The research reported in this chapter was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), grant number SH 82/5‐1, “Cross‐Border Temporary Staffing – Market‐Making and Transnational Regulation in Interregional Comparison”, Principle Investigator Karen Shire. The participation of Jun Imai in the research was partly funded through the JSPS Grant‐in‐Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI B, Grant number: 15H0340515), “Demographic change and mobility regime in Asian societies”, Principle investigator Yoshimichi Sato, Tohoku University. We thank Ingo Schulz‐Schaeffer and Thomas Haipeter for valuable comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. We also thank our colleagues in the research group “Cross‐Border Labour Markets” at the University Duisburg‐Essen and acknowledge the generous support of this collaboration by the university’s Central Research Unit “The Transformation of Contemporary Societies”.
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Notes
- 1.
In this chapter, the People’s Republic of China is referred to as China, and the Republic of China is referred to as Taiwan.
- 2.
Chinese, English, German and Japanese. In Poland and the Netherlands, English was most often the language of local operations.
- 3.
Article 3, 4(d), ILO Convention 34, Fee‐Charging Employment Agencies Convention, 1933.
- 4.
ILO Convention 96 Fee‐Charging Employment Agencies, 1949.
- 5.
ILO Convention 88 Employment Service Convention, 1948.
- 6.
This pattern of commercial regulation was later followed in East Asia by South Korea, and, in modified form, by China.
- 7.
Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Georgia, Hungary, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia and Macedonia all adopted the convention. Ratification in Western Europe was weaker than for previous conventions, but only because some countries had already legalized private services (notably the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden, as noted above), and negotiations for an EU directive to regulate temporary agency work were already anticipated.
- 8.
A similar logic is evident in the ILO Convention on migration (ILO Convention 97, Migration for Employment Convention), whereby employment services should be freely provided, and “sufficiently large” movements of labour should be regulated by bilateral agreements (Articles 2, 10). An annex to the convention, which may be ratified with the main text, covers recruitment “otherwise than under government‐sponsored arrangements for group transfer” (Annex 1), including private agencies (Article 3, 3(b), in which case, the authorization and conditions of operation are government specified.
- 9.
Specifically, workers are governed by the laws of the country in which they “habitually carry out their work” (Recital 14, Posted Workers Directive 96/71/EC), which include provisions on maximum work periods and minimum standards regarding rest periods, holidays and pay.
- 10.
The revisions, which are still under review, are supposed to mandate the application of all destination country labour standards to posted workers and coverage of posted workers under any laws in destination countries mandating the equal treatment of subcontract workers (Fries‐Tersch et al. 2017).
- 11.
A list of interview partners is included in the reference section at the end of this chapter.
- 12.
These authors write: “Most intra‐ASEAN migrants are unskilled workers (more than 87 % …), and irregular migration remains an intractable problem. These flows are concentrated in just a few corridors. The top five corridors – Myanmar to Thailand, Indonesia to Malaysia, Malaysia to Singapore, Lao People’s Democratic Republic to Thailand, and Cambodia to Thailand – represent 88 per cent of the total intra‐ASEAN migrant stock.” (Sugiyartot and Rannveig Agunias 2014, p. 1).
- 13.
New bilateral agreements have been concluded with Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam as part of broader economic partnership agreements.
- 14.
Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and the Philippines have ratified ILO C97 on migration, with Malaysia opting out of the annexes, which stipulate government regulation of private agencies in group transfers. The Philippines opts out of norms covering government‐directed group transfers.
- 15.
Although South Korea was not a focus of our research, it is an exemplary case of how temporary agency employment is adopted under international norms. South Korea never ratified the past or present ILO conventions, yet the country legalized temporary agency work under direct pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after the Asian financial crisis in 1997, to adopt structural reforms for improving labour market flexibility. In South Korea, where the Japanese term “dispatch” instead of temporary agency work is used, new legislation mimicked the original Japanese approach of restricting agency work to specific occupations. Despite the attempt to contain the spread of agency work through restrictions, this and other non‐regular employment forms have expanded rapidly (Shin 2013).
- 16.
Under subcontracting regulations, the staffing agency becomes the subcontractor to a client firm. This represents a functional equivalent to posting of workers across borders in Europe.
- 17.
This stipulation is a way to make sure that subcontracting is not agency staffing in the form of purely labour subcontracting, http://mailbox.evta.gov.tw/oldepaper/123.htm Nov 15, 2011 (Last accessed May 04, 2016). The Ministry of Labor holds that subcontracting must come with other things, such as equipment, in addition to workers. Agency work is considered as pure labour subcontracting, which is not covered by the Taiwanese Employment Service Law.
- 18.
This was confirmed in an interview with the executive manager of a European temporary staffing firm operating in Bangkok (Interview, European TSF1, Bangkok, March 23, 2015).
- 19.
Recruitment firms, which act as labour brokers, are extremely important in specific migration corridors, especially in the Southeast Asian sending countries for domestic and care labour, and for migration to the United Arab Emirates. Recently migration researchers, under the concept of the “migration industry” have turned to study such market actors (Lindquist et al. 2012).
- 20.
Migration researchers, especially economists, tend to define skilled labour by educational level (university degree and above). The definition used in the field by intermediaries however is much closer to occupational skills, and includes vocational skills, which may be classified in quantitative studies as low(er) skilled.
- 21.
Since the empirical research was concluded, Eurociett has been renamed the World Employment Confederation Europe.
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Shire, K., Heinrich, S., Imai, J., Mottweiler, H., Tünte, M., Wang, CC. (2018). Private Labour Market Intermediaries in Cross-Border Labour Markets in Europe and Asia: International Norms, Regional Actors and Patterns of Cross-Border Labour Mobility. In: Quack, S., Schulz-Schaeffer, I., Shire, K., Weiß, A. (eds) Transnationalisierung der Arbeit. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-20939-1_6
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