Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

German trade unions and Polish migrant workers 203
and pay: ‘Together with a growing permeability of the borders, irregular contract
work and illegal employment are increasing. For both states considerable problems
arise’ (Foundation Stone 90/2: 8). The membership magazine published the statement
of the Berlin section of IG BAU complaining that employees of GDR-based
enterprises were accepting jobs with poor conditions.
In Berlin in particular, the local enterprises are just waiting to use the cheap
subcontractors from the GDR and to reduce their permanent workforce. We
Berlin construction workers can and will not compete with the ‘cheap-pay’
[Billiglohn – a term with a pejorative undertone] in the GDR. This will be a
competition between unequals. The local workers will not stand for the selling
out of social and tariff protection. . . . The IG BAU therefore demands the
restriction of the announced measures [i.e. the liberalisation of movement] on
the free movement of goods only and to postpone the free movement of services
until the framework [in East and West] has adjusted.
(Foundation Stone 90/2: 8)
With this statement, workers from the East, in this case citizens of the GDR, were
classified as interlopers, lumped together with irregular contract workers or illegal
workers, and stereotyped as unfair competitors. The claim of the Berlin section of
IG BAU to maintain the legal barriers against citizens of the GDR in order to
protect the workers in the West, was published without further editorial comment,
although this very clearly formulated exclusionist attitude against compatriots
had no legal basis. In the course of the political events of re-unification, the issue of
the construction workers from East Germany received a new framing: in June 1990
the federal executive board of IG BAU explained that the trade union would expand
into East Germany in order to integrate East German workers into the organisation
(Foundation Stone 90/5: 5). In some of the following issues, reports were published
of East German workers accepting pay under the level of the tariff. But from now
on, employers were held responsible for such occurrences.
Employers and clients massively abuse the workers from the new federal Länder
as price-reducers and ‘cheap-paid’. Public clients are no exception in this
respect. . . . We make this demand: equal pay for equal work on Western
German construction sites.
(Foundation Stone 92/2)
After an initial exclusionist reflex, perceiving East German workers as outside
interlopers, they were quickly accepted as a category which was difficult to integrate
but impossible to exclude. The frame of reference shifted from rejection to solidarity.
CEE contract workers as interlopers
As expected, the construction industry enjoyed a boom period and the employ-ment
situation improved. However, simultaneously, the number of foreign workers from
East European countries increased as a result of the bilateral agreements on the