ABSTRACT
In the Nordic countries, ‘social dumping’ and labour migration have become highly related issues in public discourse since the EU enlargements of 2004 and 2007. As workers from the new EU member states have travelled in large numbers to the old EU member states, concerns have been raised about the effect this will have on the receiving countries. Large socioeconomic differences between Western and Central-Eastern European (CEE) countries, manifested in significant dissimilarities in wages and working conditions, have formed the background for these concerns. Terms like ‘the Polish plumbers’, ‘welfare tourism’ and ‘social dumping’ may be seen as part of a populist political discourse aimed at fuelling and exploiting these concerns. However, they also stand for some of the more broadly harboured concerns about the specific institutional arrangements that have been at stake in the debates on labour migration and social dumping. This has been particularly true for the Nordic countries, where both welfare and labour market institutions have been seen as potentially being put under pressure by the arrival of the new labour migrants.
