KON_F_04 In the Service of the State

Objective/Research Question

The project investigates under which conditions economic structural change and sociopolitical objectives can be constitutive for social cohesion – or give rise to processes of social polarization. The project is based on the larger context of the structural shift in public services in Europe between about 1955 and 1995 from a strictly regulated public-sector system towards a service sector shaped according to business criteria, which – this would be a topic worth discussing – was made possible only by a new global migration in the low-wage sector. Especially since the workforces in public services (waste collection and care) were characterized by being made up of migrants, it also hit them first when the public sector wanted to withdraw from public services. In the project, public services therefore serve as a prism for analysing the transformation of global labour migration as a state-directed process and for asking which social conflicts and societal defence mechanisms developed in the workplace and in the framework of local administration and how these could be overcome.

The project includes a European comparison and is designed as a long-term study: alongside Germany, the focus lies on Italy and France as further countries with migrant labour markets in public services. From the 1960s onwards, migrants from South Korea and the Philippines increasingly took on tasks in patient and geriatric care in Germany, which in the past had mostly been the responsibility of female family members outside the official labour market statistics. Vast numbers of migrants from the Philippines were employed in Italy’s care sector. By 1970, the ratio of migrants in the workforces of France’s waste collectors had risen to 75 per cent; they mostly came from North Africa, Senegal, and Mali. These three countries were selected because they are the three large founding states of the European Economic Community, which initially gained importance as a forum for information and exchange and later also as an independent player for regulatory and norm-setting matters. In addition to an international perspective based on comparison and transfer methods, the project picks out an explicit gender perspective from its research subject of care/ waste collection. Last but not least, it offers a diachronic approach to current discussions, which so far have persisted solely on the geographical axis of Eastern Europe/Central Europe and the very specific problems and debates associated with it. Seen as a whole, a convincing research design thus emerges that analyses integration and disintegration as a consequence of the relationship between labour migration and the transformation of public services in Europe.