Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

214 Norbert Cyrus
increasing xenophobia among our workers’ (IG BSE o. J., quoted in Treichler 1998:
224). To extinguish xenophobic attitudes among its members, IG BAU proposed
restricting access to German labour markets. The logic behind this argument is as
follows: ‘xenophobic anxieties about immigrants serve to justify a policy of restricting
migration, and that policy is then expected to preserve the population from antiforeigner
ideologies’ (Blaschke 1998: 25).
The more important aspect here is that IG BAU, in order to achieve its
organisational goals, exploits not only the stereotype of foreign workers but also of
its own members. The stereotype of a ‘racist German construction worker’ was
accepted and used as an argument in order to strengthen its own position. IG BAU
used the argument of xenophobia as a threatening means. The point of interest
according to Treichler (1998: 224) is that xenophobia was discovered as a matter
of fact by the organisation only in a situation when the competition with foreign
workers from Poland and other CEE-countries raised the threat that domestic
workers would be replaced. Xenophobia was however not the subject of intraorganisational
dispute, but was
politically used by the sectoral trade union as a threatening factor in order to
mobilise against the inter-governmental agreements. To give one example, the
deputy chairman of IG BAU, Ernst Ludwig Laux, mentioned with regard to
the impact of the contract agreements with CEE countries on the German
construction labour market in September 1992: ‘Whoever adds fuel to the fire
with such approaches (i.e. the intergovernmental agreements) and undermines
the tariff order will in due course be surprised by the echo’.
(Treichler 1998: 225)
This argument was repeated with respect to the contract workers and the European
posted workers as well (Sahl 1997). The organisation portrays its members as
susceptible to or even affected by xenophobia, and itself as an organisation trying
to pacify them. But Faist et al. in their study (1999) reject the claim that xenophobia
is a characteristic of construction workers:
According to all information available, Polish contract workers explained
that they have no problems with German colleagues, however they often
criticised the degrading attitude of employees of German-controlled authorities
against foreigners. However, in the course of the deterioration of the labour
market situation in the construction sector, most of all in developments since
the mid-1990s, activities could be observed that increasingly raised the media
interest: bigger construction sites with a high share of foreign workers from
the so-called cheap paid countries were occupied or blockaded by German
workers. The impetus for such actions may have come from the increasing
political visibility of the subject – with xenophobia running along – by trade
unions and sectoral employers’ associations, who had pointed to the high
amount of employment of foreigners.
(Faist et al. 1999: 221)