Gabriella Alberti

Mobility strategies, ‘mobility differentials’ and ‘transnational exit’: the experiences of precarious migrants in London’s hospitality jobs

This article explores the patterns of occupational and geographical mobility of migrant hospitality workers, drawing on participatory research in London. It focuses on the ways in which migrants strategize around temporary employment and move across different jobs and locations trying to improve their precarious lives. Combining labour process theory and the perspective of the autonomy of migration the author reviews the concept of ‘mobility power’ as a form of resistance to degrading work. The findings illustrate that, while certain categories of migrants remain trapped in temporary employment, others manage to move on occupationally, develop aspects of their lives beyond work and engage in new migration. The main argument is that, in contrast to mainstream accounts of migrants’ labour market incorporation, migrant temp workers use their transnational exit power to quit bad jobs and defy employers’ assumptions about their availability to work under poor conditions.

Organising migrants as workers or as migrant workers? Intersectionality, trade unions and precarious work

This paper considers precarious work from the point of view of trade union practice in the area of equality and diversity, exploring the way in which unions organise and recruit low-paid, vulnerable migrant workers. A theoretical approach is developed in order to understand the particular vulnerability and diversity of migrant workers in the labour market. Insights from the literature on intersectionality are applied to the study of employment, industrial relations and human resource management practice. Drawing from four case studies, the strategies of three UK trade unions towards organising low-paid migrants are compared. It is concluded that trade unions tend to consider migrants primarily as workers (taking on a so-called ‘universalistic’ approach), rather than as migrant workers with particular and overlapping forms of oppression (a ‘particularistic’ approach). As a result, unions tend to construct a dichotomy between workplace and migration issues, impeding the effective involvement of diverse and marginalised workers into unions. Based on these findings, we argue that integrating universalistic and particularistic approaches to union organising and recruitment strategies is critical to promote the successful involvement of vulnerable migrants into trade unions.

Moving beyond the dichotomy of workplace and community unionism: The challenges of organising migrant workers in London’s hotels:

This article examines a joint effort by the union Unite and the community organisation London Citizens to unionise two migrant-rich hotels in London. The author explores the effectiveness of union and community strategies in the field of migrant organising drawing from the literature on union strategy and workers’ activism and focusing on workers’ own experiences of mobilisation. Gender, contractual and migration-related barriers to workers’ engagement in the campaign appeared determinant of the failure of the unionisation effort while the leaders eventually favoured a politics of incentive towards employers, ‘contracting out’ the protest to institutional actors in the community. The central argument is that neither workplace-based nor community unionism alone appears effective in terms of sustaining union activism among highly fragmented, migrant and precarious workforces. The renewal of industrial unionism in the UK rather requires unions to tackle the intersecting discriminations experienced by migrants across their communities and workplaces.

In, Against and Beyond Precarity: Work in Insecure Times:

In this Foreword to the special issue ‘In, Against and Beyond Precarity’ the guest editors take stock of the existing literature on precarity, highlighting the strengths and limitations of using this concept as an analytical tool for examining the world of work. Concluding that the overstretched nature of concept has diluted its political effectiveness, the editors suggest instead a focus on precarization as a process, drawing from perspectives that focus on the objective conditions, as well as subjective and heterogeneous experiences and perceptions of insecure employment. Framed in this way, they present a summary of the contributions to the special issue spanning a range of countries and organizational contexts, identifying key drivers, patterns and forms of precarization. These are conceptualized as implicit, explicit, productive and citizenship precarization. These forms and patterns indicate the need to address precariousness in the realm of social reproduction and post-wage politics, while holding these in tension with conflicts at the point of production. Finally, the guest editors argue for a dramatic re-think of current forms of state and non-state social protections as responses to the precarization of work and employment across countries in both the Global ‘North’ and ‘South’.

Unpacking the Category of Migrant Workers in Trade Union Research: A Multi-Level Approach to Migrant Intersectionalities:

This article reflects on the theoretical and empirical challenges that arise when researching trade union strategies towards migrant workers. By bringing together the debates on migration and intersectionality in Employment Relations, the authors highlight the problems of conflating different experiences of migrants under a homogenous view of the ‘migrant worker’ and rather suggest to (1) take account of ‘migrant intersectionalities’ – including the category of migration status among other categorical differences in the workforce, and (2) to do so at different levels of the analysis (micro, meso and macro). This multi-level, intersectional approach we argue leads to a more nuanced understanding of the realities of migration at a time of major societal challenges for organized labour.

Migrating Industrial Relations: Migrant Workers' Initiative within and outside Trade Unions

This article develops an embedded actor‐centred framework for studying the mobilization and bargaining practices of migrant workers. This framework is applied to examine two instances of labour organizing by low‐paid Latin American workers in London showing how migrant workers can develop innovative collective initiatives located at the junction of class and ethnicity that can be effective and rewarding in material and non‐material terms. In particular, the article shows that while there is a growing interest on the part of established unions to represent migrant workers, their bargaining and mobilization strategies appear inadequate to accommodate the bottom‐up initiatives of such workers who, as a result, have started to articulate them independently. On the basis of the findings obtained, we thus argue in favour of an actor‐centred framework to the study of migration and IR to better identify migrant workers’ interests, identities and practices as shaped by complex regulatory and social context.

Posting and agency work in British construction and hospitality: the role of regulation in differentiating the experiences of migrants

Abstract This article engages with IHRM debates on the transnational regulation of labour, exploring how migration policy and work fragmentation affect employment dynamics in multi-employer settings. It draws from two qualitative case studies on migrant workers in British hospitality and construction, focusing on regulatory outcomes of the Agency Worker Directive, the Posting of Workers Directive and the Tier System of immigration. 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. Highlighting the combined influence of migration regulation and management restructuring practices, the article proposes a re-theorisation of IHRM that includes migration perspectives into the study of management changes and labour regulation.

Book review symposium: Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries

The author would like to give thanks to Dr Gregory Schwartz at the University of Bath for the guidance, motivation and assistance he offered in the writing of this review, and Jennifer Tomlinson for her helpful comments on an earlier draft. Also due a mention are the presenters and participants at ‘A Conversation on The Problem with Work’, hosted at the University of Warwick in November 2012, for the light they helped shed upon the implications of Weeks’s important book.

Book review symposium

Amid the devastation wrought over the past five years by the current global capitalist crisis, debates accompanying harsh austerity policies have tended to enact few variations of one basic script: ‘jobs’ are the salvation from collapse, corporate ‘job creators’ its avengers. Unprecedented pain is thus being visited, in the name of job creation, upon those that, over the past four neoliberal decades, have already suffered the injuries of economic liberalization. Politicians from the right and the left alike have consistently used the imperative of creating jobs to legitimize deepening inequalities, the constant erosion of labour and environmental standards, corporate tax cuts, the dismantling of public services and redistributive policies, the deepening insecurity of lives forced to depend on labour markets that offer little of the rewards and dignity they promise. Kathi Weeks’s The Problem with Work is thus uniquely timely for those who want to confront the narrowing of options and the stifling of imagination currently underway in mainstream discussions on how jobs shape a precarious world. The book’s main strength is its critical appraisal of employment not merely as an object of sociological analysis and therapeutics. The crisis of work is not here primarily about employees’ security, motivation and satisfaction, or the challenge of rebalancing the requirements of jobs, families and social provisions. It cannot be fixed by social engineering and productionrelated policy interventions. It rather speaks to the collapse of norms – evoking citizenship, freedom, empowerment and socialization – that have made work a master signifier of social existence in an age in which, as Weeks argues following André Gorz, actual jobs have ceased to underwrite any of those values. It is thus time, Weeks continues, to replace sociology with political theory as the key to unlock the implications of work with power relations, imaginative projects, social processes that produce governable subjects but also liberate subversive desires of liberation from, as much as of, labour. If the problem, then, is life’s subordination to work, it comprehensively affects the stable and precariously employed as well as the unemployed while fusing realms conventionally separated as ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’. Rather than the 526346WES0010.1177/0950017014526346Work, employment and societyBook review symposium research-article2014

migrant women transforming citizenship: life-stories from Britain and Germany

Umut Erel’s ‘Migrant women transforming citizenship’ is an in-depth exploration of the life-stories of ten migrant women ‘from Turkey’ in Germany and Britain. Focusing on a particular group of ‘highly educated and skilled’ migrant women, the author investigates through an ‘intersectional perspective’, their multiple positions in the countries of immigration across the axes of class, gender, ethnic and other social divisions.