Guest worker migrants, marketization and exclusion in Central Europe

The key question of our discussion is how the new global political economy, the emerging global labor market, relevant political communities and local societies locate and handle the status of guest workers and how we can incorporate their often racist exclusion into our analysis. We concentrate on the workers’ perspectives and on the emerging new type of economy. The discussion will address the demands and the maneuvering of the employing companies as well as the ways governments try to handle these processes discursively and legally. The discussion will not solely be an academic analysis; trade union representatives and advocates of the employees will give account of their views.
Speakers and their topics
Zsuzsanna Árendás, PhD, is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences (CSS), Institute for Sociology, in Budapest. She is also a Research Affiliate at the Democracy Institute, Budapest. Zsuzsa’s research examines the social production of race and inequalities, with particular attention to how these processes intersect with transnational mobilities. Her research is qualitative and ethnographic in nature. Her recent work focuses on temporary labour migration to Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), specifically the mobility of workers from India to Slovakia.
In her short intervention, Zsuzsa Árendás will discuss processes of racialization in south-western Slovakia, drawing on her ongoing ethnographic research with Indian workers from the state of Kerala in the automobile industry. She will focus in particular on narratives of Europeanness and whiteness, and on how these are produced, negotiated, and experienced in the local context of social hierarchies intersecting global discourses of race, merit, and deservingness.
Tibor T. Meszmann is an activist and senior researcher at the Central European Labour Studies Institute, Bratislava. His research centers on migrants and industrial relations in transnational labor markets, trade union politics, the impact of technological change on work and employment, platform mediated work, especially in Hungary, but also Serbia and Slovakia.
His talk will focus on the needs and the maneuvering of the employing companies, mostly in automotives in Hungary and Slovakia. He will also address the question, "why and how governments try to handle these processes discursively and legally". The concepts of factory regimes (Burawoy), dynamics of consent and control at transnationalised local labour markets have been very useful for generating insights.
Tamás Kiss is a researcher at the Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities since 2007 and the managing editor of the European Yearbook of Minority Issues. He holds an MA in sociology (2000) and a PhD in Cultural Studies (2010). He has extensively investigated interethnic relations and minority policies in Romania and Eastern Europe. The focus of his research is on institutional mechanisms producing inequalities, racialisation of class relations, and minority identity strategies. Investigating migratory processes is also among his main areas of interest, being part of numerous international comparative projects on migration and the author of papers and research reports focusing on this topic. He is also the co-editor and co-author of the book Unequal Accommodation of Minority Rights: Hungarian in Transylvania (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
His intervention examines the political economy and discourse of Global South immigration in Romania, where progressive neoliberal hegemony remains intact. Focusing on the 2020 Ditrău incident, Romania's first immigration debate, he shows how mainstream media praised immigrants as indispensable "hard-working guest workers." The same coverage blamed labour-import tensions on a "backward countryside" and branded Transylvanian Hungarians, a non-dominant white group, as racist. This narrative by Romania's dominant historical bloc extended the neoliberal order into immigration policy. It equated capital interests with the public interest, obscured structural inequality, and reduced racism to individual moral failure. The debate, he argues, was not really about integration. It served to reinforce Romania's center-periphery relations and discipline subordinate groups, above all the working class, immigrant and native alike.
Balázs Bábel has been working at the Vasas, Hungarian Metalworkers' Federation since 2014 and currently serves as the organization’s vice president. A union leader with a background in sociology and international studies, he places great emphasis—in addition to traditional employee advocacy—on union renewal, organizational development, international labor mobility, and the inclusion of foreign workers in advocacy efforts. He frequently draws attention in the press to the vulnerable situation of foreign workers, which is exacerbated by the fact that, due to regulatory requirements, the vast majority of them are employed through staffing agencies.
Father Elmer
Father Elmer (full name Elmer Escalona Hernandez, SVD) was born in the Philippines and is a religious missionary priest of the Divine Word Missionaries (SVD) who serves in Hungary.
Discussion leader:
Attila Melegh was a founding director of the Karl Polányi Center for Global Social Studies at Corvinus University, Budapest He is a sociologist, economist and historian. Attila Melegh studied economics and sociology at Karl Marx University of Economics and social history at Oxford University. He has a PhD in history from Debrecen University. He received DSc from the Hungarian Academy. He is a habilitated full professor at Corvinus University, Budapest, and a scientific adviser at the Demographic Research Institute. Editor of Eszmélet and Demográfia English Edition journal. He has been a Vienna Karl Polanyi Visiting Professor at Vienna University of Economics, University of Vienna and Central European University. He is a member of the European Academy. He is the author of the book On the East/West Slope, Globalization, Nationalism, Racism and Discourses on Central and Eastern Europe. His latest, 2023 book at Palgrave-Macmillan is: The Migration Turn and Eastern Europe: A Global Historical Sociological Analysis.