Chapter 9: Industrial Citizenship and International Mobility: Employer’s Interventions into the State of Welfare of Danish and Finnish ‘Expats’ in India¹

When Danish and Finnish highly educated workers depart from the Nordic region to take up a temporary work assignment outside of Europe they are frequently met by societies that are organized quite differently to their own. In the case of a move to India, they leave the safety and security of reputedly strong, small and, until recently, relatively homogeneous welfare states in which they trust, have faith, and feel secure. The state intervenes in their everyday lives with various forms of social protection and care to such an extent that it is sometimes referred to as a ‘mother state’ outside of the region. They arrive in India, a massively complex and diverse, highly populated ‘growth’ economy, where both extreme wealth and extreme poverty exist. Social protection in India is not only different in character, it is also largely targeted at the poor, at rural dwellers, at minority groups and at historically disadvantaged and demeaned caste groups. Social services in general meanwhile continue to be plagued by corruption rather than operate on trust. Concomitantly, as the Nordic temporary migrants’ relationships with the organizational structures that provide for their basic needs transform, the set of needs they have changes too. In the absence of a welfare state, the employer intervenes in order to secure the well-being of the employees, their families, and ultimately the success of the assignment.