ABSTRACT
Intra-EU labour mobility has become a major structuring factor in certain occupational labour markets. Firms engage in transnational hiring and, in doing so, consciously strategize across sovereign sites and arenas of regulation in order to take advantage of lower cost structures and less strict regulatory environments. These practices are part of a pervasive dynamic of labour-cost competition that is integral to the growth of capitalist markets (Bernaciak, Introduction to this volume). They are embedded in the process of ‘creative destruction’ that inherently threatens social standards but, in mainstream economic thought, is also fundamental to the logic of capitalist accumulation. According to Schumpeter (1942), who coined the concept of creative destruction, capitalism progresses by destroying old social and production structures and replacing them with new, presumably more efficient ones. Schumpeter argues that, in the end, creative destruction will make society as a whole better off, although there will be winners and losers in the process. While the underlying necessity of creative destruction is rarely contested, the limits of what can be done to achieve it are. Defining these limits is the focus of the social dumping debate.
