Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

German trade unions and Polish migrant workers 195
the GDR, the number of construction workers was above the Western average.
After 1990, the East German construction industry grew by 125 per cent up to
1995, and by 1998, it formed 15 per cent of the total Gross National Product
of East Germany (which is three times as much as in West Germany and
indicates both the volume of investment in construction and the weakness
of other industries in the eastern part of the country). Employment had grown
by 43 per cent (Syben 1998: 14). One reason for rising unemployment in the
second half of the 1990s thus derived from a previous oversupply of labour
(Treichler 1998: 234).
5 Additionally, the influx of immigrants (ethnic Germans, foreigners, asylum
seekers) contributed to the increase in labour supply and unemployment in
this sector. A disproportionate number of those with rights of access to the
German labour markets look for employment in construction. While in 1987,
about 20 per cent of all those who became unemployed from the construction
industry had not worked in Germany before, the share grew to 37 per cent in
1992. The increase in unemployment mirrors not so much the replacement
of already-employed resident workers, but an increased presence of immigrants
to the unemployment rolls: ‘By no means the contract for services workers
can be blamed for this increase’ (IW 1993: 21).
6 The German government has since 1989 signed bi-lateral agreements with
twelve Central and East European (CEE) countries on the employment of East
European contract workers. These inter-governmental agreements gave
large German enterprises the opportunity to cooperate with subcontractors
from CEE-countries (Rudolph 1996). Within a fixed limit of initially nearly
100,000 workers, East European contract enterprises gained access to German
labour markets. The CEE-firms competed for work with the German smalland
medium-sized enterprises. The foreign sending-firm was under a duty
to pay the workers according to the German standards. However, employment
took place mostly with disregard to the statutory conditions (cf. Cyrus and
Helias 1993; Bundesregierung 1996; Faist et al. 1999). Poland holds the greatest
share of the contract for services programme, with a limit of 35,170 workers
(cf. Cyrus 1994, 2001b).
7 With the completion of the European Single Market in 1993, providing for
free movement of workers and service enterprises within the EU, construction
firms and workers from other EU member states gained free access to the
German construction market. Consequently the number of EU enterprises and
the number of workers from other EU member states increased. Sending enterprises
from EU member states signed subcontracts with German construction
enterprises and thus competed with the CEE-contract firms and the German
small- and medium-sized firms. The numbers of EU contract workers quickly
amounted to an estimated 200,000 workers (Köbele and Leuschner 1995).
In a speech to a trade union conference, the Minister for Labour and Social
Order, Norbert Blüm (1995) underlined that, in spite of an economic boom in
construction, 134,000 resident construction workers were unemployed, while
at the same time, 150,000 legal EU workers were employed (Blüm 1995: 129).