Trapping workers’ consent? Temporary work agencies’ role in reproducing labour power of non-local workers for Hungarian manufacturing companies

Abstract

In Central Eastern European countries, temporary work agencies have become increasingly prominent, powerful and indispensable actors in providing labour to user companies in manufacturing. In explaining the success of the staffing sector in Hungary, we go beyond a broader production/regulatory environment that provided a fertile ground to the rise of temporary agencies and a resulting (local) labour control regime. We highlight the element of workers’ consent as a necessary condition for the rise of this sector based on atypical, triangular employment. Namely temporary agency work is a rather confusing triangular employment form, that involves a temporary employment relationship between a temporary work agency and a worker, where the worker is assigned to work for, and under the control of a third party, a user company. We ask how labour power is reproduced at the intersection of control structures (on part of two employers and the state) and consent (on part of workers as owners of labour power). From the workers’ perspective, we show that temporary work agencies and the triangular employment relationship appears with both multiple offers of temporary ‘mobility’ and individualised, obscure entrepreneurial risk taking, which eventually ‘traps’ workers’ consent to the sector, thus shaping specific forms of individualised working subjectivities and facilitating particular forms of social reproduction with short-term benefits and long-term vulnerabilities. Our analysis is based on 5 years of field research, interviews with non-local temporary agency workers, employed in six newly industrialised regions in Hungary that are dominated by large multinational user companies.