Recent decades have seen the EU grappling with a major struggle between the securitization of its external borders and demand for exploitable and disposable cheap workforce in various sectors. As a result, the EU has multiplied its borders by pushing them both outwards and inwards, and the distinction between migrants' status as regular and irregular, legal and illegal, citizen and non-citizen, has been continuously portrayed as black and white. This produces and sustains an analytical, political and practical divide that often obscures commonalities in workers' dispossession and is an obstacle to unified struggles to secure workers' rights. This volume moves beyond a perspective of migrants' exclusion and inclusion as solely a product of migration processes. It contextualizes migration in the larger transformations of the local, national and transnational labour markets and relations that point to the ongoing precarization of working lives. These processes of inclusion are methodologically approached through exclusion at macro, micro and meso levels. This positions the ethnographically documented experiences of immigrant labourers in the challenges of contemporary labour and migratory regimes, and traces new forms of collective response and contestation emerging in these reconfiguring contexts.
This edited volume could not be more timely in its critical examination of the intersection of precarious work and migration. Importantly migration is contextualised in wider transformation of local, national and transnational labour markets. Based on qualitative research by young scholars it goes beyond viewing migrants as victims, but focuses on their collective struggles as part of or supported by trade unions and grassroots organisation. -- Jane Hardy, University of Hertfordshire
This is an important contribution that aims to uncover the broader aspects of migration in relation to work and employment. The chapters look at the edges of the social and the more hidden forms of work and exploitation, as well prompting us to think about and question the effectiveness of more established forms of responding to the issue of exclusion. -- Miguel Martinez Lucio, University of Manchester
Olena Fedyuk is a Research Affiliate at the Center for Policy Studies. She holds a PhD from the department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at CEU. Her main academic interests include transnational migration, care-work, labor transformations, female employment policies and migration policies. Her dissertation was an ethnography of Ukrainian female migration to Italy and tackled questions of transnational moral economies, distant motherhood and care regimes.
Paul Stewart is Professor of the Sociology of Work and Employment at the University of Strathclyde. He is co-ordinator of the Marie Curie programme "Changing Employment", a 4 million Euro FP7 ITN programme (2012-2016) with eight partner European universities and range of European social partners.
Raia Apostolova obtained her doctoral degree in sociology and social anthropology from Central European University, Budapest. Her dissertation (Moving labor power and historical forms of migration) looks at the formation of three major categories: the internationalist socialist worker, the social benefit tourist and the economic migrant. The author argues that we need to exceed the legal frameworks of migration that are readily available to us and interrogate the very spaces (historical, ideological, and socio-political) of their making in order to understand the relation between migration and capitalism.
Karima Aziz holds a Mag. phil. in political science and a Mag. phil. in Polish studies from the University of Vienna and was a Marie Skłodowska Curie Early Stage Researcher in the ‘ChangingEmployment’ Initial Training Network. Her PhD thesis at the London Metropolitan University examines the experiences of female Polish migrant workers in the UK. Her academic interests lie in the field of migration, gender and work.
Ben Egan has since 2013 been a PhD candidate at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, working on employment relations in multinational companies and diversity management in Belgium, France and the UK. He is a policy advisor at the European Trade Union Confederation, advising on labour market and employment issues. He has previously worked as a trade union official in the UK, working mostly as a campaign organiser in the education sector.
Chibuzo Ejiogu is a lecturer in Human Resource Management (HRM) and employment relations at Coventry University, UK. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. His teaching and research draws on his industry experience including roles in sustainable development, HRM and hospitality management as well as his involvement in social movements and worker activism. He was part of a team at the University of Strathclyde that pioneered the ‘scenes and sounds of migration’ seminar series that utilises documentary films, dialogue and music to explore and innovatively engage with the complex dynamics of migration. His multi-disciplinary research interests include changes to work and employment, migration, sociology of work, political economy, postcolonialism, regulatory and institutional change, organisational analysis, global governance, corporate governance, CSR, reward management, performance management, human rights, worker activism, networks and social movements.
Mateusz Karolak is a research assistant and PhD candidate at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Wroclaw (Poland). From 2013 to 2016 he worked as an Early Stage Researcher in the Marie Curie Initial Training Network ‘ChangingEmployment’. His research interests include the political economy of Central-Eastern Europe, reproduction of inequalities, consequences of precarisation of work and intra-EU migrations with a particular focus on causation, consequences and subjective experiences of returning migrants. He is member of the editorial board of the academic journal Praktyka Teoretyczna.
Martin Lundsteen is an independent researcher, currently working on a project studying the tension between urban and national scales1 of belonging, and an assistant professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. In 2015, he obtained his PhD with a thesis on social conflicts and convivencia in Salt, a small Catalan town (‘Social Conflicts and Convivencia. An Ethnography of the Social Effects of “The Crisis” in a Small Catalan Town’). As a postdoctoral researcher, he has worked in several research projects on Islamophobia in Catalonia and, specifically, in Barcelona. He has been a member of the Grup d’Estudis sobre Reciprocitat (GER) since 2009, the Observatori d’Antropologia del Conflicte Urbà (OACU) since 2013 and Stop Als Fenòmens Islamòfobs (SAFI) since 2014. His research interests include political and economic anthropology, informal economy, urban anthropology, the political management of the poor, Islamophobia and racism, and, lately, nationalism and diversity.
Radosław Polkowski works as a researcher at the Scottish Government. From 2013 and 2016, he was a fellow in the FP7 Marie-Skłodowska Curie ‘ChangingEmployment’ programme and obtained his PhD in 2017 from the University of Strathclyde for a thesis on East-West migration in Europe with a focus on new immigration destinations: Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Poland. He has an extensive expertise also in relation to migration in East Asia, and in particular South Korea, which he gained through a post-doctoral research at the Academy of Korean Studies (2017). Moreover, he taught about political economy of East Asia and South Korea as a visiting lecturer at the University of Wroclaw (2016-2017), wrote articles for major newspaper media in South Korea and runs an analytical blog focusing on social affairs in this country. Of additional special interest both within the academy and in the policy community is his media work which embraces both photographic exposure and video presentations. His photographic work has received two awards, and he has completed a documentary film called Our Kingdom about migrant workers in Northern Ireland.
Irene Sabaté is a researcher in Social Anthropology and a lecturer at the Universitat de Barcelona. In 2009 she obtained her PhD with a dissertation on housing provisioning in East Berlin (Habitar tras el Muro. La cuestión de la vivienda en el este de Berlín, 2012). As a postdoctoral researcher, between 2009 and 2012 she took part in the 7th FP European project MEDEA (Models and their Effects on Development Paths), on industrial work and economic models, and, since 2012, she has been investigating mortgage indebtedness and home repossessions in the Barcelona metropolitan area, with a Post-PhD Research Grant from the Wenner Gren Foundation in 2014. She has been a member of the Grup d’Estudis sobre Reciprocitat (GER) since 2005, and she teaches Economic Anthropology, Anthropology of Consumption and Urban Anthropology. Her research interests include political economy, reciprocity, provisioning, work and social reproduction, housing, debt and credit relations, and financialization.
Nina Sahraoui is Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute within the ERC project EU Border Care. Nina received her PhD at London Metropolitan University supported by the Marie Curie ITN ‘ChangingEmployment’. Her doctoral research focused on a gendered political economy analysis of the articulation of migration, care and employment regimes through the study of migrant and minority ethnic workers’ experiences in older-age care in London, Paris and Madrid.
Jamie Woodcock is a fellow at the LSE. He is the author of Working the Phones, a study of a call centre in the UK inspired by the workers’ inquiry. His current research involves developing this method in co-research projects with Deliveroo drivers and other digital workers in the so-called gig economy. He is on the editorial board of Historical Materialism.
