Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the working of a transnational labour network from Northern Hungary by shedding light on the role of informal recruiters, migration intermediaries in facilitating migration by recruiting low-skilled labourers who depend on them by trying to practice their “existential mobility”

Paper long abstract:

The paper investigates the working of a transnational labour network from Northern Hungary to Germany by shedding light on the role of informal recruiters, a particular kind of migration intermediaries in facilitating migration by recruiting those precariat, low-skilled labourers from Hungary who depend on them by trying to practice their “right to escape” (Mezzadra 2004) through “existential mobility” (Hage 2009).

Within low-end temporary labour markets, both private, profit seeking formal intermediaries and informal recruiters are widely used by firms and workers in the European Union due to the neoliberal labour marker deregulation and the rise of the desire of flexibility under fierce competition within corporate strategies. These wider global political economic contexts gave rise to the burgeoning use of informal intermediaries by companies in Western Europe who encourage and export low-skilled, destitute labourers from the semi-peripheral Eastern European countries, with no command of foreign language to move to Germany (or other Western European countries) by facilitating their employment, travel and accommodation in exchange for a substantial commission.

The paper, benefiting from long term ethnographic fieldwork in an economically backward region in North Hungary, and using the theoretical framework of moral economy, explores how this dependent relation is constituted and perceived by both the recruiters and their posted labourers. It also investigates what makes a good recruiter with a sustainable business, and also, upon what patterns of trust, reciprocity and moral values are those transnational labour networks based, that they are embedded in?