This article by Sonila Danaj and Gabriella Alberti engages with IHRM debates on the transnational regulation of labour. The findings illustrate how workers’ experiences are critically shaped by the combination of their migration and employment statuses in the context of firms’ restructuring strategies and transnational labour mobility. Temporal employment constraints and exclusion from equal treatment linked to migrant status, combined with labour subcontracting across the sectors, produce intensification of work, inferior terms and conditions, greater insecurity and dependence for migrant temporary workers. The main argument is that increasing differentiation between categories of migrant workers goes beyond the simple distinction of EU and Third Country Nationals, and is produced by the exceptional regulatory spaces into which these migrants are locked.