant labour market integration

This report examines the state of migrant labour market integration in Finland through the lens of migrant, refugee and asylum applicants’ (MRAs) experiences with the Finnish labour market. Using the narrative biographic approach to research, the report analyses narratives of MRAs labour market experiences in order to glean a nuanced understanding...

This report gives an overview of the Con3Post project research that analyses a new and understudied phenomenon of posting third country nationals (TCNs) in the European construction sector, with a special focus on the posting flow involving workers from Ukraine being posted to Finland and Estonia through Poland.

We find that although the revision of the Posted Workers Directive (PWD) is a positive step, worker posting by its nature provides many opportunities for employers to evade and arbitrage national regulatory systems. As such, ensuring a level playing field and protecting workers' rights will require an ongoing policy attention of EU, national and gr...

The PROMO project¹ is based around a series of policy workshops and conferences from 2017 and 2018. The project aims to make recommendations to improve: • national labour protection systems for posted workers; • institutions, practices and channels for promoting industrial democracy for posted workers; • the collection of data relevant to making in...

This report is based on two focus group interviews with three Finnish Construction Trade Union (Rakennusliitto, RL) representatives and two Industrial Union (Teollisuusliitto, TL) representatives and on individual interviews with Finnish Electrical Workers´ Union (Sähköliitto, SL), and the Federation of Finnish Enterprises (Suomen Yrittäjät, SY) re...

Suomenkielinen tiivistelmä englannin kielen artikkelista/Finnish language abstract of an English language article

The PROMO project is based around a series of policy workshops/conferences from 2017 and 2018. The project aims to make recommendations to improve: • national labour protection systems for posted workers; • institutions, practices and channels for promoting industrial democracy for posted workers; • the collection of data relevant to making informe...

This article analyses a project by Finnish and Estonian unions to adopt ‘organizing model’ strategies through establishing the transnational ‘Baltic Organising Academy’. Initially aimed at Estonian workplaces, successful campaigns inspired Finnish unions to copy the model in Finland. This cooperation was originally motivated by labour market interd...

Reconstructing Solidarity is a book about unions' struggles against the expansion of precarious work in Europe, and the implications of these struggles for worker solidarity and institutional change. The authors argue against the "dualization" thesis that unions act primarily to protect labour market insiders at the expense of outsiders, finding in...

Posting of workers has become a vehicle for labour mobility for millions of workers around the European Union (EU), and a standard way in which some sectors recruit labour. It is also a constant point of contention between those concerned about a race to the bottom on labour standards, and those who wish to promote unregulated labour markets. So...

This article makes the case that the institutional construction of the EU integration process has furthered the cause of free movement, but is producing a backlash against the free mobility of persons because of its mechanistic dynamics. The backlash against free movement is manifesting in constraints on the social rights of mobile EU citizens, pro...

The emergence of the European Union citizenship agenda has mainly taken place along the evolution of mobility rights, with the goal of creating a pan-European labor market. Mobility undermines the nationally embedded notion of industrial citizenship. Industrial citizenship protects workers’ rights and secures their participation in national politic...

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...

Este artigo compara formas de transnacionalismo do trabalho em três setores: indústria automotiva; transporte marítimo; vestuário e indústria têxtil. Em cada caso, os sindicatos se envolvem em atividades transnacionais muito diferentes para reassumir o controle sobre o mercado de trabalho e a concorrência. Conforme as instituições de cooperação tra...

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...

There has been an explosion of interest in the idea of European Union citizenship in recent years, as a defining example of postnational cosmopolitan citizenship potentially replacing or layered on top of national citizenship. We argue this form of EU citizenship undermines industrial citizenship, which is a crucial support for social solidarity on...

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...

Despite the rapid increase in cross-national labour migration since EU enlargement in 2004, there has been little research on transnational union efforts to organize migrant workers. This article examines the European Migrant Workers Union, created by the German union IG BAU in a shift away from national protectionism towards transnational organizi...

Using evidence from the shipbuilding and construction industries in Finland, this article shows how trade union responses to the introduction of migrant workers can be conditioned by product markets. Growing numbers of ‘posted workers’, or intra‐European Union work migrants employed via transnational subcontractors, are segmenting the labour market...

Purpose – Capital, through its practices and narratives of global competition, is able to play unions in different locations off against one another through the construction and exploitation of difference. Trade unions and their activists have responded through formal institutional responses and with new forms of network-based cooperation which is,...

Despite the presence of hyper-mobile migrant workers in the European Union, there is very little research on transnational union organizing efforts.i This paper examines the European Migrant Workers Union (EMWU), which signalled a shift by the German union Industriegewerkschaft Bauen-Agrar-Umwelt (IG BAU) in its approach to migrant workers away fro...

This article argues, through analysing industrial relations at the Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant construction site in Finland, that national unionism is inappropriately structured for the transnational construction industry. Olkiluoto 3 is being built by a French/German consortium employing mostly posted migrants via transnational subcontractors...

In January and February 2009, a wave of wildcat strikes swept across the United Kingdom, as British workers protested the employment of Italian and Portuguese workers at construction contractors at power plants. These protests erupted spontaneously from workers who were angered at foreign contractors bringing their ‘posted’ workforce from abroad to...

This article argues that off-shore is losing its exceptionality by being absorbed into a broader process of variegation and deterritorialization of sovereignty, and that capital’s search for a new “fix” is driving this process. Capital goes off-shore by exploiting non-territorial definitions of sovereignty, as a means of shifting the regulatory reg...

Transnational politics and labor markets are undermining national industrial relations systems in Europe. This article examines the construction industry, where the internationalization of the labor market has gone especially far. To test hypotheses about di ferences between “national systems,” the authors examine the United Kingdom, Finland, and G...

This article compares forms of labour transnationalism in three industrial sectors: motor manufacturing, maritime shipping and clothing and textile manufacturing. In each case, unions engage in very different transnational activities to reassert control over labour markets and competition. As institutions of transnational cooperation deepen, unions...

This is a book about how global unionism was born in the maritime shipping sector. It argues that the industrial structure of shipping, and specifically the interconnected nature of shipping production chains, facilitated the globalization of union bargaining strategy, and the transnationalization of union structures for mobilizing industrial actio...

World order structures class relations, and vice-versa, so a shift from a world ordered around insular nationally based capitalist systems to a single integrated global production system and market implies a shift from national to global and transnational classes. Capitalist hegemony has been built on capitalist hegemony in individual nation states...

Two multinational retail firms, IKEA and Wal-Mart, illuminate the implications of a new era of labor standards—focused on the transnational firm. Global labor standards are increasingly enforced through transnational corporation (TNC) adherence to voluntary codes rather than through national labor regulation. Nonetheless, privatized labor-standards...

Under the auspices of the International Transport Workers’ Federation’s (ITF) Flag of Convenience campaign, maritime unions have developed transnational global structures exploiting interdependencies in transportation production chains. The ITF, a London-based association of transport unions, connects the struggles of seafarers and port workers thr...

The increasing globalization of the economy and the continued expansion of multinational corporations have triggered a variety of forms of union action across national frontiers. The chapter examines several forms of internationalism, including campaigns around strike solidarity, collective bargaining initiatives, and cross-border organizing drives...

The most significant case of transnational union bargaining co-ordination in existence is in the maritime shipping industry. A global union association, the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF), and a global employers' federation, the International Maritime Employers' Committee (IMEC), now negotiate over pay scales for seafarers on Fla...