Ruben Timmerman

Dissertation

By Invisible Hands: Work, Exploitation, and the Migrant Division of Labor

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Richard Staring
Co-supervisor: Prof. Dr. Rene van Swaaningen
Nomination: Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, Erasmus School of Law

More than forty years ago, the German investigative journalist Günter Wallraff published the book Ganz unten (translated into English as Lowest of the Low), in which he reported on labour abuses and racism in the German steel industry. The book was revelatory and became world-famous, but Wallraff was also controversial because he had conducted his research disguised as a Turkish migrant worker.

Your dissertation, with the fine title By Invisible Hands: Work, Exploitation, and the Migrant Division of Labour, stands in that tradition. You too investigated the ‘bottom end’ of the labour market, in construction, logistics and food processing. You too examined the precarious working conditions of migrant workers. Yet your work differs from Wallraff’s in two crucial and positive respects. First, you add scientific depth, and second, you engage in extensive reflection on your own positionality and ethics as a researcher working undercover. You do so explicitly from your underlying motivation as a social scientist: contributing to decent work and equal opportunities for all.

Erasmus once wrote: “Good laws arise from bad morals.” He probably meant that laws and regulations emerge from the imperfections of human behaviour. Your book adds another layer to this idea. Your dissertation is not primarily concerned with extreme abuses such as modern slavery or human trafficking, but rather with the structural problems of exploitation and undignified working conditions embedded in the economic system. In doing so, it highlights the entire continuum of harmful labour conditions. Your work also demonstrates that attempting to eradicate only the most extreme abuses through criminal law is insufficient. Much of the exploitation and many of the undignified working conditions you describe are not formally prohibited. To use a familiar metaphor: it is not only a matter of a few “bad apples”. There is also something wrong with the tree and the soil in which it grows. Those who focus solely on the extremes and on the perpetrators of modern slavery – as many politicians and media outlets do – are therefore being short-sighted.

The jury finds the combination of legal and socio-political recommendations in your dissertation impressive and highly promising. You address policymakers and employers directly, but also trade unions, with recommendations such as banning temporary employment agencies in certain sectors and urging unions to do far more to represent politically marginalized migrant workers.

You also combine ethnography with a strong understanding of legal frameworks, skilfully linking descriptions of abstract macroeconomics, politics and policy to the everyday experiences of migrant workers on the shop floor. Few scholars will quite so literally have had their feet in the mud as you have – from driving vans that transport workers to and from their jobs in the early hours of the morning to working on sometimes hazardous construction sites and production lines.

But it is not only the content that impresses; the form does as well. In the jury’s view, your writing is crystal clear, with not a word too many or too few. That style genuinely reinforces the substance and immediately draws the reader into your story – and into Rotterdam – in an almost journalistic and vividly descriptive manner. In the empirical chapters, your dissertation moves seamlessly from everyday observations to broader structures. In doing so, it clearly demonstrates how daily work reflects larger social trends, underlying economic relationships and political choices.

I have no doubt that Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam would have been curious to read this book about his birthplace. On behalf of the entire jury, I am therefore delighted to congratulate you on receiving the Erasmus Dissertation Prize.