Episode 2. Field notes and reflections from the workers’ dormitory in Czechia: Conversation with Hannah Schling
Host: Olena Fedyuk
As a part of her work on social reproduction of migrant workers in the Czech FDI-driven electronics industry, Hannah spent 3 months living in a workers’ dormitory. Hannah discusses how life in the dormitory is linked to the rhythms of just-in-time factory production, and how, for these precariously employed and hourly-paid agency workers, time spent in the dormitories becomes time ‘waiting for work’. Reflecting on her own position in the dormitory, Hannah speaks of a variety of hierarches and fragmentations among the multi-national dormitory dwellers, and historicises the workers’ dormitory in the context of Czech socialist industrial development.
Olena Fedyuk is a MSCA Fellow at the University of Padua. Her project “RightsLab: Towards Transnational Labour Rights?” looks into temporary work agencies and third-country national workers in the EU. She is an anthropologist by training with research areas in gendered migration flows, migrant labour, and moral economy of migration. Since 2012, she’s turned to documentary filmmaking as a way to grasp humour and contradictions of migration stories and speak of complicated life journeys, both emotionally and geographically.
Hannah Schling is Lecturer in the Human Geographies of Work and the Economy in the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow. Her ethnographically driven research focuses on labour migration in CEE’s export manufacturing and distribution sectors, with a focus on social reproduction and employer-provided accommodation such as dormitories. She has previously held posts at Queen Mary University of London, and holds a PhD in Human Geography from King’s College London.
Dumitrița Holdiș is a sociologist who worked for CEU’s Center for Media, Data and Society’s in Budapest, Hungary and for the Center for Independent Journalism in Bucharest, Romania where she managed projects on media freedom, journalism and hate speech. She conducted research on media funding disinformation and media representation in the past. She is also a podcast enthusiast. She created podcasts for the Central European University, the New Books Network and Radio Civic Sfântu Gheorghe, a community radio based in the Danube Delta in Romania.
CREDITS:
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 893032.
This project has suppored by UKRI Economic and Social Research Council award number ES/V011561/1.
REFERENCES:
Andrijasevic, R. and Sacchetto, D., 2017. ‘Disappearing workers’: Foxconn in Europe and the changing role of temporary work agencies. Work, employment and society, 31(1), pp.54-70.
Berger J. & Mohr J. (1975). A seventh man. Verso Books.
Burzová, P. L. (2019). ’Standard workers are from here, normal people’: Ethnoracial closure and industrial organisation of cheap labour in the Czech Republic. Anthropological Notebooks, 25(1).
Drahokoupil, J. Andrijasevic, R. and Sacchetto, D. (2016). (eds). Flexible workforces and low profit margins: electronics assembly between Europe and China. ETUI
Fedyuk, O. and Stewart, P. (2018) Inclusion and Exclusion in Europe: Migration, Work and Employment Perspectives. ECPR Press.
Meszmann, T. and Fedyuk, O. (2019). “Snakes or Ladders? Job Quality Assessment among Temp Workers from Ukraine in Hungarian Electronics.” Central and Eastern European Migration Review 8.1: 75-93.
Meszmann, T. and Fedyuk, O. (2020). Non-local workers in Hungarian automotives. Changing environments for worker mobility and modes of interest formation. Center for Policy Studies, pp.1-17.
Multicultural Centre Prague. Subcontracting and EU mobile workers in the Czech Republic: Exploitation, Liability and Institutional Gaps? LABCIT Country Report
Schling, H. (2017). “(Re)Production: Everyday Life In The Workers’ Dormitory.” Space and Society. Accessed at: https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/re-production-everyday-life-in-the-workers-dormitory
Schling, H. (2022). ‘Racialisation and dormitory labour regimes: ‘just-in-time’ migrant workers in Czechia’. In Baglioni, E., Campling, L., Coe, N.M., Smith, A. (eds). Labour Regimes and Global Production. Agenda Publishing: Newcastle.
Schling, H. (2020). ‘The dormitory’. In Frejlachova, K., Pazdera, M., Riha, T., and Spicak, M. (eds). Steel cities: Architectures of Logistics in East Central Europe. Park books and VI PER