Romanian demonstrating for work and integration in front of the town hall in Oslo, Norway, in 2013. Robert B. Fishman/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.
These are not times to conflate or deepen some of the fractured lines along which states from the old western and eastern parts of the EU carefully tread. But a decade after joining the EU one must question how EU migrant labourers, particularly from Romania but more widely from the EU’s Eastern European member states, continue to be treated both as threats to western European societies and as workers for whom exploitation and abuse is acceptable treatment.
As EU nationals with the fundamental right to travel and work throughout the EU, these individuals should rightfully expect to have their labour rights upheld irrespective of the member state in which they work. They would, however, be a bit foolish to do so. Migrant labourers from the eastern half of the continent continue to face high levels of discrimination and exploitation at their places of work, with many suffering everything from poverty-level wages and punishingly long hours to the threat of expulsion and sexual assault. Thus while the economic consolidation of the EU has made it possible to move between labour markets, it has not closed the spaces in which and mechanisms through which exploitation flourishes, even in the case of EU citizens themselves.
