Citizenship and Work: Case Studies of Differential Inclusion/Exclusion (Deliverable 10.3)

In its previous research, Work Package 10 of bEUcitizen examined the rise of the worker-citizen and found that work can shape differential inclusion into the community. However, people may also be differentially included and excluded from the world of work. Deliverable D10.3 explores these processes with regard to specific groups of people or individuals that engage in specific types of labour. Five case studies of different social groups (both citizens and migrants) serve to examine the relationship between work, citizenship and inclusion/exclusion. The case studies are a mixture of a single state focus, or a comparative focus of particular groups in select countries involved in WP10: Croatia, Ireland, Israel, the Netherlands and the UK.1

Deliverable D10.1 analysed the ways in which the ‘worker citizen’ underpins national and EU citizenship with respect to policies regarding entry to and residence in a nation state, naturalisation, and access to social security provisions, policies which cut across citizens and migrants. We examined how citizenship is increasingly cast as being deserved by hard-working, self-reliant individuals prepared to take responsibility for themselves and demonstrated that citizenship requires having the status of a worker (Anderson, Shutes, Walker 2015). For the purposes of this report, we refer to ‘worker’ as both a legal and social status. Under EU Law, to attain worker status, work has to be deemed to be “genuine and effective” and not on such a small scale as to be “marginal and ancillary” (See Anderson, Shutes, Walker, 2015: 52 for further discussion). Thus understanding the relation between inclusion and exclusion and the spaces in between (which we described as ‘differential inclusion) requires us to analyse how people are differentially included in labour markets and in the world of work.

Analyses of the relationship between citizenship and the labour market have tended to examine the exclusions of migrants and the exclusions of those who have the legal status of citizenship separately. For example, the literature on the impact of immigration policies on the labour market participation of migrants has tended to sit apart from the literature on the impact of welfare-to-work policies on the labour market participation of citizens. In keeping with the theme of this work package, we are interested in examining citizens and migrants together, taking as our starting point inclusion/exclusion from the labour market, rather than the migrant/citizen binary. This deliverable (D10.3) examines how the labour of different groups is differentially included – how different groups are differentially included as ‘workers’ – and discusses the implications for understanding the relationship between citizenship and work, and the barriers to citizenship, for both citizens and migrants.

We have five case studies which focus on different social groups and the ways in which they are differentially included in the labour market (in different national contexts). They comprise: (1) people with disabilities as participants in the adjusted wage programme in Israel; (2) EU migrant women in the UK; (3) refugees in Croatia and Ireland; (4) domestic workers in the Netherlands. The fifth case study, beggars/begging in the UK and Croatia, was chosen to explore exclusion from the world of work and the delineation of the boundaries of labour itself, as well as its relation to honour and to community.