The ‘Agency Arena’ and precarious subjectivities: Exploring the impact of structural and subjective factors in reproducing migrant worker exploitation in Glasgow

The UK's socioeconomic structure depends upon, and actively pushes towards, migrant workers filling jobs at the lowest rungs of the labour hierarchy; employment agencies perform a critical sorting function in this respect. Drawing on a PhD research project consisting of 21 interviews with migrant workers as well as an immersed, covert participant observation process of six migrant-dense precarious workplaces, this paper explores the manifestations of precarity in Glasgow and the impact of structural and subjective factors in reproducing migrant exploitation. The research revealed a complex continuum between structural compulsion and agentic decisions, intimately connected to migrants' understandings of their roles as workers and as migrants, which were themselves contingent upon their personal circumstances, migration backgrounds, availability of information and counter-hegemonic narratives. In response to the transience and insecurity experienced by many precarious migrant workers, community-embedded institutions such as social centres are argued to be the most effective means of addressing the combination of structural and subjective barriers that impede migrant worker organisation.