Abstract
This article investigates the impacts of negative labor market experiences on the life satisfaction of European East–West mobile workers by taking Czech, Slovak and Hungarian cross-border commuters working in Austria as an example. The recent literature has indicated a ‘dark side’ of East–West mobility, as many mobile Eastern Europeans face negative labor market experiences in the Western labor markets. If East–West commuters accept such experiences, employers and employees may quite easily subvert working standards, with detrimental effects on host countries that are intertwined in cross-border labor markets. Empirically, this study used a sequential mixed-methods design, based on quantitative and qualitative data from a research project on East–West commuters in Austria. The empirical findings showed that the negative labor market experiences are not important for commuters’ life satisfaction. From a multitude of those experiences under investigation, only ethnic discrimination experiences had a significantly negative impact. Instead, life satisfaction was mainly influenced by the overall health status and the perception that one’s own living conditions have improved in comparison with those of others from one’s country of origin. The in-depth qualitative findings corroborated the quantitative findings in terms of the low relevance of negative labor market experiences for the subjective assessments of commuting.
Highlights
This article investigates the impacts of negative labor market experiences on the life satisfaction of European East–West mobile workers by taking Czech, Slovak and Hungarian cross-border commuters who work in Austria as an example
Different types of data were generated in TRANSLAB, of which the following are used in the present study: (1) a standardized survey of cross-border commuters to Austria and non-migrants living in the regions of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary bordering on Austria (N 1⁄4 2,687), which was realized by the project team in cooperation with GfK Austria, and (2) qualitative, episodic interviews with Hungarian commuters who had gathered experience in Austria’s catering and hotel sector (N 1⁄4 27), conducted by the present author
The empirical findings show that cross-border commuters’ life satisfaction is relatively high; it is significantly lower in comparison to other major groups in the Austrian labor market (Balt atescu, 2014; Bartram, 2011; Haindorfer, 2019; Safi, 2010)
Summary
This article investigates the impacts of negative labor market experiences on the life satisfaction of European East–West mobile workers by taking Czech, Slovak and Hungarian cross-border commuters who work in Austria as an example. The project was oriented toward the established methods of ‘ethnosurvey’, developed to investigate labor migration between Mexico and the USA (Massey, 1987) Against this methodological background, different types of data were generated in TRANSLAB, of which the following are used in the present study: (1) a standardized survey (the TRANSLAB-Survey) of cross-border commuters to Austria and non-migrants living in the regions of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary bordering on Austria (N 1⁄4 2,687), which was realized by the project team in cooperation with GfK Austria, and (2) qualitative, episodic interviews with Hungarian commuters who had gathered experience in Austria’s catering and hotel sector (N 1⁄4 27), conducted by the present author. The qualitative sample was restricted to Hungarian commuters, due to experience in approaching this group (Haindorfer, 2013) as well as pragmatically driven research considerations
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