Flexible Work and Immigration in Europe

Published date01 March 2015
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12022
Date01 March 2015
Flexible Work and Immigration in Europe
Damian Raess and Brian Burgoon
Abstract
Immigration has risen substantially in many European economies, with far-
reaching if still uncertain implications for labour markets and industrial
relations. This article investigates such implications, focusing on employment
flexibility, involving both ‘external flexibility’ (fixed-term or temporary agency
and/or involuntary part-time work) and ‘internal flexibility’ (overtime and/or
balancing-time accounts). The article identifies reasons why immigration
should generally increase the incidence of such flexibility, and why external
flexibility should rise more than internal flexibility. The article supports these
claims using a dataset of establishments in 16 European countries.
1. Introduction
International migration has become among the most controversial and
important developments in contemporary European political economy and
industrial relations. This reflects in part the highly visible rise in foreign-born
shares in many European economies since the 1970s, parallel to turbulent
labour market developments. But it also reflects the widely debated conse-
quences of immigration for virtually all aspects of industrial relations, includ-
ing labour supply, wages and employment.
Despite such controversy, we know little about immigration’s implications
for one of the most important developments in contemporary industrial
relations: the rise and spread of flexible work. Such practices involve non-
standard work, especially part-time and temporary work contracts, and flex-
ible working time by full-time workers, especially overtime and varying work
weeks via ‘balancing-time’ accounts (e.g. European Commission 2006; Hunter
et al. 1993). Such flexibility is a source of both wonder and worry. Some expect
it to help in combining work with family or by increasing productivity (Booth
and van Ours 2008; Cappelli 1999; De Graaf-Zijl 2005; Doogan 2005; Guest
2004; Knell 2000). But others find that flexibility engenders social fragmenta-
tion and isolation, or job and income insecurity (Beck 2000; De Witte and
Damian Raess is at the Université de Genève. Brian Burgoon is at the University of Amsterdam.
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British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12022
53:1 March 2015 0007–1080 pp. 94–111
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2013. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Näswall 2003; Erlinghagen 2008; Green et al. 2010; Heery and Salmon 2000).
Whether one welcomes or laments flexible employment, its rise deserves
explanation.
How and whether flexible working practices have anything to do with
immigration, as opposed to domestic political and economic conditions, is an
open question. The dominant view is that flexible contracts and working time
are shaped by domestic factors — where immigration or other globalization
features are either ignored or do not matter (Golden and Appelbaum 2006;
Gustafsson et al. 2003; Hunter et al. 1993; Kalleberg 2001; Smith and
Neuwirth 2008). Those studies exploring global economic forces offer com-
peting and limited views into migration’s role in shaping flexible employ-
ment. Some find that trade and capital openness create pressures which
increase flexibility, at least for particular socioeconomic groups surveyed (e.g.
Blair-Loy and Jacobs 2003; Jirjahn 2008; Lillie 2012; McDowell et al. 2008;
Raess and Burgoon 2006). A few draw the opposite conclusion, where glo-
balization increases profitability, which gets passed on to workers as less
rather than more flexible work (e.g., Flanagan 2006). Still others have found
globalization to spur flexible employment particularly where work councils
negotiate trade-offs between employment and working conditions (Burgoon
and Raess 2009). Existing studies, however, have limited empirical reach,
focusing on facets of globalization other than immigration and with no
large-N work considering flexibility effects of immigration.
To redress such shortcomings, this study explores arguments about how
immigration affects two kinds of employment flexibility: fixed-term or tempo-
rary agency work and employer-mandated part-time work, which we term
‘external flexibility’; and overtime and balancing-time accounts, which we
term ‘internal flexibility’. As Section 2 explains, migration creates opportuni-
ties for labour substitution that should increase employment flexibility gener-
ally. But by directly increasing available and more docile labour supply,
immigration should more positively affect non-standard contracts constitut-
ing external flexibility than it does working-time practices constituting internal
flexibility.
Sections 3 and 4 test these arguments on a survey of private establishments
in 16 European countries that allows judging how immigration affects flex-
ibility standards at the level where standards are most directly decided. The
analysis reveals patterns broadly in line with expectations. On the one hand,
foreign-born shares tend to be unrelated to the incidence of internal flexibil-
ity, as measured in incidence of paid overtime, of balancing-time accounts or
a composite of both. On the other hand, foreign-born shares tend to strongly
spur external flexibility: fixed-term or agency employees, employer-mandated
part-time employees or a composite of both. Furthermore, the latter pattern
predominates the way immigration influences a combined measure of both
internal and external flexibility: foreign-born shares modestly increase the
incidence of composite measures of internal and external flexibility.
The results suggest that immigration shapes flexibility practices in
European labour markets but in ways that vary across different aspects of
Flexible Work and Immigration in Europe 95
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2013.

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