Heartfelt congratulation, Maria Bołdok!! In September, she successfully completed her Master’s thesis at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Salzburg. Maria was a VISION student project assistant and alum of the EuMIGS Double Degree programme.
Maria’s thesis, „Neoliberalism in the intra-EU borderscape. Precarity of Polish cross-border workers in the Lubuskie-Brandenburg” examined how the cross-border labour regime shapes the working conditions in automotive production and logistics sectors. The thesis drew on the primary data Maria has collected in the VISION project, interviews collected in VISION, labour laws, policies, and statistics.
Two empirical chapters of Maria’s thesis focused specifically on the issues of stretched spatio-temporality of cross-border commuting, which produces a significant discrepancy between the remunerated and de facto working hours. The second main theme was a paradox that workers cross borders every day while social security remains rather immobile. Maria’s research was situated in cross-border commuting between Lubuskie and Brandenburg in the historical and socio-economic context. Informed by critical border studies combined with feminist, structural and migration-systems approaches, her point of departure was commuting workers’ from Lubskie navigating precarious labour conditions in Brandenburg. She unpacked a lack of adequate policy, both at the European and national levels, producing the structural conditions of the de facto extended work hours in a distinctive flexibilised labor regime among daily cros-sborder commuters. The regime capitalises on the partriarchal division of labor in which ‘productive’ cross-border labour is sustained through non-monetised female reproductive labor at home in Lubuskie, on the one hand. On the other hand, it draws on the spatial dynamics between peripheralisation (Lubskie) and rapid development of industry (Metropole Region of Berlin-Brandeburg).
We wish Maria Bołdok lots of success in her next career stage!