From 'forced mobility' to 'forced immobility' - The case of Spanish migrant care workers and nurses in Spain in Berlin (original) (raw)

Official youth unemployment figures stand above 55 per cent in the Spanish state (Scarpetta, Sonnet, & Manfredi, 2010). For a while now, German chancellor Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schäuble have openly argued that Spanish youth unemployment will be solved by moving to Germany (Evans, 2013). Bach has shown the way in which the state directly “manages migration” by devising recruitment policies for migrant nurses in the UK (Bach, 2010). However there is no existing literature on the German case. As part of my PhD research on autonomous migrant groups and trade unions, I have been analysing the 15-M group in Berlin and their working group Gruppo Accion Syndical (GAS). In my participatory and ethnographic research I have discovered that German private nursing and care companies have been recruiting young Spanish women and men to come to work in the German care sector. Unlike in the UK where the nurses can move freely between employers, Spanish nurses in Germany are forced to stay with the company for a minimum of two years or else pay a fine of up to 10,000 euros. Bloch has shown that the opportunities for female migrant workers to challenge the exploitation collectively are few. Thus, migrant women can potentially contest their own oppression (work and gender) through migration (A. Bloch et al., 2014:341-342) and hyper-mobility (Alberti, 2014; Munck, 2011) to overcome bad working conditions, and precarious employment. However this is not possible for Spanish nurses in Germany. So, what strategies of resistance have they turned to instead? And how do Spanish migrant nurses renegotiate ‘mobility’ in terms their experience? References Alberti, G. (2014). Mobility strategies, “mobility differentials” and “transnational exit”: the experiences of precarious migrants in London’s hospitality jobs. Work, Employment & Society. doi:10.1177/0950017014528403 Bach, S. (2010). Managed migration?: nurse recruitment and the consequences of state policy. Industrial Relations Journal, 41(3), 249–266. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2338.2010.00567.x Bloch, A., Kumarappan, L., & Mckay, S. (2014). Women Migrants Today : New Directions , No Papers , Old Barriers, 17(September), 339–355. Evans, S. (2013). Merkel tells young Europeans to move to find work. Retrieved June 12, 2015, from http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-22906820 Munck, R. (2011). Trade Unions , Migration and Social Transformation, 236–251. Scarpetta, S., Sonnet, A., & Manfredi, T. (2010, April 14). Rising Youth Unemployment During The Crisis. OECD Publishing. doi:10.1787/5kmh79zb2mmv-en