Losers of representation: Gains and losses of globalisation as seen by workers in internationalised companies in the Netherlands

Dichotomisation between winners and losers is a prominent element of the debate on globalisation, with ordinary workers often considered losers. However, little is known about what workers make of globalisation, how they experience the phenomenon, and how they talk about it. We use a set of focus groups to explore meaning-making on the globalisation of the economy among lower-educated employees of Dutch internationalised firms. We find that they weigh up the pros and cons and proudly struggle with the consequences of globalisation. To the degree that they feel left behind, it is by politics and government. This suggests that dislike of globalisation is the result of negative experiences with politics, rather than the other way around.

The notion that globalisation produces a society of winners and losers is a recurring element of the debate on globalisation (Djaïz, 2020; Goodhart, 2016; Haidt, 2016; Kriesi et al., 2012). Winners are supposedly happy with the world as it goes. Losers long for the (supposed) warmth of an exclusive nation-state as compensation for the globalised, competitive labour market. This creates an image of strong societal tensions around globalisation.

But what do ordinary people living under conditions of globalisation make of this? Does globalisation indeed make them turn away from regular politics and towards populism, or are the relations between open borders and policy preferences more complex? After all, given its huge influence, globalisation should come with benefits as well, and why should workers not be aware of these? As a contribution to an ongoing debate about globalisation and right-wing populist attitudes (for instance, in this journal, Van Rossem & Roose, 2022) we look qualitatively into what workers in an internationalised economy make of open borders. Using focus groups among Dutch workers (Dekker et al., 2020), we find a narrative of loss, and also of pride and sympathy. Moreover, the criticism of globalisation is shaped by previous political disappointments.

In discussions about economic globalisation, the issue of cleavage formation has become a prominent theme since West European politics in the age of Globalisation (Kriesi et al., 2008). More recently, based on content analyses of debates in Western media, Roberts and Lamp (2021) distinguish six prominent narratives on cleavages. First, an ‘establishment narrative’ with only winners. Second, ‘global threats narrative’ with only losers worldwide. Third, the ‘geoeconomic narrative’ with some countries gaining at the expense of others. Fourth, the ‘corporate power narrative’ with multinational corporations winning at the expense of workers, governments, and citizens worldwide. Fifth, the ‘right-wing populist narrative’ of workers in developing countries gaining at the expense of workers in developed countries. Sixth, the ‘left-wing populist narrative’ of elites gaining at the expense of the middle class and poor worldwide. In academic research of social, cultural, and political divisions in Western countries, varieties of the sixth narrative are leading. ‘There is widespread agreement that globalisation has generated new “winners” and “losers” in advanced industrialised societies – providing opportunities for political parties to mobilise the latter’ (Norris & Inglehart, 2019, p. 137). The attraction of losers and winners – or ‘victims and beneficiaries’ (Van Rossem & Roose, 2022) – to different parties is embedded in broader divisions of preferences and values, forming new ideological cleavages (open versus closed, cosmopolitan versus communitarian, etc.). A growing literature of public opinion in Europe shows the alignment or clustering of attitudes to globalisation issues such as immigration, international trade and trade agreements, EU integration, and climate change and climate policies (Dilger, 2023; Helbling & Jungkunz, 2020; Teney et al., 2014). Teney and Rupieper (2022, p. 3) summarise these findings as cumulating evidence for the polarity of winners and losers of globalisation. In this view, winners and losers are defined by their opinions about globalisation, independently of personal gains and losses.

Other research sticks to different impacts of (economic) globalisation on peoples’ living situations and especially their labour market positions and outlooks. Autor and colleagues for example look at competition via import (particularly from China) that presses the wages and leads to rising unemployment of workers in parts of the country where traditional industry is in decay (Autor et al., 2013, 2020). Winners are those who profit from open borders and people who don’t profit are the losers. Tsatsanis and Belchior find a ‘a modest but clear representation gap between the “winners” and “losers” of globalisation,’ particularly concerning the economic policy preferences of the lower educated (Tsatsanis & Belchior, 2023, p. 64). Milanoviç contrasts a rise of a solid middle class in China and rising wealth of already prosperous elites in the West, with a purchasing power decline of ordinary people in the Netherlands or Britain and the United States (Milanović, 2016; Went, 2018). Therefore, losers would turn to populist ideas, such as ‘America first’ or ‘take back control’ (Guriev & Papaioannou, 2022; Mutz, 2021; Rodrik, 2018, 2021; Stiglitz, 2017).

In this mainly economic stream of research, there is little discussion how the supposed winners and losers experience globalisation, let alone whether they see themselves as winners and losers. Winners and losers are distinguished based on general characteristics. According to a comparison of voters in the USA and the UK, particularly predictive of support of right-wing radicals is ‘nostalgic deprivation,’ the idea that because of globalisation, something is lost in in the ability to influence the allocation of material and psychological resources, or political efficacy (Gest et al., 2018, p. 1713). Welfare populism, the motive to keep ‘undeserving’ immigrants from profiting from the welfare state, is suggested as more particular western European behaviour (De Koster et al., 2013). Mutz (2021) describes how the public opinion on international trade is highly malleable, and that the suggestion of globalisation as a competition with ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ is (at least in an American context) very productive for politicians looking to get a message across.

A substantial part of the research is dedicated to labour market characteristics and educational levels as explanatory factors of discontent. ‘Low-skilled individuals exposed to globalisation experience the highest levels of labour market risks and can therefore be characterised as globalisation losers. In contrast, high-skilled individuals benefit from exposure to the global economy. As globalisation winners, they experience less labour market risk and are consequently also less willing to support redistributive policies’ (Walter, 2017, p. 77). The distinction might also be based on education levels (Helbling & Jungkunz, 2020; Noordzij et al., 2021), or a combination of job characteristics and educational levels (Van Rossem & Roose, 2022). Or the degree to which industries can be offshored. Kaihovaara and Im (2020, p. 341) find that ‘differences in immigration attitudes between routine and nonroutine workers become more polarised as offshorability increases.’

There are few qualitative studies, and those scholars that do qualitative research, tend to concentrate on ‘losers,’ that is on deprived, ‘left behind’ groups, and focus on cultural rather than economic or social insecurity, on feelings of loss rather than on loss of income. A prominent example is Hochschild’s analysis of ‘strangers in their own land.’ She shows how Americans (from southern states) mourn for the loss of beloved attitudes about freedom of religion and government, and a loss of possibilities to ‘achieve the American dream’ (Hochschild, 2016). Similarly, Gest (2016) portrays workers in both the United Kingdom and the United States who feel disempowered, displaced to the periphery of society. Additionally, Kimmel found that ‘as they [the “angry white men”] saw it, they’d lost some words that had real meaning to them: honour, integrity, dignity’ (Kimmel, 2017, p. 4). These studies point at a cultural revolution at the heart of the backlash. They suggest it is not a lack of education or social security or exposure to competition, but rather discomfort with demographic changes and the liberal values that accompany globalisation that explains how people understand it (Norris & Inglehart, 2019).

In short, ‘winners and losers of globalisation’ has become a dominant frame to discuss the consequences of globalisation and to explain populist voting in Western countries. However, even among political economists ‘there is no consensus […] about exactly how globalization matters for […] perceptions of labor market risk and their policy preferences. It remains particularly contested who the winners and losers of globalization are’ (Walter, 2017, p. 55).

However, except for specific groups in the US and UK regions that have been extremely affected by international competition due to factory closures, we know little about how globalisation is experienced. We particularly know little about how globalisation is experienced by people in less extreme positions. In this paper, we focus on the experiences of globalisation of lower-skilled workers who did manage to keep their jobs, in Dutch companies that operate on a globalised scale. These people are not quintessential ‘losers,’ as they are not flexible workers in the service industry or in the warehouses of the internet economy and their employers thrive in a globalised economy. But they have a first-hand experience of working under conditions of international competition. What can we learn from their collective sense making (or ‘negotiated shared meaning,’ Gamson, 1992, p. 111) on the globalisation of the economy? We organised focus groups with these workers to explore this question. We find that the workers struggle to love globalisation rather than reject it. For them, the workplace can be a place to come to terms with the negative consequences of globalisation. For these negative consequences, they blame representative politics rather than capitalism or immigrants.

Figure 1 combines findings from an IPSOS public opinion survey with findings from the KOF globalisation index that integrates measures of economic, social, and political terms (Haelg, 2020). Both are based on data from 2019. The Netherlands combines the highest KOF-score worldwide for overall globalisation with limited public support for globalisation, a level of support comparable to that of the United States.

Figure 2 places globalisation support and scepticism in the Netherlands in a time perspective. From 2008 till 2021, a minority of 13–26% support the statement that ‘people like me mainly experience disadvantages from the disappearance of borders and the opening of our economy’; 36–48% reject the statement. There was a rise of globalisation scepticism in 2009–2015, probably because of the financial and euro crisis, and a decrease from 2015 onwards, continuing in the covid crisis of 2020/’21. The years we gathered our data, (2018–19) were not exceptional, and we see no reasons to assume that the pandemic has destroyed the timeliness of our findings.

In our research, we will focus on ‘ordinary workers’ in internationalised firms. They belong to the larger group of lower educated (roughly the lowest half) private employees. In Figure 3, we compare this group with other groups as regards their outlooks on globalisation as well as on national politics. We do so because, as we will see later, these outlooks are often strongly intertwined in discussions. The indicators for support of globalisation and support for national politics used in Figure 3 are also correlated at the individual level (r = .38) and they vary between groups. Figure 3 shows that students, public employees, and higher-educated private employees are much more positive about globalisation and politics than lower-educated private employees. However, people forced out of the labour market by unemployment or disability are more negative in both respects.

Summarizing, we deal in this paper with a segment of a relatively globalisation-sceptical part of the population in a country that is highly globalised but not overly positive about globalisation. Our research took place before the covid crisis, but that crisis does not seem to have had huge effects on globalisation attitudes.

Focus groups are a proven method in social science research (Barbour, 2018; Featherstone, 2017; Kitzinger, 1995; Krueger, 1997; Morgan, 1996). The usual method is to select 7–10 people who have never met before, paying attention to diversity to strengthen arguments that findings apply to a larger population (Cyr, 2016; Duchesne, 2017; Stewart & Shamdasani, 2014). Because we are less interested in generalisations to a larger population but want to find out how conversations unfold in natural settings, we adapted the less common ‘peer groups’ approach, gathering people in focus groups who share living and working conditions and who are familiar with one another. We have been inspired by William Gamson (1992) who uses this approach in his study Talking Politics to demonstrate meaning making among working people, how they are ‘passive nor dumb.’ Gamson argues that it is tempting for conservatives to see average people as ignorant and for progressives to see them as blinded by class structures (Gamson, 1992, p. 6). He sets out to show how (amongst others) bus drivers, car mechanics, and firefighters make sense of crucial public events. His participants met as colleagues or friends, at home rather than in a formal setting. In these ‘sociable public discourses,’ they debated nuclear power, the Arab Israeli conflict, affirmative action, and industry troubles. A conversation would generally start with participants reproducing media discourse, but these images would be criticised with both their popular or folk wisdom and with experiential knowledge from their own lives (job, family, neighbourhood). In this way, the participants produced collective action frames that offer rather nuanced insights into how political opinions come about, where moral indignation and injustice do have a place but are not always expressed effectively. We consider this a promising approach to bring about new insights about globalisation.

Three inclusion criteria steered our method of selecting participants. First, participants must work at internationalised companies. We speak of internationalised companies if they meet two characteristics. First, the company has cross-border production chains or it employs employees from different countries who work together at the same, Dutch locations. Second, because women and men still largely dominate in different sectors, we wanted at least sectors where more women and sectors where more men worked. As a sector where women are well represented, we concentrated on companies in the retail trade; as a sector where men are well represented, we concentrated on construction and logistics. Third, to take regional differences into account we initially looked for companies in the Utrecht region (the metropolitan part of the Netherlands) and the Venlo region (close to Germany). Via existing contacts with labour union professionals and local entrepreneurs, we ‘snowballed’ in four companies, inviting participants with lower education and a traditional Dutch background, and mostly succeeded in having them at the table. One of the groups turned out to consist predominantly of participants employed in middle management, with amongst other foremen, a bookkeeper of the firm and a personnel manager. And two groups of workers in construction also had participants with an immigrant background, respectively 3 and 1. We offered participants a reimbursement of 30 euros via a voucher. We managed to organise 8 focus group with a total of 45 participants.

The participants worked in four sectors: track construction, metal construction, regular construction, and the retail sector (see Appendix B). They worked in department stores, constructed railways, built buildings, or drew steel wires. In two groups, workers with a migrant background were present. A total of 10 women and 35 men participated. So, there is a bias of men in the focus groups. We have not corrected for this. This was focus group research that cannot be representative of the population of the Netherlands. We aimed to understand patterns of feeling via a variety of groups, what globalisation can mean among working people. This variety was sufficiently reached.

Building on Gamson’s approach, we met with six of our eight groups in their canteens, in late 2018 and early 2019. Due to tense relationships with management, we met with two groups in a (secluded space in a) cafe or community centre near the workplace. The conversations took place while sitting in a circle, in which we as researchers sat among the participants and did not act as interviewers, but mainly as organisers and drivers of the mutual conversation. We let the participants exchange ideas about ‘open borders’ and stayed away as much as possible from the somewhat abstract word ‘globalisation.’ After discussing different theses, we submitted cartoons to the participants, to enhance the participation of the quieter members of the groups. To be able to frame our results in a larger quantitative study that asked similar questions (Autor et al., 2020), we addressed three issues:

1. How do working people interpret ‘globalisation’ and overlapping concepts such as ‘open borders,’ and what meaning do they assign to them in their daily lives?

2. What role do these working people think is played by institutions such as politics and the welfare state in steering globalisation?

3. How do they perceive the impact of globalisation on their work?

We asked these questions in three ways. First, we asked open questions: what do you think about open borders? How do you think the Netherlands is doing? After about 15 or 20 minutes, we would present two theses: ‘open borders are good for companies, not for citizens’ and ‘government has to protect workers from open borders.’ The debate around that would generally last for half an hour. And finally, we presented three cartoon-like drawings, to enhance the possibilities to participate in the conversation. One suggested that only Polish-speaking brick layers would get a job; one suggested that a big ship from China was welcomed in the harbour because of the cheap products; the third suggested that a judge selects the immigrants allowed into the country on basis of their added economical value. Debates about these cartoons confirmed the direction of the dialogue up to that point rather than that they added new insights, but the instrument allowed to make sure that all participants had their say.

We noted a remarkable contrast between the conversations about globalisation in general and about globalisation at the workplace. Literally no one would argue against open borders in the first part of any of the conversations. Participants were happy to talk about Dutch traditions of trade and commerce, and they defended the idea of open borders because of their importance for the economy in general. This is in line with folk knowledge about the Netherlands, the (contested) roots of the Netherlands as a globalised country, of discoverers and tradespeople, are part and parcel of history lessons at school.

As the participants in the different focus groups knew one another as colleagues, there was a mutual understanding of the positions they held toward contentious public issues. If participants talked about open borders or free trade, they could and sometimes would predict what the other participants thought about the topic at hand. I know you don’t agree with me, the more outspoken participants said to the group on several occasions before giving their opinions. Explicit or implicit references to prominent populist politicians would underscore their positions. This ‘supply side,’ or the presence of politicians that offer clear resistance to globalisation and that make immigration, integration, and multiculturalism into hotly contested topics, appeared as a topic participants would rather be done with.

As the conversation on open borders was underway, some participants would identify themselves as very critical of immigration. I’m sorry but my daughter has been on a waiting list for a house already two years and in the meantime every asylum seeker gets a nice apartment, I know I’m not supposed to say this, but it’s enough, just enough, a female participant in the railroad construction group stated quite forcefully after first listening to the balanced remarks that her colleagues made as opening statements. This would happen well before we presented the drawings that might invoke these topics. Some participants clearly felt the urge to express their ideas after keeping silent during the first rounds of conversation. This held for all groups. Among construction workers and railroad workers, the conversational style would be ruder than among the steel factory workers that partly had desk jobs and the retail workers that professionally engage with clients daily. But the discussion would not get impolite, there was an unambiguous political versatility or sense of citizenship present. (It is of course well possible that the presence of academic researchers reminded people to choose their words carefully.)

Labour immigrants from Eastern Europe and asylum-seekers from all over the world would be the recurring examples for the participants that identified themselves after a while as rather critical of open borders. These participants tended to stress that they were not against open borders as such, but against people misusing them and that misuse was widespread. Participants with an immigrant background defended the right to migrate in search of a better life. Of course, if you want to provide for your family, you deserve a job, but these people come to collect welfare, the most explicit bricklayer stated. The criticism was predominantly economically inspired. These critics of globalisation would predominantly respond offhandedly if culture arose further along a conversation. If colleagues with a Muslim background want to pray during work, why not, was a recurrent element of all the conversations. I smoke, they pray. If workers from Poland or Bulgaria drink much or wear strange tracksuits, why not. If they do their job.

In a same manner, this is not about you, of course, was the recurring conversational argument when the statements about the false competition by immigrant workers were introduced with participants with an immigrant background present, as in the case of the construction workers. And the addressed participant with an immigration background tended to refrain from engaging with those types of remarks, acknowledging by nodding or smiling their awareness of the good intentions of the speaker. Once, an explicit opinion about Eastern Europeans was expressed only after an apology towards one of the other participants, as you have a Hungarian wife.

The gist of the recurring argument is that immigration creates unfair competition. A Polish worker costs about 20 euros and we cost 40 or 50 euros, one elder brick layer explained the rest of the group. Of course, you rather have ten Bulgarians working for 350 euros each than ten Dutchmen working for 3500 euros each, that’s logical from the perspective of an entrepreneur, was the same argument among steel workers. But many examples would sound like the ones that can be heard in the news at the time of our research. A general statement such as immigrants get everything, glasses, dental surgery, even benefits they do not need, was suggested, and not really discussed in a group of railroad workers. And there seemed to be no surprises among participants about the points of view expressed in the conversations, as if it this was not the first time the debate was brought up under colleagues.

As a counterclaim to rather general remarks some participants would repeat that the Netherlands is dependent on trade or that their own company is dependent on open borders, and that a bit of unfairness is a reasonable price for a lot of progress. And other participants would suggest that immigrants also have a family to take care of. One needs to understand individual motives of people, not judge them as a group, a retail employee intervened. Yes, but only up to a point, would be the retort by a more outspoken participant, not if we become the actual victims. The rest of the group would at that point communicate with physical or facial expressions that they were aware of the different positions and saw little need to contribute anything new to the conversation.

Our suggestion that government could protect workers from open borders would invoke sceptical remarks. In several groups the spontaneous, cynical reaction was: Yes, that would be a great idea, but who takes care of it? There was nobody who would suggest that this type of protection is currently in place. Participants agreed that the welfare state was willingly sacrificed for worldwide competition. It is no longer possible for government to protect ordinary workers, a retail employee explained to the rest of the group, international laws get in the way. No one came to the defence of the subsequent governments that made these choices over the last decades.

This tense relationship with public life stands in stark contrast with a strong identification with companies. As the participants spend the bigger part of their daily life working at the same place, sometimes for decades, this is a not big surprise. There is a strong sense of pride directly connected to working in an internationalised economy. Participants are proud that they manage from day to day and that their companies also manage to survive. To work for a thriving company, in a system that makes this company thrive is a satisfying experience as well. Our company still exists in this rough market economy, which proves that it is doing something right. We are part of that. Other Dutch department stores go bankrupt, and rightly so, if you look at what they try to sell, was several times mentioned among the retail workers. The products of these firms are of minor quality, or they operate with outdated concepts whereas our participants are part of an up-to-speed enterprise and proudly so. You should be able to stand your ground as a company, and we manage to do just that because our factory makes good steel, not that Chinese stuff. It is our product that goes to Canada, not theirs, the workers in the steel factory explained us collectively. With the same pride, railroad workers would talk. It is the Saudi’s asking us to come to build a railroad, not the other way around, God forbid. And do you not always find a Dutchman selling stuff, even at the South Pole?

But this pride comes with a price, because working hours are long and pay is not that good. I urge my daughter to finish professional education, she must make more of it than I do, but in the meantime I’m happy I can pay the rent, as one of the retail ladies has it. This type of argument evokes a lot of consent in the groups. Participants do work that has to be done, if not for their companies than for their loved ones. After all, competition with foreign companies is something participants never aspired. They took their job to make a living or raise a family, send their children to college, and retire before the aching of their backs become too prominent. They did not hope nor expect to switch jobs often or to make other great changes in their lives, to become famous or powerful. They do not see themselves as entrepreneurs by nature nor by training, but they find themselves confronted with a competitive environment. There is always someone who wants to do my job, who can do my job, suggested one of the railroad workers, although the rest of the group did frown upon that and not necessarily saw their functions as easily interchangeable.

However, the welfare state as an institution did not evoke pride but anger during the conversations. This anger had several substantial elements, the rising costs of medical care and the decreasing number of holiday and sick leave figured prominently, but the debate on the retirement age set the tone throughout the different groups. At the time of research, it was prominently discussed whether the retirement age would have to rise to more than 68 or 70. Our participants would say unison, young, and old, that if there ever was proof that average people pay the price for open borders, it is that the insecurity grows about the day one can retire. One of the participants would start alongside a line as I cannot imagine how I should do this job for another 10 years, it makes me sick and the others would join, step in, maybe suggest that they themselves were better off (because almost retired) but nevertheless underwrite the observation. What I do on the construction site, I cannot keep doing until I’m 60, let alone 65 or older. Early retirement should be a reward for a tough job as theirs, the argument would run.

Unions try to step up, participants know, but they have little confidence in the results. They blame government for the experience of insecurity. Being able to stop at a certain point in time is not a vague wish but a concrete longing. They are fully aware that their incomes did not rise with the tide, that the costs of living have gone up while their salaries have not. However, insecurity about their health and old age is more pressing. From the beginning of their working lives participants knew that they would not become rich. The promise was, that there would be rewards for a job well done, such as regular holidays, decent sick leave, and a steady income as a pensioner starting somewhere shortly after their 60th birthday. The feeling of a broken social contract appeared to be widely shared, although no one dwelled on the topic for long, as if there was little idea what to do about this. Politics was considered part of the problem rather than of the solution.

It was particularly when participants talked about how globalisation affects their job that the quality of the conversation changed, from an exchange of points of view to a constructive but rather nostalgic, sad dialogue about how workers ‘as workers’ are left out in the cold nowadays.

All participants are quite aware that their job depends on open borders. These open borders were also regularly connected to individual benefits. Such as buying cheap clothes from other parts of the world among the female participants, cheap tools among the male participants, and electronics among the younger participants. But feelings of shame and helplessness connected with these cheap web-shops would easily pop up. You’d be robbing yourselves if you would buy that telephone case not at Ali-express, but in a store. They do not come up with a solution: participants share their feelings but don’t know what to do. Foreign DIY stores take over from Dutch stores. Of course, I go there, they are way cheaper. But I know that this local store that has very special nuts and bolts will disappear this year or the next. Hell, I even know one guy that will lose his job because of this. Sometimes colleagues will help in these parts of the conversation, with suggestions that other countries need wealth as well, or that buying these products helps poorer people make a living.

This type of guilt hints at the individualised or estranged experience at the workplace that constitutes the novel element of this narrative. When talking about open borders in general (question 1) or when talking about companies and government (question 2), participants might sometimes blurt something funny, bring up something they read on the internet or make statements without listening to one another. However, around work itself we met another type of conversation, of the sort Gamson calls ‘experienced knowledge’ (Gamson, 1992, p. 127). Bringing up events or developments at the workplace, participants would together construct analyses that did not divide them amongst themselves. They often made confirming remarks, waited for others to finish their story, and followed up with a similar experience. The topic would be treated as a discovery made by the group or as an insight that participants were happy to share, because they felt that up to that point nobody ever listened to it.

Participants consistently reported an absence of safety, an absence of community and an absence of craftsmanship. Experiences in the group led to collective definitions of these absences, whereas on the other topics reproduction of familiar political debates was more prominent, and members of the groups based tried to avoid clashes based on well-known preferences. The topic of open borders left participants weary, as it was just as hard to argue in favour of it as it was to argue against it. The role of government left the participants worked up, angry. When the conversation touched upon their work; however, the mood was more interactive and supportive – tell them how you got demoted, tell them about that incident, participants would say to one another.

First, participants would bring up a lack of safe working conditions and relate this to open borders. Those who work in construction or logistics experience direct threats. They paint this lack of safety in bright colours. Back, hip and knee complaints are for a good part of our participants a daily topic that apparently has disappeared from the public eye. Heavy lifting, night shifts, one just must cope with these things and not complain too much. To the idea of our participants, this is because of a change in the culture of management, one that is more demanding and less listening, because it must respond to international standards and can recruit from an internationalised pool of workers. We are not allowed to sit down during working hours, because that gives a bad message to the customer, so yeah, we use tramadol or diclofenac when our legs hurt, it is quite common, explained one of the retail employees.

It has become increasingly common for construction sites to employ many Southern and Eastern European workers. They do not usually speak Dutch, but according to our participants, their command of English or German is also very limited. Hence it is not uncommon for railroad construction workers to make lists of instructions on how to handle high-voltage distribution cables in up to eight languages. I don’t know whether you understand what 320,000 volts is, but we had to write a manual in Croatian, but someone choose the wrong Croatian dialect and still our colleagues did not understand it. A remark like the previous one would unite the participants, who would nod in our direction or that of the speaker. Most participants would refrain from criticizing immigration as such, but the Babylonesque character of their daily experiences united them in explicit ideas that one can have too many strangers around.

Second, they reported a lack of community at work. With internationalised management and colleagues from many other countries, daily interaction loses meaning. There is less conviviality, due to globalisation. They experience a lack of say in shaping their work whereas they do have ideas about this. There is literally no possibility to share anything with co-workers from Eastern Europe, but also colleagues with temporary contracts will not put much energy in small talk at the coffee machine. During a company outing, Dutch, Russians, Moroccans, Turks, and Portuguese will sit at separate tables. There is no mixing whatsoever, was part of the exchange between the steel factory workers. It is maybe not wrong, participants will offer during the conversation, we prefer our own kind as well. But it feels unnatural to not even try to invite the truck driver that has just arrived at the factory in for a coffee, because you know you cannot communicate.

Mirroring this lack of understanding, international management does not acknowledge local habits. Employees of the department store we talked to were once very proud of the typical Dutch Sint Nicolas celebrations in their stores, with hundreds of metres of exuberant garlands and dozens of mannequins dressed as Black Petes. It made December a special month, and friends and relatives would mention the buoyant decorations. It was a source of pride. With an Anglo-Saxon owner, Christmas and Halloween have taken over as the important holidays. There is nothing attractive or distinctive in this, we now do what every shop all over the world does.

Third is the absence of craftsmanship. The jobs of our participants once required special qualities, but they have been reduced to standardised routine work by open borders. Employees of the department store were obliged to express elaborate welcome words to all clients instead of relating to them the way they see as proper. We are not allowed to choose our own words, but we must stick to a script, as if we are children. You cannot stick to the local language, you must behave very formally, even if it goes against all your instincts at that time. Construction workers narrate that the nice parts of their job – the demanding parts of the brickwork – is outsourced, to reduce risks and costs. What remains is more standardised, less interesting. Not the complex brick laying but at best sand-lime bricks, and most of the time just helping freelancers, who earn more than they themselves but have less experience. There is little to be proud of, at the end of a working day. No surprise our kids do not for one second think of following in our footsteps and that there are no more carpenters or mechanics anymore. So, in the minds of these participants, it was not surprising that companies say they need immigrants.

The quality of our focus group conversations – from the stifled exchanges about open borders to the engaged dialogue about workplace community – suggests that the participants do take their job quite seriously. They want their workplace to be a ‘good company in a hostile world’ (Rosa, 2016). Our first conclusion is that globalisation is tough love for working people in internationalised companies. They struggle to come to terms with the negative consequences of both economic and cultural globalisation. They are nervous about the seemingly permanent influx of newcomers that seems to be the result of open borders. They express strong feelings of loss: loss of the prospect of a good job for people with vocational training like them; loss of a sense of community at work, as flexible work begins to predominate; loss of voice: diminished influence in the direction taken by their company due to the rise of directive management styles; loss of professional pride due to a focus on efficiency; loss of safety because with the many languages that are spoken at the workplace, risks of misunderstandings and concomitant safety risks increase.

Nevertheless, our participants do not want to be seen as incapable of surviving in a competitive society. Rather than arguing against open borders, our participants want to be protected against the negative results. They also feel individually, company-wise, and nationally proud of being able to survive under these competitive circumstances. And they show sympathy for migrant labourers: even the few participants who fiercely argue in favour of closing the borders admit that they also would go great lengths to take care of their family and try to find work in other countries when needed. Probably because of their ambiguity, they preferred not to talk about the topic too much. They did not particularly like the polarisation alongside political lines with their colleagues that would follow.

Our second conclusion is that for our participants, government and representative politics are to blame – not ‘foreigners,’ let alone ‘capitalism.’ The institutions that should protect them against the negative consequences of globalisation have not delivered but let them down, participants argue. What used to compensate for a modest career – such as a good pension, good health schemes, study grants for their children – is at risk of being stripped away. It is unclear how long people will have to continue working even when that work is often strenuous and taxing. No one in government circles seems to be concerned about any of this. Instead, they allow for more insecurity by not protecting them against the consequences of a globalised economy. More than employers, politicians are to blame for these growing insecurities. Hence, their argument does not move from negative experiences of globalisation to political evaluations and behaviour, but rather vice versa from negative experiences with politics (that already let them down) to evaluations of globalisation.

The third conclusion is that the workplace both demonstrates the real vulnerabilities that globalisation causes and is a possible place to come to terms with these (Estlund, 2003). Participants express a recurrent cluster of concerns sparked by the conversation about globalisation, as summarised above. But while the public debate regularly translates views of this kind into polarisation and hard oppositions, either between different groups in society or between labour and capital, we found little evidence of this. Participants try to maintain their workplace as a community in which differences of opinion should be managed, not magnified. This effort to cherish the workplace as a community, as well as the dislike of confrontation among our participants, can both be seen as proof of citizenship well understood (Sandel, 2019). Work is then the activity of citizens, rather than of individuals striving for consumption-oriented incomes (Frega et al., 2019).

These conclusions warrant some caution, as this study has limitations. We concentrated on workers in general and did not pay much attention to differentiation in that group. We talked with workers who mostly had steady jobs in companies that successfully take part in the global economy. Their companies constitute the competition that workers in other countries fear, via successful export. We did not talk to employees of companies without an internationalised background, nor to unemployed workers. As a result of the snowballing, more white men than women or workers with an immigrant background took part in the conversations. Women were dominant among employees of the retail company, and in the two groups of construction workers three workers with an immigrant background were present. But we did not steer the conversation towards the experience of women or workers with an immigrant background, and therefore we are not able to discern meaningful distinctions in the narrative. Possibly this weakens the argument, as women and workers with an immigrant background in that part of the economy most probably have more reasons to experience loss. And the experiences we report on are ambiguous: a mixture of anxiety and pride, of insecurity about their jobs but relative security regarding their successful company. It is possible that our participants by times stuck to socially desirable answers, if not because of their colleagues then because of the academics present. But nevertheless, the expressed criticism is an incentive to rethink critiques of globalisation.

Globalisation is often understood in terms of winners and losers of global competition, as Roberts and Lamp (2021) illustrate with presenting six different prominent narratives on globalisation. This tends to lead to discussion of a societal conflict between ‘cosmopolitans’ and ‘communitarians’ (Teney et al., 2014). But our study of meaning-making of open borders by average workers in the globalised part of the Dutch economy shows first that there are more ambiguous positions than winners versus losers.

Our participants experience both positive and negative effects of globalisation and understand them as mixed. The explanatory power of globalisation as reasons for their estrangement or disillusionment is limited. There is a ‘cosmopolitan’ streak in their arguments, when they reflect upon the understandable effort of immigrants to cross borders in search of a better life or when they reflect upon the personal (commercial, cultural) benefits of globalisation. And there is also a ‘communitarian’ tendency in their argument. Where welfare state or housing are concerned, ethnically motivated arguments play a substantial part in the different narratives. From this perspective, it makes sense to understand, as Mutz (2021) does, resistance against open borders because of politicians successfully framing a range of anxieties into anti-trade or anti-European Union topics, rather than of a vivid ideology of closed borders. People do not vote against open borders out of self-interest but due to a general anxiety to be on the losing team, Mutz argues (Mutz, 2021, p. 48; also, Steiner, 2018, pp. 273–274).

Second, to the degree that talk about losers is warranted, our participants would be better portrayed as losers of representation than as losers of globalisation. Not their experience of globalisation, but their evaluation of politics makes them aware that they are on the wrong side and others benefit. On the one hand these ‘losers in representation,’ find their preferences translated poorly in policy because they participate less in politics (Schakel et al., 2020). On the other hand they feel discomfort towards politicians, i.e. ‘a clear belief that politicians are far removed from the lives of the “common” people,’ and indifferent to the lives of average workers (Noordzij et al., 2021, p. 577). And talking with Americans in the south of the United States, Hochschild (2016) found that their dissatisfaction is directed towards government, not towards companies. This idea of losers of representation is an undercurrent in debates on globalisation but deserves more attention. With experiences of loss or grief unsatisfactory expressed in politics, globalisation is a decoy rather than an explanation.

Third, a lot of public debate is highly polarised. Scholars should be aware that their conceptual dichotomies and cleavages are picked up in these debates and might fortify polarities. Our understanding of complex and contested issues such as globalisation and the discomforts associated with it can profit from efforts to present more fine-grained categories than winners and losers. Meaning making found in how global and local life interact, also known as ‘glocalisation’ (Robertson, 1995), is a productive contribution in that respect. It can help focus on the interplay of material versus non-material causes of criticism of open borders crucial to understand the backlash against globalisation (Walter, 2021). How are ‘critical consumption’ (boycotting or buying products) or ‘civic education’ (often focused on ‘world citizenship’) affected by the backlash against globalisation of the last years? What is it that competitors on the housing market bring to the table, or people planning their holidays? Apart from looking at the role of politics and media and the categories they (un)willingly create, day-to-day experiences are a relevant if not soothing source of insight on globalisation.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).