The cruel valuation of refugee potential –
making a refugee production worker
Masterthesis Eva Mos Student number: 6086683 First supervisor: Jan Rath Second reader: Olav Velthuis
Study program: Research Master Social Sciences E-mail: eva_mos@hotmail.com
1 The cruel valuation of refugee potential - making a refugee production worker
Abstract
At the one hand, contemporary refugee reception in Europe is approached through a ‘framework of potential’ that perceives refugees as potential economic source in need of
valuation and investment (e.g. through governmental regulations or programs). At the other
hand, existing segmented labour market theories identify mechanisms of disinvestment and de-recognition of refugee skills, highlighting a process of devaluation. Examining how these two relate to each other, this paper investigates how processes of valuation and devaluation
co-occur in the labour market integration of refugees in the Westland area in the Netherlands.
It demonstrates how a local labour market integration project is involved in creating
economic potential around refugees, but in being so much occupied with demand needed in the local labour market – production work – only creates short-term and limited potential, narrowly training refugees in skills useful within production settings and facilitating the allocation to low-paid and low-status jobs. The paper shows that limited valuation is the mechanism through which devaluation – relegation to segmented secondary labour market sections – is realized and that labour market integration becomes intertwined with labour market shortages. In these dynamics, temporal aspects, such as being on time, reaching the right production speed, but also the limitation of future opportunities, play an important role.
2 Introduction
At the one hand, contemporary refugee reception in Europe is approached through a ‘framework of potential’ by both governments and scholars, who perceive refugees as potential economic source in need of valuation and investment (e.g. through governmental regulations or programs) (Aiyar et al., 2016; Martin et al., 2017; Kaabel, 2017). At the other hand, existing segmented labour market theories identify mechanisms of disinvestment and de-recognition of refugee skills, highlighting a process of devaluation (Colic-Peisker & Tilbury, 2006; Maroufi, 2017). Examining how these two relate to each other, this paper investigates how processes of valuation and devaluation co-occur in the labour market integration of refugees in the Westland area in the Netherlands.
The paper demonstrates how a local labour market project invests deliberate effort to create economic potential around refugees, but is thereby so much occupied with demand needed in the local labour market - production work - that it only creates a short-term and
limited potential, narrowly training refugees in skills useful within production settings and
facilitating the allocation to low paid, low status jobs. It is shown how limited valuation is the mechanism through which devaluation – relegation to segmented secondary labour market sections – occurs and how the process of labour market integration becomes intertwined with market shortages.
The data informing this research were gathered in and around the labour market integration project ‘Meetellen en Meedoen’ (‘Counting in and Joining in’), in which refugees accommodated in the Westland area are trained in production line skills, after which they’re aligned to employers1. For two months I participated in the project, working along the refugees and the staff, both executing participant observation and interviews with staff members, refugees and (potential) employers.
The paper is built up as follows. It first presents two seemingly contradictive
theoretical perspectives – the potentiality framework and segmented labour market theory – and the different questions these perspectives evoke, the first questioning the mechanisms of valuation and the second questioning the mechanisms of devaluation. The data section
initially follows this dichotomy, examining the details of valuation and devaluation processes separately, after which it’s examined more abstractly how these processes relate to each other and indeed co-occur. It thereby answers the question how processes of valuation and
devaluation co-occur in the labour market integration of refugees in the local Westland area in the Netherlands?
Theoretically, the paper makes an innovative move by connecting recent post-Fordist theories on employability and potential (Adkins, 2008, 2012; Muehlebach, 2011, 2012) to more traditional theories of labour market segmentation, and thereby incorporates insights from valuation studies (Helgesson and Muniesa, 2013). Practices and processes of valuation
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and devaluation are regularly examined in the field of cultural and consumer sociology, addressing the assessment and production of cultural and economic value (Beckert, 2011; Heuts and Mol, 2013), but are rarely applied to refugee studies. This research is an attempt to do so, and furthermore, to show how temporal aspects play an essential role in understanding processes of (de)valuation.
The potential value of refugees
Contemporary refugee reception and integration policies in Europe are accompanied by a discussion on the economic potential of refugees. This is reflected, first, by macro-economic accounts concerned with the (positive) aggregate impact of refugees on national economies and the EU as a whole by forming an additional labour supply or providing a solution for the ageing of national populations (Aiyar et al., 2016; Hinte et al., 2015; Brühl, 2016, compare Borjas, 1995; van Dalen, 2001; Razin & Sadka, 2000 for similar arguments about migrants). Second, various institutional measures, such as labour market integration services, are implemented to incorporate refugees’ labour power in national economies (Martin et al., 2016), sometimes particularly aimed at the accelerated recognition of qualifications in sectors with labour shortages, resulting in ‘desired’ groups being more facilitated (Maroufi, 2017). Likewise, both governmental and academic actors emphasize the need for adjusting legal regulations around work (e.g. work permits) to accelerate labour market access for refugees (de Lange et al., 2017; WRR/WODC/SCP, 2015). The quest for economic potential might even start before entering the country of arrival, for example where skilled refugees in Lebanon are being granted direct admission to Germany if they possess useful skills (Maroufi, 2015) or the proposal to build a ‘refugee island’ in the Mediterranean where refugees would run the complete island economy (Isleyen, 2016).
Emphasizing refugees’ economic potential fits within a ‘boost rather than a burden’ approach in which “the integration of refugees should not be understood as a burden, but as future investment. In the long term, there are good prospects that welfare gains can be reached. In the short term, it is therefore needed to better identify and strengthen the potentials of refugees” (Hinte et al., 2015: 1). Equally, the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) promotes “a framework for applying market systems assessments [..] to identify sectors with potential economic opportunities for the refugee target group” and simultaneously work on the employability, skills and capacities of refugees “to engage with the market” (Nutz, 2017: 4).
Remarkably, in approaching ‘the refugee question’ through a framework of economic considerations and solutions, adopting a neoliberal and utilitarian approach (Benson, 2016, Isleyen, 2016), these authors even consider refugees as a platform for investment. Likewise, a recent alliance between rich entrepreneurs and the Dutch government, considering refugees ‘not as a threat but as a chance’, perceive it as their task to invest in the labour market integration of refugees, not from a viewpoint of philanthropy, but from a viewpoint of
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‘impact investment’ that should be both profitable and reach societal effects (Rutten, 2017). This transcends the idea of refugees investing in themselves, following a neoliberal logic of “the individual as an investor in a life project that requires the constant pursuit of
opportunities [..] to yield rewards” (Allon, 2010: 367), and instead displays the notion of
societal investment in a group of newcomers that might yield societal returns on the long
term and thus contains economic potential.
Theoretically, this perspective fits in a more general trend of perceiving particular groups through a lens of economic potential. Theorized by Adkins (2008, 2012), a
potentiality framework starts from the idea that groups less (economically) valued in the labour force during Fordism, such as women, unemployed, disabled or pensioners flourish in current post-Fordist societies as a source of economic potential: “transformed into a site of potential, possibility and promise” (Adkins, 2012: 626, compare Muehlebach, 2011, 2012). These groups are not considered economically useless but are approached and valued in terms of what they might or can do as potential economic source, whereby “value is
increasingly organized and harnessed [..] via a prospecting for potential, that is, for new sites of possibility and future commercial energies” (Adkins, 2012: 625). A potentiality framework operates via a logic of futurity and appraises prospect more than past skills or acquirements. “[T]he value of labour or the worker lies not in accumulated embodied skills and experience but in potential capacities” (Adkins, 2012: 625, italics added). The assurance of potential growth, capacities and return on investment become dominant modes of thinking in the labor market and other domains of life (Allon, 2010; Kuehn and Corrigan, 2013) whereby securing a strategy forward, guaranteeing future economic potential, matters more than past skills, achievements or results.
Applied to the labour market, this means that unemployment is not simply a ‘time away from productive activity’, but is characterized by the continuation of a wide range of ‘productive’ activities, so that the unemployed “ensure perpetual market availability or
perpetual job readiness, even if employment never arrives” (Adkins, 2012: 635; Hassel, 2014; Sowa et al., 2015; Peck, 2003). As a consequence, a wide range of activities, including labour market training, work experience and placements, active job searches and search reporting, counselling and individual action plans aim at what people could do as productive citizens instead of structurally locating them outside the productive labour force.
Where Adkins’ account remains abstract, Muehlebach (2011, 2012) empirically demonstrates how the Italian state demands marginal populations such as the unemployed youth, early retirees, and pensioners in Italy to undertake unwaged labour (volunteering) in return for receiving social belonging and public dignity. According to Muehlebach, both authorities and volunteers participate in a ‘public fantasy’ in which volunteering is deemed to lead to social belonging and public recognition, in the same way that paid work led to
stability and belonging (2012: 11). In this way, otherwise (economically) ‘useless’ groups are made productive.
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Adkins and Muehlebach are not concerned with refugees in particular, but their framework has important implications for the current reception of refugees and evokes questions answered in this paper. Applying this perspective to refugee reception and integration, first, breaks with the distinction of newcomers ‘with’ or ‘without’ prospects in which the ‘unassimilable’ ethnic other is perceived as obtaining fixed characteristics fit or unfit for the nation’s labour market (Bonjour and Duyvendak, 2017). Instead, it perceives newcomers as mouldable into potential and a potential useful addition to the labour force (Kaabel, 2017). However, as Muehlebach (2011, 2012) shows, (institutional) effort is needed to create this labour pool: there’s not suddenly a (potential) productive labour force. This raises the question of how exactly economic potential is created around refugees and who are involved in this process. More particularly, this paper shows how a deliberate effort is made to create and ensure the economic potential of the refugee group towards (future) employers and to deliver them with added value to the local labour market2.
Second, accounts examining the mechanisms around the creation of economic potential, often do so from a nation-level perspective (Martin et al., 2016; de Lange et al., 2017; Muehlebach, 2011, 2012). This neglects the particular dynamics and institutional mechanisms at the local level, even though the local scale is where refugees and the labour market actually meet and the local labour market defines what is considered useful economic potential in the first place. Attention for locality is furthermore particularly pregnant in the Dutch case, where a wave of decentralization since 2105 made municipalities bear the main responsibility for the labour market integration of refugees. This resulted in a wide variety of different approaches by municipalities, which often still reside in the phase of
experimentation (Razenberg & de Gruijter, 2017a, compare Darrow, 2015 for a street level approach of refugee services). For these reasons, this paper pays particular attention the local scale, zooming in on mechanisms at work in the Westland area in the Netherlands.
Refugees in a segmented labour market
Alongside the above presented framework of potential, previous research shows that
refugees, in comparison to both native-born and other immigrants, end up considerably more often in unemployment, lower occupational and income positions and often experience downward occupational mobility (Connor, 2010; Bakker et al., 2017; Pietka-Nykaza, 2015; Valtonen, 2004). Though this ‘refugee gap’ partly diminishes over time, as refugees’ participation in employment rises, data for the Netherlands show that the income level of refugees both starts and remains far behind other migrants even after living 15 years in the country (Bakker et al., 2017). That employment levels rise but income levels remain low might be explained through the type of job and contract, since refugees work more often in part-time jobs and with insecure labour contracts. Data for the Netherlands indeed showed an
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The refugee group in this research concerns ‘status holders’ – refugees with a temporal residency permit, mostly for five year. Throughout the rest of this paper, the term ‘refugees’ will be used.
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increase of refugees in employment between 2011 and 2013 (from 37 to 46%), but
demonstrated this was due to an increase in very small jobs (less than 12 hours per week) at the cost of full time employment, which decreased with 7,6%. Also, two thirds (66%) of refugees in the Netherlands have temporal contracts, opposed to 55% among other non-western immigrants and 34% among the native-born (Klaver et al., 2014).
Most quantitative accounts explain this disadvantaged position through individual-level explanations, such as human capital, total years of education, host country specific education, work experience and language ability (Connor, 2010; de Vroome & van Tubergen, 2010) or social capital, examining the effects of contacts with co-ethnics and natives (Lamba, 2003). Though some quantitative studies try to measure more institutional factors, such as the length of stay in asylum centres or the residence status (Bakker et al., 2014), these remain individual-level factors and assume a considerable amount of agency in dealing with social degradation (Pietka-Nykaza, 2015).
These studies thus only partly explain the variation around the refugee gap, as Connor admits at the end of his article: “there are substantial differences between refugees and non-refugee immigrants [and natives, red.] that remain unexplained” (2010: 392). The above mentioned accounts are unable, first, to explain how institutional regulations and mechanisms at both the local and national level steer refugee incorporation into the labour market.
Second, they don’t specify the relationship between refugees and particular employment
niches in the labour market, often in the secondary segment. By accentuating political
economic dimensions, labour market segmentation theories do provide a framework for doing so and address these two shortcomings by examining how “social and institutional forces reduce opportunities for certain social groups, for example women and immigrants, and relegate hem to the second division of the labour market” (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, 2006: 206, compare Stilwell, 2003; Dickens and Lang, 1988; Hudson, 2007).
Studies applying this perspective to refugees argue that refugees are relegated to undesirable low-status and low-paid jobs that natives avoid, regardless of their human capital. Rather than elucidating or ‘blaming’ the individual for a lack of skills or capital, these
perspectives show how the non-qualification of skills (Kaabel, 2107), language-barriers and discrimination function at an institutional level as ‘monopoly-like mechanisms’ to secure a continuous supply of labourers, in which it is deemed suitable, natural and fair that those with lacking (language) skills end up in low-status, low-paid, insecure jobs and should even be grateful for this (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, 2006; Valtonen, 2001).
Important for this paper is the question how (semi)governmental actors are involved in the relegation of refugees to secondary labour markets. Frome one angle, Colic-Peisker and Tilbury demonstrate the functioning of ‘regional sponsored migration schemes’ in Australia “through which the government tries to address the shortage of low-skilled labour in depopulating country areas” (2006: 203). Refugees are encouraged to settle in country
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areas “where jobs are ‘guaranteed’. Needless to say, these are low-status, low-paid and often also unhealthy jobs, such as abattoir and farm work” (2006: 205).
From a different angle, Kay and Miles (1988) show how the post-war British government carried out an intentional recruitment of Eastern European refugees from displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria to work in secondary segment industries and services suffering from labour shortages but deemed essential for economic recovery of Britain. The refugees were recruited and selected in the country of origin on the basis of their expected labour power quality and fit to the sectors: healthy, strong and fit bodies for males to work in mining and agriculture and fit, clean and dignified women for cleaning jobs. It resulted in a ‘hierarchy of desirability’ among the refugees, but also to a direct alignment to secondary labour market sectors since severe employment restrictions were implemented by the British government. The recruited refugees “were not only confined to a restricted range of ‘approved industries and services’ but also could not leave their jobs without official consent” (1988: 223), next to being at risk of deportation by not performing well.
Analysing the current reception of refugees, Maroufi (2017) shows how recent labour market reforms for refugees in Germany risk to allocate them in precarious and segmented sectors. First, to achieve quicker integration, refugees are now allowed to start working after three months instead of fifteen, but need governmental approval for their job. The officially recognized jobs also include temporary and subcontracted labour and unpaid internships, functioning as a stimulus to undertake these (more easily accessible) precarious jobs. Second, temporary employment is facilitated through temporary employment agencies for refugees “promoting subcontracted labour as an instrument for the integration of refugees” (2017: 28). Finally, measures are implemented to grant accelerated residency status if financial
independence could be proved, but “such pressure is precisely a reason why refugees could accept precarious or even exploitative labour relations in the hope to facilitate their access to secure residence rights” (2017: 25; compare Scherschel, 2016; Chauvin et al., 2013). This leads Maroufi to conclude that “such initiatives normalize subcontracted labour as an employment solution [..] integrating refugees on a ‘low threshold’ in the labour market” (2017: 28) and that the normalization of precarious job opportunities by policy makers and industrial actors lead to further segmentalization.
8 Valuation and devaluation in a local setting
The framework of labour market segmentation provides a different perspective than the potentiality framework, highlighting mechanisms at work that create (more or less consciously) a devalued labour pool of refugee workers. Rather than investing in refugee skills, it’s deemed logical, fair and natural that they will end up in secondary labour market segments, a mechanism that is both “functional for the capitalist economy at a societal level as well as for individual employers, as it provides a constant supply of cheap labour ready to take on the bottom jobs” (Colic-Peisker, 2006: 206).
The two frameworks thus seem to present and analyse an opposing logic. On the one hand, a potentiality framework perceives how refugees are approached as potential economic source that is in need of valuation (e.g. through governmental regulations or programs) and wonders how this valorization process and the practices of valuation function. On the other hand, segmented labour market theories describe mechanisms of disinvestment and de-recognition of refugee skills, wondering how the devaluation of this group functions. This paper investigates whether and how these two relate to each other, examining how processes of valuation and devaluation co-exist within one (local) setting. Since both perspectives often address macro level factors, rather than a street level perspective, this paper emphasizes local labour market dynamics and local agencies operating at the intersection of the valuation and devaluation of refugee skills.
This results in the intriguing question how processes of valuation and devaluation co-occur
in the labour market integration of refugees in the local Westland area in the Netherlands? Data and method
The data were gathered in and around the labour market integration project ‘Meetellen en Meedoen’ (‘Counting in and Joining in’) for refugees accommodated in the Westland area in the Netherlands, in which refugees are trained in production line skills during a period of maximum 1,5 years. The project started in April 2016 and is executed by Corporate Social Responsibility business Patijnenburg, which was originally involved in sheltered employment but functions since several years as the only and overall responsible for labour market
(re)integration in the area. Functioning as a ‘Government Ltd.’ (Overheids BV), the
municipality both outsourced the complete re-integration responsibility to Patijnenburg, but simultaneously functions as the only shareholder. Patijnenburg receives subsidies from the local government as well income arrived from the sale of products made within the business (van Berkel and van der Aa, 2005).
Following the ideal of ‘quick integration’, refugees are enrolled in the project as soon as they apply for social benefits in the municipality, and aims to start the trajectory within three weeks. Participation is a prerequisite for receiving social benefits and participants work at least 16 hours per week. Apart from receiving social benefits, there’s no salary involved.
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While the eventual aim is to guide people into paid employment, the official governmental agreement states the aim as to ‘reduce the distance to the labour market’ by offering a ‘work-learning’ (dual) trajectory in which practical work experience is acquired during the period of citizenship training.
During two months, I worked alongside the refugees and the staff in the project, joining in the performance of production work, participating in additional trainings and gatherings, such as job interview trainings and a ‘speed meet’ to connect refugees to an employment agency, and visiting employers in the area. Next to observations, qualitative, in-depth interviews have been held with staff members of the project (8), participating refugees (11, among which 6 Syrians3, 4 Eritreans and 1 Iranian), (potential) employers (3), the local department of Vluchtelingenwerk (Council for Refugees) and the regional labour market coordinator4. The interviews with staff members centred on the functioning of the project, its aims, the ways to reach these aims and their everyday work experience with both refugees and employers. The interviews with refugees centred on their former working lives, current experience in the project and their perception about future employment. Interviews with employers concerned their experience with the project, their understanding of valuable employee skills and their perception on the social mobility of this group.
A qualitative strategy was chosen to be able to provide a street level perspective, analyzing how the logics of refugee integration were applied in practice rather than formulated in discourse (Darrow, 2015). Observation provided insight in the everyday interactions and relations between staff and refugees (Desmond, 2014) while interviews provided in-depth information about the institutional dynamics and experiences from the different actors involved (Lamont & Swidler, 2014). The two methods reciprocally
strengthened each other, since the interviews provided an improved lens for observation and observed occasions could be further elaborated during the interviews.
The data were analysed using Atlas.ti. The coding process started with descriptively analysing the experiences of both the staff and refugees. It soon appeared that codes used for the staff couldn’t be applied to refugees and vice versa, appearing to talk from a completely different perspective. The staff valued the project rather positively, whereas the refugees expressed a negative experience. Going back to theory, it appeared that the concepts of valuation and devaluation provided a useful lens for further coding. From then on, more attention was paid to institutional codes, describing the relation of the project toward the labour market and employers, rather than focusing on micro-interactions between staff and refugees. The focus on temporal aspects during coding was a deliberate choice beforehand. The project promoted itself through temporal aspects - such as being on time and production speed – and during the fieldwork, time appeared to be an omnipresent aspect in the daily
3 During the interviews with Syrians, I was assisted by an Arabic translator. 4
The staff consisted of a project leader, floor supervisors, job coaches and account managers. The interviewed employers were Nature’s pride, Rexnord and Agrolux.
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interactions. Coding consciously for everything that related to time or temporality, it appeared that much more temporal dimensions appeared than the project promoted – such as limited future and time deceleration - as is described below.
The Westland area
The Westland area is located between The Hague and Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Its economy is characterized mainly by agriculture and horticulture and contains numerous manufacturing jobs in both green houses and surrounding industries such as agricultural auctions and ‘agrologistics’ – the (re)packing and (re)distribution of fruit and vegetables from all over the world. The jobs are mainly physically demanding, low-skilled and low-paid jobs and often concern temporal (seasonal) employment (Rijk & Somers, 1998; Buijs, 1988).
For its enormous economic impact, the area is also known as ‘the green port’ of the Netherlands. Notwithstanding its economic relevance, labour market shortages in the area have been addressed since the late 80s, in line with other agricultural sectors in the
Netherlands (Buijs, 1988; Bax & de Bruin, 1993; Overbeek & Hillebrand, 1993; Engbersen, 2009). Also, the employment of both undocumented and seasonal migrants, mainly Eastern Europeans, to fill these gaps is a theme that is often addressed in relation to the Westland (Engbersen et al., 2012; de Bakker et al., 2004; Wolf, 2015).
The ‘high availability of work’, as many of my respondents noted, or in other words the labour market shortages, especially in agricultural and manufacturing sectors, make the area a known target for policy interventions. Already in 1992 efforts were made to link the long term unemployed to the area (Engbersen, 2009)5. More recently, in 2012, several remarkable interventions were made by sending busses with unemployed people to the area in the hope that they would get employed there, mostly with marginal effects due to refusal of the jobs by the unemployed or being unfit for the type of work offered (van der Bol, 2012). Engbersen remarks that though some unemployed may find work in agriculture, these numbers evaporate in relation to the number of Eastern Europeans working in these sectors6.
The case under examination here is thus interesting since it fits in a longer tradition of aligning the unemployed to jobs in the Westland. But more so, it adopts a unique approach towards labour market integration – one that is intensive (at least 16 hours per week) and imitates an industrial work plant to train refugees and make them ‘ready’ for working in the local manual labour market.
5 First by facilitating them through arranging transport, later by sanctioning people through cutting social
benefits in case of denial, as it appeared that most people refused the jobs offered to them.
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In 2004, 383 unemployed found employment in agriculture, against 20.000 temporary work permits for Eastern Europeans to work in this sector (Engbersen, 2009: 54)
11 The process of valuation: making a production worker
The training space of the project is an almost exact copy of an industrial production plant and is called ‘the Work Academy’. The main activity of the refugees consists of doing simple assembling work, such as constructing little devices for solar panels or greenhouse systems, that are in turn sold to companies (see figure 1 and 2). The work day in the Work Academy starts at 08.00 and ends at 16.30, and contains three breaks during the day, two breaks of 10 minutes and one of 30 minutes. The work day is regulated by one centrally visible clock and a central bell that denotes the starting and ending times and the breaks, and is managed by two ‘work leaders’ or supervisors on the floor.
Figure 1. A refugee at work in the project (source: MVO Westland, 2016: 12)
Figure 2. The training space. The imitation of an industrial work plant. (source: own photography)
12 Reworking temporal skills
The project starts from the idea that the refugee group accommodated in the Westland is not automatically ready for the local labour market and needs (intensive) training to become so. Untrained refugees are considered ‘useless’ for employers, in particular regarding their temporal skills such as being on time and obtaining the right production speed. They need to undergo a transformation from ‘unready’ or ‘useless’ to ‘readiness’ or ‘usefulness’ to become valuable for the local labour market. As a staff member explains:
“Just the farmer from Eritrea, in principle, is not at all useful for the entrepreneur, unless he’s good guy and the company says ‘I find it important to help this group’. Then it’s more out of motivation instead of saying ‘these are such toppers’, because there’s always trouble with them, since of course they’re completely not used to being on time, and they don’t work hard enough.” (account manager)
The project therefore aims to intervene on those lacking (temporal) skills by “broadening the knowledge of the Dutch language and to expand on the employee skills, such as being on time, reaching a high production speed and increasing the (physical) work load capacity” (MVO Westland, 2016: 13).
Remarkable is the focus on temporality, in which three aspects stand out: being on time, physical duration and production speed. Firstly, being on time is not only considered a general Dutch capacity that refugees ‘with little work experience in the Netherlands’ are lacking, but is understood as an indispensable quality within the local economy of manual labour. Since the production line starts running at a particular time and all employees depend on each other for reaching the necessary speed, being on time is an essential quality and in fact means being present too early, to be ready when the line starts.
Secondly, the project aims to improve physical duration: the ability to stand on one’s feet for at least eight hours. Sitting is forbidden during the training, accept when participants have permission from the supervisor or obtain an official medical certificate. This raised quite some conflict between refugees and the work leaders, and accordingly, a refugee expressed that he felt like a child, having to ask for permission to sit, and therefore often remained standing even though he had pain in his back. Since most production work concerns standing work, both staff and employers consider this a necessary quality to reduce the distance to the local labour market. An employer explains he even stimulated the project to undertake more standing work: “When I visited Patijnenburg, they were doing the work sitting. Then I said: let them stand, if they come to us [our factory] they also have to stand for eight hours. So now they do more things as we do, they try to do as many things as possible standing. [..] you have to let them stand, because everywhere, production work means standing. The
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Thirdly, the production speed of refugees is considered problematic, and not in line with the speed the local labour market demands. Regularly, this was linked to refugees coming from countries with slow time regimes, where a Western or modern production speed was deemed lacking7. A staff member noted:
“if you have been a farmer in Eritrea and worked on the land, that is not comparable to here. First, the work speed, the production level is just much higher. This also has to do with the climate of course. In a country with a very warm climate, during the day people don’t work. It’s too hot outside. So the speed is different there, that doesn’t mean less but different from the Netherlands. [..] For them, farming is just a big vegetable garden and then they have tomatoes, pepper plants, or whatever they harvest. And often, a part is for themselves, and a part is on a barrow with a donkey to the closest village and then selling the surplus. That’s really how they live there.” (job coach)
Another staff member noted: “if you’ve been a farmer in Eritrea but you never saw a work or grain robot and you are standing there with a socket the whole day, that’s something different from what they learn here, what they demand here” (account manager).
Testing and securing
Just teaching refugees the right temporal skills and then handing them over to employers is considered not enough. In the process of valuating their potential, it is deemed important to
secure those skills. The supervisors are responsible for observing the skills and progress of
the refugees and guiding them in improving those skills. The imitated factory setting is deemed ideal for observing and testing the capacities of the participants, as the project leader explains: “the added value of this department is that one can observe the people within a protected environment, observing how people are doing while working, without immediately bothering employers if there are problems”. Next to ‘general’ observations around work attitude and progress, the concrete productivity and working speed (for example 150 products per hour) can be tested. A work leader explains that “we observe how much someone can produce within an hour, if it is less than we can approach someone on this, saying that it must be quicker, we can do measurements on this.”
Interestingly, the targets and productivity norms aren’t just ‘artificially’ made up as testing mechanisms, but indeed arrive from a real functioning market incorporated in the Work Academy, whereby the products made by refugees are sold to external commercial parties. This means that the participants are part of an elaborate system of orders, targets and quality to be reached and, even though not paid, they can be typified as real employees producing real things for real markets, thereby presented as ‘a competitive labour force’ in the information folder (Patijnenburg, z.d.).
7 The official information folder also states that “because of cultural differences there might be a different work
ethics. The typical Dutch agreements on working hours and production speed are for example different in the country of origin” (MVO Westland, 2016: 13).
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A staff member describes that the inclusion of real market logics provides a further advantage of the project, by confronting refugees with the real practice of labour markets, and this experience is considered a useful trait in the alignment toward future employers.
Securing skills toward employers
The imitation of an industrial work plant and its according measures are more than an end in itself. In the process of valuation, it functions above all as a means to guarantee the skills of (potential) refugee workers towards (potential) employers, in which the project and project staff function as an intermediary between supply and demand of labour. They know both what employers need and ‘what’s on offer’, by keeping track on the progress and readiness of candidates. The Work Academy thus delivers an advantage for project staff that has to ‘sell’ their candidates towards (potential) employers, since it provides them with a proof of work experience and necessary skills in an industrial setting.
“Yes it’s very valuable for me to have trust in someone to sell him. ‘I have here x and he’s always present’. Just the basic labour market skills, the Dutch values and norms, that someone sticks to those. And a deal is a deal (afspraak is afspraak). That’s very important. That gives the employer trust [..]. So here it’s really about the basic skills that may bother an employer, if he doesn’t show up and is always too late, then the employer says, then I actually don’t want him at all.” (Staff member – account manager)
“An employer is not a philanthropic institution, he’s not aimed at ‘this people had such a though time, come work with me’. An employer wants to offer people chances but they first have to deserve it. And that part, that one knows what an employer needs, we can deliver that here within the project. That they learn, [the skill of] producing, it may be basic work but it’s a start.” (Staff member – job coach)
Furthermore, by selecting only the ‘ready’ candidates, the project serves as a selection and recruitment mechanism and provides employers with the advantage of pre-selected refugees - those deemed reliable, fast and obtaining a high level of ‘learnability’ (leerbaarheid).
Towards employers, it’s secured that only ‘ready’ refugees and those with ‘potential’ are delivered, or otherwise that possible ‘risks’ or ‘weaknesses’ of candidates can be told to the employer in advance. As a job coach explains: “The moment in which the work leader observes, there’s potential in it, or someone is good in this or that, then it’s easier for a job coach to guide someone into a job. If one knows, what are someone’s capabilities, what do we have to reckon with. Then you can indicate towards the employer: these are the things someone has difficulties with, you have to reckon with this.”
This corresponds to the experience of an employer: “my experience is that MVO Westland delivers people that are indeed really ready, not so many but qualitatively good. Much better selected and only those people who are really ready for it. [..] We could’ve also
15
posted a job application, but then we have to adopt a role in the selection procedure. Now we have them as a mediator. Is really convenient. I absolutely see the added value. They take over recruitment and selection and several practical stuff and time to explain things.”
Delivering good candidates is furthermore deemed important to secure future collaboration with employers:
“yes that department is a work-learning location [..] a check on production speed, physical capacity, how does one behave in a group, does someone take initiative, these kinds of things. And that
information is on the other side again very important to know if one can propose someone. Because if someone is continuously too late and has excuses every time then I don’t propose him towards a company. This company accepts this two times and then they say: ‘what kind of guy did you deliver me, I can’t use him at all’. [but] if the work leader here says: this is a real good guy [topvent], takes initiative, is always on time, very reliable.[..] Then I’ve got this story towards the entrepreneur. So this department is really important.” (Staff member – account manager)
Even though the Work Academy delivers training and experience in production skills, tests the skills and selects eligible refugees, this is not sufficient for employers to have faith in the economic potential of refugees. Therefore, the internal trajectory in the Work Academy is followed by a ‘free trial period’ (proefplaatsing) in which the employer gets the chance to check out the refugees potential inside his factory for a period of one or several months, without the obligation to pay a salary. An employer stressed the need of a trial period: “what we arranged now with Patijnenburg, what we do is apparently very complex. The distance to the labour market [is still big] [ ..] so we agreed, they first enter with a trial period. Then we invest time in it as a company, that costs money. But well, then we don’t have to pay this person yet. And then we teach him, during 2 months, monitoring”.
Ironically, the trial period regularly led to drop outs, according to staff members and employers due to ‘lacking motivation’, misbehavior (e.g. being too late, not showing up) or not reaching the necessary speed, in particular not in comparison to the supply of Eastern European seasonal migrants that ‘reach the speed within two days’. Since a very present ‘time-is-money’ logic is present in most companies, refugees are considered a decelerating factor in the production process, both not reaching the necessary speed and needing extra explanation, which costs time. An employer describes that floor managers’ interests conflict with taking time for further investment in skills, as “they are not really willing to help, they just want to run the production line.” In these failing attempts and the unwillingness from companies to invest too much time in guidance, the first ‘cracks’ in the valuation process become visible. This is, however, not yet a proof of devaluation.
16 The process of devaluation: a limited pathway
Thus far, a process of valuation is described, consisting of adjusting temporal skills, securing these through testing and imitating a real industrial setting, and acting as intermediary toward demands and wishes of employers. Following a logic of investment, the project is involved in increasing the economical use value of refugees at the local labour market, investing in production skills and reducing the distance to the labour market. However, the approach also shows that the skills learnt only concern skills for a particular segment of the labour market – manufacturing jobs. Since participation is obligatory, and the jobs offered to refugees can’t be refused, as is described below, a very particular pathway is laid out for refugees that educates them into a factory worker.
Without surprise, refugees didn’t share the perspective of usefulness and investment, but by contrast express the uselessness of the trajectory. They express there’s nothing to be learnt at the Work Academy and it doesn't bear any relationship with former work
experiences. Though several participants, mostly Eritreans, had little to no education and thereby experience less ‘factual’ degradation, the project offers this group little to no further education. Furthermore, regardless of their background, participants are subject to the same trajectory of becoming a factory worker. Very cynically, a Syrian participant, formerly employed as baker and plaster decorator, expressed that instead of becoming integrated into the labour market, he felt he became integrated with the clock:
“I only learnt how to put the screw, tire it or let it relax, until now nothing significant. I don’t even know what the pieces are made for. So I only receive orders to put ‘this with this’ but I don’t know what it’s for [..] they told me this work is for integration and to improve my language, but now I become integrated with the pieces I’m working with, the elements, and I become integrated with the clock.” (Syrian, male, 45 years old, secondary education)
Later in the interview he expressed: “I’m always relaxed but I feel bored when I’m working, I need
to concentrate on the screws and that makes my eyes tired. [..] I want a clock that is faster than this one. This one is very lazy and it doesn't work. The clock in my home is very fast but this one is very slow. At one o'clock I look at the clock and I find it one o'clock and after half an hour I look at it and I find it one o’clock. [asks me] Can you change the clock?” (idem)
This experience was shared by another Syrian man, when I asked: “and what did you think of this work when you started, the first day?”
“actually it’s too much boring. For that, I try to focus on work, to forget the time. I try to work very fast, just to miss time. [..] Actually I learnt that from Egypt. In Egypt I worked in the same thing. [That] I work in something, I don’t like it, but I should work. So I learnt how I can miss time with working. Not ‘miss time’ by doing a good job but by not thinking in the job, just do it like a machine.” (Syrian, male, 26 years old, university degree)
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Remarkably, whereas the training aims to change temporal dimensions by speeding them up, the experiences of refugees also indicate temporal aspects, but from a very different angle. Instead of acceleration, refugees express the time in the Work Academy going ‘so slow’. Counting off until the break or making jokes about the breaks – someone calling ‘Break!’ – ‘haha no not yet’ – were very common practices. Concerning temporal dimensions, the refugees furthermore expressed that next to being trained in useless skills currently, the project also limited their future, as a Syrian participants told me: ‘it kills your dreams’.
“if I do this kind of work, it will be not useful for me. It’ll not be useful for anyone, really. [..] if they force me to do something, I’ll do like a machine and I’ll fail and make everything wrong. That’s not because I need to make it bad but it’s like, you get the dream, then someone kills your dream. You get the dream, like now I can study what I like, I can do what I like and suddenly someone says you can’t do anything, you can’t go back to what you did in Syria, you should work all the time and do [makes movements with his hands doing constructing work].”
[..]
Interviewer: “you said ‘they limit my choices’?”
Respondent: “they try to do that. Not for me only. For all. For example, if you’re working here for three of four months they try to take you to another work in the same thing (production work), but outside of social benefits. And that, you don’t have any choices, you should do. For me, I still fight, but for another person, he has no opinion or isn’t strong enough to fight for that, they will put him in the work, he’ll be stuck in this work for all his life because he doesn’t know anything except this work.”
[..]
“The municipality needs refugees to work as handmade work. But most of refugees need to continue studying. And that makes a problem. A big problem. Because you know, it’s like a chance for us. [..] You can do what you like, that’s the gift. But they try to steal that from us.” (all quotes, Syrian, male, 26 years old, university degree)
‘We don’t guide people into dream jobs’
The project staff likewise expresses that their task is not to deliver refugees ‘dream jobs’, but ‘bread jobs’ (droombaan-broodbaan). To place the candidates, labour market sectors are approached that provide easy access for people with little language skills and little work experience in the Netherlands. A staff member notes “We have a lot of companies in logistics where we place people because they can easily flow into those” and “Of course we’re always looking at employers that fit to the capabilities of our candidates. So, I can put a lot of time in an accountancy firm but I don’t have candidates for this anyway. So, we look more into cleaning, logistics” (italics mine). The project leader likewise expresses: “we don’t guide people into dream jobs, it’s as simple as that. We guide people into work available.”
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Next to the (easily available) ‘demand-argument’, what strengthens the allocation of refugees into particular jobs is that refugees can’t refuse the jobs ‘offered’ to them by the staff8. As a work leader explains:
“No, they don’t have a choice, for a moment you have to get rid of the idea that anyone who’s here can choose where he wants to work in. No, if there’s a job available you have to accept it because that’s the way it’s written in the rules of the government. I didn’t write them, I only perform them. There it’s written that you have to be available for every kind of job [..] and if you say ‘no I don’t want this’, then you can say ‘no’ one time but the second time, that’s not allowed. You can deny one or two jobs and afterwards you have to accept it, that’s how it’s written. [..] If you again say ‘no I don’t want this’, then here we say, wait, you just don’t want to work, than you don’t receive social benefits anymore, or less.”
A final mechanism regulating the allocation to bottom jobs is a very particular idea of social mobility. While recognizing that the jobs offered to refugees are indeed often minimum-wage jobs, both the staff and employers consider it suitable that refugees, as newcomers, start in bottom jobs since the local labour market structure is such that ‘everyone starts at the bottom’. It’s considered very well possible that refugees will achieve social mobility, on the condition that they invest in themselves and ‘take the opportunities’ offered to them in the project, such as joining in unpaid internships or trial periods to show their willingness. Being willing to prove oneself and being able to think in long term trajectories are considered an important trait for achieving social mobility. Examining further what was meant by social mobility, however, it appeared that both staff and employers thought of this mobility as mobility within the production line, such as becoming ‘order picker’ or ‘foreman’, rather than achieving success in another type of job, and thereby held a particularly narrow definition of social mobility.
Most remarkably, the project staff expressed that devaluation (being aligned to bottom jobs) is ‘not the end stage’ and that refugees didn’t understand this idea. To refer back to the beginning of the data section – the idea that refugees have wrong temporal skills – it appeared that this was also applied to their capacity of ‘long term thinking’. While refugees themselves expressed the concern that the project limits their future, the project staff argued that refugees don’t understand the idea of ‘investment’ - “Sometimes refugees don’t keep in mind that they have to invest to eventually arrive somewhere” (staff member) - and that it’s “not in their culture to think in long-term trajectories” (project leader). Accordingly, disagreements
between staff members and refugees about refugees not ‘taking the chances offered’ provided an ample source of conflict within the project. Talking about an Eritrean man unwilling to accept the job offered to him, a job coach explains:
8 This is in line with the ‘work first’ approach in the Netherlands, in which the unemployed who receive social
benefits but are considered employable are deemed to join in ‘activation’ activities and have to accept work offered to them by social services (Bunt, 2008).
19 “He has by chance an employer that sees a lot of potential in him, but well, he doesn’t see this as a chance himself, he’s very negative. He’s like, putting stickers on a piece of fruit, that’s not why I came to the Netherlands. While, he doesn’t see .. He’s there at the bottom of the work. And that means attaching stickers. But why? Because he can’t do other work because of [lacking]
communication. If he’s better with the language, then he’ll get more responsible work. So he doesn’t have this insight. He thinks he has this insight but he doesn’t have it.” (italics mine)
Another staff member summarizes the logics explained above in one striking quote:
“Look, we all start at the bottom, we all start at the bottom at a young age [..] Then one acquires experience. Here, you are a status holder, you arrive in a new country, you’re 40 and then you also start at the bottom. [..] I can imagine that one has to flip a switch. Of course not everyone is able to do that, to keep seeing perspective on the long run.” (account manager)
Logics of valuation and devaluation combined
To what extent social mobility is indeed possible can’t be concluded by the gathered data and should be subject of future (longitudinal) research. What can be concluded is that the project has very much influence in the kinds of jobs refugees will take on in the near future and the pathways that are deemed right for them – for the most part production sectors in the local labour market. It thereby forms a mechanism for relegating refugees into paid, low-status, physical jobs.
To understand how processes of valuation and devaluation relate, it’s necessary to understand that a process of limited valuation is at work. The data show that in the Westland area, (governmental) valuation is deemed necessary to guide refugees from a status of unreadiness to one of readiness for the local labour market and thereby legitimizes external intervention. However, this valuation process is at the same time limiting, by setting apart the refugee group as currently ‘unready’ for the labour market but suitable for production work in the near future, regardless of their past skills or experiences. The process doesn’t start from existing skills, but presupposes the refugee potential to be manufacturing potential in low-paid, low-status and physically heavy jobs. As a consequence, valuation is narrowly aimed at (temporal) production skills such as being on time and reaching production speed, rather than other human capital such as creativity or analytical skills. Also, in approaching refugees beforehand as a bunch of potential production labourers, elaborate individual assessment of their ‘real’ value is being denied.
This process of temporal intervention is by several authors understood through a cultural lens of ‘temporal othering’: the tendency to position the (non-western) ethnic other within a different time frame - one of backwardness, slowness and inactivity - that provides the legitimation to intervene: “To accelerate the pace of citizens, to speed them up or
influence their consumption of time and stimulate certain legitimate forms of ‘activity’” (van den Berg, 2016: 26; compare Fabian, 1983; Ahmed, 2007).
20
However, in this research, (temporal) valuation concerns more than a cultural difference, since it also functions in fulfilling a particular demand in the labour market. Valuation is narrowly aimed at the demand side of production work and is occupied with learning production skills needed in the local economy. The need to speed up is very closely connected to sectors where work is ‘available’, meaning easily accessible for those with lacking (language or other native) skills. Thus, next to predefining refugees’ potential (solely) as production potential, limited potential is created by prioritizing the demand-side of low-paid, low-skilled and physically heavy jobs.
In the emphasis on demand, the process of valuation is heavily employer-oriented (Sowa et al., 2015), adopting valuation strategies to provide employers with faith and guarantee of the candidates’ potential. Remarkable is the standardized way in which this is done. Rather than selling ‘unique candidates’, the project adopts an approach that trains and tests refugees in a uniform way, thereby making a wide variety of refugees with various backgrounds easily comparable and making it possible to ‘objectively’ recruit the ready ones (Espeland and Stevens, 1998). Temporal measures facilitate this process, since being on time and production speed are easily measurable and comparable.
Valuation as devaluation
It can now be examined how processes of valuation and devaluation co-occur in the Westland area. In being so busy with the creation of economic potential in line with the local labour market demand, the examined project risks to limit the current and future opportunities of refugees, only providing them with skills useful within production settings, thereby aimed at a short-term demand in a very particular local setting. Previous research already observed how the continuous search for potential employability and the (demand for) a permanent sale of labour power risks to result in the downgrading of wages and working conditions (Sowa et al., 2015; Peck, 2003).
The data show how, paradoxically, the particular need for and practices of valuation form the mechanism through which devaluation – relegation to segmented secondary labour sections – is realized. What is at work are not ‘free market’ mechanisms, in which a supply side of entering refugees automatically fills the gaps in the labour market, but a deliberate effort by a semi-governmental agent to create economical potential in which the ‘unready’ supply side of refugees is made ready for a particular share of the demand side.
Finally, it can be concluded that processes of valuation and devaluation meet where labour market integration becomes intertwined with labour market shortages. In focusing so much on a particular share of the demand side, the project bears the risk to yield and
crystallize a very narrow definition of ‘labour market integration’, understood as integration in production sectors, providing the skills necessary for those sectors and aimed at a
21
Since participation in the project is obligatory and offered jobs have to be accepted, it thereby decides and (de)limits to a very big extent the pathways for refugees to follow, in which there’s little room for agency, past skills and work experience, or a long-term future of participants. As often in research, respondents themselves formulate the logics at work razor sharp:
“They don’t really get education, and sometimes they find this.. yes of course the work is not always at the level they were used to in the country of origin. Or they came here with the idea of building up a better future, and to grab the chances they didn’t get in their own country. So these kinds of things, there’s a discrepancy in this, and I’m often modifying this image with a translator, this expectation.” (Staff member - job coach, italics mine)
Conclusion
In this paper, it was examined how processes of valuation and devaluation co-occur in a labour market integration project for refugees in the Westland area in the Netherlands. This arose from a seeming contradiction between a ‘framework of potentiality’ and segmented labour market theories.
A lens of valuation shows how the project Meetellen en Meedoen aims to train refugees deemed ‘unfit’ for the local labour market – mainly in terms of temporal
dimensions, such as being on time and reaching the necessary production speed – in order to become ready for the manufacturing segment of the labour market. Within the valuation process, much alignment is sought with (potential) employers, by imitating a production factory, testing skills, selective recruiting and providing a free trial period in which the
employer gets the opportunity to check out the labour market potential of the refugee himself. By contrast, a lens of devaluation showed the experiences of refugees, who expressed that the activities carried out in the project were not meaningful and had no relation to past skills, and that the project instead limited their current and future opportunities. This picture was
strengthened by insight in the devaluing logics of the project, such as the search for and placement in easily accessible jobs, the impossibility to refuse offered jobs and a very narrow picture of refugees’ social mobility.
The data show how a deliberate effort is made by a semi-governmental agent in
creating and ensuring the economic potential of the refugee group towards (future)
employers and to deliver them with ‘added value’ to the local labour market, but this interference to create value is at the same time the mechanism through which devaluation - relegation to segmented secondary labour market sections – is realized. In being so busy with the creation of economic potential in line with a particular demand in the local labour market – production jobs - the project risks to limit the current and future opportunities of refugees, only providing them with skills useful within production settings and aimed at short-term valuation in a very particular local setting.
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It displays a case where dynamics of labour market integration and labour market shortages become intertwined, through which a narrow conception of valuation co-occurs with and evokes devaluation. The linkage of labour shortages to labour market integration leads to both an oversimplification of the problem and the solution.
The aim of this research was to examine the rationale behind and activities executed within the project rather than the achievements or successes it booked. This could be subject of future research. What did appear were several ‘cracks’ in the valuation process, in
particular where refugees were by employers considered less productive than Eastern European seasonal migrants who reach the necessary speed ‘within 2 days’. By contrast, refugees did regularly not succeed in reaching the necessary speed during the trial period, ‘even after 2 months’, and then returned to the Work Academy. An important difference between these two groups is the conscious recruitment for the type of jobs, as a staff member noted: “Everything that works here in horticulture is selected in Poland on
nimble-fingeredness and hand-eye-coordination, on motivation, and they don’t select on these requirements if someone enters a boat in Syria.” In terms of labour market segmentation, it might be considered ‘fortunate’ that it doesn’t reach major successes, so that the risk of allocation might be limited.
Further research could also address more the marketization within this labour market integration project, examining how refugees are already ‘productive’ workers during their trajectory (van Berkel & van der Aa, 2005). Finally, the research didn’t use longitudinal data and was unable to examine how the devaluation and relegation to segmented labour market might both influence further trajectories on the individual level and spoil refugees’ ‘real’ capacities on a macro-economic level on the long term.
To conclude, the research contributed theoretically by connecting recent post-Fordist theories on employability and potential (Adkins, 2008, 2012; Muehlebach, 2011, 2012) to more traditional theories of labour market segmentation and offered openings for the
application of valuation studies to refugee studies. Though the current refugee reception goes accompanied by the quest for their economic potential, the need for ‘the capitalization of almost everything’ (Leyshon and Thrift, 2007) might well result in a cruel valuation that both limits the current and future opportunities of refugees.
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