EU citizenship as precarious status for precarious workers: Implications of national policies restricting EU citizens’ rights for young university-educated EU migrants in Brussels

Simola, Anna
(2020) EU Citizenship and Free Movement Rights Taking Supranational Citizenship Seriously — ISBN: [9789004411784], p. 190–214, published

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Abstract
Several EU countries have recently adopted increasingly restrictive policies and administrative practices that reinforce the conditionality in EU migrants’ access to rights associated with EU citizenship and raise barriers to that access (Bruzelius 2019; Pennings & Seeleib-Kaiser 2018). Popular and political pres- sure to re-establish control over national borders, labour markets and welfare systems is growing in different parts of Europe, and also the Court of Justice of the European Union (ecj) has adjusted its case law away from protection of equal treatment of all citizens towards an interpretation that emphasises legal residence as the new cornerstone in EU migrants’ access to social rights in other Union Member States (Dougan 2016; Jacqueson 2018). Consequently, while many EU countries have restricted the conditions of social entitlements for EU migrants, in countries like Sweden and Belgium access to entitlements has been limited primarily by restricting their access to legal residence on the basis of paid work or economic independence (Bruzelius 2019; Shutes 2016; Simola 2018). In her article mapping a series of recent ecj judgments and their application on the national level, Charlotte O’Brien (2016: 941) argues that these developments are resulting in genuinely free movement and equal treat- ment becoming the preserve of privileged migrants in secure, regular, full- time, and permanent work, who are accorded much greater safety in the free movement framework than those in lower-paid and less secure jobs. The re- strictions may therefore have particularly detrimental effects on the everyday lives of EU migrants in precarious work positions (Alberti 2016; Dwyer et al. 2019; O’Brien 2016; Simola 2018). This chapter examines the consequences of these policies and practices on the lives and careers of young, university-educated EU citizens who, de- spite their qualifications, faced many disadvantages in the world of work andtherefore became subject to these policies after moving to Brussels. It presents results from a qualitative study building on interviews with young migrants from the strongly divergent economic and welfare state environments of Southern Europe and Nordic countries. These regions differ not only in terms of labour market conditions for young workers, but also significantly in how much the welfare systems in these regions render young people dependent on their families in moments of need (Saraceno 2016). This data thus allows us to take into account the policies of young migrants’ countries of origin, which may become critical when they face restricted access to social security entitlements in their destination countries. The chapter will first discuss the previous literature on the legal-administra- tive context of the restrictive policies, as well as the factors channelling young educated EU migrants into precarious work in institutionally embedded la- bour markets. Subsequently, after presenting data and methods, the empirical section highlights how young, qualified EU migrants’ lives and labour market positions may be critically conditioned by the Member States’ policies that en- force restrictive work-related conditionality on EU citizens’ access to social security and the way in which these policies interact with conditions imposed on welfare applicants more generally. The analysis shows that making EU citi- zens’ rights to welfare state protection and legal residence conditional on their ability to obtain stable, good quality employment variegates both opportuni- ties and outcomes of “free” mobility.
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  • University of Helsinki

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Simola, A. (2020). EU citizenship as precarious status for precarious workers: Implications of national policies restricting EU citizens’ rights for young university-educated EU migrants in Brussels. In Sandra Mantu, Paul Minderhoud, Elspeth Guild (eds.) (ed.), EU Citizenship and Free Movement Rights Taking Supranational Citizenship Seriously (p. p. 190–214). Brill.