Managing migrant workers in the multi-employer context: Keeping control while transferring employer responsibilities

Abstract

Pressured by global competition, organisations are constantly looking for new strategies that allow them to reduce labour costs, increase workers’ flexibility, and transfer burdensome employer responsibilities to other actors (Kalleberg, 2009; Muehlberger, 2007). Outsourcing and in-house subcontracting are popular solutions, leading to the increasing presence of alternative contractual arrangements in which multiple employers are involved (Cappelli and Keller, 2013). However, whereas the literature on the new world of work (for example Grimshaw, Cartwright, Keizer and Rubery, 2018; Lee, 2012; Legge, 2007) pays considerable attention to the challenges that arise in this context, this body of literature fails to sufficiently take into account the role of labour’s diversity. Yet, the literature on the employment of migrant workers shows that employers deliberately target this vulnerable group as part of their low-cost strategy (Baxter-Reid, 2016; Hopkins, 2017; MacKenzie and Forde, 2009), praising migrant workers for their superior work ethic and compliance (Baxter-Reid, 2016). It also shows how organisations manage ethnic minority workers workplace, mainly based on standard employment situations, but does not provide sufficient insight into how migrant workers are managed in non-standard employment contexts. In this article we address two research questions: 1) How are migrant identities connected to the challenges that arise in the multi-employer organisation? 2) How does the client organisation manage employee diversity in a multi-employer context? In order to answer our research questions, we conducted an in-depth case study of an organisation in the meat industry, characterised by high competitive pressure and known for its extensive use of migrant workers (Berntsen, 2015; Wagner, 2015), which works with several in-house subcontractors. In this article we identify two types of practices that are used to manage migrant workers in the multi-employer organisation: enhanced disciplining practices and ‘good employer’ practices. We show that these practices enable the organisation to strategically gain back control over certain employer responsibilities that were transferred in its subcontracting construction to counter negative outcomes of its subcontracting decision, while the way in which direct workers refer to the workplace based behaviour of the migrant workers reflects an ethnicization of typical subcontracting challenges.