Transnationalization of Labor Mobility Development Trends and Selected Challenges of Its Regulation

Ever since the early development of the industrial mode of production paid employment has been  strongly structured by regional or at least national mobility strucures until the end of the 20th Century. Ways to the workplace were primarily daily oscillations; spatially varying work assignments concentrated on relatively small groups of experts and construction workers.

With the internationalization of value chains, migration and organizations, this picture changed dramatically. Labor mobility becomes transnational for a constantly growing share of the working population. This concerns inner-European labor migration as a crisis-induced labor migration, as well as contract and subcontract work, but also the growing cross-border mobility within profit and non-profit organizations as well as the increase of locally recruited employees who have the nationality of the “parent organization“. In our contribution, after conducting an empirical assessment of selected types of new transnational labor mobility, the related challenges of regulating their labor, employment and participation conditions will be discussed. Along with secondary data this paper refers back to the results of a project funded by the German Research foundation (DFG) on cross-border personnel mobility in organizations