17 - “Just-In-Time” Migrant Workers in Czechia: Racialization and Dormitory Labour Regimes

Summary

Introduction

In 2017 the Czech Ministry of the Interior ran a campaign with governmental and policing bodies at national, regional and municipal scales targeting “security and public order in industrial zones and their surroundings related to the increased employment of foreigners” (Ministerstvo Vnitra 2017). Undertaking press conferences and highly mediatized “raids” on worker dormitories, the campaign expressed an increasingly xenophobic atmosphere in a pre-election year in which fears about migrants took centre stage (Krčal & Naxera 2018). With rising numbers of migrant workers from eastern EU and third countries1 precariously employed in the export-oriented manufacturing sector, media headlines repeatedly depicted “foreign workers” and worker dormitories as sites of violence, criminality and social threat. Krimi-plzeň, an online, hard right but relatively widely read publication focusing on “crime reporting” in the industrial city of Pilsen, perhaps captured the pinnacle of this with its 2016 special report: “Foreigners in Pilsen from A to Z without rose-tinted glasses”, the subheading of which went on with “syphilis, alcohol, drugs, murder, dormitories, fights, scabies – and a solution nowhere to be seen” (Krimi-plzeň 2016).

It would be a mistake to simply put such abjectly violent characterization of migrant workers down to the reactionary jolts of rising right-wing currents in central and eastern Europe, a local peculiarity of “post-socialist” Europe (Dzenovska 2013). Rather, such explicitly racializing characterization of “foreigners” by state and media is also related to the social reproduction of a just-in-time migrant workforce in the Czech dormitory labour regime, which is prevalent in sectors such as electronics manufacturing, and employers’ contingent attempts to assemble and manage a socially differentiated workforce (see also Chapter 16 by Andrijasevic). The dormitory labour regime is not geared solely towards the production of commodities, but presents a terrain of struggle over the very (re)production of labouring subjects within changing local conditions and geographies of global production. As Taylor and Rioux (2018: 45) outline, “We shouldn't think of a labour regime as a singular mechanism, but rather as a series of overlapping social processes that, together, shape how workforces with specific characteristics are produced and utilised.” The (re)production and management of such “specific characteristics” encompasses historically and geographically contingent processes of gendering and racialization that hierarchically differentiate workers in ways tightly articulated with class exploitation and shaped by scale-crossing dynamics of international migration and globalized production.