Dialect Anthropol (2013) 37:401–421

DOI 10.1007/s10624-013-9319-9

Unemployment and labor migration in rural Galicia

(Spain)

Sharon R. Roseman

Published online: 17 November 2013

 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Abstract This article focuses on the difficulty of entering into—and literally

getting back and forth to—the waged labor market for adolescent and young
adult workers from rural parts of Galicia, a region that has experienced a pro-
longed history of persistently high levels of unemployment. Unemployment is
one of the most serious issues facing Spain, other countries of the EU, and states
all over the world. In Spain, for the population of workers under 30, this problem
is at staggeringly high levels that have reached 50 % plus in the last few years of
the current crisis but has been longstanding. So, too, has labor migration to and
from rural Galician households. This article takes a broad approach to the ana-
lysis of labor mobility, including daily commuting as well as longer distance and
longer duration labor migration. It considers the role of state and EU policies
over time in instituting, supporting, or discouraging different geographical tra-
jectories and forms of movement for young adult ‘‘wage seekers’’ from rural
Galician households.

Keywords Unemployment
Surplus labor
Labor migration
Rural

Galicia
Spain

Introduction

In 2010, a reality television show launched in Spain with the subject of

‘‘Generación ni–ni.’’ This phrase is used to refer to the contemporary generation
of adolescents and young adults, many of whom neither have work, nor are studying

S. R. Roseman (&)
Department of Anthropology, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s,
NL A1C 5S7, Canada
e-mail: sroseman@mun.ca

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402 S. R. Roseman

or training.1 Ni–ni stands for ‘‘neither/nor.’’ In the Autonomous Community of Galicia,

located in the Northwest of the country, the term is translated as ‘‘Xeración nin–nin’’ in
the Galician language. It can be compared to ideas such as ‘‘Generation X’’ used earlier
in the North American context as an essentializing discursive shorthand for
understanding the interplay between specific economic and social conditions and
individuals’ understanding of them (Coupland 1991; also see Ortner 2006). ‘‘Gener-
ation ni–ni’’ has been used as a ‘‘co-text’’ or ‘‘intertext’’ (Silverstein and Urban 1996: 6)
alongside the arrays of statistics and other terminological systems produced by the
governments of Galicia, Spain, and the EU during the last several years, both before and
during this period of the severe 2007-onward economic crisis.
The psychologists, other social scientists, and journalists who write about ‘‘ni–
ni’’ frequently characterize the adolescents and young adults so named as individual
social actors who have no particular interests, plans, or hopes for the future and are
reliant on their parents (Barberı́a 2009). For example, the sociologist Eduardo
Bericat notes that there is a strong ‘‘presentism’’ in this generation that is aligned
dangerously, in his view, with infantilization, a reduced ability to take risks, and the
possibility of nihilism (Barberı́a 2009).2
In my research experience, the ‘‘nin–nin’’ idea is associated culturally not so much
with the rural working class with whose families I have conducted my most extensive
fieldwork since 1989 but with two other groups: the children of professionals facing
downward class mobility often called JASP [(Jóvenes Aunque Sobradamente
Preparados as a shorthand in Spanish for ‘‘over-qualified youth’’)]; and the children
of working class, urban-based parents who may have fared poorly in school, and,
even if they received specialized education or training, have not been able to make
the transition into any form of lasting stable employment. Of course some in all three
groups participate in unrecorded (both paid and unpaid) labor including, especially in
the countryside, subsistence food production (e.g., Roseman 2002).
In rural households, the ideologically charged idea of nin–nin is far less salient than
simply paro or desemprego, the words, respectively, used in Spanish and Galician to refer
to ‘‘unemployment.’’ Rural workers’ families absorb references to nin–nin against both
published unemployment statistics and, more viscerally, the fear and material experience
of themselves or their family members and neighbors being without paid work. When an
agency of Spain’s central government supported a 2011 study by political scientists and
sociologists aimed at ‘‘desmontando’’ (taking apart) ‘‘Generación ni–ni,’’ which was by
then being widely recognized as a damaging stereotype, a member of a discussion group
told the researchers: ‘‘We’re all becoming unemployed. It’s like a virus, you call someone
1
‘‘For 3 months, eight youths, five males, and three females, between 16 and 25 years of age, will be
separated from their families, although be in contact with them, to experience a process of therapeutic re-
education’’ (FórmulaTV 2010). This and all further translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.
2
Also note the wording in these two newspaper stories: ‘‘The ‘discouraged’ ‘Nin-nin’…nor can they!
August 13, 2010. Warnings about a ‘lost generation’ of young people excluded from the labor
market….the ‘devastating’ impact of the crisis marks the beginning of the International Year of Youth’’
(Camino 2010). ‘‘They don’t study, nor do they work…nor do they want to? The ‘Generation nin nin’
children of abundance. They grew up ‘with money in their change purse and the fridge full’, in complete
tranquility spoiled by their parents who ‘want to offer them all that they didn’t have’, converting them
into authentic ‘conformists’, bored by everything and without knowing how to value things’’ (Camino
2009).

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and they tell you that they’ve been let go’’ (Navarrete Moreno et al. 2011: 1). I have often
had this experience in recent years, such as when a Galician woman in her twenties shared
the rare and exciting news with me in 2011 that she had landed a permanent position but a
few months later told me that she had been let go. With the austerity cuts that have
increased in pace and severity throughout 2012 and 2013, bleak personal stories such as
hers abound. The upcoming cessation of various government programs directed at
younger workers, such as rent support, and the further decline in opportunities in public
sector employment are further devastating her generational cohort. They are of course not
the only age group affected, as from 2008 to 2012 the number of unemployed individuals
over 55 years has increased 3.3 times (Dobaño 2012a). In the period 2008–2012, there
was a 60 % increase in unemployment in the four Galician provinces as a whole (Ibid). It
is common to see mainstream media reports such as this one by the journalist Erik
Dobaño noting that there are only two options left to unemployed younger adults, to either
become involved in intercountry labor migration or to receive additional education or
training (Ibid.). These high levels of unemployment alongside housing repossession and
eviction notices are leading to massive upheaval for many individuals, families, and
friendship circles, including reports of suicides coinciding with the arrival of eviction
agents (Dobaño 2012b; Menéndez Osorio et al. 2012).
Against this background, in this article, I examine dominant trends toward
geographical displacement in the labor market for young adult workers from rural
Galicia over the past half-century. I demonstrate the transformation from a post-
WWII ‘‘guest worker’’ program that involved European states facilitating the
migration of workers on temporary contracts to the current situation in which
European workers are said to have a ‘‘duty’’ and not just a ‘‘right’’ to engage in wage
work even if that means crossing state borders. I have labeled the overlapping
periods of time examined as the ‘‘guest worker moment’’ (1960–1990), the
‘‘commuter moment’’ (1970-present), and the ‘‘flexicurity moment’’ (1999-present). I
use these different ‘‘moments’’ to reference the dominance of specific material and
political realities that have sequentially and also often incrementally become key
influences on the lives of rural Galicians. At the end of the article, I return to the
current ‘‘crisis moment’’ (2007-present) with which I begin the article, and the
centrality of the crisis of unemployment within resistance movements that call on
the role of states in securing opportunities for ‘‘wage seeking’’ (after Denning 2010).

Unemployment, surplus labor, and migration

Unemployment, and particularly ‘‘youth unemployment,’’ is one of the most serious

issues facing Spain, other countries of the EU, and states all over the world. A 2010
International Labour Organization report notes:
Numerous studies show how entering labour markets during recession can
leave permanent scars on the generation of youth affected and, recently, fears
have been expressed regarding a possible crisis legacy of a ‘lost generation’
made up of young people who detach themselves from the labour
market altogether (Elder et al. 2010: 1).

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404 S. R. Roseman

In the context of the EU, Spain has for the past few years had one of the highest
unemployment rates for adolescents and young adults, hovering around 50 %, the
sharp rise beginning in 2007 and 2008 (Elder et al. 2010).3 In the Galician context,
in the third quarter of 2012, the official unemployment rate for those between 16 and
19 years of age was 52.5 %, for those between 20 and 24 it was 45.5 %, and it only
fell to 28 % in the age range of 25–29 (Instituto Galego de Estatı́stica 2012). As
Galbraith, Conceição, and Ferreira have reminded us, this is not new: ‘‘[overall]
unemployment [in Spain] rose from 3 to 19 per cent in the decade of Franco’s death
and has stayed near those levels for many years’’ (1999: 40). These days, ‘‘ni–ni’’
statistics are frequently cited alongside those for unemployment. So, too, is
information such as a 2011 figure that over 73 % of salaried younger workers were
currently employed on temporary contracts (Consejo de la Juventud de España
2011a, b).
Like the various groups of dispossessed Europeans discussed by Jane Kramer in
the 1970s, even before the economic instability that began with the crisis of
2007–2009 the experience of unemployed, underemployed, or insecurely employed
late adolescent and young adult Galician workers did not fit the dominant public
sphere narratives of ‘‘Europeanness’’ that have been generated since WWII.4
Moreover, as a political problem, unemployment and underemployment as well as
increasing levels of precarious labor have been a focus both within specific states
and at a European level. Unemployment figures were one of the ongoing matters of
consideration as part of the road toward an integrated economy and labor market in
the European Union (Coates 1998: 132).
In the writings of Karl Marx and other nineteenth century political economists,
the unemployed were die Unbeschäftigen ‘‘the not-busy, the unoccupied’’ (Capital
cited in Denning 2010: 82), or the ‘‘reserve army of labour’’ (Denning 2010: 84). As
various authors have pointed out, Marx did not provide an in-depth theoretical
analysis of this process but predicted that what Michael Denning terms an
‘‘accumulation of labour’’ would accompany ‘‘an accumulation of capital’’
(Denning 2010: 80):
It is capitalist accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces
indeed in direct relation with its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant
working population, i.e. a population which is superfluous to capital’s average
requirements for its own valorization, and is therefore a surplus population
[…] the relative surplus population exists in all kinds of forms. Every worker
belongs to it during the time when he is only partially employed or wholly
employed (Marx 1976: 764 cited in Denning 2010: 96–97)
3
‘‘In Spain, the unemployment rate of youth with primary or less education more than doubled from 21.4
to 46.4 percent between 2007Q4 and 2009Q4. At the same time, the unemployment rate of the highly-
educated youth in Spain has also increased significantly, jumping from 15.0 to 27.8 percent over the same
period’’ (Elder et al. 2010: 32).
4
‘‘They did not fit the exhausted conventional categories of European life. They were unwelcome and
unwanted, and merely by being themselves they managed to sabotage the image most other people held of
Europe, but it was their labor and their various loyalties which had supported that image in the past, and
which support it now—and which will certainly have a lot to do with Europe’s future’’ (Kramer 1980:
xii).

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Denning has recently proposed taking ‘‘wageless life, not wage labour,’’ as ‘‘the
starting point in understanding the free market’’ (Denning 2010: 81). He asks us to
imagine the dispossessed proletarian household as a wageless base of
subsistence labour […] which supports a superstructure of migrant wage
seekers […] These migrations may be short in distance and in interval—the
daily streetcars or buses from tenement to factory, apartment block to office,
that will come to be called ‘commuting’— or they may be extended to the
yearly proletarian globehopping of seasonal workers… (Denning 2010: 81).
Both the necessity of physical displacement and the legacy of feminist theorizing
about reproduction and production5 are embedded explicitly in Denning’s
conceptualization of the trajectories of ‘‘migrant wage seekers’’ as they are
involved in the ‘‘dispossession, expropriation, and radical dependence on the
market’’ that he notes is a more accurate description of proletarianization than
simply ‘‘wage labour’’ (Denning 2010: 81).
Some of my previous work has examined how rural Galician proletarian
households fit into the pattern of combined wageless work and migrant wage
seeking that he describes (e.g., Roseman 1999, 2002, 2012). In this article, I
explicitly consider how the formation of labor markets for rural Galicians has been
spatialized in particular ways from the 1960s onward—in particular in being
incessantly ‘‘fractured by geographic mobility’’ (Barber 2008: 40) at more than one
scale. I examine how state and European ideologies and specific policies institute,
support, or discourage not just spatial displacement generally but also the forms and
conditions of geographical mobility (and even, sometimes, the specific trajectories)
through which rural Galician wage seeking occurs. Following Denning, these forms
include lengthy daily commuting as well as the longer distance and longer duration
travel normally associated with labor migration.6
Therefore, this article aims to engage with Denning’s ideas about the migration
of wage seekers and, more generally, contribute to broader, long-standing
conversations about the political economy of ‘‘uneven development,’’ the ‘‘spatial
fix’’ (Harvey 1982), and ‘‘space–time compression’’ (Harvey 1989) that involve the
movement of capital as well as pools of labor rendered surplus at specific
geographical scales (e.g., Burawoy 1976; Harvey 1982, 1989, 2006; Li 2009; Smith
2008 [1984]; Wolf 1982; Wolpe 1980). Although much of this literature examines
the global scale of the movement of surplus labor within and from the Global South,
Costis Hadjimichalis has recently reiterated the importance of reincorporating a
focus on ‘‘uneven geographical development’’ in thinking about the ‘‘current
financial and debt crisis in the eurozone’’ (Hadjimichalis 2011: 254). A number of

5
For a summary of early feminist challenges to productivist analytical frameworks, see Brodkin Sacks
1989.
6
As Cohen and Sirkeci note, institutional definitions of labor (and other forms of) migration are often
overly circumscribed: ‘‘Mobility breaks the conventional and static definition of migration offered by
groups like the U.N. (‘movement from point A to point B for at least 12 months’)’’ (Cohen and Sirkeci
2011: 7). Although the ‘‘migration of wage seekers’’ encompasses even more, another broad term is
‘‘employment-related geographical mobility’’ (see, for example, Roseman, Neis, and Gardiner Barber
forthcoming).

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social scientists highlighted geographical unevenness within Europe from the

1970s–1990s, including Doreen Massey whose ideas about the ‘‘spatial divisions of
labor,’’ ‘‘spatial differentiation,’’ and the ‘‘power-geometry’’ of ‘‘time–space
compression’’ followed her own empirical focus on industrial restructuring in the
United Kingdom (e.g., Massey 1979, 1982, 1984, 1994, 1995, 1999; also see
Castells 1975).
In his classic 1976 treatment of ‘‘systems of migrant labor,’’ Michael Burawoy
emphasized the spatial separation between the key activities involved in what he
termed the ‘‘renewal’’ and ‘‘maintenance’’ of workers. His discussion of ‘‘renewal’’
collates unwaged (or wageless) caregiving and subsistence labor and public
infrastructures ranging from housing to transportation (Burawoy 1976: 1052).7
Burawoy’s analysis made a significant impact on understandings of how mobile
labor, whether ‘‘internal’’ or ‘‘external,’’ involves employers and importing
localities or states ‘‘externalizing the costs of renewal’’ of wage laborers (and their
families) (Burawoy 1976: 1054, 1066). He further emphasized the role of ‘‘specific
political mechanisms’’ to ‘‘regulate’’ workers’ ‘‘movement between industry and
‘home’’’ (Burawoy 1976: 1051). As such, his early intervention is relevant to my
argument below. However, Gavin Smith (2011) has cautioned recently against
approaches that highlight states’ roles in political-economic processes of dispos-
session and exploitation without examining in-depth the economic dynamics of
capitalism. Not only is labor rendered ‘‘surplus’’ ‘‘when a population is valued just
for its marketable labour capacities,’’ the capitalist system is threatened by a
‘‘relative surplus population’’ that can additionally not contribute to ‘‘the realization
of value’’ through commodified consumption (Smith 2011: 15, 16). The push for
twentieth century welfare state provisions in places such as capitalist Europe was in
part driven by specific class interests that benefitted from the securing of reserve
labor and consumption pools. This contrasts with what has occurred in the Global
South where, as discussed by Tania Li (2009), the capitalist predation upon
resources in peripheralized geographic spaces is producing people considered to be
of no use to capital who can be thought of as ‘‘absolute surplus labor’’ (Smith 2011:
16–17; also see Denning 2010: 82–86). However, as Eileen Meiksins Wood
emphasizes, ‘‘capital has always needed the support of territorial states,’’ states
which not only provide military force, but also other ‘‘useful transmission belts for
capitalist imperatives’’ (Wood 2003: 23). Moreover, in the case of Spain and other
countries now within the European Union, we can parse efforts to grapple with
reframing the legal and other multi-state affordances for these same imperatives.
For example, in a report to the European Commission that initiates the ‘‘flexicurity’’
drive I discuss below, Supiot et al. (2001: 198) refer to the need to develop an ‘‘all-
encompassing politique du travail’’ or ‘‘labor market policy’’ to manage the need for

7
He employs the term ‘‘reproduction’’ for both ‘‘renewal’’ and ‘‘maintenance,’’ and for the continuation
of a specific migrant system. It is only near the end of the article that he refers to gender differentiation
and links between relations of production and reproduction (Burawoy 1976: 1083–1084). His account is
therefore distinct from a feminist political economy analysis that ‘‘exposes the dependency of capitalist
development’’ on ‘‘relations of social reproduction’’ whether the latter take place in proximity to or at
great geographical distances from sites of labor migration (Luxton 2006: 40; also see Brodkin Sacks
1989; Roseman, Neis and Barber forthcoming).

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‘‘flexibility’’ in the face of what they term economic ‘‘uncertainty’’ within European
space. The political ideology embedded in this process is relevant to the legacy of
Burawoy (1976) and others’ earlier analyses of ‘‘migration systems.’’ While there is
a discussion of how mobile European workers’ must be protected legally across
country borders, individual states’ provisions of ‘‘direct or distinguished employ-
ment subsidies’’ to combat unemployment within their borders are said to constitute
‘‘social dumping’’ and ‘‘unfair competition’’ under the Treaty of Rome (Supiot et al.
2001: 208). Lastly, it is important to incorporate Costas Lapavitsas’ emphasis on
how financialization broadly speaking has entailed the intensive and increasing
‘‘‘financialization’ of workers’ income, savings, consumption, and assets,’’ a
process exacerbated by declining public support for services such as transportation
(Lapavitsas 2011: 620). When workers’ mobility is tied to financialized processes,
we must consider how they become increasingly subjected to ‘‘financial expropri-
ation’’ on their way to producing surplus value. ‘‘Financial expropriation’’ involves
‘‘extracting financial profit directly out of the personal income of workers and
others’’ (Lapavitsas 2009: 115).
I now turn to the case of Galicia, to examine a series of major public policies that
over time have variously impacted on the long-standing difficulty of entering into—
and literally getting back and forth to—labor markets for young adult and other
wage seekers from rural households.

The ‘‘guest worker’’ moment (1960–1990)

Although we could go further back in history, for the purpose of this article I begin
with the 1960s and 1970s when many young Galician men, and to some extent
women, were inserted in a European-wide rather than local, regional, or national
labor market under temporary worker programs, such as the Fremdarbeiter (or
‘‘alien worker’’) program in Switzerland and gastarbeiter (or ‘‘guest worker’’)
program in the German Federal Republic to which the Spanish state was a signatory
(1960 for Germany and 1961 for Switzerland) (Castles and Kosack 1973: 13).
Spanish workers constituted one of the largest groups employed under these
arrangements, which at the beginning did not welcome minor dependents. The many
workers who entered other countries illegally were in even more precarious
situations. As Castles and Kosack noted, all of these workers formed a labor reserve
for prosperous areas, and the vast majority could not move out of the ‘‘bottom
stratum’’ of the ‘‘working class’’ (1973: 7). The Spanish government was reacting to
a failed policy of autarchy (Cayetano Rosado 2007: 1276). It opened up the Spanish
economy to external investors, raised interest rates, transferred over the major
control of the economy to financial institutions and large, increasingly multi-
national firms (Ibid.). It also promoted ‘‘The export of great volumes of […]
unemployment localized in rural areas’’ (Cayetano Rosado 2007: 1277).
In some cases, employers specified that they preferred workers who were
younger than 35. In one recent study of the labor contracts, 80 % were for males and
over 90 % were between 15 and 44 years of age (Cayetano Rosado 2007). In Hans
Christian Buechler and Judith-Maria Buechler’s anthropological study of Galician

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migrants in Switzerland in the 1970s, they found the same pattern: ‘‘45.7 % of the
Galician men and 62.2 % of the women were between 21 and 30’’ (Buechler 1987:
239–240).8 Martin reports the same pattern for the case of Germany, where most
guest workers in the 1960s and 1970s were, as he puts it, ‘‘ex-farmers between 18
and 35’’ (Martin 2006: 14).
The majority of the officially documented workers were from rural areas, with
84 % of those recruited from Spain in 1969 coming from rural settlements in parts
of southern Spain and Galicia in the Northwest (Castles and Kosack 1973: 46).
From 158 registered workers leaving Galicia for Switzerland in the program’s first
year, in 1961, a peak of 19,688 was reached by 1973, declining to some hundreds by
the first half of the 1990s after extensive return migration (Richter 2004: 270).
In the Galician rural municipality of Zas where I have conducted long-term
fieldwork, from the 1960s until the early 1990s, to become a circular (or pendular)
migrant was a common way to enter the full-time waged labor market. Even after
the gastarbeiter and other similar programs ended in the early 1970s, when people
continued to travel northward to work on contracts that did not fall under specific
‘‘guest worker’’-type arrangements, they thought and spoke of their circular
migration as being part of the same ‘‘moment’’ that had been initiated for people in
the vicinity in the 1960s. In 1990 and 1991, I found that over 80 % of 70 households
in my main study parish had had at least one member working in Switzerland,
Germany, France, or the UK in the previous decade. It was so common for young
men to find their first jobs abroad through chain migration, following relatives and
neighbors, that it was described as being almost like a youthful ‘‘rite of passage:’’
that which one did at the point of being ready to do full-time wage work, not unlike
how male adolescents from nearby coastal villages had previously joined their
fathers and uncles on fishing vessels (also see Cohen and Sirkeci 2011: 89). Some of
these men were later joined by their wives, and many of the children I knew in the
early 1990s had been raised by grandparents back in Galicia.
These workers’ oral histories about their insertion in a circular migration system
are replete with details about how their employment was contingent on social
networks, being agreeable to bending the rules, and undocumented (often second)
jobs. A man who had worked for 3 years in Switzerland in the 1970s explained to
me that he was not recognized as having journeymen papers, being paid as a peón.
He highlighted how he was given repeat contracts because he did not take sick
leave, and worked unrecorded overtime (Roseman 2012). Moreover, while there, he
worked for a farmer in exchange for food. Working overtime or in second jobs was
common for women as well as men. A woman who went to Switzerland with her
husband for several years in the 1980s had a gardening job during the week but took
care of an elderly woman in a private home on Saturdays. Similar data are reported
by Marina Richter (2004) who did fieldwork with Galician migrants in Switzerland
in the 1980s.

8
‘‘In 1972 the age bracket with the largest proportion of both male and female migrants was between 21
and 30: 42.9 percent of all Spanish men and 50.8 percent of the women fell into this category. For Galicia
as a whole this age bracket predominated even more for both sexes: 45.7 percent of the Galician men and
62.2 percent of the women were between 21 and 30, …’’ (Buechler 1987: 239–240).

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What characterized these labor migrants, who were often called ‘‘Suizos’’ locally,
was the maintenance of households located partly in rural Galicia and partly in
Swiss apartments and worker dormitories. This situation was always described to
me as ‘‘necessary,’’ as an imperative. There was simply ‘‘no work’’ in Galicia,
whereas there was work to be had in countries such as Switzerland, work that paid
wages that were high in relative terms. However, because they could not be sure of
their employment status, and the difficulties of raising children abroad, very few
Galician labor migrants had contemplated establishing permanent homes in other
European countries. The Spanish government’s encouragement of guest worker
arrangements for rural workers from Galicia therefore constituted a policy
supporting a particular form of migration, one that encouraged people to maintain
dual household arrangements. In Denning’s (2020) terms, these workers were
encouraged to seek wages abroad and to similarly undertake wageless reproductive
and subsistence labor within and between two geographical spaces.
The ‘‘guest worker moment,’’ and the role of state policies in designing and
promoting it, is a fairly well-known instance among many of governments being
involved in the mobility of workers to support capital accumulation in specific
locations. It can be compared to numerous historical and current examples,
including France’s ‘‘guest worker’’ program of the 1920s (Dewhurst Lewis 2007),
the bracero program in the United States (Burawoy 1976; Martin 2006), and
Canada’s current temporary foreign worker program (Martin 2006). However, in
order to provide a comparative perspective on governments’ less and more explicit
shaping of labor markets in situations of high unemployment, I now turn to other
ways in which younger Galician rural workers have had to confront the process of
entering the waged labor force.
As was the case in other peripheralized areas in southern Europe, paved roads
arrived relatively late to many Galician villages even though emigrants and migrant
laborers had been moving out of and back into these settlements by foot and through
animal transport for centuries (Roseman 1996). However, without implying
causality, it can be noted that the arrival of paved roads to many corners of the
municipality of Zas did coincide with and afford the wave of mobile laborers
travelling to wage jobs in more northern countries. During the guest worker
moment, workers travelled to Switzerland, Germany, and other countries by road
and then air or rail, and also via long-distance road trips including car pooling and
collectively hiring rural taxi drivers to make the journey. I now turn to the shaping
of wage seekers’ experience of expanded rural commuting entailing both relatively
shorter distance travel to wage jobs as well as a trend toward a highly commodified
and privatized consumption of financialized assets as part of the journey to work.

The rural commuting moment (1970-present)

Alongside contract wage work in other countries, rurbanism also became a strong
pattern in Galicia and Spain as a whole from the 1970s onward. Rurbanism involves
people living in villages or towns and commuting to work and services in larger
urban centers. It is associated with unemployment, insecure employment, and high

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urban housing costs, as well as cultural and social commitments to rural spaces. As
Camarero Rioja explains, in Spain ‘‘the situation of scarce and precarious
employment had generated an important rural ‘commuting’ [phenomenon]’’
(Camarero Rioja 1991: 22). In 15 Spanish provinces, the four Galician ones among
them, ‘‘more than one-third of the employed population living in rural localities had
to displace themselves to another municipality to get to work’’ (Camarero Rioja
1991: 22).
I have examined the type of transportation policies that have made the use of
private transportation both more necessary and more difficult for those who
commute to jobs outside of rural municipalities such as Zas. From the 1960s
onward, Spain relied on toll highways operated by privatized capital for part of its
roadway expansion.9 These toll roads entailed great costs to the public from 1967 to
1996, accruing from tax exemptions, guarantees on the exchange rates linked to
borrowing capital from outside the country, and subsidies (Costas and Bel 2001:
243–244; Acerete et al. 2009: 22). As such, they are a clear example of the process
of both privatization and financialization (Lapavitsas 2011). In response, the
socialist government of Felipe González did decrease the country’s reliance on
privatized highways in the 1980s but this did not avert what happened later to result
in the current context in Galicia (Acerete et al. 2009; Bel and Fageda 2005: 194,
197).
What happens when you live near a toll highway and need to travel to work? In
the case of Zas, a toll highway connecting workers to jobs in the largest Galician
city of A Coruña was built in the 1990s and the firm operating it (Autoestradas de
Galicia) has the concession until 2045 (Bel and Fageda 2005: 195). The cost of tolls
for a daily trip back and forth to the city in a regular private vehicle was over 13
euros in late 2011.
The pressure to own a private automobile, carpool, or to live in the city during the
week is increased by the inadequate bus service provided by private companies that
secure concessions from governments. In 2011, it was impossible to arrive on time
for morning start times for jobs in the city of A Coruña. It was equally impossible to
spend sufficient time with family and friends on weekends, given that there are only
two buses running on Sunday.
When I used to visit the municipality on weekends in the 1990s while living in
the capital city of Santiago de Compostela, the bus that I took was referred to as the
‘‘workers’ bus.’’ Indeed, when I mounted the bus at 7:00 a.m. on several Monday
mornings I found that I knew many of the passengers: a woman who worked as a

9
As Dı́az Fernández notes, the idea of having private interests invest in and benefit from the national
highway system in Spain dates to proposals from the 1950s: ‘‘hay que consignar que en el primer
quinquenio de los años 1950 la Administración del Estado retomarı́a la experiencia propuesta por el
C.N.F.E. de dejar participar a la inversión privada en la ejecución de una red nacional de carreteras de
amplia capacidad de carga […] la amortización de la inversión del capital privado estarı́a asegurada desde
el momento en el que la explotación del servicio serı́a quien garantizarse la consecución de una
sustanciosa rentabilidad […] derivada del cobro de una tasa de peaje a la población demandante de
transporte. En los últimos años de la década de 1950, la Administración Central promulgaba la Ley de 30
de Julio de 1959, en base a la cual se creaba la Dirección General de Tráfico (D.G.T.) perteneciente al
entonces Ministerio de la Gobernación, quien a partir de esa fecha pasarı́a a ostentar estas competencias
en las funciones normativa y sancionadora,’’ (Dı́az Fernández 2007: 122).

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Unemployment and labor migration 411

cook in a restaurant, another woman who worked as a housekeeper and caregiver for
a professional couple, men who worked in construction. The ‘‘workers’ bus’’ or
‘‘The Finisterre’’ was a motif in the labor histories that I was compiling from people,
many older adults using the term to refer to the very first buses that they took, run by
the Transportes Finisterre company. Nowadays, it is common to find more tourists
and pilgrims than workers on some bus routes. Indeed, companies such as Alsa
advertise that they are ‘‘El Bus del Camino de Santiago.’’10 Indeed, the ‘‘St. James
Way Bus’’ is graphically rendered to appeal to potential customers who are
backpacking travelers heading to, or likely from, this Catholic pilgrimage site to
which many walk. In recent years, I have encountered some of these travelers sitting
among rural workers on buses heading back to Santiago de Compostela from the
fishing town of Fisterra (or Finisterre) which has developed for some as the ‘‘final’’
pilgrimage destination following a visit to St. James’ tomb in the cathedral in
Santiago (see Herrero 2008).
Since the decrease in circular and temporary ‘‘guest worker’’ migration to
countries such as Switzerland and Germany, young adults entering the labor market
have come to rely heavily on private transportation, even for weekly commuting.
Part of the weekly commuting pattern is connected to not staying where one works
on Fridays after work, to socializing back home. Rural areas attract a more densely
attended nightclub crowd than the cities. Moreover, this socializing is a key trope
through which people express being young and being attached to rural spaces. One
works all over, but one ‘‘goes out’’ at home.
When Marı́a told me in 2008 how she had tried to continue living with her mother in a
village only 35 kilometers from the city where she works, but found the bus service
impossible, she lamented this fact–that she could not receive help from her mother if
she had children, or in turn help her with daily tasks as she aged. Her comment reflected
the continued existence of a three-generation stem family household model in parts of
rural Galicia, a pattern that I have noted previously was particularly adaptable for the
guest worker moment, as grandparents raising children whose parents worked abroad
made more cultural sense in rural Galicia than elsewhere in Western Europe (Roseman
1999). In Denning’s terms (2010), the grandparental generation has provided much of
the wageless caregiving and subsistence labor that is a base for the wage-seeking
migrant parents. Marı́a’s preference would be to receive from and potentially provide
reproductive labor to her aging mother.
In the past few years, young people have mobilized for better bus service, and
even for the Noitebus or Nightbus that services rural passengers. As part of this
mobilization, in a mocking article published in a regional newspaper, the author
referred to confused tourists who arrive in Cee and see ‘‘the only and forgotten bus
station on the Costa da Morte’’ (Redacción de QPC 2009), noting that most
localities do not have a bus station or even a marked stop. It took a grassroots group
to put together the first ever consolidated poster indicating the routes and timetables
for the three bus companies that currently hold the concessions in this part of the
province of A Coruña.11 The neglect of Galicia’s infrastructure is the focus of a

10
http://www.horario-autobuses.com/autobuses-santiago-compostela.
11
http://www.busescostadamorte.com/.

123
412 S. R. Roseman

well-known 1972 nationalist text by the economist and political leader Xosé Manuel
Beiras (1972). Similar arguments have been used in recent years (e.g., Alonso-
Carrera and Freire-Serén 2001). Some have criticized the delay in the AVE fast
speed train connecting cities in Galicia to each other and to Madrid. However, an
increasing chorus is using the same arguments about unequal access to mobilize
people around the citizenship rights of those from towns and villages as well as
ecological justice (e.g., Torres 2005; on earlier rural responses to a lack of rural
infrastructure in this area, see Roseman 1996, 2008).
There have also been protests against the transportation policy decision related to
Galicia’s impending incorporation into Spain’s high speed train network.12 In 2008,
I visited an information table of the ‘‘Save the Train’’ group which had just formed
and they displayed a petition against the removal of regional routes in preference for
only having express routes between cities.13 This is another transportation policy
that continues to encourage workers from rural localities to use private transpor-
tation, commute weekly, or permanently relocate. It is not surprising that choices
about train service are seen as a serious threat to the viability of some communities.
It is often compared to other decisions such as the location of new hospitals or high
schools.14 In one newspaper editorial from 2007, the author talked about the
increasing number of closed and abandoned stations representing the ‘‘displacement
of executives and tourists in exchange for a means of transportation for more modest
people’’ (Novas da Galiza 2006–2007a). A cartoon appeared just underneath with
the words ‘‘Spanish High Speed in Galicia (Alta Velocidad Española en Galicia)’’
separating an image of a train pulled up to a train platform and a series of other
images, all crossed out with a diagonal line: of a bird, a stone dolmen, a cow, a tree,
a rural homestead, and a group of people (Novas da Galicia 2006–2007b). Such
commentaries bring to mind David Harvey’s evocation of Balzac’s nineteenth
century description of a bourgeois: ‘‘desire to reduce and eliminate all spatial and
temporal barriers’’ […] ‘‘of utterly isolating himself from the milieu in which he
resides, and of crossing, by virtue of an almost infinite locomotive power, the
enormous distance of physical nature.’’ (Harvey 2003: 49–50).
Tim Cresswell has analyzed the successful campaign of the Los Angeles Bus
Riders Union and others that fought against bus fare increases that would support
light rail lines serving wealthy neighborhoods. He argues that the campaign made a
case against the differential treatment of citizens and for ‘‘spatial justice—a form of
justice that does recognize the spatiality of rights and responsibilities’’ (Cresswell
2006: 168). In Galicia, one can see the beginning of a similar mobilization in the

12
See, for example, http://www.novasgz.com/pdf/ngz49.pdf. These followed late 1990s protests against
the ecological damage caused by some train routes: http://www.elpais.com/articulo/madrid/MADRID/
MINISTERIO_DE_FOMENTO/PODER_EJECUTIVO/_GOBIERNO_PP_/1996-2000/42/pueblos/unen/
quejas/tren/rapido/elpepiautmad/19980123elpmad_17/Tes.
13
http://salvaotren.netai.net/.
14
The deregulation of the airline industry is also having an impact on migrant laborers, with the most
recent change being not only the suppression of some routes but additionally the airlines’ decision to
charge customers for the weight of their baggage—something that impacts far more on someone who is
travelling to work at a job for several months as opposed to business executives going somewhere for a
few days or a week.

123
Unemployment and labor migration 413

2000s. Transportation policies that have had a particularly severe impact on young
workers from rural households are being challenged on the basis of a differential
treatment of rural as opposed to urban citizens.
It is equally important to examine how the financial expropriation entailed in
workers being forced to take out loans to purchase vehicles and to use credit cards to
fill their private vehicles with fuel and perhaps also to pay tolls (Lapavitsas 2009;
2011). In the case of privatized toll roads, this expropriation is manifold. Workers’
salaries are directed toward paying fees to support essential infrastructures that have
been built on the basis of private finance. As social science studies of tourism have
emphasized, the consumption entailed in mobility is an important aspect of
capitalist profits in some regions. If we think about the case of labor migration, the
profits that accrue from workers’ expenditures on physical travel (as well as other
associated infrastructures such as cell phones) often involve expenditures that are
based on financial expropriation of workers’ personal incomes.

The flexicurity moment (1999-present)

In the 1999 report to the European Commission that I referenced above, Alain
Supiot and his colleagues from various European countries set out a clear statement
advocating the need for ‘‘flexibility.’’ They insist that ‘‘flexibility’’ is a good gloss
‘‘to sum up the changes taking place in the world of work’’ and define it as ‘‘the
pursuit of a collectively efficient response to economic uncertainties and risks’’
(Supiot et al. 2001: 190, 191).
We can see this idea being reinforced through the 2000s in Galicia as well as
other parts of Europe, as policy makers at all levels addressed youth unemployment,
poverty, and migration with various terminologies and programs. Part of the focus
was on the assumption that young workers were reluctant to engage in long-distance
migration. In the Spanish context, there was an emphasis on the importance of
achieving ‘‘emancipación’’ or that ability to move out from one’s parents’ family
home as well as from the ‘‘culture of temporality’’ (CJE 2011a). Due in large part to
the economic insecurity facing young adults in Spain, 89 % of those between 20 and
24, and 78 % of those between 25 and 29 live with their parents (CJE 2011a). The
central and Galician governments put programs in place to facilitate young adults
living independently of their parents’ households, the very type of programs that are
now being discontinued due to austerity measures (CJE 2011b). The [Youth
Institute’s (Instituto de Juventud)] ‘‘Emancipación Joven’’ (Youth Emancipation)
Program had 202 offices throughout the country focused on placing youth in
employment and their own dwellings. This even led to a micro-lending system for
youth in association with a financial institution ‘‘La Caixa.’’15 In addition, a
program (from 2008) meant for, in part, rent support provided an ‘‘emancipation
income’’ (renta de emancipación). Eligible recipients had to have been employed in

15
See http://www.injuve.es/portal.portal.action; http://www.injuve.es/contenidos.type.action?type=3117
09737&menuId=311709737&mimenu=Emancipaci%F3n%20Joven. This and other Web sites in this
section accessed on March 30, 2011.

123
414 S. R. Roseman

the last 6 months, or could demonstrate having an employment contract, were

between 22 and 33 years, and earning less than 22,000 euros per annum.16 An
additional array of programs was directed at young workers, and others, who wished
to purchase homes, or who had to move due to employment.17
The Galician government also had a Youth information portal run by the Office of
Youth and Volunteerism (Dirección Xeral de Xuventude e Voluntariado) under the
Ministry of Work and Wellbeing (Consellerı́a de Traballo e Benestar) and an
Interdepartmental Commission on Youth.18 Xuventude.net links a reader to a number of
programs, including ‘‘Emancipación Xove’’ and ‘‘Programas de mobilidade europeos.’’
Workshops were offered in all municipalities for youth under 30 to assist with ‘‘the
emancipation of Galician youth’’ (‘‘a emancipación da mocidade galega’’).19 The last line
of the outline of these workshops read ‘‘Emancı́pate!’’ (‘‘Emancipate yourself!’’). I would
argue that there are significant connections between the ‘emancipation’ policies of earlier
in the century and labor migration promotion policies.
Up until spring of 2011, the ‘‘Galician Mobility’’ suite outlined funding for short
exchanges, other travel, and employment-related travel. Under the European
Leonardo Da Vinci program, young adults undertook 10-week apprenticeship
placements in fields such as carpentry, mechanics, computing, and tourism in other
countries.20 Even at the level of high school students, there were noticeable attempts
to influence young people’s approach to migration through the EU exchange
program Comenius which involves schools such as the Terra do Xallas institution in
Santa Comba that services students from Zas (La Voz de Galicia 2009).21 Casas da
Mocidade or Youth Centers in rural municipalities (such as Allariz, Ourense)
promoted opportunities to learn French and English in France and the United
Kingdom for those between 16 and 30.22
Such policies demonstrate the development of a discourse of ‘‘flexibility’’ that
generally promoted an ‘‘emancipation from,’’ but also an abandonment of not just
one’s parents’ home. In the midst of the lingering economic crisis, one of the
predominant public culture messages for young workers in Galicia and elsewhere in
Europe is to leave not just their parents’ homes, their home communities, and
regions, but also their countries. One of the ironies of the expansion of the range of
mobility rights in Europe over the past two decades has been a relatively low level
of movement of workers from within the original member states, in contrast to the
ongoing movement of workers from both new member states and other continents.23

16
http://www.alquilerjoven.es/.
17
See http://www.ayudasviviendajoven.es/Detalles.aspx?IDClass=4139.
18
http://xuventude.xunta.es/.
19
http://xuventude.xunta.es/emancipacion-xove.html.
20
http://xuventude.xunta.es/leonardo-da-vinci.html.
21
Also see http://ec.europa.eu/education/programmes/llp/structure/comenius_en.html.
22
http://www.allariz.com/mocidade/novas.asp?cat=2.
23
‘‘Intra-EU migration occurs at a range of skills levels, from the highly skilled to the unskilled. The
mobility patterns are variable, but movements are largely temporary in nature. Approximately 1.5 % of
EU-25 citizens lived and worked in a different Member State from their country of origin. This proportion
has not changed significantly for the last 30 years’’ (Vartia-Väänänen et al. 2006: 8).

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Unemployment and labor migration 415

2006 was the European Year of Workers’ Mobility, a designation used to

promote the European Employment Strategy’s decision to make ‘‘geographical
mobility a political priority’’ (EURES 2007). In terms of young adult workers, this
idea was reinforced with the European Youth Pact of 2005. The Europass,
introduced in 2004, has involved the recording and transfer of education and skills
from one jurisdiction to another. One part of it is the Europass-Mobility that
‘‘records all periods of transnational mobility.’’24 A ‘‘youthpass’’ was introduced as
well to record exchanges, training, volunteer work, and other activities.25 These
types of initiatives were instituted to respond to a perceived resistance to intra-EU
labor migration.
Following up on the discussion of ‘‘security’’ and ‘‘flexibility’’ in documents such
as Supiot et al. (2001), one of the recent EU policy terms that has been deployed to
deal with this restricted intra-European mobility is the concept of ‘‘flexicurity.’’ Not
unlike the moment I began with, that of guest worker agreements between state
governments, the EU would like European citizens and especially those with
specialized trades or professions, to circulate within the bounds of ‘‘Fortress
Europe.’’ Flexicurity is defined [by the European Commission of Employment,
Social Affairs and Inclusion] as ‘‘an integrated strategy for enhancing, at the same
time, flexibility and security in the labour market. It attempts to reconcile
employers’ need for a flexible workforce with workers’ need for security—
confidence that they will not face long periods of unemployment.’’26 Moreover,
‘‘integrated flexicurity policies’’ are said to ‘‘play a key role in modernising labour
markets and contributing to the achievement of the 75 % employment rate target set
by the Europe 2020 Strategy’’ (Ibid). The ‘‘Youth on the Move’’ set of programs
was in 2011 listed as one of the main actions taken so far.27 Many of the initiatives I
listed above fit into this framework that derives from the Supiot et al. (2001) report
and its assertion of the need to provide the protections to workers needed to make
labor migration within Europe even more possible and palatable. The European
Youth Portal on working listed many more.
When the ‘‘Report of the Mission for Flexicurity’’ notes that two of its four
‘‘components’’ are ‘‘more flexible and secure contractual arrangements, from the
point of view of both employer and worker’’ and ‘‘lifelong learning strategies in
order to ensure workers’ ongoing capacity to adapt, and increase their employabil-
ity,’’ that there must be ‘‘a balance between the rights and responsibilities of
employers, workers, and jobseekers and the authorities,’’ it makes one wonder
whether jobseekers are thought to have a ‘‘responsibility’’ not just to seek wages but
to engage in labor migration (Mission for Flexicurity 2008: 3).

24
http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/internal_market/living_and_working_in_the_internal_market/
c11077_en.htm.
25
http://www.youthpass.eu/en/youthpass/.
26
http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=102&langId=en.
27
http://europa.eu/youthonthemove/index_en.htm.

123
416 S. R. Roseman

The crisis moment (2007-present)

I began this article with the current period of the crisis that began in 2007–2009.
Where do things stand in terms of labor migration in this situation of extreme
unemployment and financial expropriation—especially among young workers?
There are clear parallels between the guest worker moment and the initial period of
the flexicurity moment, in terms of a drive to circulate laborers to where they are
needed by capital. The policy of pushing for intercountry labor migration during the
early 2000s has had greater impacts than previously expected; however, one must
assume that these are at least as much due to the necessity to seek employment
throughout the EU because of severe levels of unemployment in countries such as
Spain as opposed to purely policy successes (e.g., The Migration Observatory
2011). Moreover, it is important to consider the historical context for any resistance
to returning to long-distance circular and permanent labor migration among those
from the original EU member states. A consistent theme in my ethnographic data
from the past 20 years is a moral economy expectation that economic prosperity and
broader access to education or training, associated in Spain with the country’s
membership in the European Union, should be correlated with local and at least
national employment opportunities. James Scott argued that peasant rebellion and
other forms of resistance in Southeast Asia resulted from historical moments when
threats to ‘‘subsistence security […were] socially experienced as [violations of] a
pattern of moral rights or expectations’’ (Scott 1976: 6; also see Scott 1985).
Europeans such as rural Galicians have historically associated labor migration with
working class membership, poverty, high unemployment, and the spatialized
disparities that historically characterized unequal development within Europe. In the
pre-Crisis period, they developed a moral economy expectation that governments
should provide conditions of non-migration. How do the new messages about youth
passes, flexicurity, and even ‘emancipation’ accord with ideas which circulated in
the villages about those who must leave as being ‘‘pobriño/as’’ [a diminutive for
‘‘poor ones’’] who may live alone, not know their neighbors, and not have many kin
nearby on whom to rely? For a brief time in the 1980s and 1990s, ‘‘successful’’
migrants returned from places such as Switzerland and were able to renovate their
homes and settle into local or commuting-distance employment. However, many of
the jobs that returning Galician migrants took up in Spain were an integral part of
the disastrous financialization of the economy, given that so many worked in the
booming construction sector which lost just under one million jobs from 2005 to
2010 (Instituto Nacional de Estadı́stica 2013). Will economic success now not be
displayed upon ‘‘return’’ from years of working at far distances from home but
continuously, through permanent or ongoing circular labor migration? There is no
question now that one major driving set of policies affecting labor migration has to
do with the austerity measures, measures closely tied to job losses and the decision
to shed positions in the public as well as private sector.
In reaction against financialization, unemployment, and political corruption,
various political movements began to convene mass numbers of people in public
spaces in the spring of 2011, adding to general strikes and other acts of protest to
austerity measures in Spain. 15-M refers to a wide range of movements including

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Unemployment and labor migration 417

Real Democracia Ya!,28 the Indignados,29 and Juventud sin Futuro30 that are linked
to the initial acts of solidarity and resistance in public spaces on May 15, 2011.31
More recently, 20-M has referred to the anti-austerity protests of 2012. The
movements behind 15-M had of course begun earlier, in numerous private
conversations and collective cyberspace nodes as well as in some public displays.
However, when the acts of resistance exploded into the Plaza del Sol in Madrid in
2011, and soon after into other open-air squares and similar public spaces
throughout Spain and elsewhere in the world, many were surprised. I was in Galicia
at that time and was able to attend the first meetings held in Santiago de Compostela
and Lugo. The discussions ranged widely in those first meetings, but alongside
concerns about public monies being used to bail out financial institutions, political
corruption, and a lack of access to housing, unemployment among young adults was
a repeated focus of debates. The back and forth between participants of different
generational cohorts often centered on this theme, as well as the need to resist the
capitalist and policy status quos, as had previous generations during earlier periods
of political and economic crisis. Among the eight proposals of the forum
Democracia Real Ya!, the second one is ‘‘Against Unemployment’’ and contains
five separate policy suggestions including that of working toward a ‘‘structural
unemployment’’ level of under 5 % and setting retirement age at 65 and not raising
it until youth unemployment has been eliminated (Democracia Real Ya! 2011a).
Unemployment is central to the forum’s manifesto (translated into 11 languages);
indeed, it begins with the lines: ‘‘We are ordinary people. We are like you: people,
who get up every morning to study, work or find a job’’ (Democracia Real Ya!
2011b).32
Interestingly, in the context of this article, in the many web pages linked to the
15-M and Democracia Real Ya! network we can find young adults focused on
generally remaking economies, work, and lives in rural living spaces in parts of the
country such as Galicia.33 Although this converges generally with the predominance
of Spanish rurbanization and recent reversals of population decline in some rural
areas (Roseman, Prado and Pereiro 2013), there are also links between this aspect of
Spain’s current resistance movements and the connections being made with the
international La Via Campesina movement.34

28
In translation, this is Real Democracy Now!.
29
The term ‘‘indignado’’ is connected with the book.
30
Youth without a Future.
31
The 15-M moment of course preceded the initiation of Occupy Wall Street by some months, despite
some on the North American side of the Atlantic at times later conflating protests in Spain and elsewhere
with an American impetus. See the list of movements and links to the many associated web pages at:
http://tomalaplaza.net/; http://www.democraciarealya.es/; http://movimiento15m.wordpress.com/; http://
movimientoindignadosspanishrevolution.wordpress.com/about/.
32
Also see Revolting Europe 2012; Standing 2011 and on the terms precariat or precariato used among
one group of the Italian Left and elsewhere in Europe. For a Portuguese example, see Matos 2012.
33
For example, http://ruralesenredadxs.org/encuentro-rural-15m-rurales-enredadxs-2/; http://ruralesenred
adxs.org/quienes-somos/.
34
http://viacampesina.org/en/.

123
418 S. R. Roseman

Conclusion

The resistance movements mentioned above and their successors, the type of wage-
seeking characteristic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ongoing
financial expropriation will all likely continue to shape the next few decades.
‘‘Mobility’’ or labor migration is being produced as a duty of European citizens.
However, we know that this policy direction is experienced differently by
differentially situated social actors. Those who have participated in localized and
general strikes in Spain in 2011 and 2012 have not overlooked how ‘‘Europeans’’ as
well as state citizenships are being framed to serve the needs of capital, that we are
not so distant from the ‘‘guest worker’’ moment initiated in the 1960s, and earlier
periods.
To return to the place where I started, if migration is framed as both a ‘‘right’’ and
an obligation, what about employment in general? In contrast with some forms of
socialism and communism (e.g., Ghodsee 2005; Müller 2007), access to secure
employment is not framed as a right under capitalism even as wage work is
increasingly considered to be an obligation. The flexicurity literature certainly plays
with this contradiction, with stated targets such as that of reaching 75 %
employment (also see the section on ‘‘Duty to Work’’ in Supiot et al. 2001: 32–34).
If the EU flexicurity policy direction is framing labor migration as an obligation
and not just a right, how and where is this message of obligation being taken up
explicitly by Spain and other state governments of the EU? Undoubtedly, austerity
measures—including the cessation of unemployment benefits to many workers who
have long been seeking employment—are one of the clearest impetuses to wage
seekers to move further from home (Supiot et al. 2001: 32–34). As I demonstrate
with my focus on rural commuting, we need to consider how workers’
displacements across different geographical distances are impacted by a range of
public policies, including those connected with temporality, transportation and
housing. An expanded comparison of labor migration at various spatial–temporal
scales can enrich a consideration of class, generational, spatial, and other
inequalities, of the conditions under which people move, of what leads to processes
of dispossession and expropriation as well as how they are structured.

Acknowledgments I am indebted to my friends in Galicia for their hospitality and trust in me during
some very difficult times. Thank you to Winnie Lem, Pauline Gardiner Barber, Wayne Fife, and an
anonymous reviewer for helpful comments and suggestions on prior drafts of this article. The earlier
periods of fieldwork referenced here were supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, McMaster University,
the Xunta de Galicia, and the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela.

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