The Impact of Professionalization Processes of Migrant Trade Union Members on Their Positioning Towards Anti-Immigrant Public Discourses

In the last decades within the big industrial firms with a large number of migrant workers, some of the migrant workers could experience an unexpected upward mobility through their participation in the trade union and especially the workers councils. Some of them could gain access to the most privileged positions of representatives of the workers who are freed from the work in the production and can dedicate their working hours to managing the interests of the workers in relation to the strategies of the firm management. These migrants experience a transformation from worker in the production to a union  official/manager in the firm and in this was an unexpected upward social mobility.  

In the focus of my presentation are the biographical processes of transformation and professionalization these workers experience and the impact of these processes on their self-positioning towards current public anti-immigrant discourses.