The article examines the relationship between forms of worker accommodation and the labour process, aiming to identify the settings in which work is influenced by the ways workers are accommodated. Drawing on a range of case studies, we use secondary analysis to propose a typology of differentiated links between the two spheres. Acceleration in commodity circulation reshapes both the temporal organization of work and the spatial organization of production networks (Harvey, 1990). This, we argue, has forced the labour process and worker accommodation to become closely interconnected and mutually influential. Theorizing this relationship we suggest creates dyadic effects between workplaces and living spaces for the labour process. In one direction, living spaces are drawn to the site of production, giving rise to work-centred accommodation that often takes collective, institutionally-organized or worker self-organized forms. Accommodation is subordinate to the workplace for extracting value from labour. In the other direction, the labour process is dispersed into domestic space, producing heterogeneous forms of home working. Here, the living spaces subsidize the workplace for labour valorization. We further differentiate work-centred accommodation into four ideal types: workplace-confined, workplace-controlled, workplace-tied and worker-organized accommodation. In both work-centred and home-centred accommodation, we examine the labour processes effects through the effort and mobility indeterminacies that labour and capital traverse (Smith, 2006).

The European automotive industry is undergoing deep restructuring, shaped by overproduction, market saturation and profitability pressures. All precede but intersect with the electric transition. This article argues that current changes reflect structural dynamics of capitalism rather than a shift driven solely by electrification. Focusing on supply chains in Italy and Poland, we present findings from qualitative research based on interviews with workers, trade unionists and managers. Building on Silver's framework of 'fixes' used by capital to restore profitability, we introduce the concept of the labour fix to capture how firms reorganise and segment the workforce to adapt to global transformations. Our analysis shows how different fixes interact, and how the labour fix becomes central in contexts of uncertainty. We further examine how labour may respond in diverse ways, shaped by workers' position within supply chains and the industrial relations legacies of specific national contexts. L'industrie automobile europ & eacute;enne subit une profonde restructuration, marqu & eacute;e par la surproduction, une saturation du march & eacute; et des pressions sur la rentabilit & eacute;. Ces facteurs ont pr & eacute;c & eacute;d & eacute; la transition & eacute;lectrique, mais s'y m & ecirc;lent & eacute;galement. Cet article fait valoir que les changements actuels r & eacute;sultent davantage de la dynamique structurelle du capitalisme que d'une & eacute;volution uniquement motiv & eacute;e par l'& eacute;lectrification. En se focalisant sur les cha & icirc;nes d'approvisionnement en Italie et en Pologne, les auteurs pr & eacute;sentent les conclusions d'une & eacute;tude qualitative men & eacute;e & agrave; partir d'entretiens avec des travailleurs, des syndicalistes et des dirigeants. En utilisant le cadre conceptuel de Silver sur les << solutions >> utilis & eacute;es par le capital pour restaurer la rentabilit & eacute;, ils introduisent le concept de << solution li & eacute;e au travail >> pour d & eacute;crire comment les entreprises r & eacute;organisent et segmentent leur main-d'oe uvre afin de s'adapter aux transformations mondiales. L'analyse montre que diff & eacute;rentes solutions interagissent et que la solution li & eacute;e au travail devient centrale dans des contextes d'incertitude. L'article examine ensuite comment la main-d'oe uvre peut r & eacute;agir diff & eacute;remment, en fonction de la position des travailleurs dans les cha & icirc;nes d'approvisionnement et de l'h & eacute;ritage des relations industrielles dans des contextes nationaux sp & eacute;cifiques. Die europ & auml;ische Automobilindustrie erlebt eine tiefgreifende Umstrukturierung, gepr & auml;gt durch & Uuml;berproduktion, Markts & auml;ttigung und Rentabilit & auml;tsdruck. Diese Faktoren wirken schon im Vorfeld der Transition zur Elektromobilit & auml;t und & uuml;berschneiden sich gleichzeitig mit ihr. Der vorliegende Artikel argumentiert, dass die aktuellen Ver & auml;nderungen strukturelle Dynamiken des Kapitalismus widerspiegeln und nicht als ein Wandel zu interpretieren sind, der allein durch die Elektrifizierung vorangetrieben wird. Prim & auml;r mit Blick auf Lieferketten in Italien und Polen pr & auml;sentieren wir in diesem Artikel Ergebnisse qualitativer Forschung auf Grundlage von Interviews mit Arbeitnehmer:innen, Gewerkschafter:innen und Unternehmensleitungen. Ausgehend von den bei Silver beschriebenen Strategien (,,fixes") des Kapitals, wieder die Gewinnzone zu erreichen, stellen wir das Konzept des labour fix vor. Dies beschreibt die Strategie von Unternehmen, durch Reorganisation und Segmentierung der Belegschaften auf globale Ver & auml;nderungen zu reagieren. Unsere Analyse zeigt, wie unterschiedliche Strategien interagieren und wie der labour fix in einem Kontext der Unsicherheit zu einem entscheidenden Faktor wird. Wir untersuchen weiterhin, wie die Arbeitnehmerschaft darauf in unterschiedlicher Weise reagieren kann und wie diese Antwort durch die Position der Arbeitnehmer:innen innerhalb der Lieferketten und durch die Traditionen der Arbeitsbeziehungen in bestimmten nationalen Kontexten bestimmtgepr & auml;gt wird.

Based on ethnographic research and interviews conducted over 2 years (2021–2023), mainly with Bangladeshi workers, community leaders, local NGO staff and trade union representatives in two Italian shipyards in Fincantieri, this paper focuses on the interrelations of labour process, social reproduction and migration regime. Our study analyses how the articulations of these three spheres in a specific locality shape social relations within and outside the workplace. First, we focus on the analysis of the labour process organised through subcontracting firms and informal intermediaries that select workers and control them inside the workplace. Second, we show how the social reproduction of the Bangladeshi workers in the private sphere is influenced and controlled by their ‘ethnic community’. Third, we highlight the impact of Italian migration and labour policy on workers' behaviour. The intertwined nature of the mechanisms of these processes reflects the fact that workplaces are not a detached part of society. Rather, they are embedded in general political rules and involve the time and space of social reproduction where the labour force reproduces itself.

This article investigates how cross-border mobility in the European shipbuilding industry affected the employment security of workers on standard and non-standard contracts in sending and receiving countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. It draws on qualitative findings from Germany, Italy, Norway, Poland and Romania, where shipbuilding production is integrated into transnational networks, leading to high cross-border mobility. Despite restrictions and a reduction of shipbuilding activities, the east-west labour mobility continued during the pandemic contributing to employment security in the east and addressing labour shortages in the west. The findings show that the type of employment contract, national employment protections and workers’ mobility status (e.g. posted or self-initiated) influence workers’ vulnerability. Specifically, the mobile workers with the most secure employment were also better protected by government measures than those in less secure employment during the pandemic, resulting in hierarchised groups of cross-border labour. Workers engaging in circular migration across Europe were the least protected.

In view of the growing onward migration and multisited transnationalism among naturalized EU citizens, this article seeks to advance the current understanding of transnational social fields, cataloguing the complex interplays of migrants' ways of being, belonging, and in-betweenness across different places and spaces. Drawing on multisited qualitative research with Italian Bangladeshis in Italy and the United Kingdom, the paper presents how their 'ways of being' are expressed by maintaining transnational attachments to the country of origin and the wider Bangladeshi diaspora. In addition, they maintain transnational 'ways of belonging' by incorporating the Bengali language, culture, traditions, and values, and transmitting them to the next generation. Beyond these multiplicities of being and belonging, the findings put forward two important, yet contrasting, observations. On the one hand, there is an ongoing pursuit of onward migration to the UK among a section of the community-often influenced by social networks and transnational connections with the recognised Bangladeshi diaspora in the UK. Apart from being in the 'community comfort zone' and language advantage in the integration process, many migrants perceive living in the UK as having a higher 'prestige', 'class' or 'status' vis-a-vis Italy in terms of life quality, wealth, cultural, and religious freedom. On the other hand, another cohort is emotionally and culturally embedded in Italian societies and is in a dilemma of whether to migrate onward. In this process, they constantly blend, shift, and negotiate their ways of belonging. The findings unfold how a new geography of belonging takes shape, characterised by fluidities, multifaceted identities, and everyday life practices in a transnational space.

Posted work is often framed as a business model based on social dumping. Widespread regulatory evasion is imputed to regulation's opacity, firms' predatory practices and trade unions' inability to organise posted workers. Isolation and precariousness channel posted workers' agency into individualised reworking or exit strategies. These perspectives, however insightful, focus either on formal regulations, enforcement actors or host countries' institutional settings. Drawing on biographical interviews with Italian construction workers posted abroad, and semi-structured interviews with non-posted workers and stakeholders of the sector in Italy, the article adopts an actor-centred perspective and mobilises the concept of labour regime to show how its disciplining elements operating in the construction sector in Italy stick with workers during their postings and enhance their disposability. Although this sticky labour regime constrains workers' agency abroad, it remains continuously contested and offers ways for workers to subvert it and improve their employment conditions.

Research on the childcare arrangements of migrant families has primarily focused on transnational childcare practices or childcare-work reconciliation in the host society, without paying appropriate attention to the dynamic and complex negotiation processes that underlie mobility-childcare coordination. This study proposes the concept of transnational childcare bricolage to explore how Chinese migrant families in Italy mobilize and (re)assemble transnationally located and/or unconventional resources and constantly (re)adjust childcare arrangements to achieve a nuanced match between evolving childcare demand and capacity. The study draws on in-depth interviews with members from 50 Chinese migrant families in Italy, as well as participant observation and multi-sited ethnographic observation. Through analyses of their mobility-childcare negotiation processes, we illustrate how migrant families from different social class backgrounds navigate the complexities and contingencies embedded within a family-state-transnational triad. Additionally, our research questions the ethnicized division of care work between migrants and natives, highlighting common experiences of marginalization and work-care tensions faced by women of similar socio-economic positioning, regardless of their ethnicity and/or nationality.

This chapter takes a journey across different literature streams to review the study of labour turnover since the modern factory of the early 20th century, to then move to approaches to turnover and mobility power across labour process theory, comparative political economy, and critical migration scholarship. The authors explore the ambivalent efforts of capital at both facilitating and constraining mobility in the history of ‘labour capture’ and in relation to the movement of capital. The relatively unfree nature of labour in capitalism, showing elements of continuity with pre-capitalist forms of labour bondage and controls, helps in understanding why workers have always engaged with mobility strategies in the forms of desertion, migration, and quitting to counter or diminish exploitation. The theoretical literature surrounding labour migration shows how we need to promote interdisciplinary dialogue to unpack the moments of tensions that mobility engenders for management, and the opportunities it opens for workers to build forms of resistance both individually and collectively. The authors thus elaborate a compositional and transnational approach to labour migration and its autonomy that highlights the historical entrapment of such mobilities and workers’ ongoing attempts at overcoming it, in the labour process and beyond.

This chapter focuses on the labour process in global production with attention to Export Processing Zones where migrant labour is subject to highly exploitative control regimes that limit the free movement of workers. The authors show how in these critical zones, the heterogeneity of labour supplies and its racialization and genderization are key mechanisms for the disempowerment of workers as well as the control of their mobility. They propose the notion of Enclaves of Differentiated Labour (EDL) to encapsulate how labour is spatially regimented and divided under specific regulatory regimes, and how the state allows for the disparaging of labour standards. While special economic zones in the Global South are the most significant examples of EDL, similar dynamics of migrant worker control and resistance emerge in different production contexts in the Global North. Drawing from a wide range of studies on migrant workers, the authors revise the notions of worker power considered in Chapter 1, rethinking the turnover of migrant labour as migrant labour mobility power and arguing that both work effort bargaining and mobility effort bargaining (Smith, 2006) constitute forms of individual and collective exit, leveraging power inside and outside the workplace, with important consequences for migrants’ working lives.

This chapter explores the conflicts around labour migration in the field of worker organizing. It firstly addresses the question of worker power in broad terms, to then consider how migration scholars have enriched past categorizations, including questions of migrant labour mobility, precariousness, and the relatively unfree labour relations that arise from immigration controls and temporary visas. Subsequently, we review the historical racialization of migrant labour and high turnover inside the labour movement, up to the contemporary literature on migrant workers in industrial relations and union attempts at integrating migrant workers, adopting ‘equal’ or ‘special treatment’ (Penninx and Roosblad, 2000). While across the Global North and South some unions appear to build significant alliances with civic actors to support temporary migrant workers, the question of whether migrants should be organized separately or integrated into institutional industrial relations bears testament to the ongoing biases within unions against the transiency of migrant labour. Drawing from research on grass-roots efforts at the self-organization of migrant workers inside and outside official unions, the chapter shows how the racialization and precarity of temporary migrant labour are being challenged from the bottom up by migrants, who at times succeed at winning their disputes despite their precarious conditions.

At a time when worker shortages have emerged as a global challenge, this highly original book bridges migration and labour studies to examine worker mobility and its management. This will be a valuable resource for both scholars and practitioners.

The question of labour turnover has been variously examined across labour and organization studies, but it has not been studied systematically in relation to international migration. In this book we tackle the question of labour turnover (the churning of workers in and out of workplace organizations) from the perspective of migrant labour. Here we build on the critical strands of labour and migration studies to shift our gaze to the social composition of labour (Wright, 2002), focusing on the specific drivers and subjective and social dynamics that link the phenomenon of labour instability to international migration. We consider the relationship between labour migration and turnover as emblematic of the wider effects of the intersectional differentiation of work and employment on workers’ lives and action for change in capitalist societies. Since the pioneering work of Hirschman (1970), the act of workers quitting their job, described as labour mobility or exit, has indeed been countered to worker voice and presented as an individualistic, opportunistic behaviour taken autonomously by workers, as opposed to engaging in labour collective voice over effort bargaining (usually expressed through trade union representation). The tendency to see turnover as a primarily individualistic behaviour can be found especially in the field of industrial relations, which privileges collective forms of action in the workplace, whether or not institutionally mediated by trade unions (see Smith, 2006; Beynon, 1973). In the field of organization and management studies, scholars have tended to favour a functionalist approach both to the question of turnover and the role of migration in flexible labour markets revolving around costs and efficiency issues for employers, while employment studies have concentrated on the impact of labour mobility on collective bargaining in the workplace.

The concluding chapter draws the implications of each thematic chapter. Based on the reviewed literature and evidence it proposes a new concept for each of the themes, namely: the ‘logistics of migrant labour’ to highlight the relationality of different actors and migration infrastructures that regulate human mobility and the conflict-laden nature of such regulatory spaces; ‘social mobility power’ as a non-individualistic way to capture migrants’ mobility power within and without the workplace, centering migrant spatial practices in the labour process and global production; ‘mobility skills’ to describe migrant collective resources to move across the terrain of production and social reproduction; and ‘transnational mobility bargaining’ as the expression of migrant turnover power in the field of industrial relations. Established theorizations of worker power are thus revised, arguing that associational/community forces inside and outside the workplace may influence migrants’ ability to use their marketplace mobility through migration and to improve their conditions collectively. The book contributes to a new understanding of the politics of migrant labour that reverses the mainstream image of migrants as the ultimate form of vulnerable labour and calls for the need to overcome the historical counterposing of exit and voice in the debate on worker agency.