ABSTRACT
Drawing upon interviews with Romanians posted to Germany in the construction and meat-processing sectors, with migrant advisers and with union representatives, as well as on ethnographic work, this chapter explores the informalisation of recruitment within transnational labour markets. Firstly, given the wide range of actors with different roles and practices actively shaping its regulatory setting, I analyse the recruitment infrastructure (Xiang and Lindquist 2014) of posted employment using the concept of ‘transnational governance’ (Djelic and Andresson 2006). Secondly, I show that the actors involved in posted work illustrate different types of transnational involvement (Smith and Guarnizo 1998): companies experience transnationalism from above, agents experience transnationalism from below and workers experience transnationalism both from above and below. Moreover, I argue that within the recruitment process for this type of employment, some formal actors (companies) rely on informal actors and practices: while part of the companies resorts to employees’ migration networks, others resort to agents. Therefore, at times it becomes difficult to differentiate between formal and informal arrangements amongst posting companies, agents and migrants (Linquist et al. 2010).
