Politics of Precarity: Migrant Conditions, Struggles and Experiences (Studies in Critical Social Sciences) (Studies in Critical Social Sciences, 97) [Lam ed.] 9789004297814, 9789004329706, 9004297812

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Politics of Precarity

Studies in Critical Social Sciences Series Editor David Fasenfest (Wayne State University) Editorial Board Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (Duke University) Chris Chase-Dunn (University of California-Riverside) William Carroll (University of Victoria) Raewyn Connell (University of Sydney) Kimberlé W. Crenshaw (University of California, la, and Columbia University) Heidi Gottfried (Wayne State University) Karin Gottschall (University of Bremen) Mary Romero (Arizona State University) Alfredo Saad Filho (University of London) Chizuko Ueno (University of Tokyo) Sylvia Walby (Lancaster University)

VOLUME 97

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/scss

Politics of Precarity Migrant Conditions, Struggles and Experiences Edited by

Carl-Ulrik Schierup Martin Bak Jørgensen

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: “Chemistry vi:v” by Martin Ålund. Oil on Board. Photo by Helena Björk. ©2012 Martin Ålund. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016039607

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1573-4234 isbn 978-90-04-29781-4 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-32970-6 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Preface vii About the Authors ix 1 From ‘Social Exclusion’ to ‘Precarity’. The Becoming-migrant of Labour: An Introduction 1 Carl-Ulrik Schierup and Martin Bak Jørgensen 2 A Geneology of Precarity: A Toolbox for Rearticulating Fragmented Social Realities In and Out of the Workplace 30 Maribel Casas-Cortés 3 The Precariat Strikes Back – Precarity Struggles in Practice 52 Martin Bak Jørgensen 4 Globalisation, Labour and the ‘Precariat’: Old Wine in New Bottles? 78 Ronaldo Munck 5 Rethinking Migration in the Context of Precarity: The Case of Turkey 99 Nazlı Şenses 6 Multiplex Migration and Aspects of Precarisation: Swedish Retirement Migrants to Spain and their Service Providers 118 Anna Gavanas and Ines Calzada 7 Employment in Crisis: Cyprus and the Extension of Precarity 138 Gregoris Ioannou 8 Migrant Precarity under China’s New Immigration Law Regime 160 Mimi Zou 9 Running into Nowhere: Educational Migration in Beijing and the Conundrum of Social and Existential Mobility 179 Susanne Bregnbæk

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Necropolitics and the Migrant as a Political Subject of Disgust: The Precarious Everyday of Russia’s Labour Migrants 198 John Round and Irina Kuznetsova-Morenko

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Mobile Commons and/in Precarious Spaces: Mapping Migrant Struggles and Social Resistance 224 Nicos Trimikliniotis, Dimitris Parsanoglou and Vassilis Tsianos

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The Working Class and the City as Political Platform in New York 245 Peter Schultz Jørgensen

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Under the Rainbow. Migration, Precarity and People Power in ­Postapartheid South Africa 276 Carl-Ulrik Schierup Index 317

Preface This volume originates from a special issue in Critical Sociology on “Politics of Precarity: Migrant Conditions, Struggles and Experiences” to be published in 2016 (42:6/7). The editor of Critical Sociology David Fasenfest suggested that we worked the articles from the special issue into an extended edited volume to be published in this Brill Series on Studies in Critical Social Science. We have done so by in some cases including the original articles in that journal and others, by including chapters that are revised and expanded versions of prior publications, by adding new chapters, and by expanding our introduction to broaden the scope of this project. We are grateful for the support of David for the opportunity to publish this book and his encouragement during the process. We also thank the contributing authors in this book for their effort and contribution to enrich the perspectives on the issue at stake. What is at stake then? The book examines the range and strength of ­analysing contemporary transformations and struggles through the lens of ‘precarity’. Rather than defining a single precariat, the interest of this volume is in exploring ‘varieties of precarity’. Precarity takes different forms in different parts of the world, on different scales and in different socio-economic contexts, and yet they share certain features in terms of conditions as well as propensity for agency. Contributions to this volume testify that precarity may be a political proposition as much as a sociological category that offers an analytical description of current transformations. Migrants are everywhere at the centre of this puzzle. While editing the final version of this book ever new issues emerged around the globe which illustrates the importance of this problematic. Austerity policies have hit the bottom of society causing increased precarisation of work, citizenship and livelihoods. The one per cent has followed its own rules. ­Millions live under the burden of neoliberal globalisation in world of growing inequality. Yet, in this bleakness there is also resistance: On the streets, among progressive labour unions, in the political subjectivity and activism among undocumented migrants across the five continents, in movements re-articulating multicultural commons in the world’s large cities, and in the refugee solidarity movements opposing a European Union that avoids responsibility and is losing its humanity and political legitimacy. In South Africa we see alliances of ‘poor people’s movements rising from a rebellious ‘uncivil society’, beyond the control of neoliberal governance, and we find students mobilising along other groups, contesting race and class-based prerogatives and disadvantages.

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In the us and uk new agendas on inequality, labour conditions, citizenship and ­racism have emerged. In mainland China workers refute the flawed image of ­China as the victor of capitalist globalisation in thousands of wildcat strikes every year, demonstrating that a contemporary countermovement of the ­precariat is a workers’ struggle. Nuit debout protesters occupying French cities testify that issues of labour rights remain central to struggles over precarity also in the old global North. In the South thousands of people took to the streets in Lagos under the banner of ‘Occupy Nigeria’. World social fora on migration, development and human rights gather civil society activists in struggles for the human and labour rights of a global migrant precariat. Contemporary precarity struggles are a global movement and often under the same token. This book is a humble contribution to the record of this multiplicity of contemporary precarity struggles Carl-Ulrik Schierup & Martin Bak Jørgensen April 2016

About the Authors Susanne Bregnbæk is a social anthropologist and holds a position as Assistant Professor at ­University College Capital in Copenhagen. Her research is mostly focused on China, where she has explored higher education as a lens to ­understanding youth, generations and state/citizen relationships. She has also published on Chinese house-church Christianity and existential quests for agency and ­well-being more broadly. Currently she is working on a new project about ­refugee ­children and their families in Denmark. Ines Calzada is Senior Lecturer in the University of Linköping and Associated Researcher at ipp-csic. She specializes in the field of comparative social policy combined with research on attitudes towards the Welfare State. She has participated in several national and international research projects on different aspects of welfare policies, paying particular attention to the ways in which individuals make sense of social inequalities and state intervention. In parallel, she maintains a sheer interest in the different methodologies that can be applied in the social sciences. Maribel Casas-Cortés is currently a Hunt fellow of the Wenner Gren Foundation writing full time on her first monograph Precarious Movements: Tinkering with Labor, Care and Mobility. Her work looks at how instances of collective action rethink and ­politically engage the intersections between changing cultures of production, practices of reproduction and patterns of migration within Southern Europe. Related to the question of precarious migration, she is also participating in a multi-disciplinary research team based out of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on latest eu border policy in the Mediterranean, specifically the design, implementation and consequences of border externalization practices by the European Union in Northern Africa. Anna Gavanas is Associate Professor at Social Anthropology and Gender Studies, Remeso/ Linköping University. She is currently involved in research on Swedish retirees in Spain as the principal investigator of the project ‘Swedish retirement migrants to Spain and their migrant workers: interlinked migration chains and their consequences to work and care in Ageing Europe’. Her research covers a

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wide range of areas, including migration, welfare policies, labour market informalization and social exclusion. Additional areas of specialization are ‘global care chains’ in the eu, privatization of elderly care in Sweden as well as u.s. fatherhood politics. Gregoris Ioannou is a sociologist and works as an Adjunct Lecturer at Frederick University and the Social and Political Sciences Department at the University of Cyprus. He has been engaged in research in the fields of oral and social history, employment, trade unionism, migration and social movements, digital public sphere, communication and media framing. He has published aspects of his works in journals such as Mobilization: an international quarterly, Working usa: the journal of labor and society, Capital and Class, The Cyprus Review and the Annal of the Cyprus Research Centre and has contributed chapters to several edited volumes. Martin Bak Jørgensen is Associate Professor at CoMID at the Department for Culture and Global Studies, Aalborg University, Denmark. He works within the fields of sociology, political sociology and political science. He has published book Politics of Dissent (Peter Lang, 2015; co-authored with Óscar García Agustín) and Solidarity Without Borders: Gramscian perspectives on migration and civil society alliances (Pluto Press, 2016; ; co-authored with Óscar García Agustín). He has published articles in journals like Internal Migration Review, Critical Sociology, Journal of International Migration and Integration and British Journal of International Politics. Irina Kuznetsova-Morenko is a Research Fellow at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental ­Sciences at the University of Birmingham. Her research expertise includes migration, health, disabilities studies, social policy and accessible cities in the post-Soviet sphere. She has led and participated in various applied and academic studies founded by regional bodies in Russia and also the European Commission, Open Society Institute, MacArthur Foundation, Russian Foundation for Humanities amongst others. Previously she worked at Kazan Federal University in Russia. Ronaldo Munck is Head of Civic Engagement at Dublin City University. He has developed a broad set of overlapping interests under the general rubric of political ­sociology

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and more recently the globalisation problematic. His work on Latin America culminated in Rethinking Latin America: Development, Hegemony and Social Transformation (Palgrave, 2013) which brought a Gramscian perspective to bear on current politics. Another constant theme is his work has been his work on the sociology of work and labour movements from a broad c­ omparative orientation which culminates with the widely cited Labour and Globalisation: the new ‘great transformation’ (Zed Books, 2002). Dimitris Parsanoglou is Senior Researcher at the Panteion University of Social and political Sciences in Athens and he has worked with several institutions and ngos in European and national projects about migration, gender and employment issues. He took his PhD in Sociology at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. His research interests include the history and sociology of immigration to Greece, particularly on issues of employment and urban space. John Round is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental ­Sciences at the University of Birmingham. His overarching research i­ nterest is the exploration of the socio-economic pathways that have developed in ­Russia since the Soviet Union’s collapse, with particular attention paid to the nature of informal economic practice/governance and how this impacts upon ­everyday life, the workplace, social policy, state/society relations, corruption and migration. Within this he is interested in the relationships between the state and economy and the failure of economic diversification and the ­problematic ­nature of post-Soviet social policy. Carl-Ulrik Schierup is Professor in Ethnic Studies with disciplinary background in social anthropology, sociology and political economy. He has published widely on issues of international migration and ethnic relations, globalization, nationalism, multiculturalism, citizenship, working life and labour relations. Among his major works is the book Paradoxes of Multiculturalism (Avebury, 1991; co-authored with Aleksandra Ålund), Migration, Citizenship and the European Welfare State: A European Dilemma (Oxford University Press, 2006; co-authored with Peo Hansen and Stephen Castles) and the edited book Migration, Precarity and Global Governance: Challenges and Opportunities for Labour (Oxford University Press, 2015; co-edited with Ronaldo Munck, Branka Likić-Brborić and Anders Neergaard).

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Peter Schultz Jørgensen is an architect and urban planner. He has worked for Danish municipalities with city development and urban strategies. As a writer he is interested in the relations between globalization and urbanity on local and city levels. In particular, he is interested in social movements and their struggles for systemic transformations. He published an extensive case-study of New York City in the book New York & kampen for byen [New York and the Fight for the City] (Frydenlund, 2013). He is now departing from these findings and the perspective of ‘the right to the city’ to a study on Europe and Denmark focusing on the urban commons and the next society. Nazlı Şenses is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Başkent University, Turkey. Her research interests are comparative politics, politics of civil society, international migration, and politics of irregular migration. Her PhD dissertation analysed the irregular migration policies of Greece, Spain and Turkey in a comparative perspective with a specific focus to the role of civil society actors. She has (co-authored) publications on the Europeanization of irregular migration polices of Turkey and the role of civil society organizations in the field of migration in Turkey. Vassilis Tsianos is Vertretungsprofessor at the University of Hamburg. He teaches theoretical sociology and migration studies at the University of Kiel. His work examines social theory, citizenship racism, migration, borders, urban space, commons and precarity. Nicos Trimikliniotis is Associate Professor at the University of Nicosia and Senior Expert heading the Cyprus team on fundamental rights for the eu Fundamental Rights Agency (franet). He is a practising Barrister and has researched on ethnic conflict and reconciliation, public law and state theory, class, integration, citizenship, migration, racism, free movement of workers, discrimination, eu and Labour Law. He has published the book Mobile Commons, Migrant Digitalities and the Right to the City (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, co-authored with Dimitris Parsanoglou and Vassilis Tsianos). Mimi Zou is Associate Director of the Centre for Rights and Justice and Assistant ­Professor at the Faculty of Law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, China. Her

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o­ n-going research has been concerned with the law’s construction of ­migrants as ‘non-citizens’ in the workplace and within the host political ­community. She is currently undertaking a comparative project on the v­ ariations of l­ abour migration laws and policies and their interface with the distinct labour market regulatory models, structures, and institutions that underpin the construct of ‘citizenship at work’ in a number of industrialised and industrialising countries.

chapter 1

From ‘Social Exclusion’ to ‘Precarity’. The Becoming-migrant of Labour: An Introduction1 Carl-Ulrik Schierup and Martin Bak Jørgensen ‘Precarity’ is an ascendant term for contemporary globality; an increasingly used scientific concept, as well as a signifier of resistance by social movements. It refers to a multidimensional ‘weight of the world’, embodying ‘­social suffering’2 through degradation of work, a fractured and racialising citizenship, excessive human vulnerability and ‘unequal burdening of toxic risk’.3 ‘Migration’ is another powerful term in our time, represented as ‘the age of migration’.4 Discourses and studies of ‘precarity’ and ‘migration’ still tend to belong to disparate departments in the social sciences. Yet, linking them offers a fecund point of departure for exploring the intersection of cumulative social dispossession and new subaltern struggles springing from the ‘third great transformation’. With Karl Polanyi’s (1944) celebrated work, The Great Transformation in mind, Burawoy (2010) coined the phrase ‘the third wave of marketization’. It suggests a similarity between neoliberal globalisation and earlier transformational crises in the history of capitalism. It relates to the sweeping commodification of human labour, money and land – uprooting human beings from their communities, looting all that is common, and effectively dispossessing people of social protection and their daily livelihoods. This grand process of deprivation is seen to provoke – similar to the proposition of Polanyi (1944) relating to the world social crisis of the 1930s – contentious counter-movements of today. Translated into our present discourse this implies an understanding of precarity as representing “both a condition and a possible rallying point for resistance” (Waite 2008, 412); as a ‘condition’ representing the downside of a 1 This chapter expands upon an earlier version by the authors, appearing as “Politics of Precarity: Migrant Conditions, Stuggles and Experience” Critical Sociology doi: 10.1177/ 0896920516640065. 2 Alluding to Bourdieu’s (1999) The Weight of the World: Social Suffering and Impoverishment in Contemporary Society. 3 Alluding to Woolfson and Likić-Brborić (2008) “Migrants in the Unequal Burdening of ‘Toxic’ Risk: Towards a New Global Governance Regime”. 4 Alluding to the title of the book, The Age of Migration by Castles, de Haas and Miller (2014).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004329706_002

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‘neoliberal utopia’s’ uncompromising gamble on the free market (Bech 2000, 4) and as ‘resistance’, an interpellation of social movements generating novel strategies and discourses for reclaiming the commons or, as Polanyi expressed it, ‘re-embedding’ the economy in society. It is a globally articulated countermovement in the making. It will by necessity have new actors, objectives and claims whose prospects are still undecided (Burawoy 2010). It encompasses the labour conflicts of informal workers in China or Bangladesh, the re-articulation of memories of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the Arab Spring, Spain’s Indignados movement, the Occupy movement and new inclusive trade unions in the United States, a ramifying transcultural Zapatist movement, antifascist coalitions across Europe, etc. From the vantage point of this premise the contributions in this book ask questions that seek to span the social conditions and agency of people as ­diverse as first generation urbanites in China, migrant pensioners and unemployed youth in Sweden and Spain, refugees in Germany, irregular and r­ egular migrants in Southern Europe, Turkey, Russia the United States and South Africa. Consideration is given to vulnerable livelihoods in segregated megacities belonging to antagonistic geopolitical power-houses, and social movements advocating migrants’ rights as well as wider anti-austerity movements. By exploring the notion of precarity as a theoretical and analytical concept and linking it to migration the authors venture beyond what is currently (for want of a better term) still represented as ‘the Global North’; formerly the First among the ‘Three Worlds’ of the Cold War. They explore affinities, synergies, convergence and dissimilarities with related concepts like ‘social exclusion/ inclusion’, ‘austerity’ ‘flexibility’, ‘exploitation’, ‘unfree’ and ‘forced’ labour. They track along mutually intersecting paths towards a complex understanding of precarity as a social condition but at the same time a critical assessment of precarity as a political proposition. We set off, accordingly, to explore the range and anticipated strength of analysing contemporary transformations and struggles through the lens of precarity. Rather than defining a single ‘precariat’ as a new (dangerous) ‘class’ (Standing 2011), we explore variations of precarity from a global perspective. These variations embody different shapes in different parts of the world, on different scales and in different socio-economic contexts and yet they appear to share common features in terms of conditionality and a contingent disposition for agency. As a social science concept precarity, as well as its derived neologism ‘precariat’, is associated with Pierre Bourdieu’s (1963) portrayal of a nascent colonial working class in Algeria in the 1950s in terms of precarité. Bourdieu referred, more specifically, to the class divide that separated racialised casual or contingent workers (travailleurs intermittents) from permanently employed w ­ orkers.

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In the 1980s different linguistic and discursive versions of ‘precarité’ were taken into broader use in social science studies of informal and casual labour in France, Italy and Spain and during the 2000s – in spite of being criticised for lacking analytical clarity (Barbier 2004) – across Europe and the World. The concept has gained importance as a perspective in critical labour and citizenship studies in general, and in studies on migration in particular. The invention of its derivative ‘precariat’ is attributed to French activists campaigning for irregular migrants’ rights at the turn of the millennium (Jossin, et al. 2005). It was adopted as a slogan for alternative Euro-Mayday parades (Foti 2005), and gained importance in youth movements across Europe (Casas-­Cortés, Chapter 2 this volume). It has been diffused broadly as a signifier of social movements contesting the politics of austerity and adopted as a controversial neologism in the social sciences. Guy Standing (2011) popularised the concept widely with his book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. Its wider reference is to a globally growing workforce of casual labourers whose lives are precarious. Their experience in the world of work is marked by ‘precarity’ in terms of informal labour, wage squeezes, temporariness, uncertainty and pernicious risk. It is a term designating a historical moment marked by the emergence of a new global norm of contingent employment, social risk and fragmented life situations – without security, protection or predictability. The English concepts like ‘precariousness’, ‘precarious employment’ and ‘precarious workers’ have, during the 2000s, become important in critical studies on migration and work (e.g. Anderson 2010), and ‘precarity’ – the direct transposition of Bourdieu’s original term into an English neologism – ­together with ‘precariat’, are on the rise as new paradigmatic terms for studies of social inequality, disadvantage and poverty.5 An important background is that the ‘social exclusion/inclusion’ paradigm, which has been dominant in the eu since the early 1990s and subsequently across the world, is starting to be seen as not very realistic in its prevalent discursive and institutional embodiments (Schierup, et al. 2015). This is happening against the background of current neoliberal austerity measures for the restructuring of labour markets and citizenship, depriving citizens of essential social, political and civic rights and usurping effective popular capacity for political agency (Sassen 2006). It is combined with growing scepticism about the power of conventional institutional tools of ‘social inclusion’ to act as antidotes to ‘exclusion’. In sum, it concerns increasing doubt about the institutional remedies for the cure of ‘social 5 Especially after the publication of Standing’s (2011) book, The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class, which provoked extensive discussion on scientific and political blogs, as well as in journals and newspapers across the world.

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anomy’ accorded to the guardianship of the still officially existing, but actually increasingly fading, welfare state of a formerly affluent North-Atlantic world (Schierup, et al. 2006). Whereas – proceeding mostly from an essentially functionalist (Durkheimian) paradigm (Levitas 1998) – mainstream perspectives on ‘social exclusion/ inclusion’ are derived from theories of ‘integration’ and ‘social cohesion’ depicting social disadvantage as a consequence of redeemable institutional shortcomings, a critical heterodox discourse representing precarity as a “constitutive element of the new global disorder, to which it is very functional” (Ricceri 2011, 68), turns functionalism on its head. From this perspective social exclusion is no longer seen as a systemic ‘error’ that can be fixed through social engineering or the politics of moral improvement; rather as an essential purpose in a disjointed political economy of neoliberal globalisation within which the excluded are unsafe and vulnerable – but not superfluous. Viewed thus not as regrettable ‘mistake’, on the contrary, the excluded are ‘valuable’ because they are ‘vulnerable’, and thus particularly exploitable (Bauder 2006, 26). Precarity is therefore akin to the term ‘expulsion’ used by Saskia Sassen (2014, 1) for “capturing the pathologies of today’s global capitalism”. The wider historical-structural context is the generation of a ‘surplus population’,6 numbering multiple millions during the past three and a half decades. It is a globally mobile reserve army of labour at the disposal of transnational corporations, sub-contractors and franchises. It is produced by austerity programs which roll back the social compacts of welfare in developmental states, and it has grown on the ruins of actually existing socialism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China. Through international migration it feeds private as well as public employers across the globe. Poverty, insecurity and unpredictability are consequently moved beyond the integrationist Durkheimian concern with ‘social cohesion’ in prevalent discourses on ‘social exclusioninclusion’ and into the Marxian terrain of ‘exploitation’ (Schierup, et al. 2015) where the surplus population and the industrial reserve army provide disciplinary vehicles for regulation and the instigation of morality (Harvey 2010). Taken in broad terms, we may thus speak of precarity as a mode of keeping the “reserve army of labour in labour – thereby maximising both productive activity and placing downward pressure on wages” (Moase 2012). That is precarity as ‘flexploitation’ (Bourdieu 1999). Or as expressed by Bourdieu (1999, 84): “insecurity is the product not of an economic inevitability, identified with the much heralded ‘globalization’, but of a political will”. 6 Marx (1976 [1885], Chapter 25).

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It is a creation of a political economy merging new forms of globalised labour force management with a fragmentation, depreciation and profound remoulding of established frameworks of citizenship, and with the management of global migration as a privileged tool. A growing body of research has pointed to migration as an important element in this broader process of the erosion of social and labour rights propelling a sweeping ‘recommodification’ of the labour force (Bommes and Kolb 2006, 109; Castles 2011; Fudge 2014; Schierup, et al. 2006). Related to this, studies have pointed to the proliferation of new modes of ‘niched’ labour markets driven by the ways in which transnational, and often circular or irregular, migration is instrumentalised in the regulation and remaking of economies, labour markets and contemporary societies across the globe (Bauder 2006; Galabuzi 2006; Raes, et al. 2002; Toksöz and Ünlütürk Ulutaş 2012; Veiga 1999). In this context, borders and immigration control function as a “tap regulating the flow of labour” (Anderson 2010, 300) and a mould for the making of labour with specific value for labour markets and employers. The methodical making of ‘institutional uncertainty’, in particular connected with irregular migration, “help[s to] produce ‘precarious workers’ over whom employers and labour users have particular mechanisms of control”. In effect, broader research on precarity is emerging within international labour and migration studies, boosted by critical perspectives on neoliberal globalisation.7 A Fordist mode of labour force management in the heyday of the modern welfare state – at least as a social norm and backed by elaborate positive regulation – included the whole life cycle of the worker in its longterm business calculations (including costs for education, health, pension, and old age care, and other components of social reproduction). This was likewise the case for smaller formal sectors in developmental and developing states. Emerging neoliberal labour force management has, in contrast, been characterised in terms of a generalised mode of hyper-exploitation, which, “by operating only on the present, simultaneously exploits the future” (Tsianos 2007, 19; cf. ­Papadopoulos 2005). An imperative embodied in precarity is, what is more, an incremental, forced mobility, regionally, globally and nationally, and flexibly across places, occupations and sectors. In effect, “[t]he embodied experience of precarity is, the attempt to live with incessant neoliberal imperatives to transform the self”, (Tsianos 2007, 192). Seen from this perspective the ‘migrant’ is the quintessential incarnation of precarity, with irregular and circulant migrant workers and refugees and asylum seekers being among the most disadvantaged in this 7 For example, Papadopoulos (2005), Waite (2008), Standing (2011), Evans (2000), Munck (2007), Phelan (2006), Waterman (2001), Wacquant (2007), Webster (2008), Barchiesi (2006).

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globally expanding ‘relative surplus population’ (Marx 1976 [1885], Chapter 25). Precarisation of work develops in tandem with a precarisation of citizenship as the dual outcomes of the (global) restructuring of the economy and labour markets alongside a fracturing of frameworks of citizenship (Goldring and Landolt 2011). It structures precarity as a condition embodying imperatives of flexibility, multilocality and compressed mobility (Tsianos 2007, 192). It determines the centrality of mobility in workers’ behaviour and struggles, but furthermore what precarity activists have termed “the becoming-migrant of labour” where “[w]orking conditions suffered by migrants today (such as informality in the contract, vulnerability, intense links between territory and employment, low salaries, lack of union rights, temporality, total availability, etc.) are spreading […] to the rest of workers” (Casas-Cortés, Chapter 2 this volume; Martin Bak Jørgensen, Chapter 3 this volume).

Social Condition and Political Proposition

The academic – and to some degree the activist – debate has hinted at problems inherent in ‘the precariat’ as a theoretical and analytical tool. Standing’s attempt to lump extremely heterogeneous groups into one analytical category has had to face criticism from different angles (e.g. Breman 2013; Seymour 2012). This book contributes to the debate by offering analytical perspectives on what precarity looks like in various contexts and practices. Maribel CasasCortés (Chapter 2) quotes a Spanish EuroMayDay organiser who asserts that: “Precarity is [a] political proposition more than a sociological category”. The statement implies that precarity is related to action more than offering an analytical description of the current transformations. The aim of the book is nevertheless to do both. The politics of precarity determines the political economy of neoliberal capitalism which produces precarity of labour, livelihoods and citizenship, and also resistance against the systemic structuration through which it operates. The volume opens with two chapters that in different ways discuss how precarity can be understood conceptually as a set of practices. These chapters emphasise agency through analyses of social movements and activist networks mobilising under the banner of precarity, and they discuss reconceptualization of citizenship. The argument of Maribel Casas-Cortés’ chapter ‘A geneology of precarity: A toolbox for rearticulating fragmented social realities in and out of the workplace’ (Chapter 2) is that precarity is a political concept. Although it depicts crucial socio-political conditions of neoliberal globalisation, in her ethnographic research of activist networks and precarity struggles it has come to

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mean a proposition and in practical terms a toolbox which gives activists the tools to work on the politics of necessity created by austerity policies in Europe. She connects her own finding to the ‘Autonomy of migration’ approach (Heidenreich and Vukadinović 2008) which grew out of self-organised efforts by migrants, including the sans-papiers movements, as well as the activism of solidarity with migrants, denouncing the violence and deaths at the borders and human-rights violations perpetuated by migration policies. Critical ­migration- and border studies (Casas-Cortes, et al. 2015), like the autonomy of migration approach, warn against victimising migrants and posit migration as a social movement that has been able to escape from border control many times. Thereby border control is understood as a complex mechanism for the bio-political ordering of populations generating different forms of mobility. Migration is framed as a core component of capitalism, and mobility as one of the main traits of workers’ practices. Although mobility is regulated and exists in a frictionless form for some and a constrained one for others the concept still invokes a capacity for agency. The increasingly close link between precarity and migration started to become visible during EuroMayDay parades when the question of migration linked to local precarity became visible. Investigating links between migration and precarity requires that we rethink the latter, argues Martin Bak Jørgensen in ‘The Precariat strikes back – p ­ recarity struggles in practice’ (Chapter 3). He engages in a theoretical discussion with the literature on the precariat and distinguishes between precarity (as a condition), precariat (as an identity) and precarisation (as a process). Precarity has been used as a sweeping generalisation to describe post-Fordist society and a new regime of flexploitation but has under-emphasised social agency. Thus precarity can serve as an interpellation in struggles for rights and a just society and as a possible catalyst for transformation. Mobilising under precarity is not an individual undertaking but the attempt to build new commons. Jørgensen therefore emphasises the argument of Negri that we need to “redefine the reality and meaning of the word ‘rights’ based on common demands and social cooperation” (Negri 2004). Through different cases of collective mobilisation in Hamburg and Brussels the chapter elucidates how precarisation unfolds in practice and how the precariat’s position becomes a rallying point for mobilisation that builds alliances across ethnic, racial and class-based divisions, takes forward a movement based in political analysis and helps define wider strategies for resistance and the claiming of rights.8 These alliances can be productive for migrants’ struggles for rights, but can also have detrimental effects. The creation of different categories of migrant workers with d­ ifferent 8 See Nyers and Rygiel (2012).

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sets of rights tied to their immigration status has, as Aziz Choudry and Mondli Hlatshwayo (Choudry and Hlatshwayo 2016, 5) argue, become a standard component of policies and “a capitalist strategy which is fundamental to the functioning of many economies” (Choudry and Hlatshwayo 2016, 5) and which facilitates the constant reduction of labour costs. After a brief period of scholarly optimism which foresaw that categories of denizens would be a disappearing phenomenon (e.g. Hammar 1990) the reality has turned out to be a permanent hierarchy of different statuses (Morris 2002; Ong 2006), linked to an increasing precarisation and fracturing of citizenship (cf. Goldring and Landholt 2011). Citizenship today is a contested concept. Despite guaranteeing equal rights and obligations, it is distributed and applied in a variety of exclusive ways: all citizens are not equal nor do they have the same access to rights and obligations. The case studies from Hamburg and Brussels show contestations of rights and who is to be counted as citizens are played out in practice.

Precarity at Work beyond ‘North’ and ‘South’

In current sociological use ‘precarity’ and the neologism ‘precariat’ have mainly been developed by scholars, who relate to deep changes in the economy, citizenship and class structure in European welfare states – conventionally associated with ‘Fordism’ – and who from there attempt to globalise the concept (Standing 2011). This has been met by criticism referring to historical conditions in the global ‘North’ as well as the ‘South’; speaking provisionally in the language that has become the standard in critical research, replacing discourses of the ‘three (or four) worlds’ or of ‘Centre’, ‘Periphery’ and ‘Semi-Periphery’ in the ‘World System’. Thus, argue Neilson and Rositter (2008), “a deep political consideration of the concept of precarity requires us to see Fordism as an exception”, a short ‘episode’ in European and Western history. Or, as phrased by Foster (2011), far from being a distinctive product of the post-Fordist economy, “historically precarity might be more the rule and the Fordist promise of relative job security and union protection more the exception”; a condition with which proletarians, seen in a longue durée perspective on the history of capitalism, have not been gifted. Others contend that precarious labour and livelihoods were always, and continue to be, the normal condition for the majority of the world’s population; “in the global South, in eastern Europe, as well as for most women and migrants in the North” (Network 2006) – and still with the South taking the lead, in terms of ‘condition’ as well as spearhead of ‘resistance’, with livelihoods of the informal economy as key (Keyworth 2012).

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This global ‘majority perspective’ on precarity also questions the very ‘newness’ of the discovery of the ‘precariat’ as concept and social reality. It is a critical ‘view from the South’ that Ronaldo Munck deepens in his contribution to this volume (Chapter 4). He traces the theoretical and analytical geneology of precarity through a long trail of research on social ‘marginality’ and ‘informal labour’ in the global South. He takes this further into a wider discussion of the production of an informal working class systemically related to the global expansion of capital-labour relations and driven by a vastly expanded (primitive) accumulation through dispossession after the cold war, the breaking down of the ‘second world’ and the incorporation of hitherto non-capitalist communities into the orbit of capital. The way the ‘marginal pole’ of the economy and the preponderance of informal labour in the global South was conceptualised and analysed by several, in particular Latin American, scholars decades ago appears, although phrased in other conceptual terms, to predate the ‘discovery’ of the ‘precariat’ propagated through critical studies of contemporary neoliberal capitalism in the North. It was a contingent, vulnerable and precarious labour force positioned in a seemingly disconnected ‘informal economy’ of the South. It is a ‘marginal pole’ of the labour force and the economy which was (and is) nevertheless closely connected with the dominant pole of the economy, whereby proliferating corporate chains of outsourcing and subcontracting channel and expropriate the ­lion’s share of surplus value produced by increasingly abundant hyper-­ exploited precarious labour forcibly extracted from embeddedness in protective social institutions of rural communities (e.g. Quijano Obregon 1974). Seen from this perspective the contemporary precarisation of labour and livelihoods in North-Atlantic societies since the beginning of the 1980s has been conceptualised in terms of the ‘Brazilianisation of the West’ (Bech 2000), with the South telling the North its fortune, and with ‘the migrant’, the South in the North, as harbinger (Blaschke and Greussing 1980). Colonial and postcolonial predicaments and present day imperial politics continue to reproduce a critical watershed as to economy, political power, state and society in South and North. Yet, the present conjuncture suggests an approach from a perspective of ‘incorporating comparison’ (McMichael 1990, 671), seeing precarisation of labour, citizenship and livelihoods in North and South as potentially comparable since they are shaped and connected through similar forces and processes of globalisation. At the same time a need is posited for reviewing theories of political economy that have been critically opposing neo-classical orthodoxy. General lines for the makeover of critical theory on the global political economy of migrant labour were suggested by Alejandro

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Portes and John Walton (1991, 190) in Labor, Class and the International System. They argued that [c]lass formation on a global level […] means that geographically dispersed labour is not only part of the same stratification system, but increasingly occupies common locations within that system apart from its residence in the core, semiperiphery or periphery. Thus, they saw “core and periphery hierarchies” as interpenetrating and “sharing some (increasingly) common positions and attendant fortunes”. Their proposition remains pertinent given the particular character of class dominance and labour force management in neoliberal globalisation, and its current impact on societies in the South as well as the North. This pertains not least to critical globalisation studies which tend to remain concentrated on the treatment of southern migrants while risking obscuring the emergence of more complex patterns embodied in dehumanising policies and exploitation in so-called ‘emerging economies’ of the South, which are at least ostensibly similar to those prevailing in the dominant economic and immigration nodes of the North (Tobias 2012). This is the central concern of Nazlı Şenses’ contribution (Chapter 5), ‘Turkey’s new precariat: Differentiated vulnerability and new alliances’. Her chapter focuses on the relevance of the notion of precarity and precarious labour in connection with Turkey’s transformation from a developmental state on Europe’s periphery, exporting (migrant) labour on a grand scale into what has been designated as one of the World’s ‘ten big emerging markets’. It is driven by a neo-liberal transformation, one new feature of which has been the growth of a labour force of irregular cross border migrants as a particular category within an already huge and growing informal ‘domestic’ labour force. Yet, she contends, the irregular migrants embody the essence of precarity, exposed as they are to an exceedingly vulnerable existence distinguished from the conditions and livelihoods of a large domestic informal precariat by the lack of any formal rights, except for those enshrined in certain international human rights’ conventions (cf. Erdoğdu and Şenses 2015). Şenses argues for the need to assess with care the specific Turkish experience, both in terms of its particular political economy of precarity, which cannot be restricted to the ‘South’, or the ‘North’, and the specific challenges confronting labour unions and an emerging Turkish precariat movement, for which the inclusion of irregular migrant workers appears to represent sine qua non. In their contribution Anna Gavanas and Ines Calzades (Chapter 6) offer a further deconstruction of the global North–South dichotomy by depicting different faces of precarity along a charged North–South axis in a European Union

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disjointed by politics of austerity, here represented against the backdrop of the different neoliberal transformation of established welfare regimes in Sweden and Spain. The analytical focus is on ‘international retirement migration’ (irm) which has become a standard designation for the retreat to low income countries by old age pensioners from high income countries in North America and Northern Europe. They are the increasingly numerous people from the United States and Canada whom you will encounter in any tourist resort along the coasts of Mexico or across the Caribbean. In the eu Spain takes on a similar function for pensioners from the dominant northern economic powerhouses of the Union – like Germany, Sweden and Holland – as Mexico does in the nafta. The politics of austerity has, as in other parts of the eu South, contributed to increasing precarisation of labour and livelihoods in Spain, not least contained in a swelling informal economy and labour market which provides a huge reserve army of labour at the disposition of a rhizomising irm industry, managed by local petty entrepreneurs and chains of subcontracting. This precarious reserve army of irm service and care workers is in itself ethnically segmented and racialised through politics of citizenship and indigeneity, with a still numerous migrant labour force as the most vulnerable and cheapest on sale, the most exposed to unabated risk of expulsion from the institutions of a shrinking Spanish welfare state. Yet, based on a critical perspective of a parallel neoliberal transformation of the Swedish welfare state, Gavanas and Calzades reject a view that would present Swedish irms as uniformly privileged northerners. Many are themselves economically and socially vulnerable and seek recourse in imr, not simply to secure a place in the sun, but by attempts to escape from the increasingly precaritised livelihoods of growing numbers of older people also within the societies of the North itself through making strategic choices in a newly emerging transnational field of ‘comparative advantages’ across an economically and socially polarising EU-Europe. The latter is particularly clearly exposed through Sweden’s transformation from social democratic model into an austerity showcase (Schierup and Scarpa Forthcoming) displaying sustained economic growth but also the fastest increase in social inequality among members of the oecd (2011) with differential impacts across indicators of class, ethnicity/race, gender and age. The perspective of the different manifestations of precarisation in a fracturing European Union is supported by Gregoris Ioannou’s Chapter (7) ‘Employment in crisis: Cyprus and the extension of precarity’, which charts the distressing consequences of the incorporation and exposure to politics of austerity of this island community at the eu’s South-Eastern rim. A lingering political economy of precarisation through informalization became, for many,

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surprisingly exacerbated by the 2004 accession to the eu; as in other parts of the Southern European rim this was brought about by sweeping deindustrialisation, tertialisation and financialisation of the economy. This came in tandem with a race to the bottom contingent on ‘harmonising’ by labour law and consummated through the demise of previously powerful labour unions, all brought to breaking point after the 2008 financial crash, followed in 2013 by devastating austerity dictates from Brussels. A fast precarisation of labour and livelihoods has traversed the whole of society, across a hierarchy of privilege and benefits. But the harshest blow fell on the substantial labour force of irregular migrant workers, outside the realm of labour law and social rights. Mimi Zou’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 8), ‘Migrant Precarity under China’s New Immigration Law Regime’ elucidates further aspects of changing livelihoods and the multiple varieties of migrant precarity in an increasingly multipolar world beyond the confines of ‘North’ and ‘South’, and not least driven by changing regimes of accumulation in China and other brics members (Garnaut, et al. 2013). While the eu is currently veiling its fractured project for regional integration behind a despondent discourse about a (selfinflicted) so-called ‘refugee crisis’ (Munck and Schierup 2016), echoing Oswald Spengler’s (1991) pessimistic Decline of the West, China ties the mobilisation of precarious labour, through a primitive accumulation of unseen world historical dimensions into new grand schemes of macro-regional (Eurasian) integration. Economists have estimated the size of China’s informal contingent to be between 46 percent and 68 percent of the urban workforce (Lee and ­Kofman 2012). China’s established position as ‘the World’s factory’ has been built to a large degree by a regime of primitive accumulation designed to exploit low wage hukou peasant workers. It has involved growing masses of workers caught up in internal circular rural–urban migration and subjected to precarious working and living conditions (Ngai and Huilin 2010) under the cold hand of draconian ‘bloody Taylorism’9 and drawing heavily on informal labour in rural hinterlands for their reproduction. They were for long alienated from wider city society by a stringent pass regime.10 China’s rural labour force has been far from depleted and the peasant-worker regime is still far from being a legacy of the past. Nevertheless, while the stringent administrative means by which 9 10

Our allusion to a concept coined by Liepitz (1982; cf. Schierup 2007). Which, while not sharing its racist presuppositions and conceived purely in functional terms of labour force management, could be compared with migration management through the control of influxes to the cities during the apartheid era in South Africa ­(described in Chapter 13 of this book).

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urbanisation was once curbed has now been relinquished, today the lack of welfare provision and social services continues to deter many internal migrant workers from settling or dwelling in the cities for long periods (Meng 2013). Zou’s interest lies, however, with current processes of reregulation through a reformed labour legislation that marks China’s current phase of increasingly differentiated labour force management.11 Her particular focus is on precarity related to legislation targeted at controlling foreign migrant labour. This is so far only a trickle compared with China’s gargantuan population and domestic labour force. Nevertheless, it is a harbinger of what might come in a society which already sees itself in need of countering a looming demographic crisis through a multiplicity of measures for the mobilisation of labour, within and outside its borders. However, as elsewhere (e.g. the United States and the eu), the new legislation and its contingent policy measures will hardly alleviate the conditions of China’s cross border migrant workers, but rather, Zou contends, produce a range of precarious migrant statuses that will have an adverse bearing on migrants’ employment conditions and livelihoods. Precaricity The large metropolises of the world are preeminent nodes for the production and articulation of multiple variations of precarious labour and livelihoods. Most critical studies of the precarisation of city life, contingent on migration, ethnicity or race, have looked at metropolises of the global North. They describe the neoliberal restructuring of the economy and welfare institutions, contingent on which citizenship is increasingly losing the former level of protection with rights being reduced or ignored (Lipman 2013; Sassen 2006) and precarisation deepening (Standing 2011; Wacquant 2009). Multiple and fluid forms of racialised expulsion, usually connected with migration, constitute the biggest problem in increasingly segregated urban spaces (Schierup 2000; Schierup, et al. 2015). Labour market and housing segregation and precarious employment have been driving forces of social polarisation affecting, in particular, unemployed youth, ‘working poor’, and regular and irregular migrants (Anderson 2013; Sassen 1991). Such polarisation and exclusion is embedded in policies on health, residence and education. Living conditions have deteriorated under the influence of enforced dispossession of the most disadvantaged (Wilson 1987) combined with processes of gentrification (Sassen 1991). The 11

Many aspects of which are scrutinised in Liukkunen (2015).

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r­esult is a fast growing precarisation which pushes disadvantaged urbanites out of the sunny side of ethnically and racially divided global cities or leaves them in vulnerable positions (Wacquant 1996). The recent history of Chinese urbanisation provides new scenarios which broaden perceptions of the global precaricity. This is intimately linked with growing megacities which act like dynamos that can transform China into a potential capitalist hegemon able to challenge the position of the United States as the dominant economic powerhouse in the world. Enforced politics of dispossession in the 1990s, designed to produce a vast new mobile and flexible labour force, has broadened and deepened the precarisation of labour. The stripping of social benefits and rights to employment with the breakdown of the socialist social contract and privatisation in the public sector ‘precarised’ millions of people previously employed in the state and collective sectors (Lee and Kofman 2012). Linked to the engineering of a refurbished political economy of primitive accumulation, this situation drove a massive influx of internal labour migrants towards the cities in search of factory and construction jobs. It is a development that has not passed without challenge, as amply manifested by new forms of labour organisation and a large number of strikes (e.g. Ngai and Huilin 2010). However, China’s (capitalist) 21st century new great leap forward has spawned a numerous consumerist population of highly educated urban professionals. From this important constituent of China’s breath-taking urbanisation and modernisation two alluring political and popular discourses of the megacity have surfaced (Engebretsen 2013, 62). First, the “urban space – or the city, as material space and symbolic field – [is framed] as the proper location for living modern lives (as opposed to the rural village)”. Secondly, there is a powerful discursive link between the idea of the ‘city’ and images of ‘education’, promising that attending a college or obtaining a university degree is a certain ticket to middle-class prosperity. China’s current drive towards a higher value, innovative and knowledge-intensive economy and its push towards advanced urbanisation do spawn fast growing categories of moneyed urbanites. However, increasing pressures on urban resources and the competitive character of the urban economy also challenge social stability and raise the risk of social protest. It indicates that ‘the good life’ of the city and paths for getting there are becoming unobtainable for increasing numbers of people (Du and Li 2010). This produces new forms of urban poverty and precarious livelihoods involving a motley multitude of new urbanites with fewer resources, among them China’s so-called ‘Ant Tribe’. These are college graduates from recent rural backgrounds living on the outskirts of Beijing (and other major Chinese cities), who, although ostensibly similar to Western Europe’s

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reserve army of young educated precarians, in many ways share the predicament of China’s hukou migrant workers. Unemployed university graduates, are now recognised as the fourth major precarious social group alongside peasants, unemployed poor and migrant workers (Engebretsen 2013; Xing 2009). Susanne Bregnbæk’s Chapter (9) ‘Running into nowhere: Educational migration in Beijing and the conundrum of social and existential mobility’ provides a rare ethnographic account of this not so well known face of the new Chinese precaricity. Her description of the lives of the ‘Ant Tribe’ as a vulnerable community on the edge of the megacity bears witness to a situation in which the collusion of a precarious labour market and the insecurities embodied in a cut-throat educational system extends the boundaries of belonging to a casual precariat. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing, Bregnbæk depicts a ‘race to the bottom’ as a huge number of first generation, young urban college graduates learn to labour. They are caught between a competitive educational system and the moral burden of inflated expectations from parents and communities in the rural hinterlands from which they migrated. Simultaneously they struggle because they are not part of an urban labour market with established informal networks, crucial for opening doors in a society, where in Bregnbæk’s words, “the idea that social mobility can be attained through higher education is often a fantasy reserved for elite families”. Hence, studies of Chinese cities provide us with new knowledge on the intersection of migration and precarity. However, Moscow – another metropolitan nodal point mostly beyond the radar of critical Western social scientists – may qualify as the quintessential example of the contemporary precaricity. A Russian migrant precariat of newly fabricated ‘aliens’ coming from former southern republics of the Soviet Union – previously addressed as ‘fellow citizens’ or ‘comrades’ – matches, according to estimates, the number of irregular Hispanic migrant workers in the United States or the total number of irregular migrant workers in the whole of the European Union (e.g. Bobkov, et al. 2011). Migrants are inserted by clandestine practices into urban labour markets and into a society characterised by the incremental growth of inequality, wrought by speculative businesses of ruthless oligarchs, neoliberal austerity policies, laissez-faire and state corruption. Welcoming this new migrant precariat from the south of the former ‘Eastern Bloc’ to the occupational ghettos of metropolitan Moscow is best described say Böhm and Fernandez (2005, 786) as, “Vellkome tu hell”: Moscow, the former capital of the “second world” has become one of these urban conglomerates where the “first world” meets its dirty ­underbelly.

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This vast city has one of the highest concentrations of luxury hotels and cars anywhere in the world. The extremely rich, who have built their wealth on the debris of the melt-down of real existing socialism and the rise of real-existing neoliberal capitalism, come together with migrants from within Russia as well as many ex-Soviet republics in one place. Of course, this ‘meeting’ is often no more than a virtual one, as the migrants – who are mostly illegal – work and live in parts of the city that will never be seen by the rich. In ‘Necropolitics and the migrant as a political subject of disgust: The precarious everyday of Russia’s labour migrants’, which is their Chapter (10) for the present volume, John Round and Irina Kuznetsova argue that precarisation of migrants has expanded and now occupies an ontological position of migrants in Russian society. The notion of ‘necropolitics’ emphasises ‘death’. By employing Achille Mbembe’s (2003) term to describe the situation of migrants in Moscow the authors contend that necropolitics is not a historical exception. It does not refer to Nazi death camps or treatment of prisoners but the experiences and everyday conditions that migrants live with in Moscow. While this resembles the understanding of precarity as an ontological concept of existential vulnerability (e.g. Butler 2009), Round and Kuznetsova stress how the ‘city of exception’ is created and maintained with crucial effects on the lives of many migrant workers. Migrants are forcibly kept in a state of illegallity and exposed to a constant reification of vulnerability and precarity. For Mbembe, and the authors necropolitics is not just about killing but rather about who is left to die through decisions taken by the state. In Moscow precarity renders migrants both visible and invisible. They are invisible through being sans papiers but visible when the state puts blame on ‘the migrant’ as the carrier of disease, as criminal, and as a racialised object of disgust. ‘Necropolitics’ is thus a framework through which the state views migrants as diseased, criminal and deviating. The result can be death but more a ‘letting die’ contingent on a hateful institutionally embedded racism, as when the authorities close their eyes to far right groups hunting down migrants, and build control through securitisation and state-sponsored police harassment. Round and Kuznetsova present a dystopian warning, claiming that Russia may not be an exception in our current ‘age of migration’; but at the same time appear to contend only that by revealing the actions, priorities and desires of the state in an extreme case such as Moscow can we get the tools to unravel the conditions and practices in countries and cities where the abuse of migrants may appear to be on a lesser scale. Yet we may ask whether Russia is indeed so extreme? The increasing death tolls in the Mediterranean bear witness that

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death is an integral component of most contemporary migration flows. Neither is ‘letting die’ an exception. Stories about migrants dying on their way to Greece and Italy make their way into the news every day. The termination of the Italian Mare Nostrum program and its replacement in early 2015 by the eu Operation Triton with much less funding led only to an increase in the number of deaths at sea. The eu has indeed desperately endeavoured to buy absolution for its self-inflicted, so-called ‘refugee crisis’ through concentrating asylum seekers in camps in a Turkey, itself riven by internecine war but seemingly with little objection to the conditions of refugees struggling to survive in those same Turkish refugee camps. They are living examples of Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) description of ‘the bare life’ – ‘a life stripped of all rights’. Nor are xenophobic attacks a particularly Russian phenomenon. Neo-Fascist hatemongering is on the political agenda all across Europe. In Northern Finland vigilante groups calling themselves the ‘Soldiers of Odin’ are patrolling the streets of Kemi on the watch for asylum seekers. In Stockholm masked far right members in late January 2016 made a public call for action and started ‘cleansing’ the central station of migrants depicted as ‘criminal’ and ‘disgusting’. In February, a masked citizens’ guard which hunts asylum-seeking minors across the city centre already seems to have become part of the creeping ‘pathological normalcy’12 of a country that, not long ago, was hailed as a moral-political great power (Ålund et al. 2016). As with Nazi Germany in the 1930s, a driving force in Swedish political conjuncture today seems to be that the dominant neo-liberal economic and political establishment is seeking recourse in a compromise and an alliance with a conservative neo-communitarian and proto-fascist nationalism. The same could be said for other parts of the eu. It resembles a covert stratagem for perpetuating, under changing political conditions, the hegemonic politics of ‘accumulation through dispossession’ implicating a deepening precarisation of labour, livelihoods and citizenship, with migrants (including asylum seekers) as the core of a flexible hyper-exploited precariat, yet guaranteeing to the extreme radical right that migrants will never become ‘citizens’, enjoy substantial social rights or gain full membership of the nation (Ålund et al. 2016).

Politics of Possibility?

The other side of a Janus-faced politics of precarity is popular resistance; phrased in a Polanyian discourse (1944) as a ‘countermovement’ for decommodification and restitution of the commons. While the dystopian perspective 12

Concept used by Mudde (2010).

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outlined by Round and Kuznetsova leaves no place for this, the contribution (Chapter 10) ‘Mobile commons and/in precarious spaces’ by Nicos Trimikliniotis, Dimitris Parsanoglou and Vassilis Tsianos to this volume challenges this perspective. They investigate migrant struggles and resistance in Athens, Nicosia and Istanbul from a standpoint that sees a pessimistic one-sided reading of the world as succumbing to global neoliberal elites – a world imprisoned and controlled via technologies of surveillance – as problematic. It tends to reproduce ‘paradigms of pessimism’ at the expense of seeing the world through a lens of ‘politics of possibility’.13 Mapping migrant struggles, digitalities and ‘social resistance’ they go on to demonstrate how political subjectivity and agency are constituted among migrants in the three cities. Precarity in their reading goes beyond work and working conditions, to include matters of health, housing, education, culture, social rights and mobility. Their field-work in the three cities documents the collective mobilisation of precaritised migrants through mobile commons from which emerges a frame of practice which captures the everyday life experiences of migrants. ‘Commons’ are constituted by the shared social reality and coping strategies of the migrants. As mobile commons they become spaces of ‘precarity-and-resistance’ which constantly strive to redefine the notion of ‘rights’ through daily struggles for the character, use and meaning of spaces. They also alter the meaning of ‘borders’ which themselves become mobile and flexible. The micropolitics of the commons stem from the shared knowledge and struggle of migrants not only for surviving in the cities but also for re-claiming their rights to be in and transform them. While precarity is often represented as the ontological common (cf. Butler 2009) – that which we are born into – the ‘mobile common’ refers here to everyday lives as resistance; a perspective that focuses on concrete actions for constituting political subjectivity in terms of re-claiming rights and existence on the neighbourhood level, pertaining to migrants and non-migrants alike. It relates to a social practice by which the subaltern speaks back through ‘charting’ socialities, new spatialities and reshaping new modes of citizenship. Seen from this perspective, cities have become the new frontier zones for social struggles (Harvey 2012; Sassen 2012; Sassen 2006). Numerous urban studies have shown how the cities become political platforms for movements demanding ‘social justice’ (Dikeç 2007; Harvey 2012; Holston 2009; Marcuse 2009; Schierup, et al. 2014; Scocco 2015). They are key sites for the production of new

13

Recalling also the sociology of emergence, which focuses on possibility: “the Not Yet [the future] has meaning (as possibility), but no direction, for it can end either in hope or disaster” (Santos 2004). See also Agustín and Jørgensen (2016a).

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identities and norms. ‘The right to the city’ (Lefebvre 1968) has become a rallying cry mobilising power for re-negotiating the rights of precaritised urbanites vis-à-vis the market and the state. Cities are the primary receivers of migrant flows and migrants constantly add to their composition and diversity (Schiller and Çağlar 2009). While cities are critical nodes for the extended reproduction of racialised social inequality, interaction in urban space may also create new commonalities (Rosales and Ålund Forthcoming). In this sense cities can be regarded as strategic sites of social innovation and social and political transformation across different institutional domains (Sassen 2012). Cities offer venues and operational and discursive openings for the disadvantaged (Brown 2013). While it was the cities of the Unites States that used to be depicted as the archetype of the neoliberal ‘necropolis’ – not least as embodied in the ‘impacted’ African-American ghettoes in, among others, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and New York (Hughes 1991; Wacquant 1996; Wilson 1993) – urban insurrection and contentious urban justice movements in cities of the us have also long been and remain the most important points of reference and inspiration for subaltern urban movements in big cities across the world. They are also the focus of Peter Schultz Jørgensen’s Chapter (12), ‘The Working Class and the city as Political Platform in New York’, in which he investigates the formation of class unity and a new collective narrative among migrant and native workers in New York City (nyc). Schultz Jørgensen’s interpretation uses examples of radical urban politics currently playing out in nyc and their potential for developing into an expanded working class an sich. Metropolitan New York is a site par excellence for gentrification and precarisation, but at the same time it also provides the resources and platform for articulating new political subjectivities and forms of resistance. He demonstrates how nyc has been transformed by neoliberal globalisation, describes changing conditions of labour and livelihoods, discusses the positions of the urban working class and trade unions, and maps emerging forms of organised resistance. These are found in different parts of the city (e.g. the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens) embodied in civil society organisations like, for example, the Domestic Workers United (dwu), Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association (cswa), and National Mobilization Against Sweatshops (nmass). These organisations have managed to build up a collective narrative claiming both rights to the city and dignified livelihoods. In this sense Shultz Jørgensen draws on Henri Lefebvre’s seminal work (1968), with the right to the city as a political locus for urban social struggles and collective empowerment invested in reshaping the urban condition (Harvey 2012) and remoulding conceptions of citizenship (Purcell 2003). While claims for the right to the city are not restricted to the United States or the ‘North’ in general, but are embodied in numerous instances and forms of activism across the

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globe, South as well as North (e.g. Cocco 2015; Shin 2013), the chapter nevertheless provides a generic example of the amalgamation of ‘transversal politics’ (cf. Agustín and Jørgensen 2016; Yuval-Davis 1999) that breaks new paths for contemporary urban struggles.

Rainbow Commons of the Third Great Transformation

At the same time, it might in truth be a current popular revival of the memo­ ry of the South African Freedom Charter, proclaimed five decades ago, that carries one of the strongest messages to contemporary social movements as Carl-Ulrik Schierup intimates in his chapter ‘Under the rainbow. Migration, precarity and people power in post-apartheid South Africa’ (Chapter 13). In it he enquires into the structuration of precarity and a living-dead memory of people power buried in South Africa’s ‘unfinished revolution’; a state of ­protracted crisis for the dreamland of a democratic post-apartheid ‘Rainbow Nation of God’, shattered by a Faustian neoliberal compact, a predatory extractionism and growing inequality, all entangled with a surreptitious politics of xenoracism ruling through turning poor black citizens against poor migrant ‘aliens’ in poverty stricken townships. The chapter departs from an exploration of the transformation of South Africa’s labour force management and its migratory system from a centralised management of unfree labour by the apartheid state bureaucracy to a post-apartheid state of precarity driven by ‘flex­ ploitation’. In effect, ‘precarity’ comes to serve as a critical deconstruction of the global corporate language of ‘flexibility’, the underside of which is the extended contemporary reproduction of a large composite relative surplus population (McIntyre 2011) – overwhelmingly black and to a considerable degree migrant – whose wretched are driven to employ inventive survival strategies beyond the reach of formal regulatory frameworks. There has been little help from labour unions whose leaders are trapped in the constraints and privileges of the ruling post-apartheid hegemony. A visionary democratic, internationalist and anti-imperialist ‘South African exceptionalism’, socially, culturally and racially inclusive, as claimed by the post-Apartheid discourse is difficult to recognise in this reality. The embrace of neoliberalism has ‘stolen the South African Dream’ and also turned post1994 South Africa into a dehumanising neoliberal laboratory similar to others around the globe. South Africa may be another dystopia, yet a dystopia challenged. Precarity becomes a political proposition carried forth by a precarious multitude through the daily micro-political creativity of ‘invented spaces’, embodied in a myriad of protests against housing privatisation, forced e­ victions

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and the commodification of basic needs like electricity and water. While there may be no pot of gold under the end of the rainbow, current popular upheavals bear witness to arresting from the ground up knowledge production (Choundry and Kapoor 2010), capacities for the building of subaltern rainbow commons and the resuscitation of people power, drawing on memories from the 20th century’s long struggle against apartheid. It is a volatile precariat that can be mobilised by the authoritarian politics of xenoracism and token social policies; or alternatively through building its own commons from the ground up. In this latter reading the precariat indeed turns ‘dangerous’ (cf. Standing 2011), because an inventive ‘informalization from below’ carries with it more than a flexible and affirmative adjustment to a corporate ‘informalization from above’; a transmutation from facilitator of ‘flexploitation’ to a rebellious ­‘politics of informal people’14 bearing with it challenges to the neoliberal hegemony. It may merge into or come to be piloted by a broader popular countermovement and political parties reclaiming the commons on a wider scale, including contentious factions of a fractured trade unionism that seeks its own roots in memories of a once community-based movement for people power, and which offers an ideopolitical heritage to be mobilised under novel conditions across the neo-apartheid divisions between ‘aliens’ and ‘natives’. This perspective opens up parallels with, not least, EU-Europe and the United States in terms of from the ground up rainbow movements of ‘uncivil society’ (Bayat 1997) coming out of the ‘third great transformation’ (Schierup and Ålund 2013); a movement that, insofar as it forms alliances across deepening racialised divides, stands up against a crisis-driven mobilisation and the mainstreaming of a neo-fascist ‘pathological normalcy’15 in the present state of ‘the North’ (Ålund, et al. 2016). The initial growth of popular movements from the ground up and their later institutionalisation as new or reformed political parties16 can be read as seed beds for a coming-together in struggles against the politics of austerity stemming from what can be captured by the ‘precariat’ as a political interpellation (Agustín and Jørgensen 2016b). As a ‘movement of movements’ – in Gramscian terms (McNally 2015) – it becomes the voice of the insurgent. It is an active and deliberate re-politicising of society rearticulating deep-seated disputes and conflicts.

14 15 16

Alluding to Bayat (1997). Alluding to the notion of Mudde (2010). E.g., Podemos in Spain, Initiative for Democratic Socialism in Slovenia, initially Syriza in Greece, British Labour’s u-turn under Jeremy Corbyn, and potentially the mobilisation of rebellious youth around the 2016 campaign of Bernie Sanders in the United States.

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The driver of this type of politics is the formation of alliances by a multitude of political actors coming together – beyond identity politics and beyond North and South – in social struggles that challenge an immanent democratic closure. It pertains to the growth of new solidarities from below – as practices in different settings and on different levels ensure the conformation and redefinition of political identities in defence of and for reclaiming the ­commons – which constitute, at the same time, a shared understanding of what is the commons.17

Acknowledgement of Funding

We appreciate generous funding by forte, the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare [grant number 2006–1524] and by a Swedish Research Links grant from the Swedish Research Council [grant number 2013–6682]. References Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998. Agustín, Óscar Garcia and Martin Bak Jørgensen. “Against Pessimism. A Time and Space for Solidarity”. In Solidarity without Borders: Gramscian Perspectives on Migration & Civil Society Alliances, edited by Óscar Garcia Agustín and Martin Bak Jørgensen, 223–233. London: Pluto Press, 2016a. Agustín, Óscar García and Martin Bak Jørgensen, eds. Solidarity without Borders: Gramscian Perspectives on Migration & Civil Society Alliances. London: Pluto Press, 2016b. Ålund, Aleksandra, Carl-Ulrik Schierup and Anders Neergaard. “Democratic Fall or Spring? An Essay on Migration, Social Movements and Sweden’s Current Transformation”. Paper presented at the Transnational Migration and Modern States in Times of Economic Crisis, Moscow, 24–25 September, 2015, 2016. Accessed March 7, 2016. Anderson, Bridget. “Migration, Immigration Controls and the Fashioning of Precarious Worker”. Work, Employment and Society 24:2 (2010): 300–317. Anderson, Bridget. Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Controls. ­Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

17

Alluding to Featherstone (2012).

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chapter 2

A Geneology of Precarity: A Toolbox for Rearticulating Fragmented Social Realities In and Out of the Workplace1 Maribel Casas-Cortés A constellation of activist collectives and social movements in southern and central Europe today is working under the umbrella concept of ‘precarity’. In contrast to the term ‘flexible labour’, ‘precarious labour’ implies certain negative connotations referring to the loss of the security found in the welfare state époque. Relatedly, the lexicon of precarity has produced new understandings of labour and new experimental forms of organising in Europe.2 Struggles around precarity often occur outside political parties and mainstream unions. Precarity initiatives simultaneously emphasise local, place-based organising while actively engaging in transnational communication and pan-European actions. The following portrait of the proliferation of precarity as a political concept is based on several years of ethnographic engagement with several networks of precarious struggles, especially participation in the Madrid-based feminist activist-research collective, Precarias a la Deriva. In following the emergence and development of the concept of precarity, I want to trace a geneology of its multiple uses and resignifications as a rhizomatic development, not as a strict chronology but inspired by a Deleuzian understanding of multiple and simultaneous trends feeding into and contesting one another. Etymologically speaking, ‘precarity’ comes from the Latin root prex or precis, meaning ‘to pray, to plead’, and it commonly implies risky or uncertain situations. Within the field of European struggles dealing with this notion, I have identified four distinct although interrelated conceptual developments that redefine precarity as follows: (1) labour after the rollback of welfare state 1 This chapter was first published as Casas-Cortés, Maribel. “A geneology of precarity: A toolbox for rearticulating fragmented social realities in and out of the workplace”. Rethinking Marxism 26.2 (2014): 206–226. We appreciate the permission of the journal to republish the article in this volume. 2 This geneology constitutes only a section of a further development within social movements in Europe around the question of precarity (see Casas-Cortés, 2009). For a working definition of precarity used within active movements see Kruglanski (2004).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004329706_003

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­ rovisions; (2) the new paradigm of intermittent and immaterial labour; (3) p the unceasing mobility of labour; (4) the feminisation of labour and life. The clustering of the multiple meanings into four main tracks should not be understood as a means of rigid distinction or as a matter of strict chrono­ logy. Rather, these four notions of precarity have coexisted, tinkering with and building upon each other and emerging in different sectors and places, at times crisscrossing and colliding with each other. Precarity has developed as a proposition that does not order the real into precise and static identities but that realigns multiple realities into unstable formations that, while not absolute or rigid, are still practical and have material effects. My geneology suggests that precarity acts as a toolbox concept that young people have put to work in the specific context of austerity policies in Europe.

Loss of Labour Rights and Welfare State Provisions Viva el mal, viva el capital, Viva la precariedad laboral!

bruja averia, La Bola de Cristal

The 1980s children’s television program La Bola de Cristal, a series of “fables of satiric Marxism for kids” (Alba Rico 1992, 2), is currently acknowledged as one of the precursors in coining and critiquing the question of precarity in Spain. One of the characters, a mean but fun witch, Bruja Averia (the “Breakdown Witch”), represents the best of capitalism, the wonders of bureaucracy, and the nice face of the state. In the program, Bruja Averia destroys inoffensive little beings – workers, poor mums, the unemployed, and so on – all the while screaming her famous saying: “Long live evil, long live capital, and long live precarious labor!” Such satiric anticapitalist expressions made sense in the context of contested changing labour patterns in Spain in the 1980s. Desiring entrance into the European Economic Community (which Spain achieved in 1986), the socialist administration launched a series of labour market changes to catch up with its European older brothers, using the expression in fashion at the time, “We are becoming European”. Concretely, the labour reform in 1984 put an end to full-time, indefinite, and permanent contracts as the generalised framework of labour relations. In contrast, the reform welcomed a great variety of part-time, training, and fixed-term contracts. The measure was proposed by the Socialist Party (psoe) and was supported by one of the main union centrals, Union General de Trabajadores (ugt), despite general discontent. In 1988, the Socialist

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government intended to generalise these types of contracts, popularly known as ‘garbage contracts’, under the Youth Employment Plan. This legal proposal was strongly contested. A general strike shook the country on December 14, 1988, when the ugt together with the Comisiones Obreras (ccoo) issued a call to fight ‘precarious contracts’. More than 95 percent of the active population stopped working, paralysing the country for twenty-four hours. Even the Spanish tv signal was shut down. This pressure obliged the government to negotiate with the unions. The labour reform was aborted and expenditures in welfare programs were incremented (Lizon 1989). This massive mobilisation showed a general disapproval with the overall modernisation economic plan developed by the Felipe Gonzalez administration. Yet despite this successful wake-up call to the government, Gonzalez continued his process of economic modernisation and intensified legal efforts at deregulating the labour markets. A labour reform in 1992 cut unemployment benefits and was followed in turn by the legalisation of temporary work agencies in 1994. The shift experienced in labour regulation was accompanied by a growing change in labour struggles, with the historically strong unions losing their legitimacy and support. At the continental level, a series of eu directives and labour market reforms across different countries illustrated a general paradigm change from a golden Keynesian welfare state to a Thatcherist logic of less/reduced labour regulation and less employment security. Nonetheless, this transformation of state intervention in the market dynamics of capitalism was highly contested terrain. Discontent grew among the inflated jobless population in eu member countries. Around the late 1990s, the word ‘precarity’ became more and more popular thanks to a movement of the unemployed in France, which mobilised large crowds in the street under the banner of “Agir contre la precariete laboral” and which organised multisectorial and transnational “European marches against precarity and unemployment”, a landmark for pan-European civil-society actions. With his two Contre-feux intervention books, Bourdieu (1998, 2003) was one of the main supporters of the movement, denouncing globalisation as the process responsible for spreading precarious labour. The use of the term ‘precarity’ in the 1990s emerged as a direct response to the generalisation of previously atypical contracts associated with an unstable labour relationship, usually with a lower salary and less protection against firing. In the context of social welfare states, the initial sense of precarity referred to an increasing loss of labour rights, to missing those provisions that had been achieved, historically, by the actions of numerous workers’ movements and that had been institutionalised at the national level. This first understanding of precarity might then be read as a series of transformations related to issues of social citizenship, including the dismantling of welfare protections such as

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health insurance, the reforming of pensions, and the increasing privatisation of the public sector. The growing efforts among so-called “assemblies of unemployed” in France were among the most creative in the early precarity struggles. The Paris-based Assemblée de Juissieu (1998) and the French network ac! (1993) rejected the return to full employment and guild-like short-term fights for benefits for certain sectors; rather, these unemployed collectives pushed the imagination to embrace a different state of economic affairs, where waged labour would not be the only form of living and where other economic transactions would be possible. Concretely, this section of the unemployed advanced two practical notions: ‘gratuite’, meaning that not all relationships and needs must be monetised but that some could be based on no price; and ‘réappropriation’, referring to the taking over and reuse of private goods and services. These political propositions resonated with initiatives such as Dinero Gratis and YoMango in Spain (2002), which tried to elaborate a discourse and practice around everyday life based on a “for free philosophy”. This trend gave rise to a series of rearticulated demands for free services (e.g. the demand for free transport by Collective Sans Ticket in Belgium). This creative sector of the unemployed movement, together with incubating efforts at unionising certain chain workers (e.g. McDonalds), form the node or root of the next shoot in the rhizomatic development of precarity, where something more ambivalent is substituted for the feeling of ‘loss’.

Paradigmatic Transformations in the Reorganisation of Labour

Younger generations reacted against what was perceived as the main unions’ nostalgic position, which was mired in a mythical labour stability the youth had never experienced. There was no other option than “to have the courage of uncertainty” (Autonomia Conference 2012) and making precarity sexy. Colourful and fashionable logos, flyers, and websites speak to that desire of making precarity an attractive point of departure for daily lives and struggles. This position was the result of years of work and debates, mainly in Italy. The Milanbased group Chain Workers moved toward a reappropriation of May Day marches, which they called the EuroMayDay process, in the context of which a celebratory embodiment of precarity could be experimented with. These EuroMayDay actions spread from Italy to different European cities, in 2001 beginning a series of efforts to reinvent the unappealing official May Day parades and turn them into rave-like street parties, self-organised colourful crowds following unpredictable urban itineraries – usually without legal permits.

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The phenomenon of EuroMayDay contributed to the Europeanization of the discourse of precarity and to shifting its meaning toward a certain ­ambiguity, denouncing its consequences but also showing many of its ­potentialities. A series of emerging actors, texts, and interventions linked to EuroMayDay networks continued a resignification of precarity based on the logic of and, and, and … (in the sense of Deleuze’s call for complex multiplicity rather than reductionist exclusion), clustering multiple and at times ­contradictory meanings. The goal was to identify some of the latest transformations in labour ­organisation and turn them into advantages, even to enable a new kind of politics (Foti 2005). The two main tendencies being identified and worked upon in this shoot of the rhizome were constant intermittency and the increased use of communicative, affective, and cognitive skills, or what has been coined as ‘immaterial labour’.

Intermittency as Permanent Condition

Les Intermittents, an organisation of entertainment workers and performing artists (working ‘intermittently’) that formed in France in 2003, developed a fine-tuned analysis of intermittency at work. Working by temporal phases was no longer an exception proper to sectors such as the spectacle industry or seasonal agricultural work but rather was becoming a more generalised condition. Given this paradigmatic change, and speaking from the very experience of intermittent workers, Les Intermittents asked: What about those activities in between jobs that, despite not being considered part of work itself, are extremely productive and profitable for future employers or for others? Contemporary capitalism tends to rely more on activities such as self-training, research, nonwaged modes of cooperation, productive networking, and social relationships normally associated with reproduction, and it tends to exploit these without compensation. There is no formal or monetary recognition of their productive function; they are taken as activities outside of work time, and thus there are no responsibilities toward them (i.e. remunerating or guaranteeing them). This set of broad reflections about the new character of labour and the need for different modes of social distribution ensured that the resulting struggle would not be sectorial; rather, it would become a struggle open to alliances. The members of Les Intermittents spread their ideas through the boycott and disruption of public spectacles (tv shows, movie theatres, and film festivals for example) and published about intermittent and flex-work in European social movement journals such as Multitudes, Posse, Mute Magazine, Green

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Pepper, or Contrapoder. The insights sparked a rich debate within precarity ­struggles: if temporary contracts are becoming not an exception to the rule but a ­widespread practice, a distinct labour regime of duties and rights should be implemented, thus raising a series of cutting-edge political propositions: basic income, flexicurity, and commonfare. The first proposition, basic income, was related to the remuneration of ­nonwaged production. While they have become essential for contemporary accumulation, activities outside of formal labour arrangements are still not compensated. A basic income, then, would address that vacuum, covering basic needs (both in monetary and nonmonetary forms) regardless of formal labour hours.3 The demand for flexicurity likewise called for a series of security mechanisms updated for unregulated labour markets. This would mean a system that ensures access to resources while at the same time maintaining labour-flexible arrangements and a certain level of intermittency, allowing people to fully develop the possibilities opened by engaging in different ­activities outside the labour regime. These initial proposals, basic income and flexicurity, called to prominence the right to income and the recognition of being productive over the right to work. The third proposal, commonfare, suggested a necessary change to the current ‘workfare’ regime toward a reorganisation of the management and uses of labour time and of recompenses as well as resources, both material and immaterial.

Cognitive, Affective, and Communicative Skills in Labour

Growing expressions of unrest spreading in the knowledge-based sectors of the economy have led to statements such as, “The cognitariat rises across Neuropa!” (Sapienza Pirata 2009). In particular, a series of collectives and networks have questioned and confronted current logics underpinning university and research production: Sauvons la Recherche in France, Ricercatori Precari in Italy, Red de Investigadores Temporales in Spain, and internationally, the network of Edu-Factory. The critiques developed in these struggles have found inspiration in the notion of ‘immaterial labour’, which refers to the increased use of cognitive, communicative, and affective skills in the mode of production (see Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004; Virno 1996, 2003; Corsani and Lazzarato 2002; Lazzarato 2006). The interpretation that there is a generalised move away from industrial labour comes from a situated reading of Marx’s Grundrisse fragment 3 On the notion of basic income see Pinilla (2006) and Raventós (2007).

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on machines – specifically his statement that “abstract knowledge … tends to become the main productive force” (in Virno 2003, 78, author’s translation). Marx’s text is read in the light of and from within the experience of the Italian ’68 movement – ten consecutive years of constant social unrest also named the ‘permanent ’68’, ‘laboratory Italy’, and the ‘Italian anomaly’, which was characterised by a massive exodus from factory work and a demand for nonwaged production, creativity, and affect. According to Virno’s (1996) thesis on “counter-revolution”, the demands of ’68 have been incorporated into a contemporary capitalist restructuring that started in the 1980s and managed to redirect these demands onto society in the form of flexibility and a so-called information society. The so-called flexible and immaterial components have been introduced by capital in order to respond to both the emerging necessities of the global market in terms of ‘justin-time production’ and ‘zero-stock’ and also to the demands made by many antisystemic movements of the 1960s that rejected the routines of the factory or were able to place factories under their control, looking to satisfy their desires in more creative and liberating activities. By capturing these movements’ values – such as creativity, cooperation, and communication – capitalist labour organisation transcended the Fordist assembly-line model, introducing ‘immaterial labour’ as one of the main tendencies of contemporary labour practices. Hence, the thesis of “a revolution in reverse” (Virno 1996, 241). At this point, we might very well ask ourselves: What is the relation between immaterial labour, with the rich literature on its historical specificities, and precarity, which as a toolbox-concept has resignified itself in the midst of multiple social mobilisations? Greek-German militant researchers Tsianos and Papadopoulos point out that these two notions are related but not synonymous. The first, immaterial labour, refers to a sociological description of a certain mode of production whereas the second, precarity, deals with a ­subjectification process: It is misleading to assert that subjectivity is constituted by the sociological features of immaterial labour such as cooperation, creativity, linguistic exchanges, affectivity, etc. Rather, the emergent subjectivities exceed the conditions of production of immaterial labour when immaterial workers are confronted with the impasses in their life situation, the micro-oppressions and exploitation. In other words, subjectivity is produced when the contemporary regime of labour becomes embodied experience … The subjectivity of the immaterial labourers does not mirror the production process of immaterial labour; it is the diabolic blow up of

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its contingent intensities and fractures. Subjectivity is not a facticity, it is a departure. tsianos and papadopoulos 2006, 1

At this level of subjectivity another cluster of precarity struggles has emerged, this time under the notion of the ‘cognitariat’. Knowledge workers in research centres, universities, and laboratories have been inspired by the consequent reconceptualization of what was supposed to have been a privileged position, that of ‘the intellectual’. Under the new light, intellectuals and researchers are put in tandem with other workers, under similarly precarious contracts and labour conditions. The key role played by knowledge in production has led to a spin-off series of struggles: linking anti-intellectual property rights campaigns to precarity, developing infrastructures for distributive licenses, organising campaigns to remind the general public that ‘sharing is good’ (Compartir es Bueno) in reference to knowledge-based goods such as music and programs, and denouncing the patenting supported by the wto agreement in trips. With regard to the centrality of knowledge production among precarious youth, it is important to note that there is an increasing interest within social movements in the production of knowledge on their own terms, outside of market logic and conventional university standards. A series of autonomous, self-organised research and teaching institutions are emerging under university names such as Universidad Nómada and Universidad Invisibile in Spain, Universite Tangente in France, UniRiot and esc in Italy, and the University of Openness in the uk (Universidad Nómada 2008). The growing importance of cognitive, affective, and communicative aspects in the new economy has been conceptualised as capital taking over spaces of nonlabour. According to Corsani and Lazzarato (2002), contemporary capitalist accumulation is founded not only on labour exploitation but also on the exploitation of knowledge, culture, free time, the relational resources of individuals (such as communication, sex, socialisation), living material, imaginaries, and so on. Economic growth exceeds the limits of the company today. Capital not only draws profit from waged labour but also from all that collective production that arises from social relations (intellectual, communicative, creative ­resources). But capital is not recognising – especially in monetary terms  – such sources of wealth (Corsani and Lazzarato 2002, 178). In accordance with this diagnosis, a series of precarity struggles would forcefully criticise the two ­previous notions of precarity as too capitalocentric, stretching the concept of precarity yet again.

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Parenthesis on Precarias a la Deriva

What do a call-centre worker, a researcher, and a migrant nanny have in common? The Madrid-based militant research group Precarias a la Deriva has been investigating, through a feminist version of the Situationist urban drifts, the singularities in common between such disparate sectors of the economy. Despite differences of income and status, a series of shared subjective experiences and practices were identified, leading to an emergent sense of commonality between otherwise unrelated populations. Precarias a la Deriva – although inserted in the broader pan-European network of MayDays, immaterial workers, ‘copyleft’ licenses, and autonomous knowledge production through their own ‘in-house’ research – would criticise how the predominant understandings of precarity neglect the gender question and feminist contributions to economics as well as how they erase the multiplicity of experiences and the ‘radical differences’ within precarity, especially those marked by questions of race, mobility, and legality in a global context. The migrant question points to the limitations of the excessive analytical weight given to labour itself in the original use of precarity, and thus points to other possible reconceptualizations and alliances (Precarias a la Deriva 2004, 22). Sharing the critique articulated by the migration movements, the Preca­ rias point to the centrality of racism and the current configurations of coloniality in order to rethink labour, gender, and power (Eskalera Karakola 2004, 15). The last two developments of the concept of precarity try to grapple with these complex intersections, opening precarity to the question of migration and to spaces of everyday vulnerability.

Migration and Mobility as Precarity: No Borders, No Precarity

The third resignification of precarity shows how the discourse of precarity develops as an unfixed and mobile concept that, in avoiding a static ideal of the ‘precariat’, is not limited to knowledge and affective workers or to temporary labour contracts. Precarity is used as a way of understanding a sort of trend occurring in many places with many populations stretching beyond the workplace and beyond national borders, touching upon issues of race and citizenship (Bojadžijev and Karakayali 2010). While recognising commonalities, the emerging connotation of precarity points to the special vulnerability of undocumented workers: questions of legality and issues of racism have exacerbated precarious conditions. At the same time, these traits of mobility and informality have been spreading to ­other sectors. A significant portion of struggles have started to link the issues

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of migration and precarity, pointing to workers who are increasingly expected to be mobile and to labour under less-formal contract arrangements.

The Precarity of Migrant Labour

The initial work of coordinating struggles around precarity and migration started with calls for ‘Autonomy of Migration’ among antiracist movements in Germany.4 This marked a turning point in the panorama of previous struggles around migration. On the one hand was a series of self-organised efforts by migrants, including the more public sans-papiers movements, as well as hunger strikes in detention centres and self-organised border camps. On the other hand, was a vibrant activism of solidarity toward migrants, denouncing the violence and deaths at the borders and human-rights violations perpetuated by migration policies. Regardless of their contributions, these solidarity experiences were at times criticised by their countereffect of victimising migrants and reinscribing borders as powerful or even impermeable mechanisms. As a reaction to these trends, the autonomy of migration approach proposed migration as a social movement that, despite its ambivalences and exposures to failing, was able many times to escape from border control. Rather than just stopping people from crossing borders, migration management and border control were portrayed as a more complex mechanism of biopolitical ordering of populations generating differentiated forms of mobility. This sorting out of people and governing of mobility was addressed to locals and foreigners, building a management of economic activities where issues of nationality, administrative documents, racial politics, as well as educational background and skills were at play (see Mezzadra 2004, 2011; Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008; Bojadžijev and Karakayali 2010; Hess 2010; De Genova and Peutz 2010; Mitropolous 2010). This way of framing migration as a core component of capitalism, while treating mobility as one of the main traits of workers’ practices, allowed for a more horizontal understanding of the relationship between migrants and locals.

Becoming Migrant

The explicit intermingling of precarity and migration started to become visible during EuroMayDay parades when, from the calls-to-action to the actual street marches, the question of migration as linked to local precarity became quite 4 See Heidenreich and Vukadinović (2008).

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present. For example, the following call for the 2004 EuroMayDay parade in Barcelona signalled some elements of increasing commonality among migrant and precarious youth: There is a shared common sustained on tangible elements, rather than ideological ones, such as the way of inhabiting the city, the incoherent relationship between salary and work, the lack of guarantees for basic rights, cuts on freedom and militarisation of the territory, as well as the ability to build spaces for living and producing outside official statesponsored spheres or exclusively private spaces. It is obvious that migrants are situated in this context in a singular and differentiated way due to the status of non-citizenship and a general trait of lack of security and invisibility. entránsito 2004

The perspective of ‘autonomy of migration’ is directly inspired by the notion of struggles preceding – and not just responding to – capitalist transformations, a notion defended by the Italian tradition of operaismo (Tronti 1980). Migration under “the gaze of autonomy” – to paraphrase one of the main thinkers tinkering with both theoretical bodies (Mezzadra 2011) – shakes conventional notions of irregular mobility, such as the widespread stigmas that migrants are both victims of economic misery and objects of state repression. In his book on wage labour in so-called historical capitalism, De l’esclavage au salariat, Yann Moulier Boutang highlights the fact that mobility had always been a fundamental stake in workers’ behaviors and struggles (see Casas-Cortes, Cobarrubias and Pickles 2011, 587). Nonetheless, the growing centrality of mobility is understood as a paradigmatic trait of current labour practices, a process denominated by precarity activists as the becoming-migrant of labour … the centrality that mobility (both in a geographical or functional sense) has in labour today. Working conditions suffered by migrants today (such as informality in the contract, vulnerability, intense links between territory and employment, low salaries, lack of union rights, temporality, total availability, etc.) are spreading today to the rest of workers. toret and sguiglia 2006, 108

It is important to note that claiming the centrality of migrant work does not have as its intent the privileging of the figure of ‘the migrant’ as the new ­political or revolutionary subject. Rather, migration – as the epitome of labour

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mobility – is claimed as ‘a point of view’ that changes the perspective, not only when looking at migration but also with other topics: [Migration] struggles and the potential they carry should not be simply considered in terms of a ‘special issue’ on migration since what they show us exceeds the boundaries of any such narrow classification. Frassanito Network 2006

The main demand coming from migration struggles is to legalise and facilitate freedom of movement, pushing for a reconceptualization of the notions of rights, difference, and citizenship broadly speaking, in a globalised context. Both texts and actions point out that being illegal exponentially multiplies the intensity of two of precarity’s main traits: uncertainty and vulnerability. Every activity, every space becomes unsafe and potentially risky – from the initial journey, to finding a job, to the everyday activity at the workplace or at the new home, to communication with family abroad. This proliferation of uncertainty transforms precarity into something that concerns overall existence: an overarching notion of precarity that will also serve as the basis of the following set of struggles clustered under the fourth process, that of resignification.

Precarity as Increased Vulnerability in Everyday Life

March 8, 2004: In the context of International Women’s Day, the Next Genderation – a manifesto by a network of precarious feminists – cried, “Not in our names”, denouncing the way eu discourse increasingly uses women’s rights and gender equality as the argument to carry out ever more restrictive labour and migration reforms. With respect to this, Precarias a la Deriva (2005), in a fragment of an entry on biosyndicalism, points to “a generalized tendency toward the precarisation of life”, affecting society as a whole: But: what has life to do with this [precarity]? (1) First of all, life is productive. We are not among those who say, “Life has been put into production”. It has always produced: cooperation, affective territories, worlds … but now it also produces profit. It has been subsumed by the capitalist axiomatic. (2) Second of all, precarity cannot be understood only from the labour context, from the concrete conditions of work of this or that individual. A much richer and illuminating position results from understanding precarity as a generalized tendency towards the precarization of life,

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affecting society as a whole. (3) Thirdly, labour has ceased to be the site that determines individual and collective identity, a place of spontaneous encounter and aggregation and a place that nourishes the utopia of a better world. Why? Because of the failure of the worker movement and the process of capitalist restructuring that accompanied it, as much as the push of the desire towards singularity (by feminist movements, black movements, anti-colonial movements and other m ­ ovements linked to the spirit of ’68) that made the worker movement stall from the inside. A series of voices from feminist political efforts have decried that the discussion on immaterial labour as articulated by Italian thinkers and movements has been largely northern- and male-biased, neglecting other forms of precarious labour (Federici 2008; Perez Orozco 2006; Mitropoulos 2005; Precarias a la Deriva 2004). They point specifically to those jobs that, despite sharing similar traits with certain aspects of immaterial labour (mainly in reference to the communicative and affective components), may have existed for a longer time but without receiving much theoretical attention or political importance. They refer to domestic work and reproductive labour or to new types of labourers, such as call-centre operators. Often these are precisely the kinds of jobs historically ascribed to women and increasingly performed by the growing migrant population in Europe. In fact, these critiques show that those who frame debates around precarity as a ‘new’ sociological phenomenon (as opposed to simply a new politicisation) often fail to see the Fordist compromise achieved in some countries as both exceptional and predicated on the extreme exploitation of ‘others’: The experience of regular, full-time, long-term employment which cha­ racterised the most visible, mediated aspects of Fordism is an exception in capitalist history. That presupposed vast amounts of unpaid domestic labour by women and hyper-exploited labour in the colonies. This labour also underpinned the smooth distinction between work and leisure for the Fordist factory worker. The enclosures and looting of what was once contained as the Third World and the affective, unpaid labour of women allowed for the consumerist, affective “humanisation” and protectionism of what was always a small part of the Fordist working class. mitropoulos 2005, 4

Feminist critiques have also made it possible to politicise other terrains of struggle neglected or underanalysed in interpretations of precarity involving a cautious and unheroic encounter with the concept.

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These critiques suggest provocative alliances between otherwise unconnected types of labourers. Even if Italian post-Marxists insist on the idea that “life has been put to work”, feminist approaches would argue that the spheres of production and reproduction have both been sources of work for a long time (Federici 2008). Each sphere, however, possesses distinctive traits, such as the fact that reproductive tasks have historically been rendered invisible, have been unremunerated, and usually have lacked social and cultural recognition. Some characteristics of the reproductive sphere are now becoming important sources of capital valorisation, which marks a significant change. While sharing a few analytical points with post-Marxist theories of labour transformation, the specificity of this understanding of precarity comes from a distinct conceptual framework: that of feminist economics. While the former draws on the Marxist notion of “general intellect” in order to arrive at the concept of ‘immaterial labour’, the latter places attention on the reproductive world, arriving at the notion of ‘the becoming-woman of labour’.5

The Feminisation of Labour

The feminisation of labour refers to the growing presence of servile traits, historically assigned to women’s tasks, among different contemporary sectors (going from web designers to tomato pickers): The feminisation of labour is the process through which traits that usually characterised women’s work and lives such as flexibility, vulnerability, total availability, high degrees of adaptation, talent for improvisation, and the ability to assume simultaneous roles and tasks (as housewives, wives, mothers, grandmothers, daughters, nurses, teachers, midwives) are nowadays spreading through a growing spectrum of types of employment, for both men and women. TrabajoZero 2001, 75; translation mine

In a broader sense, the feminisation of labour implies that the affective-­ relational component of those historically women’s tasks is becoming a general tendency of labour in general. It becomes a common quality of different kinds of work, highly demanded in current labour markets. This ­explanation,

5 See contributions on “devenir-femme du travail” in Multidudes no. 12 (Spring) and no. 4 (March).

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s­tarting from “woman’s work” as the analytical matrix, is presented as less ­cerebral and more embodied than the discourse of immaterial labour, in the sense that it acknowledges the very material aspects of affective labour ­(TrabajoZero 2001, 78). Both feminist and post-Marxist trends share ideas such as the importance of life in current qualitative shifts in labour. Still, while developing similar arguments, their arguments stem from distinctive points of departure. For example, feminists are in agreement with Virno’s counterrevolution argument that capital was able to reappropriate the desire for creativity and cooperation from the movements of the 1960s, moving production out of the factory. Nonetheless, while feminist writers working on precarity agree that capital has not invented anything new, they contend that capital has actually discovered and appropriated the need and the desire for visibilisation by feminist movements, and women in general, in order to extract profit from their assigned tasks (Malo 2001, 78). From a feminist perspective, then, immaterial labour debates seem too production centred. In contrast, precarity has been redefined, emphasising the blurring of the realms of production and reproduction: In order to overcome the dichotomies of public/private and production/ reproduction, and to recognise and give visibility to the interconnections between the social and the economic that make it impossible to think precarity from an exclusively labour and salary based point of view, we define precarity as the set of material and symbolic conditions that determine a vital uncertainty with respect to the sustained access to the essential resources for the full development of the life of a subject. precarias a la deriva 2005, 1; emphasis added

Production and reproduction are so interwoven that it is no longer possible to speak just about precarious labour, but rather precarious life. This different approach emphasises precarity as a process, not as a particular state of affairs or a sociological category or a fixed identity: Notwithstanding, in the present context it is not possible to speak of precarity as a differentiated state (and, as such, to distinguish neatly between a precarious population and another guaranteed one), but rather that it is more fitting to detect a tendency to the precarization of life that affects society as a whole as a threat. precarias a la deriva 2004, 27

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This is where Precarias a la Deriva’s notion of the “precarization of existence” makes an important move in our dealing with the concept of precarity and in rethinking intermittency, mobility, and vulnerability beyond workspaces.

Precarisation of Life

The precarisation of existence is more than ‘life being put to work’; it refers rather to the emergence of a paradigmatic shift in spaces both of production and reproduction that involves negative, positive, and neutral consequences, such as fewer guarantees, more skills, and a flexible schedule. As the Precarias have it: In the day to day, precarity is a synonym for some labour and existential realities that are increasingly destructured: fragmented spaces; ­hyper-­intensified and saturated times; the impossibility of undertaking middle- to long-term projects; inconsistency of commitments of any kind of indolence and vulnerability of some bodies submitted to the stressful rhythm of the precarious clock. Some bodies debilitated by the inversion of the relation of forces (now on the side of capital), by the difficulties of building bonds of solidarity and mutual aid, by the current obstacles for organising conflicts in the new geographies of mobilities and the constant mutations where the only constant is change. precarias a la deriva 2004, 35

This less capitalocentric notion of precarity leads to different kinds of demands, not just monetary and labour but based mainly on what some feminist movements call “a social reorganization of care”, or what has been playfully coined as “caretizenship”, or cuidadania in Spanish.6 In this context, the call for “care strikes” is a growing political tactic. The debates on care incorporate gender, migrant, and postcolonial questions within precarity struggles.7 Focusing on the practices of care has led to the questioning and politicisation of several fields that are not usually considered to constitute political action under the rubric of precarity. These fields include the precarious spaces of the body, where health, aids, and disability struggles frame the structural causes of vulnerability in terms of precarity, and 6 Flyer distributed during the International Women’s Day march, Madrid 2008. 7 I have reviewed the question of care elsewhere. See Casas-Cortés (2012).

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the increasing generalisation of reproductive tasks, where domestic workers and feminists have pushed forward the discourse of precarity while ‘thinking with care’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 2008).

Notes on Precarity: A Toolbox Concept?

Precarity as currently used by social movements does not intend to create a perfect analytical description of current transformations. In the words of a EuroMayDay organiser in southern Spain, “Precarity is a political proposition more than a sociological category”.8 Precarity is used both as a road map tool and as a strategic political proposal in order to produce, to intervene with, to function as, and to test political hypotheses; it acts more as a point of departure than as a final solution. This understanding of precarity resonates well with Deleuze’s remarks on theoretical propositions as ‘toolboxes’ (see Foucault 1977, 208), and even as a “crowbar in willing hand”, referring to the opening potential held by concepts (Massumi 1987, xv). It also parallels the proposal by anthropologists Arturo Escobar and Michal Osterweil (2010, 187) to think certain contemporary social movements in terms of ‘Deleuzian strategies’. Proposing precarity as a toolbox concept is just the beginning of a potentially larger and richer conversation to be established between the practices of contemporary precarity movements and Deleuze’s work. For the purpose of this paper, and according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), concepts generated from ‘nomad thinking’ are able to break down previous categorical structures and make room for different and changing ways of thinking and inhabiting the world. The concept of precarity wants to play such a crowbar role in the context of mainstream understandings of exploitation and exclusion. The value of the concept of precarity should not then rely solely on the accuracy of its analysis but rather on its potential to regenerate imaginations and lifestyles in the midst of an on-going decline in traditional union organising and a perceived fragmentation of the collective into singular identities. Such a concept acts as a tool to develop unfixed understandings of the world and fluid ways of inhabiting it, stressing the potentiality of connecting singularities: Rather than analyzing the world into discrete components, reducing their manyness to the One of identity, and ordering them by rank, it sums up a set of disparate circumstances in a shattering blow. It synthesises 8 Quote from Interview to EuroMayDay organiser, Sevilla 2007.

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a multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or ­hindering their potential for future rearranging (to the contrary). The modus operandi of nomad thought is affirmation, even when its appa­ rent object is negative. massumi 1987, xiii; my emphasis

Without claiming that precarity is always able to do this kind of nonreductionist analysis and affirmative proposition à la Deleuze, the preceding geneology shows how the concept of precarity unfolds as an unfixed process of ‘summing up’, engaging and recombining distinct circumstances and emerging problematics (and, and, and …). The aim of this paper consists in developing a geneology of precarity under a Deleuzian framework in order to reveal how precarity stretches to embrace multiplicity, to go beyond the limits of workspace, and to rethink labour, citizenship, and care practices. Contemporary movements would be in that sense not examples of “struggles around axioms” based on so-called universal human rights but rather “struggles around flows” in terms of minoritarian/nonmodernist conceptions and practices of rights (Escobar and Osterweill 2010, 203–204). Such an appraisal of the concept, however, does not ignore the shortcomings of the notion of precarity as it is currently unfolding, and here we recall the multiple times when a potentially smooth politics borne of precarity has become a quite striated terrain of struggle based on coded identities and enclosed demands. The debate between ‘precariat’ and ‘precarisation’ is an instantiation of that tension. While precarisation consists in the process, many collectives are based on a form of identity politics, in the shape of the ‘precariat’, as a new subject of struggle. Building on many of these precarious class-approach struggles, Guy Standing (2011) points to the potential of the term “precariat” to name a new emerging social class that despite agglomerating different social groups – from immigrants to young, educated locals – holds certain traits in common, such as job and identity insecurity. This coincidence of process and identity politics allows for concrete demands to be posed to governments, such as the demand for an unconditional basic income. Rather than the historical disappearance of class, as the argument goes, a more fragmented global class structure has emerged alongside a more flexible open labour market.9 Nonetheless, my geneology of the concept relates better to the conceptualisation of precarity by movements themselves that frame precarity as an antagonist and fluent process of subjectification, pointing to the ­different phases of its 9 For a criticism of precarity as class see Richard Seymour (2012).

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formulation and rearticulation and affirming its potential for multiple and unexpected alliances. Acknowledgments I would like to express my gratitude to my doctoral advisor, Dr. Arturo Escobar, for encouraging me to take on the task of archiving and caring for the knowledges produced by social movements; to my dissertation committee members for their enthusiastic support; to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for funding my dissertation fieldwork in Spain; and to the American Council of Learned Societies for their funding support during my dissertation writing. My gratitude to Alexis Bhagat and John Cox for their editing work and to Sebastian Cobarrubias for keeping dinner warm and diapers changed. References Alba Rico, Santiago. Viva el mal, viva el capital. Madrid: Editorial Virus, 1992. Autonomia International Conference. 2012. “To have the Courage of Uncertainty: Cultures of Precarity”, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, December 6–7. Bojadžijev, Manuela and Serhat Karakayali. “Recuperating the sideshows of capitalism: The autonomy of migration today”. E-flux 17 (2010). Accessed February 15, 2016. http:// www.e-flux.com/journals/recuperating-the-sideshows-of-capitalism-the-auton omy-of-migration-today. Bourdieu, Pierre. Acts of resistance: Against the new myths of our time. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. Bourdieu, Pierre. Firing back: Against the tyranny of the market. New York: New Press, 2003. Casas-Cortés, Maribel. “Social movements as sites of knowledge production: Precarious labor, the fate of care and activist research in a globalizing Spain.” PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2009. Casas-Cortés, Maribel. “Uncertainty adrift: Producing a lexicon on precarity and care in Spain”. Paper presented at the Cultures of Precarity International Conference, Université Paris Ouest, Nanterre, December 6–7, 2012. Casas- Cortés, Maribel, Sebastian Cobarrubias and John Pickles. “An interview with Sandro Mezzadra”. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (2011): 584–598. Corsani, Antonella and Maurizio Lazzarato. “Le revenu garanti comme processus constituent”. Multitudes 10 (2002): 177–188.

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De Genova, Nicholas and Nathalie Peutz, eds. The deportation regime: Sovereignty, space, and the freedom of movement. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A thousand plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Entránsito. “Migrantes y precarious: Señales de un devenir común”. Indymedia Estrecho. Last modified 2004. Accessed October 24, 2009. http://estrecho.indymedia. org/newswire/display/7778/index.php. Escobar, Arturo and Michal Osterweil. “Social movements and the politics of the virtual: Deleuzian strategies”. In Science, technology and anthropology, edited by Casper Bruun Jensen and Kjetil Rödje, 187–218. New York: Berghan Books, 2010. Eskalera Karakola. “Prologo. Diferentes diferencias y ciudadanías excluyentes: Una revisión feminista”. In Otras inapropiables: Feminismos desde las fronteras, edited by M. Jacqui Alexander, Gloria Anzaldúa, Avtar Brah, Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Margaret Coulson, bell hooks, Aurora Levins Morales, Chela Sandoval, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, 9–32. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2004. Foti, Alex. “MAYDAY MAYDAY: Euro flex workers, time to get a move on!” Republicart (2005): 1–3. Accessed January 20, 2014. http://republicart.net/disc/precariat/foti01 _en.htm. Foucault, Michel. Language, counter-memory, practice: Selected essays and interviews. Translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977. Frassanito Network. “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us”. Accessed 20 2012. http://www.noborder.org/archive_item.php?id=369. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Multitude. New York: Penguin, 2004. Heidenreich, Nanna and Vodin Saša Vukadinović. “In your face: Activism, agit-prop, and the autonomy of migration; The case of Kanak Attak”. In After the avant-garde: Contemporary German and Austrian experimental film, edited by Randall Halle and Reinhild Steingröver, 131–156. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2008. Hess, Sabine. “We are facilitating states: An ethnographic analysis of the ICMPD”. In The politics of international migration management, edited by Martin Geiger and Antoine Pécoud, 96–119. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Kruglanski, Aviv. “Precarity explained to kids (a medley)”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, 4 (2004). Accessed February 15, 2016. http://www.joaap.org/4/aviv.html. Lazzarato, Maurizio. “Trabajo autónomo, producción por medio del lenguaje y ‘general intellect.’” Brumaria 7 (2006): 35–45. Lazzarato, Maurizio and Antonio Negri. “Trabajo inmaterial y subjetividad”. Brumaria 7 (2006): 45–55. Lizon, Ana Luisa Alberro. “The Spanish general strike”. Contemporary Review 254 (1989): 146.

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Maló De Molina, Marta. “Sobre la feminización del trabajo”. Revista Contrapoder 4–5 (2001). Massumi, Brian. “Translator’s foreword: The pleasures of philosophy”, foreword to A thousand plateaus, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), IX–XVI. Mezzadra, Sandro. “The right to escape”. Ephemera 4 (2004): 267–275. ———. “The gaze of autonomy: Capitalism, migration, and social struggles”. In The contested politics of mobility: Borderzones and irregularity, edited by Vicki Squire, 121–142. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. Mitropoulos, Angela. “Precari-Us?” In Precarious reader, edited by Josephine BerrySlater, 12–20. London: Mute, 2005. ———. “Interview with Angela Mitropoulos”. Shift Magazine, September, 2010. Accessed February 15, 2016. https://libcom.org/library/interview-angela-mitropoulos. New Left Project (2012). Accessed 9 March 2016. http://www.newleftproject.org/index. php/site/article_comments/we_are_all_precarious_on_the_concept_of_the _precariat_and_its_misuses. Papadopoulos, Dimitris, Niamh Stephenson and Vassilis Tsianos. Escape routes: Control and subversion in the twenty-first century. London: Pluto, 2008. Pérez Orozco, Amaia. Perspectivas feministas en torno a la economía: El caso de los cuidados. Madrid: Consejo Económico y Social, 2006. Pinilla, Rafael Pinilla. Más allá del bienestar: La renta básica de ciudadanía como innovación social basada en la evidencia. Barcelona: Icaria, 2006. Precarias a la Deriva. A la deriva por los circuitos de la precariedad femenina. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2004. Precarias a la Deriva. Precarious lexicon. Caring Labor: An Archive, 2005. Accessed 14 January 2014. http://caringlabor.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/precarias-a-la-deriva-pre carious-lexicon/. Puig de la Bellacasa. “Thinking with care”. In Ghamari-Tabrizi, S. edited. Thinking with Donna Haraway. Boston: MIT Press, 2008. Raventós, Daniel. Basic income: The material conditions of freedom. London: Pluto Pr, 2007. Seymour, Richard. We are all precarious – On the concept of the “precariat” and its misuses. Standing, Guy. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. Toret, Javier and Nicolás Sguiglia. “Cartography and war machines: challenges and experiences around militant research in Southern Europe.” Translated by María-­Isabel Casas-Cortés and Sebastián Cobarrubias, in Transform-Transversal web journal April. (2006). Accessed 9 March 2016. http://transform. eipcp. net/transversal/0406/ tsg/en.

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Tronti, Mario. “The strategy of refusal”. Semiotext (e) 3.3 (1980): 28–35. Tsianos, Vassilis and Dimitris Papadopoulos. “Precarity: A savage journey to the heart of embodied capitalism”. Transversal Journal 11 (2006). Universidad NómadaMental prototypes and monster institutions. Transversal, May (2008). Accessed 9 March 2016. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0508/universi dadnomada/en. Virno, Paolo. “Do you remember counter-revolution?” In Virno and Hard eds. Radical thought in Italy: A potential politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 241–261. Virno, Paolo. Virtuosismo y revolución: La acción política en la era del desencanto. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2003.

chapter 3

The Precariat Strikes Back – Precarity Struggles in Practice1 Martin Bak Jørgensen Introduction This message is from me to all brother and sister who are like me, to be strong and not give up until your get your rights. Nobody is stronger than others [sic]. Refugeeprotest.org 2014

Guy Standing’s description of the precariat has revitalised the debate on what the precariat is, and recently what it is not (2011, 2014). Standing’s grand cha­ racteristic of the precariat (as constituting a new (dangerous) class) met harsh critique in parts of academia and leftist venues (see, for example, Breman 2013; Frase 2013; and Seymour 2012). The rejection of the precariat as a new or separate class was articulated before however (see, for example, Robinson 2011; Neilson and Rossiter 2005; 2008; Tsianos 2007). Already in the mid-00s, researchers investigating the EuroMayDay campaigns questioned the idea that the activists protesting against precarisation (and later austerity) could be seen as constituting one unified social actor, and even less a new class (­Doerr 2010). The problem, as Neilson and Rossiter (2008) defined it, was that too much was being put into the concept thereby depriving it of analytical power. With a concept taken from Laclau, it has become an empty signifier. This chap­ ter draws on understandings linking the notion of the precariat (and processes of precarisation) to practice. Precariat and precarity are here understood as having a performative component and as an everyday phenomenon. It investi­ gates how precarity becomes a platform for ‘striking back’. Following Shukaitis (2013), the chapter asks what it does, rather than what it is: ‘What does precar­ ity add to political analysis and strategy’? Second, the chapter contends that precarity does refer to a structural condition but one that characterizes the economic condition and workplace as well as the social space. It ­characterizes 1 An earlier version of this chapter was first published as “Precariat – what it is and isn’t – ­towards an understanding of what it does” Critical Sociology doi: 10.1177/0896920515608925. This chapter elaborates the case on Recht auf Stadt.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004329706_004

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not only employment conditions but the social system as such. Precarity is hence understood as a mode for analysing economy and for rethinking hetero­ geneous identities and group formations under neoliberal capitalism. Preca­ rity is not understood as constituting a class (in a structural sense), but drawing on experiences from political activist perspectives precarity becomes a point of departure for creating a common space for social struggles and for produ­ cing new political subjectivities. The role of migrants in the advanced capitalist economies defined by neo­ liberalism and increased flexibilisation, globalisation and mobility has gained attention in political economy, labour market studies, in sociological and eth­ nographic perspectives and more recently in (critical) border studies. The mi­ grant is often described as the emblem of the precariat – the precarious figure per se. Standing also situates migrants as a central group in the growing pre­ cariat but does not prescribe the group much potential for agency. Change is not bound to come from this part of the precariat. In contrast, Hardt and Negri (2004) have characterised migrants as a special category within the multitude that embodies revolutionary potential. In Empire Hardt and Negri (2000) de­ scribed the conditions existing with the forms of global sovereignty formed by global neoliberalism. Multitude is the lived experiences and alternative to this characterised by an embedded urge for resistance against exploitation and repression and the struggle for a democratic society. They argue that: […] most migrations are driven by the need to escape conditions of vio­ lence, starvation, or depravation, but together with that negative condi­ tion there is also the positive desire for wealth, peace, and freedom. This combined act of refusal and expression of desire is enormously powerful. hardt and negri 2004, 131

Mezzadra (2007) has argued that migrant struggles prefigure the struggles of the precariat because migration tests the limits of capitalist control (and the degree to which states can manage migration), and because the precari­ ousness of migrant labour can spread to the entire workforce. Not as a ‘virus’ through a causal effect but in terms of similarity of conditions and as the effect of a general political-economic strategy of accumulation in neoliberal capital­ ism. A similar analysis was made by parts of the precarity movement itself. The Frassanito-network, which also sees the migrant as sharing all the forms of precarisation and depreciation, claims: To talk about migrants’ labour means to talk about a general tendency of labour to mobility, to diversity, to deep changes, which is already ­affecting

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although with different degrees of intensity all workers. Because of the possible extension of these conditions we speak of a political centrality of migrants’ work. Frassanito-network 2005

The migrant becomes a central figure in both the understanding of precarity and processes of precarisation and in the strategies and struggles developing from this condition. As the Frassanito-network claims migrant labour is a po­ litical category as it draws attention to, and forestalls, the general conditions of contemporary labour: “Contemporary labour is becoming migrant” (noborder network 2004). They do so because they embody the experiences of precarity and because the mobility which is the key characteristic of migration also is the response to borders and identities. Thereby the migrant struggles not only prefigure the struggles of the precariat as Mezzadra claims, migrants in this reading instinctively reacts against neoliberalism and can inspire other actors and activists to do the same (see Sivetidis 2006 for a longer discussion). Linking migrant struggles with other types of social struggles taking place under the heading of the ‘precariat’ therefore offers a reservoir of actions and strategies which can be employed to struggle for social change broadly. The interlink between migration and precarity hence offers a productive point of departure for analysing social and economic conditions and attempts to create a common ground for struggle, agency and contestation beyond the individual migrant. The chapter progresses as follows. A theoretical discussion of the related concepts of precarity (condition), precariat (identity) and precarisation (pro­ cess) is followed by a section on reactions to and from the precariat and a discussion of the potential of precarity as a tool for resistance and a possible catalyst for transformation. The chapter finally introduces three cases to illus­ trate how the processes of precarisation play out in everyday life situations and the economic, legal and social system and how precarity can become a point of mobilisation and expand to encompass new alliances and conflicts: Lampedusa in Hamburg 2013–2015, The Recht auf Stadt movement [Right to the city] in Hamburg 2015 and the ‘Freedom Not Frontex’ action in June 2014. The Lampedusa case concerns Sub-Saharan African migrants who were forced to flee Libya after nato’s invention and through Lampedusa and Italy ended up in Hamburg. The Recht auf Stadt case is an expansion of the conflict in Hamburg. The ‘Freedom Not Frontex’ action also revolves around migration, but the angle is criticism of borders, asylum systems and the eu policy frame­ work and practices of resistance.

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Conditions The concepts ‘precariat’, ‘precarity’ and ‘precarisation’ have been outlined in different ways. In this chapter, precarity designates a condition, precariat the identity formation, and precarisation the processual aspects.2 Broadly speak­ ing, the interrelated concepts refer to decades of neoliberal policy hegemony resulting in flexibilisation of the labour markets, insecurity, uncertainty and risks across social strata. The implications include a shrinking of work rights and informalization through outsourcing, temporary jobs, sub-contracting and related processes. In that sense it is not dysfunctional or a ‘strange crea­ ture’ in the global economy but rather, as Schierup, Ålund and Likić‐Brborić (2014) argue, a constitutive element of global disorder to which it is very func­ tional. While global neoliberal economy has glorified one sub-group of the precariat and blurred the retrenchment of social and work rights in narratives of the ‘creative class’ (e.g. Richard Florida) it also produces “human trash”, the “wasted lives” (Bauman 2004), which is the major part of the precariat. The term was ‘popularised’ with Standing’s book from 2011, which offers two defini­ tions of the precariat. The first definition relies on the amalgam and its em­ bedded implications: the precariat as a distinctive socio-economic group. The second definition draws on an explicit Marxist perspective: “The precariat is a c­ lass-in-the-making, if not yet a class-for-itself” (Standing 2011, 7). In other words, it can be regarded as a class-in-becoming. This distinction becomes cen­ tral when we look at the composition of the precariat. According to Standing, it consists of an ever growing number of people across the world, living and working precariously, usually in a series of short-term jobs, without recourse to stable occupational identities or careers, stable social protection or relevant protective regulations. These insecure workers have no collective bargaining power and are being abandoned by the traditional working class organisa­ tions, most notably the trade unions. Retrenchment of securities (­related to labour market, employment, job, work, skill production, income and represen­ tation) is a main dynamic of the process of precarisation. Migrants make up a large share of the world’s precariat. The claim that the precariat is a distinct 2 The Frassanito-network wrote a working paper for the EuroMayDay preparations in 2005, which presents the activists’ own distinction and conceptualization of the terms ‘precarious’, ‘precarisation’ and ‘precariat’; Frassanito-network, “Precarious, Precarisation, Precariat?”. In short, precarisation is here a process that can establish a frame for constituting political subjectivities, mitigate differences and identify commonalities and ultimately a space for struggle; see also Neilson and Rossiter, “From precarity”.

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and separate group also indicates that there are other groups (or at least one) that do not share these features and that these groups have different interests. Standing’s analysis contrasts ’the precariat’ and ‘the salariat’, which is basically defined through privileges, e.g. secure employment, sick pay, paid holidays and pension schemes, often employed by the state in the public administration and the civil service. The distinction between precariat and salariat has met heavy criticism. Leftist writers and academics refute the crude distinction between precarious and non-precarious workers and dispute that there is such a thing as a perma­ nent divide between the two. The recession and policy austerity interventions have clearly shown that budget cuts also affect public administration, educa­ tion systems and other public sectors. As Choonara (2011) writes: “All work­ ers can find themselves in a more or less precarious position” and Seymour (2012) takes it to the edge: “[w]e are all the precariat” – including all who are “not a member of the ‘power bloc’, a capitalist class in its fractions” (see also Shukaitis 2013). In a recent essay, Seymour revisits the relationship between class and precarity: So, what does it mean to be working class today? Who can speak for “the class”? In a way it may actually be the most marginal and precarious work­ ers, the disposable young, de-skilled and casual labourers, migrant work­ ers and others at the bottom of the pile. For precarity is something that isn’t reserved for a small, specialised group of people – “the precariat” or whoever. It spreads. It affects us all. The whip of insecurity disciplines even those who were recently comfortable. seymour 2014

Nevertheless, broadening the base of the precariat, as a response to Standing’s flawed diagnosis, might produce a problem for the precariat as an analytical concept. Its effects are claimed to be too diverse in the above reading (see for instance Robinson 2011). How can we analyze the emerging political and social subjectivities as one unified social actor (let alone as a class) (Tsianos 2007)? This critique or problematisation is similar to the critique of Hardt and Negri’s concept of the multitude (Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004; Shukaitis 2012). To over­ come this challenge, I here follow Casas-Cortés (2009, 2014), who argues that the concept of the precariat must be translated into practice and that the con­ cept is better seen as an analytical tool and as a strategic point of departure for political subjectivities (I will elaborate below). It can be a basis for analysing the conditions of the neoliberal economy as well as a tool for reconceptualis­ ing new heterogeneities across the social and political spheres.

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A possible problem in Standing’s historical outline of the development of the precariat is the claim that it describes a ‘new’ tendency. “Precarity is usually defined in contrast to the previous period, Fordism. Precarity is, in a common definition, ‘the labour conditions that arose after the transition from life-long, stable jobs common in industrial capitalist and welfare-state econo­ mies, to temporary, insecure, low-paying jobs emerging with the globalisation of the service and financial economy” (Casas-Cortés and Cobarrubias 2007, 115). Unemployment, underemployment, insecurity and precariousness are hardly new conditions for the working class, however. A number of scholars regard the Fordist security and union protectionism, not precarity, as the his­ torical exception (Frase 2013, 1–4; Neilson and Rossiter 2005, 2008).3 Fordism was not all-inclusive but based on distinction of insiders (skilled workers) and outsiders (atomised workers) (Neilson and Rossiter 2005). The precarisation taking place today is not an exception but part of a process of normalisation in neoliberalism (Lorey 2011). What is new then? The realisation by some groups (middle-class, highly educated, non-migrants) that they also belong to groups in both real and potentially precarious positions is perhaps a more recent phe­ nomenon. Part of the Occupy movement’s success in mobilising illustrates this perfectly. So do the anti-austerity movements like the Spanish 15-M whose membership is far broader than the normal mixture of experienced social movement activists and students.4 Moreover, precarisation is spreading to an increasing range of social sectors, and in a longer historical perspective we could argue that neoliberalism has spurred a new phase of precarisation, but that precarity as such is nothing new. If there is a new tendency it might be increased representation of a ‘­migrant precariat’ (Schierup, Ålund and Likić‐Brborić 2014; Schierup et al. 2015). ­Although young people living in for instance Greece and Spain, which struggle with historically high levels of especially youth unemployment, could argue that their conditions and life possibilities have worsened, immigrants still constitute a central part of the precariat (as also Standing argues). Bom­ mes and Geddes (2000) concluded that immigrants as a group have become ‘the new undeserving poor’ in the European welfare states. However, immi­ grants have also been depicted as instrumental in processes of precarisation. They fit the imperative of flexibility perfectly (Schierup, Ålund and Likić‐ Brborić 2014; Tsianos 2007); they have long been seen as a reserve army of la­ bour and linked to processes of exploitation; they are scapegoated as carriers 3 The critique has also come from the precarity movement itself, e.g. the Frassanito-network. 4 Personal communication with organising member of the ‘Real Democracy Now’ movement Ignaicio Sierra, April 2014; see also contributions on Spain in Cox and Fominya (2013).

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of p ­ recarity, ­embodying and importing precarity into secluded social spheres (Robinson 2011). This is an example of what Mayo (2007) in G ­ ramscian terms has described as a ‘misplaced alliance’; an alliance between national capital and labour against the competition from ’outside’, for instance in campaigns like ‘British jobs for British workers’ and potential support for neo-fascist ar­ ticulations (Agustín and Jørgensen 2016). This may obscure the fact that na­ tional ‘workers’ and immigrants share a fate of oppression and subalternity. In other words, migration is not a cause but an effect of precarity (Robinson 2011). The transformation of citizenship and the precarisation creates social and political stratification and leaves migrants in what Balibar (2003) has termed a ‘new Apartheid in Europe’. The logic of this European Apartheid, to stick with the term, is part of a broader erosion of social and work rights and the institutionalisation of precarity (Schierup, Hansen and Castles 2006). It reinforces distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ immigrants. As argued else­ where (Jørgensen 2012), states become more eager to receive migrants who make an economic contribution to society while confining marginalised and vulnerable outsiders to “impoverished and excluded communities of fate” (Jordan and Düvell 2003) paraphrasing Bauman’s ‘wasted lives’ mentioned above.

Reactions: Disengagement with Established Politics The demands of the competitive market are remorseless: reduce the cost of labour; privatise everything; remove protection from working people, and maintain a pool of unemployed to discipline those lucky enough to have a job. Trade unions are to be obstructed while the wealthy are court­ ed in the hope that they will find a pliant, flexible workforce that is easy to exploit. […] None of this is new. But where is our political represen­ tation? […] Can the Labour party be reclaimed? Or, rather, made anew into one that will represent the interests of the people? History suggests it cannot. […] The Labour party is part of the problem, not the solution. The Greens have many admirable policies, but we look in vain for a thor­ oughgoing analysis for fundamental change. We need a new voice, a new movement – a new party. loach, hudson and achcar 2013

This excerpt is from an opinion piece by British filmmaker Ken Loach, aca­ demic and writer Kate Hudson and anti-war activist Gilbert Achcar, in which they analyse the consequences of neoliberalism and precarity and repeat

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some post-political lines of thinking (Badiou, Rancière and Žižek). Traditional ­parties cannot and will not solve the problems at hand. The authors deviate from post-political perspectives as they actually point to a solution, namely mobilising for a new type of political party based on a popular mobilisation of the indignant and precarious groups in British society.5 One that does not stand on the back of social movements but somehow resembles them. If we look at the reactions to the austerity measures across the globe in the con­ text of this chapter, especially within a European context, it is fair to say that representative/electoral democracy has failed in the sense that people, as the commoners, no longer feel represented by the established political system.6, 7 Liberal market democracies have not prevented new asymmetrical cleavages, inequalities and modes of exclusion and marginalisation. In post-political and/or post-democratic society, consensus politics reduces politics to social administration, illustrated by Third Way politics and marketization of citizen­ ship or by David Cameron’s austerity defence for budget cuts in 2013: “There is no alternative”.8 Cameron here borrows the phrase directly from Margaret Thatcher’s legitimation of the tax policy and ideological defence of (econom­ ic) neoliberalism. The ‘tina’ logic is also today part of the consensus politics. However, as Mouffe (2000) has argued, consensus only represents the domi­ nant hegemony. Consensus is being disturbed and challenged, however, and the precariat plays a part in this struggle. ‘The European spring’ (symbolised by the populist mobilisations in Greece and Spain and the rise of the Syriza and Podemos parties) has shown strong mobilisation against austerity, p ­ recarity

5 What later turned into the Left Unity Party also running for election in some districts in the uk election May 7, 2015. 6 The discussion about the ‘commons’ has resurfaced in the last few years. It has been a central part of the Italian autonomia tradition of activist research (Negri, Tronti, Berardi, Virno and the ‘newer’ generation Marazzi, Fumagalli, Roggero, Mezzadra and others) (see for instance Lotringer and Marazzi 2007). The idea of the commons is clearly related to that of precarity and the precariat. The commons (or ‘commonwealth’ in Hardt and Negri’s term) stands as a practical and viable political alternative to the neoliberal society fostering eternal individual competition. Instead of pursuing favorable solutions for the individual, it stands for a collec­ tive subjectivity pursuing action and practices that benefit the commons. 7 A recent mapping of world protests between 2006 and 2013 showed that lack of ‘real’ democ­ racy is the most frequent issue in global protests (Ortiz et al. 2013). It is also perceived by the protesters as the explanation for economic injustice as it prevents economic issues from be­ ing addressed. In other words, representational democracy is not doing what it is supposed to do. 8 David Cameron, speech given in Keighley, West Yorkshire, March 7, 2013.

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and for ‘real’ democracy.9 Re-envisioning politics through the precariat can thus challenge the post-political society. This might not happen through the established political parties due to disengagement with traditional party poli­ tics10 but via new mobilisation channelled through the “newest social move­ ments” (Day 2005). Class issues are traditionally regarded as the domain of trade unions and established politics. Some constituencies, for instance un­ employed, may lack the material and symbolic resources to mobilise broadly. However, studies of French mobilisation of unemployed show the opposite. Collective organisations of unemployed [s]ucceeded in modifying, or at least for a certain period, the unem­ ployed’s own perception about their own mobilisation potential. They encouraged the unemployed to express collective claims and convinced thousands of them to mobilize. Royall as cited in Della Porta 2010, 44

This was possible because the protesters addressed issues of social recogni­ tion by acting within an institutionalised field with welfare institutions that focused on issues of unemployment (ibid, 45). I take up this discussion of the reaction to established politics to connect to the investigation of the precar­ ity as a point for mobilisation. If neither the established political parties nor the social partners (unions etc.) are agents of social and political transforma­ tion, who are the new actors in this game? Union and media activist as well as EuroMayDay organiser Alex Foti (like Hardt and Negri and Harvey) sees change coming exactly from the precariat: “The precariat is to postindustri­ alism as the proletariat was to industrialism: the non-pacified social subject” (Foti 2005). Standing’s 2014 book, A precariat charter: From denizens to citizens, arguably opens up for a similar reading – or at least for an emphasis on the urge for resistance identified in parts of the precariat. This leads us to the ques­ tion about the immigrant precariat. As mentioned, Standing downplays their role in the struggle for social and political transformation. Other scholars like ­Hannah Lewis and her colleagues make the opposite reading. They underline 9

10

The struggle against precarity is older than the 15-M mobilisations and similar of course. For instance, the EuroMayDay mobilisations against precarity, explicitly framed as such, date back to 2000–2001 (e.g. Doerr 2010; Foti 2005; Lorey 2010). New political parties engaged in anti-austerity and basically anti-capitalist issues have surfaced in the uk, Spain and recently in Bosnia and Slovenia, and at eu-level (the Party of the European Left). Likewise, the Greek Syriza party’s success can be seen as a response to the organic and political crisis.

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the ­potential of the precariat constituted of migrant workers and examine their potential for forming a political force capable of collective action and re­ sistance against neoliberal capitalism (Lewis et al. 2014; see also Casas-Cortés 2014). The migrant precariat thereby holds a role in reviving political conflicts and confronting political power. Political conflict makes the migrant preca­ riat visible as political subjects. Following Jacques Rancière’s discussion with Arendt’s work one can argue the sans-papiers have enacted the right to have rights when they speak as if they had the same rights as citizens (Rancière 2004; Schaap 2011). The Freedom Not Frontex case to be discussed later illus­ trates this well. Andrew Schaap, linking up with Rancière, captures this when he claims that the political is constituted when those who are not qualified to participate in politics act and speak as if they were (Schaap 2011, 35). Collective campaigns like ‘A Day Without Immigrants’ in 2006 organised by Latino immigrants in the United States (see Longhi 2013) and the 24h sans nous in France in 2010 where migrants stopped working and stopped consuming to show what life would be like without immigrants demonstrate the emer­ gence of new political subjectivities – the non-pacified social subjects – and how they can take agency. These examples illustrate that precarity can pro­ duce political subjectivity. The precarious figure is, so to speak, interpellated as an acting subject. Interpellation is not coming from established political parties but from alternative constellations in civil society, perceivably includ­ ing new forms of political parties as, for instance, the Spanish Podemos Party (Jørgensen and Agustín 2015).

Agency: The Precariat and Precarity as Resistance and Catalyst for Transformation

Inglehart’s ‘silent revolution’ and post-materialist narrative from the 1970s has been adopted in studies of social movements, which have often been seen as the bearers of post-materialistic values. Class cleavages in this reading – the mobilising factor of the labour movements – were seen as pacified. The rise of poor people’s movements, the EuroMayDay initiatives and the resistance of the precariat through manifestations like the ‘indignant’ movement in Spain (Indignados, 15-M) and the different manifestations of Occupy-related appro­ priations of public space show that socio-economic structures still influence present-day mobilisations and that class issues matter. Precarisation hence harbingers new modes of participation. While this may seem like an ‘over-optimistic’ perspective, I argue that demanding analytical and empirical attention to links between precarisation, practice and resistance

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can pave the way for a re-envisioning of politics. Not as a ‘counter-movement’ in the Polanyian sense, but as articulated resistance and the emergence of po­ litical subjectivities. Tsianos claims that the emergence of new subjectivities in the last decades (post-Fordist societies) is “not the configuration of production […] but the embodied experience of shifting arrangements of exploitation” (Tsianos 2007, 190). These ‘shifting arrangements’ are located within and beyond labour market arrangements but also intervene in the social dimension. Resource mobilisation approaches to studying social movements typically re­ gard social movements as anchored in individuals committing themselves to a cause and taking up the concerns of a social constituency to which they do not (necessarily) belong, due to a sense of solidarity (Giugni and Passy 2001). Linking this claim to the power of indignation (coming from the literature on the precariat) points to a broadening of the bases for protest and mobilisation. To capture the potential for structural change and systemic critiques, we need to return to the root of the word precariat (i.e. an amalgam of ‘proletariat’ and ‘precarity’) and change the conception of the proletariat and the limits of this category. What is the potential of the proletariat under contemporary neolib­ eral capitalism? Harvey made this point under the heading ‘alternatives’ in his 2012 book Rebel Cities and asked: Mourn the passing of the possibility of revolution because the proletariat has disappeared, or change our conception of the proletariat to include the hordes of unorganised urbanization producers (of the sort that mo­ bilised in immigrant rights marches), and explore their distinctive revo­ lutionary capacities and power. harvey 2012, 130

Harvey did not regard this (the new heterogeneous group) as a ‘dangerous class’ but as a productive collective organising, as a potential. This understand­ ing also paraphrases Hardt and Negri’s claim that traditional unions cannot “represent adequately the complex multiplicity of class subjects and experi­ ences” (Hardt and Negri 2009). However, they also contend that: The impotence of the unions does not signal a farewell to the working class or even a decline of worker struggle but rather an increasing multi­ plicity of the proletariat and a new physiognomy of struggles. (ibid) Harvey does not use the term ‘the precariat’ but describes the new formation and resistance as ‘urban struggles and organising processes’, and Hardt and Ne­ gri use the term ‘the multitude’. Why should the precariat then be a ­better term?

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Perhaps it is not, but it does – in the outline given so far – d­ escribe both the structural conditions of global economy and the constitution of new political subjectivities to challenge these conditions formed from very heterogeneous identities and not least the capacity to form a common social space for strug­ gle; in other words, conditions, identity and process as well as the social spaces where agency takes place. In this sense these new struggles are a ‘movement of movements’. The precarity protests during and outside EuroMayDays have created alliances between cultural producers, knowledge workers, migrants, autonomists, unemployed, trade unions, radical leftist unions, and organisa­ tions of irregular people (Lorey 2010; Raunig 2004). The capacity for change is still to be investigated and assessed as the claim-making calls for long-term structural change. Regardless of the outcome so far, Occupy has been success­ ful in identifying, disturbing and problematizing ‘common sense’. In Grams­ cian terms, common sense is hegemony, which must be challenged to create transformation. Occupy managed to ‘occupy’ the language and has, according to different scholars, altered the way the framework of global economy is being discussed today (Chomsky 2012; Langman 2013; Žižek 2012). A common ‘warning’, which can be derived from the literature on the pre­ cariat and more importantly by following recent mobilisation, is not to depict precarious groups as victims. While the structural position in the economic and social system may be precarious, these groups are not only victims of pre­ carisation. When precarity is framed as a deviation from the social norms, such a framing simultaneously presents a diagnosis of the problem and a prognosis of the solution. Unemployment is framed as an individual problem, and governments devel­ op policies that sanction and punish groups believed to be a burden. This con­ veys a liberal-paternalistic message, which is a key element of ­neo-liberalism: That society, in Wacquant’s words (2009, 8), is liberal and free at the top and restrictive, paternalistic and authoritarian at the bottom. In Punishing the Poor from 2009, Wacquant delivers a powerful analysis of how neoliberal gover­ nance has increased social divisions and led to policy-making that seeks to punish and discipline ‘problematic’ groups, thereby redefining the modalities of government action. Within this political logic, emphasising individual re­ sponsibility is a necessary tool for revitalising welfare societies. N ­ eoliberalism has no logic wish, need or drive to end inequality, however. Social theory does the precariat no good in depicting precarious groups as victims only. As ­Robinson argues: This framing of the precariat as victims at best and a social problem at worst both denies agency and voice and contributes to repressive

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­ easures aimed at marginal people. It often uses a certain doublespeak: m concern with exclusion is really concern with what is perceived as peo­ ple’s failure to “include” themselves in the system on the system’s terms; people are then to be “enabled” or “given opportunities” – often euphe­ misms for coercion – to be “included”, in effect, to be forced to circulate, communicate, work, etc. robinson 2011

In practice, this victimisation is challenged and refuted. Raunig shows how the precarity movement (across Europe) abandoned the dictum ‘stop precarity!’ in favour of a positive identification with the precariat as a group of heteroge­ neous identities whose self-image is a social movement, not a group of victims (Raunig 2007).11 Precarity does not necessarily designate a common cause (nor a class-inthe-making), and we should not lump too much into one concept (cf. the cri­ tique of Standing). There are both institutional and other divisions (e.g. legal statuses and memberships) that cause distinctions, but it can function as a so­ cial space in which struggles are articulated and united. Neilson and Rossiter describe precarity as an ontological experience and social-economic condi­ tion “with multiple registers that hold the potential to contribute to a political composition of the common” (2005, 55). They argue that these differences and experiences can be translated into a common space. Generalising from a con­ crete example of Indian taxi drivers who mobilize in reaction to racist attacks, they argue that political possibilities emerge with such moments of protest (2005, 67). ­Becoming common can be seen as ‘precarisation as political con­ stituting’ (Lorey 2010)12 and precarity can empirically be seen as “catalyst for 11

12

Some scholars question the precarity movement’s ability to effectively organize radical action (Neilson and Rossiter 2005). Mezzadra and Roggero (2006) add that the EuroMay­ Days did not generate common forms of organisation and praxis (the article is written in 2006, however, and they might reach a different conclusion today if they took, for in­ stance, 15-M networks into consideration). The precarity movement has also been criti­ cised for lacking representativity (Robinson 2011). Finally, Butler (2009) argues that since precarity is expanding rather than contracting, the ontological sameness of precarious­ ness is not recognised and therefore cannot be the starting point for politics. Lorey’s argument here is that becoming-common as political agency, something on the move and a practice, is a constituent power (Lorey 2010, 7). Although the latter term is taken from Negri, it is different from Hardt and Negri’s (2009) concept of the common as a social ontological constitution. The focus here is on the process of becoming and prac­ tice. This resembles Neilson and Rossiter’s understanding of the precarity as a “transversal movement that is never stable” (2005, 63).

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developing a new radical politics of everyday life” (Shukaitis 2013, 642). This is exactly asking what precarity does. Practices The three cases of precariat practice described in this section illustrate the chapter’s argument that precarity is not only a sociological category but rep­ resents a point of mobilisation and resistance. Precarity is what Casas-Cortés (2014) has described as ‘a toolbox for rearticulating fragmented social realities’. Migration and mobility are core components of capitalism.13 Lampedusa in Hamburg Lampedusa in Hamburg (LiHH) sprung from the ‘Emergency North Africa’ od­ yssey, which started in 2011 during nato’s intervention in Libya, and was inten­ sified by geopolitical instability in Tunisia and Egypt. In the first five months of 2011, more than 45,000 refugees from Libya arrived in Italy, most of them with origin in the sub-Saharan region and other parts of Africa, and all of them forced out of Libya where they had managed to make a living. Their lives were characterised by hardship but only some of them were refugees in Libya. What they had in common was that they all became refugees when they were aban­ doned by their workplaces (many of them international companies) in Libya when the war intensified and all were forced to flee regardless of their previ­ ous status. Arriving in Italy, they were absorbed in the Emergency North-Africa Program, which, however, was terminated in February 2013 under the Monti government. The emergency was officially declared over, and the lives and fu­ ture of the thousands of refugees were ignored. To remove them from Italian responsibility, the authorities issued a one-year humanitarian permit, which gave them mobility within the eu according to the Dublin Regulation. How­ ever, most of them were sent back. The LiHH movement was formed in March 2013 by a group of refugees from the Libyan war in direct response to German 13

The following section is based on different sources. For the case of ‘Lampedusa in Ham­ burg’ from participant observations at meetings, events and demonstrations in Hamburg, informal interviews with refugees (in St. Pauli church and living places) and activists in Hamburg, formal interview with union leader at Ver.di, online material and written mate­ rial collected in Hamburg. For the case of ‘Freedom not Frontex’, the discussion is based on online material, participant observations and interviews conducted during the Action Week in Brussels, which took place at the same time as the European Council meeting in June 2014.

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and European laws. About 300 refugees coming from Italy openly challenged the limits to free movement imposed by the Dublin Regulation. In Hamburg, the group began to organize a protest movement. It has since engaged in a fundamental and vital struggle for the members own right to stay and for the rights of all asylum seekers, refugees and migrants to freely decide where to move, live and work. LiHH’s slogan ‘We are here to stay!’ illustrates this type of struggle as it directly challenges the widespread idea that asylum seekers and refugees are only here temporarily. Access to work and identity as workers are central issues for the group. Both in their public contestation and in conversa­ tions they point to the lack of working rights, precarious conditions and ex­ ploitation in the clandestine labour market as central problems. Their banners claim belonging to a broader united precariat. Appropriating precarity (as con­ nected to labour conditions) in this sense offers a platform for mobilisation as well as an expansion of the conflict and their claims-making as their protests now go beyond issues of asylum and connect to claims for fundamental rights. As argued by Raunig above, a positive self-identification rather than one of victimisation. Their main message is summed up in the protest slogan, ‘We did not survive the nato war in Libya to come and die in the streets of Hamburg’. This message displays the interlinks between international conflicts and lo­ cal conditions as well as the brutality of the current border regime. LiHH has developed a large support base including churches, the leftist St Pauli football club, local schools, the university, the theatre, alternative social movements and, to various degrees, trade unions such as Ver.di and IG Metall (IG Metall has initiated meetings between migrants, metal workers and dock workers to exchange knowledge and experiences). Schools and students have organised protests. In an interview with local union leader Peter Bremme from Ver.di in­ formed me that the union accepted the refugees as members even though they do not have working and residence permits. gew, the education sector union, has done the same. A symbolic act perhaps, but still an expansion of alliances.

Recht auf Stadt – Gentrification, Precarisation and Migration in Hamburg Urban studies have shown how the city has the potential to become a p ­ olitical platform for social struggles and social justice and have claimed that these are not initiated in a ‘country’ but more often in urban settings (Dikec 2007; ­Harvey 2008, 2012; Holston 1998). The concept of rights to the city was coined by Henri Lefebvre (1968) in his analysis of the Parisian protests of 1968, where he identified the right to oeuvre, to participation and appropriation as the main ­components. Lefebvre’s idea of change (both social change and of the people) in the cities leads to a development of the right to the city as a p ­ olitical

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motto unifying urban social struggles, as a human right consisting in the col­ lective power to reshape the processes of urbanisation (Harvey 2008) or as partaking in the debates on citizenship (Purcell 2003). LiHH and the ‘rights to the city’ movement in Hamburg can be seen as an example of both expand­ ing the struggle and re-scaling the struggle which both open for the constitu­ tion of political subjectivities. Processes of gentrification and precarisation go hand in hand here. Gentrification is an economic process which turns cities into assets for speculative investments and a spatial fix for capitalism (Stein 2015). Doing so also entails a political dimension altering public policies on housing and common spaces. Gentrification spurs precarisation. In the active resistance against this tendency and political economic development the pro­ cesses of precarisation can become a social and political platform for uniting heterogeneous actors under ‘the rights to the city’ heading. These dynamics also warrants an investigation of the access of migrants to the housing debates and gentrification struggles. Ferreri has argued that the struggles on housing politics are inaccessible for others than professional and long-term commu­ nity groups: The temporalities of housing struggles demand to identify and engage with a more or less stable topological coordinate, something that precari­ ous workers may not be able to meet precisely because of their precari­ ous life/work situations. How can a precarious urban population even begin to tackle an issue that requires the temporal and organisational horizon of decades? ferreri 2012

It is therefore worth investigating if this holds true for Hamburg. I will also argue that right to the city claims go beyond housing politics as they also re­ gard the social fabric and composition of the city. Negri (2004) has argued that we need to “redefine the reality and meaning of the word “rights”” and pro­ poses an alternative understanding of rights where he claims that “the right to resistance is neither absolute nor self-justified. It is rather a right built upon common demands and social cooperation”.14 Thinking with Negri’s proposal brings us closer what has happened in Hamburg than the closure of struggles described by Ferreri. The rights to the city movement in Hamburg is a broad coalition fighting against commercialisation of public spaces, privatisation 14

I have borrowed the argument and reference to Negri from Vasudevan’s article “The au­ tonomous city: Towards a critical geography of occupation”, Progress in Human Geography (2014), 1–22.

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and affordable housing. Whereas these types of movements in some cities have ended up as discussion salons for architects and art students focusing on aesthetics, the movement in Hamburg (as in Madrid, Hackney, Rio…) still has links to the squatters of the 1980s and has maintained links to the autonomists’ communities and politics prober. In 2013 the movement started including the LiHH refugees in their protests. Likewise have some of the squatted houses in places like Hafenstrasse housed the refugees. Members of the “Gezi Park Fiction” group at Hafenstrasse, expressed their solidarity with the LiHH the message: “Love real boat people – Hate maritime marketing” connecting the refugee protest with the anti-gentrification struggle. They also stated: “People from Lampedusa have enriched our lives for a few months now. They gave back to St. Pauli a sense of community and a sense of knowing that our right to the city doesn’t know nations or property; and surely no skin colour”.15 In the winter 2013 the local government allowed the St. Pauli church to erect a small number of containers at the church property to house the refugees over winter. Something which again divided the initial LiHH group. This solution was protested by the rights to the city movement who did not consider this as a solution at all as it had no permanency at all gave no recognition of the structural and legal conditions. Later in 2013 Rote Flora, a former theatre now leftist communal house, in Schanzenviertel was about to be sold by the local government alongside the planned demolishment of a pair high-rises in St. Pauli, the so-called Esso-Häuser, by the new owners. Together these planned actions spurred new demonstrations. The biggest one took place December 21 of 2013 under the slogan: ‘Here to Stay: Refugees, Esso-Häuser, Rote Flora – Wir bleiben alle’. The slogan is interesting as well as powerful because it creates an inclusive ‘we’ not distinguishing between natives and foreigners (We are here to stay), based on a heterogeneous movement defining a new common ground in Gramscian terms (Agustín and Jørgensen, 2016). The conditions of this struggle changes all the time however, and expand­ ing the precariat within a collected claim of rights to the city also have had unforeseen consequences. The alliance-building with a revised version of the Rights to the city movement in Hamburg – Recht auf Stadt is a recent develop­ ment. In their self-description LiHH and Recht auf Stadt depict the alliance in the following way: A new alliance consisting of Lampedusa in Hamburg, groups from the Right to the City network, refugees from Lagers around Hamburg, trade 15

Accessed December 4, 2015, http://revolution-news.com/lampedusa-hamburg-refugees -fight-right-stay-lampedusahh/.

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union activist, student organisations and many other groups has formed in Hamburg! They want to campaign for a change in the refugee policy on the occasion of the elections in February 2015 and call themselves “Right to the City – Never mind the papers!”16 The political context was the election that took place February 15, 2015. As such the alliance constructs a new political unity based on heterogeneous actors seeking a common goal. It is not based on distinctions between ethnicity or res­ idential status but draws out the commonalities of people living in Hamburg: We are people living in Hamburg. We are refugees struggling on a daily basis with the bad living situation in overcrowded and isolated camps, we are neighbours fighting against our displacement from overpriced neigh­ bourhoods, and we are activists recapturing our right to the city. We are organised refugees of the group “Lampedusa in Hamburg”. We are union­ ists who know that as wage-earners, we can only be strong if we unite with the wage-earners working under the poorest working conditions. We are students who cannot tolerate that quality education is only for rich people. We are people who cannot accept that inalienable human rights do not apply to our neighbours. We are fighting for solidarity in Hamburg and everywhere. We take care of each other and we will become stronger by uniting our struggles. We know that in this city there is enough room for everybody except for those people who try to take away our rights and to enrich themselves at our expense. […] We fight together with homeless people, not against them. We fight for our right to the city, knowing that the profits of real estate owners are more important in this city than the needs of the general public. […] We want to live in a city where all human beings have the same rights, never mind their legal status. (ibid) Protesting under the banner of ‘never mind the papers’ while at the same time calling for formal rights through the established political channels presents an ambiguity. However the re-appropriation of rights is complex and it is hard to avoid addressing the authorities at some point. More critical voices (e.g. interview with political activist and now candidate for the leftist Die Linke for the election) see some concerns in the new alliance. First of all the ‘we’ ­constructed in the discourses tends to become a ‘they’ in practice. ‘They are here to stay’ rather than ‘we’. Members of the Recht auf Stadt groups see ­potential 16

Recht auf Stadt, accessed December 4, 2015, http://www.rechtaufstadt.net/recht-auf -stadt/3112015-demo-recht-auf-stadt-never-mind-papers.

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in formal discussions with state authorities about urban renewal projects (as the Esso-Häuser). Critiques fear that the overall problematics will be lost in this approach. It risks de-politicising the conflict and loose the internal di­ mension of the conflict. The refugees are here due to the nato-led invasion of Libya. At a demonstration January 31, 2015 more than 8,000 people were on the streets but it is true that there (from personal observation) were less banners carving out the problems with Frontex, Dublin and the Libya invasion than before. There were also less refugee speakers than before – they were no longer at the absolute frontline. The LiHH activists I talked to before, during, and after the demonstration nevertheless were satisfied with the current development. They regard the alliance with the housing organisations as an expansion of the conflict and for them shows that their problems are shared by others. Hence, precarity in itself holds the potential to contribute with a political analysis. The alliance broadens the conflict by adding a common diagnosis of gentrification and precarity in relation to housing and urban planning that is not dependent on citizenship status. A similar political analysis and call for actions is found other places in Germany. A new initiative in Kassel for example writes in a call for demonstration that: Germany, autumn of 2015: throughout the country a rhetoric of emer­ gency prevails. It is claimed that the ‘refugee crisis’ is overburdening the country. This is wrong: the problems connected to the housing of refu­ gees are the result of misled policies.17 In a sense we could understand the links between urban politics, gentrifica­ tion, precarisation and migration in Rancièren terms: Democratic politics only evolve when those who have no part in the social order makes claims and takes part in the social order (Rancière 1999).

Freedom Not Frontex The categories ‘refugees’, ’migrants’, and ‘citizens’ […] create borders be­ tween people. The division of people and countries by borders daily kills human beings. Abolish all borders! Stop the killing!18

17

18

Living space, not Coalition for decentralised living for refugees and social housing, Call for a demonstration in Kassel at 12.12.2015, accessed December 11, 2015, http://wohnraumstatt-leerstand-kassel.de/en/. March for Freedom, Contre Accords de Schengen, 2014, accessed December 4, 2015, http:// freedomnotfrontex.noblogs.org/files/2014/06/anti-schengen-front-french_merged1.pdf; translated from French.

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This slogan was used in the transnational solidarity march ‘Freedom Not Fron­ tex’, which drew participants from all over Europe (especially from Germany, including activists from LiHH) to Brussels in May 2014 followed by an Action week in Brussels in conjunction with the European Council meeting. The Ac­ tion Week was organised by the Blockupy movement, but based on participa­ tion and observations in the camp in Brussels it appeared self-organised and directed by refugee actors. Freedom not Frontex strengthened the link between struggles of migrants and refugees with anti-austerity politics and thereby broadened the conflict and expanded the political space for struggle. Referring to the commonalities in precarious conditions of immigrant and non-immigrant actors could cre­ ate a new unity. The refugees and migrant workers I talked to during the week emphasised this several times and, equally important, the local unions took up the same message. The march was significant because it shows the contours of a transnational solidarity movement based on common conditions of precarity and thereby illustrates how precarity becomes a mobilising force (as a militant identity), a political analysis (condition) and strategy. The national precarity movements (uniting sans-papiers) from different European countries (France, Belgium, Italy) were among the central organisers in Brussels. The Action Week was fol­ lowed up by a meeting in Paris and a new international event in Rome in No­ vember 2014 where The International Coalition of Sans-Papiers and Migrants (cispm) called for united actions. The most recent initiative was a four-day conference and action week in Berlin in February 2015 under the heading ‘Stop war on migrants!’ organised by cispm. After the March and Action Week, refu­ gee activists shared their experiences and encouraged mobilisation for further actions across Europe, for example in an invitation to a meeting in Amsterdam between LiHH and the Amsterdam-based ‘Wij Zijn Hier’ [We are here]: After the experience of the March for Freedom, we realized how impor­ tant it is for specific movements to connect even more, to spread infor­ mation about different struggles around Europe and to create awareness in these various countries, so that we can be united against this system that kills and remains dominant despite all the resistance.19 Precarity here becomes a vehicle for mobilisation. It provides a political analy­ sis and it defines a strategy for resistance.

19

Accessed December 4, 2015, https://www.indymedia.nl/node/23990.

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A Short Conclusion

Based on the three cases we could ask if precarity has had the transforma­ tive potential needed. None of them have been rich on political successes. The LiHH movement today is scattered, and several members have left Hamburg; the claim for freedom over Frontex has been ignored; the European borders are as strong as ever, and the spring of 2015 has added tragically to the body count of people drowning in the Mediterranean in search of a secure life. Nevertheless, the cases show that the struggles continue and that the collective will survive and grow. The problem is structural and not limited to the individual. No mat­ ter how many or whom the authorities continue to evict, it will ‘only’ be indi­ viduals. The authorities cannot evict the problem, which became evident in 2014 when German police wanted to evict a group of Lampedusa refugees from an abandoned school in Berlin where they had resided for months supported by local civil society. Protesters shouted ‘You can’t evict a movement’. If we link these immigrant struggles to broader forms of protest, contestation and strug­ gles against austerity and neoliberal capitalism, the notions of the precariat and precarity allow us to analyse these contestations across social categories and divisions. I will argue that this chapter contributes to the growing litera­ ture on precarity in three ways. Firstly, it has underlined the importance of taking the migrant as the starting point for a further theoretical development of the concept – doing so allows us to bring in the lived experiences as basis for a broader struggle for democracy; following from the first point the has chapter has emphasised the agency of the actors involved in these social and politi­ cal struggles and thereby contributes to creating a counter-narrative (also de­ veloped by other authors) speaking against the victimisation of migrants; and thirdly the chapter contributes to the literature by identifying empirical reali­ ties which we can use to develop our theoretical understandings of migration and precarity more nuanced. Precarity and the precariat has been discussed and analysed in very abstract terms which has prioritised the structural trans­ formations causing precarity over the perspective of the heterogeneous actors forming the precarity. Thereby the transformative potential of the precariat has been somewhat downplayed. Precarity is not a new phenomenon, but identifying the links between conditions of migrants and precarity as a condition in the present phase of capitalist economy offers us a toolbox for understanding contemporary prac­ tices, commonalities among immigrant and non-immigrant actors, and new forms of identity formations, alliance building and political strategies of resis­ tance. That type of studies is needed for the purpose of developing the scope

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of ­precarity studies. Doing so also opens up for more militant investigations (in line with critical migration studies and critical border studies) which can aid the on-going struggles for more just and inclusive societies. Situating our­ selves as researchers in this reality and identifying the commonalities opens up for not only a critical theoretical engagement but also a practical one. Syr­ ian refugee El Mouthena, who opened the chapter, continued his statement: It just government and the government is elected from citizens of coun­ tries where you are suffering. If you want to solve your problem you must mobilize those who select government. To stand up with you then you have power and can change something. And from today we must start working mobilising in every country we are there, if you are refuge or migrant we don’t care you are human like us. And we support you.20 Refugeeprotest.org, 2014

References Agustín, Óscar García and Martin Bak Jørgensen. “For the sake of workers but not of the immigrant workers? Misplaced alliances in Danish politics”. In Soldarities Without Borders: Gramscian perspectives on migration and civil society alliances, edited by Óscar García Agustín and Martin Bak Jørgensen, 150–166. London & New York, NY: Pluto Press, 2016. Balibar, Étienne. We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Bauman, Zygmunt. Wasted Lives. Modernity and its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. Bommes, Michael and Andrew Geddes. Immigration and Welfare. Challenging the Borders of the Welfare State. London: Routledge, 2000. Breman, Jan. “A Bogus Concept”. New Left Review 84 (2013): 130–138. Butler, Judith. Frames of War. When is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. Casas-Cortés, Maribel. “A Geneology of Precarity: A Toolbox for Rearticulating Frag­ mented Social Realities in and out of the Workplace”. Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 26:2 (2014): 206–226. Casas-Cortés, Maria Isabel. “Social Movements as Sites of Knowledge Production: Pre­ carious Work, the Fate of Care and Activist Research in a Globalizing Spain”. PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2009. 20

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Casas-Cortés, Maria Isabel and Sebastian Cobarrubias. “Drifting through the Knowl­ edge Machine”. In Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization, edited by Stevphen Shukaitis, David Graeber and Erika Biddle, 109–122. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007. Chomsky, Noam. Occupy. New York, NY: Zuccotti Park Press, 2012. Choonara, Esme. “Is there a precariat?” Socialist Review 362 (2011). Accessed December 4, 2015. http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=11781. Cox, Laurence and Cristina Flesher Fominya, eds. Understanding European Movements. London: Routledge, 2013. Day, Richard. Gramsci is Dead – Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements. London & New York, NY: Pluto Press, 2005. Della Porta, Donatella. “The Protest on Unemployment: Forms and Opportunities”. In The Contentious Politics of Unemployment in Europe, edited by Marco Giugni, 43–69. New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. Dikec, Mustafa. Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban Policy. ­Wiley-Blackwell, 2007. Doerr, Nicole. “Politicizing Precarity, Producing Visual Dialogues on Migration: Trans­ national Public Spaces in Social Movements”. FQS 11(2): Art 30. (2010). Ferreri, Mara. “Precarity and housing politics in austerity London, UK”, AntipodeFoun­ dation.org. Blog-entry posted April 16, 2012. Accessed December 4, 2015. http:// antipodefoundation.org/2012/04/16/precarity-and-housing-politics-in-austerity -london-uk/, 2012. Foti, Alex. “MAYDAY MAYDAY! euro flex workers, time to get a move on!” Transversal 4 (2005). Accessed December 4, 2015. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0704/foti/en. Frase, Peter. “The Precariat: A Class or a Condition?” New Labor Forum 10 (2013): 1–4. Frassanito-network. “Precarious, Precarization, Precariat?” 2005. Accessed December 4, 2015. [Original link is defunct]. http://05.diskursfestival.de/pdf/symposium_4.en.pdf. Giugni, Marco and Florence Passy. Political Altruism? Solidarity Movements in International Perspective. Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. London: Penguin Books, 2004. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer­ sity Press, 2009. Harvey, David. “The Right to the City”. New Left Review 53 (2008). Harvey, David. Rebel Cities. From the right to the city to urban revolution. London: Verso, 2012. Holston, James. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in B ­ razil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.

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Jordan, Bill and Franck Düvell. Migration – The Boundaries of Equality and Justice. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003. Jørgensen, Martin Bak. “Legitimizing policies: How policy approaches to irregular migrants are formulated and legitimized in Scandinavia”. Etikk i Praksis 6:2 (2012): 46–63. Jørgensen, Martin Bak and Óscar García Agustín. “The Postmodern Prince: The ­political articulation of social dissent”. In Politics of Dissent, edited by Martin Bak J­ ørgensen and Óscar García Agustín, 29–50. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2015. Langman, Lauren. “Occupy: A new new social movement”. Current Sociology 61:4 (2013): 510–524. Lefebvre, Henri. Le droit à la ville. Paris: Anthopos, 1968. Lewis, Hannah, Peter Dwyer, Stuart Hodkinson and Louise Waite. Precarious lives: Forced labour, exploitation and asylum. Bristol: Policy Press, 2014. Loach, Ken, Kate Hudson and Gilbert Achcar. “The Labour party has failed us. We need a new party of the left”. The Guardian, March 25, 2013. Accessed February 16, 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/25/labour-party-left. Longhi, Vittorio. The Immigrant War. A Global Movement against Discrimination and Exploitation. Bristol: Policy Press, 2013. Lorey, Isabell. “Becoming Common: Precarization as Political Constituting”. e-flux 6 (2010). Accessed December 4, 2015. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/148. Lorey, Isabell. “Governmental Precarization”. Transversal 1 (2011). Accessed D ­ ecember 4, 2015. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0811/lorey/en. Lotringer, Sylvère and Marazzi Christian. Autonomia. Post-political Politics. New York, NY: Semiotext(e), 2007. March for Freedom. Contre Accords de Schengen. 2014 Mayo, Peter. “Gramsci, The Southern Question and the Mediterranean”. Mediterranean Journal of Educational Studies 12:2 (2007): 1–17. Mezzadra, Sandro. “Living in Transition: Toward a Heterolingual Theory of the Multi­ tude”. Transversal 6 (2007). Mezzadra, Sandro and Gigi Roggero. “Singularisation of the common. Thoughts on the crisis of the ‘movement of movements’”. Turbulence (2006). Accessed December 4, 2015. http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-1/singularisation-of-the­ common/. Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso, 2000. Negri, Antonio. The Porcelain Workshop. For a New Grammar of Politics. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2004. Neilson, Brett and Ned Rossiter. “From precarity to Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable Networks”. The Fibreculture Journal 5 (2005). Accessed December 1, 2015. http://five.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-022-from-precarity-to-pre cariousness-and-back-again-labour-life-and-unstable-networks/.

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Neilson, Brett and Ned Rossiter. “Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Excep­ tion”. Theory, Culture & Society 25:7–8 (2008): 51–72. noborder network. “Migrant Labour: Discussion paper for the September workshop in London”. 2004. Accessed December 4, 2015. http://www.noborder.org/archive_item .php%3Fid=304.html. Ortiz, Isabel, Sara Burke, Mohamed Berrada and Hernan Cortes Saenz. World Protests 2006–2013. Initiative for Policy Dialogue and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung New York Working Paper 2013. Accessed February 16, 2016. http://policydialogue.org/files/ publications/World_Protests_2006-2013-Complete_and_Final_4282014.pdf. Purcell, Mark. “Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant”. GeoJournal 58 (2003): 99–108. Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, translated by Julie Rose. Min­ neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Rancière, Jacques. “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” South Atlantic Quarterly 103:2–3 (2004): 297–310. Raunig, Gerald. “The Monster Precariat”. (Translated by Aileen Derieg) Translate (2007). Accessed December 4, 2015. http://translate.eipcp.net/strands/02/ raunig-strands02en#redir. Raunig, Gerald. “La inseguridad vencerá. Anti-Precariousness Activism and May­ day Parades”. Translate 6 (2004). Accessed December 4, 2015. http://eipcp.net/ transversal/0704/raunig/en. Refugeeprotest.org. “Statement: El Mouthena”. 2014. Accessed February 16, 2016. http:// refugeeprotest.org/2014/07/27/statement-el-mouthena/. Robinson, Andrew. “The Precariat and the Cuts: Reconstructing Autonomy”. Andy Robinson Theory Blog 2. 20 2011. Accessed February 16, 2016. http://andyrobinsontheory­ blog2.blogspot.dk/2011/04/precariat-and-cuts.html. Schaap, Andrew. “Enacting the right to have rights: Jacques Rancière’s critique of Han­ nah Arandt”. European Journal of Political Theory 10:22 (2011): 22–45. Schierup, Carl-Ulrik, Aleksandra Ålund and Branka Likić‐Brborić. “Migration, Pre­ carization and the Democratic Deficit in Global Governance”. International Migration 53:3 (2014): 50–63. Schierup, Carl-Ulrik, Ronaldo Munck, Branka Likić‐Brborić and Anders Neergaard, eds. Migration, Precarity, and Global Governance: Challenges and Opportunities for Labour. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Schierup, Carl-Ulrik, Peo Hansen and Stephen Castles. Migration, Citizenship, and the European Welfare State – A European Dilemma. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Seymour, Richard. “We Are All Precarious – On the Concept of the ‘Precariat’ and its Misuses”. New Left Project (2012). Accessed December 4, 2015. http://www.new­ leftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/we_are_all_precarious_on_the _concept_of_the_precariat_and_its_misuses.

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Seymour, Richard. “Zero-hours contracts, and the sharp whip of insecurity that con­ trols us all”. The Guardian, May 1, 2014. Accessed December 4, 2015. http://www.the guardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/01/zero-hours-contracts-insecurity-work? CMP=twt_gu. Shukaitis, Stevphen. “Precarious Politics and Recomposing the Radical Imagination”. In Mappe della precarietà. Vol. II – Knowledge workers, creatività, saperi e dispositivi di soggettivazione, edited by Emiliana Armano and Annalisa Murgia, 231–252. Bologna: I libri di Emil, 2012. Shukaitis, Stevphen. “Recomposing precarity: Notes on the laboured politics of class composition”. ephemera 13:3 (2013): 641–658. Accessed February 16, 2016. http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/recomposing-precarity-notes -laboured-politics-class-composition. Sivetidis, Daphne. “The Anti-Capitalist Movement and the Migrant Comparing Agendas and Debating Facilities”. Sussex Migration Working Paper no. 39 (2006). Accessed February 16, 2016. https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file. php?name=mwp39.pdf&site=252. Standing, Guy. The Precariat – The New Dangerous Class. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. Standing, Guy. A precariat charter: From denizens to citizens. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. Stein, Samuel. “Precarity and Gentrification: A Feedback Loop”. Micropolitics.eu. Ac­ cessed December 4, 2015, http://www.metropolitiques.eu/Precarity-and-Gentrifica tion-A.html, 2015. Tsianos, Vassilios. “Imperceptible Politics Rethinking Radical Politics of Migration and Precarity Today”. PhD Diss., University of Hamburg, 2007. Vasudevan, Alexander. “The autonomous city: Towards a critical geography of occupa­ tion”. Progress in Human Geography (2014): 1–22. Wacquant, Loïc. Punishing the Poor. The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Žižek, Slavoj. The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. London: Verso, 2012.

chapter 4

Globalisation, Labour and the ‘Precariat’: Old Wine in New Bottles?1 Ronaldo Munck Introduction Globalisation has generated a new global working class through a massive expansion and acceleration of capital accumulation and the almost universal real subsumption of labour in the non-capitalist and radical nationalist areas of the globe, now firmly under the aegis of capitalist development. It has also, however, increased the precarious and insecure nature of most work, especially in the wake of the 2008–09 global capitalist recession. Some have suggested that a new social subject has emerged: a ‘precariat’, which now constitutes a ‘dangerous class’ as did the urban poor in Victorian Britain (eg Standing 2011). It is a term that seemingly captures some of the feelings among Northern academics, themselves subject to casualization and the end of job security. But is the term novel or even relevant, for the millions of workers and urban poor in the global South for whom precariousness has always been a seemingly natural condition? In recent years there has been an intense debate around the concept of the ‘precariat’ which has even reached the mainstream press. Undoubtedly, this has been beneficial in focusing attention on the workers of the world and how their condition has been impacted by globalisation. The term has been questioned by many experienced researchers and analysts (eg Breman 2013, Palmer 2014) and has even generated a special issue of the Global Labour Journal (2016) but it might be time to consider whether the term ‘precariat’ is not perhaps a question of ‘old wine in new bottles’ as the saying goes. What I propose here is a detailed examination of the term ‘precariat’ from a global and historical perspective which is central to any critical sociological mission (see Munck 2016). To start with, we need a contextual genealogy of the term that situates it in earlier, but still very relevant, debates around marginality and informality in the South for example. The issues addressed in the precariat debates are hardly as new as the breathless tone of discovery some of its proponents take might 1 An earlier version of this chapter was published as Munck, Ronaldo.“The Precariat: a view from the South”. Third World Quarterly, 34(5) (2013): 747–762.

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indicate. I then move on to a critical deconstruction of the term itself, its analytical adequacy and its empirical robustness. We really do need to be satisfied on both counts before we can declare an epistemological breakthrough. On that basis I then attempt a reconstruction of the real-world processes the term precariat seeks to capture and codify. This involves a classical Marxist-style proletarianisation process but also what we might call a Polanyian disembedding and dispossession process. Finally, I tackle the politics around how the term precariat has been deployed, including the spectre of a new dangerous class replacing that of communism. My conclusion is that the term ‘precariat’ can become a new political distraction if it is not rigorously deconstructed and reconstructed from a historical and majority-world perspective. My argument is that we need to ‘bring labour back in’ to the debates around the future of work and workers in the era of globalisation. Antecedents When the term ‘precariat’ burst onto the mainstream scene a few years ago (really with the publication of Guy Standing’s book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class in 2011), observers could be forgiven for thinking that this was a new sociological phenomenon being announced. However, anyone with even a passing familiarity with the ‘labour and globalisation’ debates since the 1980s and even the earlier ‘labour and development’ problematic would immediately recognise a long genealogy here. The point of a genealogical analysis is not, however, to provide a simple history of ideas. Foucault’s use of the term ‘genealogy’ suggested complex and mundane origins and not a progressive development of a system of thought. It depends more on the contingent turns of history than on a grand scheme and simple rational trends. A political genealogy of the term ‘precariat’ would thus need to examine it in relation to earlier notions of marginality, informality and social exclusion to situate it and thus understand its possible conceptual benefits but also its weaknesses. The theory of ‘marginality’ emerged in Latin America in the 1960s to account for the vast number of underemployed internal migrants who surrounded the main cities with their makeshift dwellings, and who appeared to be in all senses ‘marginal’ to the capitalist system. It seemed that hyper-urbanisation had stripped the capacity of the system to create jobs. The marginal poor were deemed to be ‘a-functional’ to the needs of monopoly capitalism, unlike the classic ‘reserve army of labour’ analysed by Marx for an earlier era. While the industrial working class was becoming integrated into the system, there was a ‘marginal mass’ which was seen as surplus to requirements. While for some

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sectors of the left this new marginal class was the true revolutionary subject, for others it generated a ‘great fear’ that social and political stability would be threatened by this new incarnation of the Victorian ‘lumpen-proletariat’ (Gerassi 1963). Empirical research in the 1970s and beyond soon showed the very obvious limitations of the marginality thesis (see Cardoso 1971; Nun 1969; Perelman 1976).2 In particular, there was little evidence that a labour elite or labour aristocracy had formed, separate from and even opposed to the marginal masses. Migrants to the city did not carry with them a rural and traditional culture that set them apart from urban industrial culture. There was considerable continuity in terms of employment patterns between the formal and informal sectors rather than a rigid divide (see Kowarick 2002; Neffa, Oliveri and Trucco 2010). The marginal poor were not anomic individuals, mere symptoms of a social breakdown. Rather, they developed strong social networks and survival strategies of considerable dynamism. Even the informal housing in the new urban settlements could just as well be seen as a solution to the housing crisis than as a dangerous time bomb waiting to disrupt mainstream society. Marginality as a paradigm also suffered from a severe form of dualism and thus it misunderstood the nature of the Latin American social formations. In his influential “Critique of dualist reason” the Brazilian political economist, Francisco De Oliveira, showed how the activities of the so-called ‘marginal sector’ were in fact quite profitable for the broader economic system. ­Small-scale commerce, for example, could facilitate the distribution of industrial goods and the self-constructed dwellings of the informal settlements saved ­capital  the cost of building workers’ houses (de Oliveira 1972). The dialectic of capital accumulation required, inescapably, the provision of labour and raw materials input from the ‘backward’ sector. The political credibility of the marginal as new revolutionary vanguard model did not last very long either, as the workers’ and peasants’ movement began to mobilise in the 1970s and there was no ‘social explosion’ in the shanty-towns. In the 1970s, this time in Africa, another term arose, namely that of ‘informality’ or the informal sector to describe workers outside the formal capitalist system. Its means and techniques of production are non-capitalist intensive, the means of production are owned by those who operate them and the division of labour is rudimentary. For Keith Hart, who did much to popularise the notion of informality, ‘the distinction between formal and informal income opportunities is based essentially on that between wage-earning and self-employment’ (Hart 1973). Significantly this conception was also picked up 2 For a recent overview, see de la Rocha et al. (2004).

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and developed around the same time by the International Labour Organisation (ilo) (ilo 1972). The informal sector, or informal economy as it became known, embraces a whole range of occupations, from small-scale manufacturing and retail to domestic service and various illegal activities, united only in terms of being beyond the reach of labour law, labour contracts, licensing and taxation laws. In a similar way to the debate around marginality, that around informality began in reaction to the unfounded optimism of orthodox modernisation theory. The latter had posited since the 1950s that capitalist modernisation would surpass and transform the ‘traditional’ economy and work practices then characteristic of the developing world. Some Marxists also shared in this optimistic view of capitalism’s revolutionary and transformative capacity. In fact, not only did so-called informal work persist but it also spread to the North in the 1970s as the long-term crisis of Fordism and Keynesianism came to a head. Alejandro Portes and collaborators wrote influentially about the informal economy in ‘advanced and less developed countries’ (Portes, Castells and Benton 1989), while Saskia Sassen (1994) argued, against the wisdom of the time, that the informal sector was, in fact, the driver and most entrepreneurial sector of advanced capitalism. In the post-Fordist era it seemed that informality was becoming generalised and was no longer an unfortunate hangover from the past. In the North it was used to describe the work of creative professionals such as architects, artists and software developers. In the South Hernando de Soto (1986–89) published his influential El Otro Sendero, using the terminology of the Peruvian Maoist group Sendero Luminoso but referring here to the dynamic informal path to economic development. This anti-statist manifesto blamed state interference in Peru (and more generally) for stifling the entrepreneurialism which would lead to economic development. The informal economy, in its brave defiance of the state (and the law), acted as a champion for development and thus also served to vindicate the free market policies of triumphant neoliberalism. The informal economy was no longer a problem; rather, it embodied the promise of an unregulated market system. Moving on to the 1980s, we see a new concept emerging, in Europe this time, namely that of ‘social exclusion’. This would emerge as an overarching paradigm to analyse the ‘new poverty’ of the era of globalisation, especially in the context of the need to produce a social ‘safety net’ alongside the unregulated expansion of finance and capitalist development more broadly (Munck 2005). It was multidimensional, embracing exclusion from employment but also from the political process and shared cultural worlds. In some variants – for example in France but also in the usa – the social exclusion paradigm focused

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on the need for social order and moral integration. This discourse detected the emergence of an urban underclass that supposedly suffered from a ‘culture of dependence’ it would have to be weaned off. From this perspective it was the social behaviour and social values of the poor that needed to be addressed rather than the social and economic structures which themselves generated poverty. This discourse was reminiscent of how, in the 1960s, the spectre of ‘marginality’ had generated a moral panic in Latin America that was shared by left and right to some extent. The social exclusion paradigm, I would argue, cannot be reduced to the moral agenda of the underclass theory nor to its Eurocentric origins and deployment. The ilo, for example, carried out a major research project on social exclusion in the 1990s (ilo 2004), deploying it as an overarching framework for understanding (and combating) the growing social inequality caused by globalisation. As a research paradigm social exclusion did break with economistic and individualistic traditional parameters of poverty. It was multidisciplinary and multidimensional in its approach. It was not static in its analysis but emphasised, rather, the dynamic and ongoing transformation of social exclusion. It was, above all, relational in that it showed how poverty and exclusion had as its counterpart the wealth and power of a few. Ultimately, however, promoting ‘social inclusion’ as policy and practice to counter exclusion was quite weak as a social policy and certainly not robust enough politically for an era in which a brash neoliberalism defined the horizon of possibilities. To be ‘marginal’, ‘informal’ or ‘socially excluded’ is to be beyond the parameters of the capitalist development process, if that is seen as a harmonious process of course. It is about being shut out from the social, economic, political and cultural mechanisms of social integration. Policy makers might thus design programs to address marginality and exclusion, much as capitalism has always sought to address poverty in one way or another. But the prospects for social engineering would be limited if poverty and exclusion are structural and inherent features of an unequal system based on power differentials. The recent emergence of the term ‘precariat’ needs to be situated in the context of these earlier attempts to theorise a form of work (and living) which does not appear to conform either to liberal notions of harmonious development, or Marxist theories of capitalism generating a proletariat which was to be its gravedigger. Deconstruction If anyone wishes to put forward a new term or concept in the social sciences they really do need to show that it is both analytically rigorous and empirically

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robust. I will argue that the term ‘precariat’ as currently deployed misunderstands the complexity of class making and remaking and is of dubious political purchase. It also, above all, acts as a colonising concept in the South in classic Eurocentric mode, although its proponents seem blithely unaware of these implications. As a concept it does not even add very much to current debates on the remaking of the Northern working class under the aegis of neoliberal globalisation. While the next section will seek a ‘reconstruction’ of the term ‘precariat’ and a clear acknowledgement of precarity as a key feature of the working class condition today, for now we will conduct a deconstruction of the assumptions, gaps and elisions we can detect in its most popularised forms. Put bluntly, beyond a postmodern cry that ‘we are all precarious’ now, I do not see any new analytical insights or strategic foresight in the concept that should detain us. Before it was popularised in its English language incarnation, précarité had already been deployed in the French socioeconomic literature around the changing patterns of work since the 1980s, often in close association with the processes of exclusion sociale (Barbier 2002). It was seen as part of the process of decline of centrality of the wage relationship in structuring society. Precarious forms of work and precarious modalities of employment were on the rise as the Fordist social regime of accumulation was losing its hegemony. Employment norms were being eroded from within, as it were, and various forms of non-standard working relations were coming to the fore. Precarity was probably more of a descriptive category and was not deemed a totally new phenomenon or a self-sufficient one. Most often it was taken in association with social exclusion or as part of a broader analysis of the shifting patterns of employment and the sociology of work. Perhaps the most influential writer in this tradition was Robert Castel, whose Les metamorphoses de la question sociale (1995) defined the analysis of the shifts in the wage relationship consequent on the emergence of the neoliberal social regime of accumulation. His emphasis was on travail précaire, and not on precarity in general, and he saw the latter as central in defining the new social question, namely the erosion of traditional work relationships and the centrality of the wage relationship. If we examine the current definitions of the precariat, Guy Standing (2011) has probably made the boldest claims for the emergence of a new class or ‘class in the making’. However, when it comes to it we do not get a very precise definition beyond the assertion that the precariat does not feel part of a solidaristic labour community (Standing 2011, 12), or that “the precariat has a feeling of being in a diffuse, unstable international community of people struggling usually in vain to give their working lives an occupational identity” (Standing 2011,

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23). The precariat is defined more or less by what it is not – a mythical, stable working class with full social and political rights – and by its vague feelings of anomie and distance from the orthodox labour movement. At a certain point, Standing becomes aware that this is quite a weak basis on which to construct a new class and he then retreats to portraying it as a class in the making. In terms of social class theory, however, there is little to support the thesis that the precariat is even a ‘class in the making’. Class locations are determined by their role in the relation of production and reproduction. Social classes are also relational, they do not emerge on their own, and we need to specify the antagonistic relations of production they are based on. Nothing said by Standing about the precariat defines a new role in terms of the relations of production of contemporary capitalism nor do we have any understanding of how these might be fundamental to the reproduction of the social system as a whole. What we do see is a rather impressionistic and premature set of identifications and generalisations leading to an umbrella concept which at best describes a certain phase of Europe’s post-Fordist working class history. What is most noticeable in the broader literature around precarity and the precariat is that it is almost totally Northern-centric in its theoretical frames and its empirical reference points. There is a totally Northern sensibility at play here, it seems. In Standing’s case it is really just Britain that is the model of economic and political development which he has in mind. There is hardly a reference to any part of the world outside the North Atlantic. It is simply assumed as the centre and the norm which will apply everywhere. There is little cognizance that the type of work described by the term ‘precarity’ has always been the norm in the global South. In fact, it is Fordism and the welfare state which is the exception to the rule from a global perspective. Decent work, to call it that even though it is a rather dubious term, has never been the norm in the postcolonial world. Rather, super-exploitation, accumulation through dispossession and what might be called ‘permanent primitive accumulation’ have by and large prevailed. From a Southern perspective, work has always-already been precarious, a basic fact which unsettles the notion that something new has been discovered. The genealogy of the concept precarity/precariat already shows its Southern origins, but this is never really acknowledged. While the precariat discourse exudes a nostalgia for something which has passed (the Keynesian/Fordist/ welfare state), it does not speak to a South which never experienced welfare state capitalism. The Southern experience of precarity is marked by the nature of the postcolonial state and, later, by the developmental state where this has emerged. The changing nature of work as a result of the erosion of the ­welfare state is but one modality of precarity, others have been in existence for

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a long time in the fraught relations between workers, the state and society in the South, marked by limited forms of citizenship. We would also note, finally, that, in the North or in the older industrialised countries, the thesis of precarity, as advanced by Standing and others, does not really stand up to scrutiny either. For example, temporary employment (often taken as an indicator of precarity) only increased from 10 per cent to 12 per cent between 1995 and 2004 across the oecd countries. Part-time work, for its part, is not always about casualization but can also be a way of retaining staff. More broadly ‘flexible’ employment can also relate to more socially adaptable forms of employment and does not always spell greater exploitation. In brief, there is little evidence of a unilinear pattern of precarisation and, in analytical terms we need to be wary of imposing a false homogeneity across ‘non-typical’ employment seen as a negative or critical concept. In one of the most wide-ranging and empirically robust analyses of the transformation of work under the so-called ‘new capitalism’ Kevin Doogan (2008) reaches similar sceptical conclusions. Whether lamenting or celebrating the decline of the traditional worker, a new orthodoxy emerged in the 1990s concerning the ‘new times’ we lived in with the flexibilisation and precarisation of labour seen as key components. In reality, however, technological change and capital mobility have been overstated and the disembeddedness of social processes may be a tendency but it has not been achieved nor is it likely to be. Doogan is particularly critical of “a left wing mindset that sees only temporariness and contingency in new employment patterns [that] is blind to the basic proposition that capital needs labour” (Doogan 2008, 206, emphasis in the original). For all the rhetoric about relocation and outsourcing, capital normally prioritises the retention of labour and the basic fact is that long-term employment is rising. Having expressed serious misgivings about the precariat project as critical sociology, I now propose to consider its impact as political discourse. Richard Seymour, in an incisive critique of Standing, declares that: The precariat is not a dangerous, exotic, alien thing, nor an incipient class to be patronised into existence. It is all of us…We are all the precariat. And if we are dangerous, it is because we are about to shatter the illusory security of our rulers. seymour 2012

To say ‘we are all the precariat’ had a certain ring as populist interpellation in the West as neoliberalism entered a global crisis in 2008–09 and the indignados and other youth mobilisations cried out the failings of the economic order

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and the betrayal of the social promises. In the streets of the European capitals the slogan ‘Il precariato si rebella’ captured the imagination and then spread to the Occupy movement and other stirrings of revolt. From 2002 onwards in the wake of the Genoa anti-capitalist mobilisations and a turn in the anti-globalisation movement to prioritise social issues, the term ‘social precariat’ came to the fore (see Tsianos and Papadopoulos 2006; Waite 2009). It became the common descriptor for a multifaceted set of social actors who saw the issues emerging from the perspective of a social movement and not as victims. Precarisation was recognised as a transnational problem and Stop Précarité (even Stop al Precariato) became common and popular slogans in several Western countries. It brought together the new graduate unemployed, the migrant sans-papiers, far left and autonomist activists, and even some left factions of the trade union movement. The latter, from their own perspective, were now recognising the growing danger to labour standards posed by agency workers and the growing precarisation of the work-force in terms of their ability to organise the working classes. In conclusion, to put it bluntly, as Neilson and Rossiter note, “the discourse of precarity does not translate on a global scale as a descriptor of contemporary labour” (2008, 54) because it is an analytical and political concept linked essentially to the decline of Fordism and the welfare state in the North. It did have purchase in Western Europe in the 2000s for a time precisely because it did point to the end of security and stability for those entering the workforce in those countries. It did also mobilise and energise a certain layer of professional graduates who were not finding work in the new post-Fordist era. However, it still tended to demand that the state assume its responsibilities as the European welfare state once did. Before moving on I note that, if the precariat is an overblown concept and precarity a more specific condition than is usually implied, this does not mean that the processes referred to are irrelevant, as I will argue in the next section. Reconstruction If we take the current interest in the precariat and precarity as a symptom of conceptual dissatisfaction with orthodox thinking and a desire for more original critical thinking, then we might try to reconstruct its object of analysis. If precarity is to be more than a Euro-May Day slogan, we need to situate it more carefully. A transformative perspective on labour needs to recognise the dialectic of proletarianisation and dispossession which is framing the remaking of the global working class. If we only focus on precarity (in the North),

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we miss out on the massive expansion of the global working class in classic Marxist forms. We can perhaps pose the current dynamics of social transformation in terms of Marx-style proletarianisation processes conjoined with Polanyi-style accumulation by dispossession (Polanyi 2001). It is important to remember that every ‘unmaking’ of the working class (for example through precarisation) always inevitably leads to its remaking. This sort of dialectical thinking is quite absent from much of the teleological reasoning of the precarity discourse, which sees it as one-way street to social disintegration and the rise of authoritarianism. The accumulation of capital on a global scale begets a global working class in the sense of an accelerated process of proletarianisation. Globalisation over the past 35 years has also deepened the shift from the formal to the real subsumption of labour in the sense that formal subsumption allows for the continuation of the pre-capitalist labour process, while the ‘real’ subsumption of labour implies that the social relations and modes of labour use are really subsumed under capital. Put simply, only capital can create the conditions for capitalist production. If capital is understood as a social relation, its dramatic global expansion will expand the working classes. The basic fact is that the numbers of workers worldwide doubled between 1975 and 1995 as part of what we called globalisation but which really should be seen as an expanded reproduction of capital on a global scale and the dramatically increased subsumption of non-capitalist forms of production. This continuing expansion of the global working class was accompanied by the full incorporation of the state socialist East and the national development South into the expanded circuit of capital accumulation. Against the theorists of new/networked/virtual capitalism David Coates has put it neatly: “Globalisation in the modern form is a process based less on the proliferation of computers than on the proliferation of proletarians” (Coates 2000, 511). From a capitalist perspective ‘the globalisation of labour is inevitable’ and there is a clear priority placed by global managers on human resource management (Johnston 1991, 115). Perhaps the most salient feature in the qualitative composition of the great quantitative leap forward of the global labour force is its concentration on the South, or what economists still call developing regions. Whereas the number of workers in the oecd countries only increased from 372 million in 1985 to 400 million in 2000 (0.5 per cent), the number of workers in the South increased from 1595 million to 2137 million, which represented a 20 per cent annual growth rate. The gender composition of the global labour force also changed dramatically over the same period, with female labour force participation surpassing 50 per cent by the mid-1980s. The expansion, feminisation and what we might call ‘Southernisation’ of the working

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class went hand in hand (Munck 2002) and changed utterly the composition of the global working class. The massive extension of proletarianisation does not mean that the working class remains as is, with the same leading sectors as in the 1950s or 1960s. Indeed, the working class has always been in flux, being continuously made, unmade and remade. If we take manufacturing and mining workers as an example, we can see how their vanguard role in one phase of capitalist expansion may now have come to an end. We know how in the North trade unions are increasingly based on the services sector rather than manufacturing. In the South miners (for example in Bolivia) and other traditional worker sectors have ceased to play a leading role as the working class has become more complex in composition. Traditional relations of representation and hegemony construction have been thrown into disarray and trade unions are no longer the undisputed articulators of mass discontent. But as Hardt and Negri put it: This shift, however, signals no farewell to the working class or even a decline of worker struggles but rather an increasing multiplicity of the proletariat and a new physiognomy of struggles (2011, 110). We must also note that proletarianisation is not incompatible with informalization. As Mike Davis has shown: the global informal working class (overlapping with but non-identical to the slum population) is about one billion strong, making it the fastest growing, and most unprecedented, social class on earth (2006, 178). Since the structural adjustment crises of the 1980s the informal sector has grown three to four times faster than formal sector employment. Multinational corporations have taken advantage, of course, of this phenomenon through their subcontracting networks now central to commodity production change. It is also an integral element of China’s blossoming industrial economy, which is under-pinned by a traditional informal sector playing nothing like a traditional role. There is not, to be sure, a dichotomy between the formal and informal economies but rather a continuum based on considerable synergies and grey overlapping areas. The informal economy might be growing but it is still based on the lack of formal employment contracts or any respect for labour rights. Furthermore, there is no indirect social welfare wage in this sector, something the Northern precariat still has a recent memory of. No longer deemed ‘marginal’ in Latin America, informal workers are now more likely to be seen as part of an urban

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and rural semi-proletariat, thoroughly integrated into the modern, internationalised economic system. Interestingly it is the continuing differences between North and South in terms of the informal proletariat which emerge as a key differentiator. While the total proportions of informal workers in Latin America in 1950 and the usa in 1900 are roughly comparable (40 per cent–50 per cent), we see that the proportion of self-employed in the us manufacturing sector had dropped to 3 per cent by 1930, while it was still around 20 per cent in Latin America in 1990 (Portes and Hoffman 2003). Taking a global perspective on labour today means a clear refusal of a Eurocentric (or North Atlantic) perspective which centers on the history of the former metropolitan territories. Informalization and precariousness did not emerge with the 2008–09 crisis. However, it might not be too fruitful to draw a clear dividing line between North and South in terms of the characteristics of capital-labour relations. We should perhaps think more in terms of a radical global heterogeneity as the dominant characteristic of labour relations. A postcolonial perspective would thus not emphasise either Southern uniqueness or Northern exceptionalism. Sandro Mezzadra argues in this regard that global capitalism is increasingly infused by heterogeneity: [B]y the contemporary and structurally related existence of the “new economy” and sweatshops, corporatisation of capital and accumulation in “primitive” forms, processes of financialisation and forced labour (2012, 166). As always, global development is uneven but combined in the way it advances and in its impact on the world of work. Increasingly labour studies are taking a global turn, first in sociology and international political economy but now also in terms of a global labour history. There is a growing recognition that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels could only have had a very partial and time-limited understanding of what wage labour meant. While ‘free’ wage labour lies at the heart of the Marxist class theory and political project, it was unpaid subsistence labour which was, and remains, the dominant form from a global perspective. Domestic labour, while crucial to the reproduction of the working class, has always been unpaid labour. Van der Linden proposes a greater focus on the way in which labour power is commodified by capitalism in different forms and suggests that the concept of ‘subaltern labour’ should be extended to also embrace s­ elf-employment, sharecropping, indentured labour and chattel slavery (Van der Linden 2008, 331; Katznelson and Zolberg 1986). Finally, we might propose an overall ­dynamic of working class deconstruction and reconstruction on a global scale, based on a

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­Marx–Polanyi dialectic. Marx’s focus on proletarianisation based on the separation of workers from the means of production can be supplemented by Karl Polanyi’s emphasis on commodification of labour along with land and money. This provides us with a more nuanced understanding of how neoliberal globalisation has subjected the world’s workers through classic capital accumulation mechanisms but also through what is becoming known as ‘accumulation through dispossession’, which essentially amounts to a modern and permanent version of Rosa Luxemburg’s extension of Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation (Harvey 2006). There are clear limits to accumulation through dispossession and the ‘race to the bottom’ or apartheid-era South Africa on a global scale would not be sustainable (Arrighi, Aschoff and Scully 2010). What this might mean as a perspective for examining the global dynamics of labour contestation is suggested by Beverley Silver. While an emphasis on “Marx-type labour unrest” leads us to focus on “the struggles of newly emerging working classes” (such as China), a complementary emphasis on “Polanyitype labour unrest” turns our attention to “the backlash resistances to the spread of a global self-regulating market” (Silver 2003). While a Marx optic engages us with the new emerging working classes of the South, a ­Polanyi ­approach show us how other working classes are being ‘unmade’ and precarised in the North and separated from the means of subsistence in the South, for example through the privatisation of water. I would argue that neither approach is sufficient on its own but that their close interplay and interweaving go a long way to unravelling some of the contemporary processes affecting labour. A perspective from the global South would seek to understand precarity as part of the broader process of dispossession and the generation of new ‘surplus populations’. The dominant development paradigm seems oblivious to this ­dimension, as in the way the World Bank (2008) analyses the ‘­transforming countries’ and their transition beyond agriculture without visualising the massive impact it is having across Asia in terms of dispossession, food insecurity and unemployment. As Tania Li notes, “welfare provisions to keep the ­dispossessed alive” do not figure in the World Bank account, which simply “assumes hundreds of millions of deeply impoverished rural people will find their way onto the transition path” (2010, 69). In the face of global turmoil and the massive wrenching up of traditional working relations and work practices some token ‘safety nets’ will not prevent a huge human catastrophe. As in other earlier debates around marginality, reserve armies of labour and various categories of surplus population it would be rather complacent to believe that losses in one sector of the global workforce will be automatically compensated for elsewhere. Certainly some forms of dispossession, such as that

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of the South A ­ frican Bantustans under apartheid, may have been consciously designed to produce a ‘reserve’ pool of labour but at the moment the churning of labour under global capitalist development is simply producing collateral damage in society. ­However, as Li notes, “the dispossessed do not go quietly”, with ­under-reported mass protests in China being but one example of this resistance (2010, 72).

Politics of Precarity

As Kate Manzo puts it in relation to development theories: even the most radically critical discourse easily slips into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest, for it can never step completely outside of a heritage from which it must borrow its tools – its history, its language – in its attempt to destroy that heritage itself (1991, 8). What I see in Standing’s ‘precariat’ is really a continuation of his long and valuable work as head of the ilo’s Socio Economic Security Programme. While critical of ilo practice, Standing has effectively provided a counterpart and legitimisation of its ‘decent work’ campaign. The ilo has now enthusiastically taken up the notion of the precariat and the problem of insecure work as it already has the answer: a rather backward-looking, utopian and impossible to implement decent work campaign. The Decent Work agenda of the ilo picks up where its focus on ‘social inclusion’ in the 1990s left off, but with a similar political dynamic. How could globalisation be given a ‘human face’? How could capital be persuaded that workers were vital to its reproduction? Decent work is defined by the ilo as employment in conditions of freedom, equity, human security and dignity. The Decent Work Agenda, for the ilo, has ‘in a relatively short period of time forged an international consensus among governments, employers, workers and civil society’. Its ambition is to provide a key element ‘to achieving a fair globalisation, reducing poverty and achieving equitable, inclusive and sustainable development’. Whatever its aspirations, this agenda never translated into effective measures and its credibility finally crashed in the wake of the ­2008–09 Great Recession (ilo 2012). The ilo has now seemingly adopted the term ‘precarious work’ in a reprise of the dualism implicit in the earlier formal/informal and inclusion/exclusion categories it had deployed in relation to the world of work. While accepting

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that the definition of precarious work ‘remains vague and multifaceted’ it argues that it is a useful term ‘to describe non-standard employment which is poorly paid, insecure, unprotected, and cannot support a household’. Precarious work is characterised by uncertainty and insecurity. The ilo and the international labour federations understand that: ‘in Africa precarious work is the norm’ but argue that ‘the phenomenon has now reached the heartlands of industrialised countries with the spread of temporary forms of employment’. ilo 2011, 30

This is perhaps a similar analysis to the ‘Brazilianisation’ thesis referred to above. ‘Decent work’ is, I would argue, not an innocent term when considered from a Southern or postcolonial perspective. Throughout the colonial world the subaltern classes struggled against the imposition of wage labour by the colonialists. There was nothing liberatory about being torn from traditional communal modes of production to become a ‘wage slave’. Even the early Western labour movement railed against wage slavery in its campaign for the eight hour day, for example. In South Africa the process was particularly dramatic. There, as Franco Barchiesi puts it, we did not have to wait for the recent financial crisis “to see precarisation emerge as a mode of appropriation by capital of the social cooperation of living labour” (2012, 243). Indeed, the whole narrative of modernisation hinged around the civilising influence of capitalism and the way in which waged work could tame the recalcitrant multitudes. Work and decency were twinned in the colonial imaginary and that is why the decent work agenda can be seen as less than liberatory from a Southern perspective. The ‘precariat’, I would argue, plays a similarly discursive role today as did the terms ‘underclass’ or ‘marginal’ in earlier debates. The precariat is seen and portrayed, as Guy Standing keeps repeating, as the ‘new dangerous class’. This, of course, is a rhetorical escalation from the notion of precarious work as ‘non-standard’, which implies a norm which should be aspired to. The term ‘les classes dangereuses’ was deployed in mid-19th century Paris by bourgeois ideologues to describe the association they saw between the working class poor and criminality. Thus Honoré-Antoine Fregier proclaimed in 1840 that: The poor and the vicious classes have been and will always be the most productive breeding ground of evildoers of all sorts; it is they whom we shall designate the dangerous classes.

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This is the genealogy within which Standing wishes to argue for the modern day precariat as ‘the new dangerous class’. Clearly there is nothing even remotely progressive about this political operation. In Marx’s work there was a similar term, namely that of the ­‘lumpen-proletariat’, deployed in a similar manner. For Marx this was a ‘class fraction’ which was not an integral part of the class structure nor defined by the relation of production, consisting of, inter alia, roués with dubious means of subsistence….vagabonds…swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets… maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers…organ-grinders, knife grinders, beg- gars – in short, the whole infinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither. marx 1970

While Standing is at pains to distance his precariat from the l­ umpen-proletariat, the family resemblance is too strong to ignore. It is worth noting how problematic the ‘lumpen proletariat’ is in the Marxist theoretical system, somewhat akin to the ‘peoples without history’ which Rosdolsky (1987) took over from Engels quite uncritically. In the Marxist theory of history social classes develop through their role in the relations of production. Thus the lumpen proletariat, defined precisely outside of these relations (like the ‘non-historic’ nation) cannot become a historical actor. If history is the history of production, and society is structured by relations of production, then the lumpen-proletariat undermines the whole edifice. Similar problems emerge with the precariat, as we saw above, certainly if it is placed in a Marxist or, indeed, any recognizable sociological framework. The politics of a ‘dangerous class’ discourse is, I would argue, quite simply incompatible with any form of progressive social transformation politics. It is a politics of social pathology which has no place in a progressive view of history and human potential. Victor Hugo in Les Misérables had already answered the ‘classes dangereuses’ prophets of his time, showing that the working poor were victims of an exploitative system and not all potential murderers and extortioners. Thus, as a political strategy for the 21st century, to even pose an emerging precariat as a new dangerous class is politically irresponsible to say the very least. Nor is it even impressionistically accurate to pose recruitment of the ‘precariat’ by the new racist right as an imminent danger. In fact the European and other emerging racist and fascist formations are appealing more to the ‘old’ working class displaced by the ongoing economic crisis.

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The notion of a ‘dangerous class’ has a long history in the racist construction of the Southern ‘Other’. The dismantling of communal modes of production and the production of a disenfranchised urban underclass were an integral element of ‘modernisation’. The degradation of the living conditions for those who were no longer peasants and not yet urban workers inspired fear and revulsion among the classes which benefited from their exploitation. As James Ferguson (2007) puts it: Urban black South Africans have long been understood as dangerous in Mary Douglas’s sense – matter out of place – betwixt and between those “proper” social categories which their very existence seems to threaten. This racialised discourse of exclusion and construction of the other as dangerous was replicated in Latin America, where slum dwellers were once called ‘cabecitas negras’ (black heads) by the decent burghers of the city. The new precariat discourse ultimately operates within the ‘labourist’ frame- work it criticises rhetorically. Labourism, for Standing, sometimes means labour unions but, more often, it is a shorthand for the social democratic state, full employment and the whole corporatist bargaining apparatus. This is set up as a traditional labourism against which to contrast the precariat and its organisations or lack thereof. Yet this ill-defined ‘labourism’ did not even prevail in pure form in the 1950s Britain which seems to act as Standing’s subconscious ‘golden era’. It certainly has had no bearing whatsoever across Asia, Africa and Latin America. That is why I argue that a nostalgic Eurocentric model of labourism permeates Standing’s precariat model and thus renders it not particularly helpful for the majority world. Bringing labour back in: The main political weakness of the precariat concept (particularly as deployed by Standing) is the complete lack of understanding of contemporary labour or of the labour movement’s organisations and strategies. Standing simply takes for granted André Gorz’s premature Farewell to the Working Class (Gorz 1982) with no supporting evidence or argument at all. It sometimes seems as if Standing has kept the world view of someone growing up in the late 1950s Britain in terms of what trade unions and labour parties essentially are. But the composition and politics of the working classes at a global level has changed hugely since then, as we saw above. And, if anything, the proletariat – in the classic Marxist sense – has become more important both numerically and politically at a global level. The

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o­ rganisations of the broad working class – national and transnational trade unions, social movement and grassroots organisations, etc – have also begun to revive after the long neoliberal night and cannot be so easily dismissed as relics of ‘old labour’, as Standing tends to do. Bringing labour back in is now crucial to an understanding of the world of work and workers in the era of globalisation, especially after the crisis of 2008–09 and the clear signs since that neoliberalism has lost its hegemonic position as global development ideology. The organised labour movement simply cannot be written off in a few lines. By way of example, in mid-2012 a new Global Union, IndustriALL (www. ­industriall-union.org) brought together affiliates of three former global union federations, namely the International Metalworkers’ Federation (imf), International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions (icem) and the International Textiles Garment and Leather Workers’ Federation (itglwf). It covers 140 countries and has 50 million members across a wide range of sectors, including the extraction of oil and gas, mining, generation and distribution of electric power, manufacturing of metals and metal products, ship-building, automotive, aerospace, mechanical engineering, electronics, chemicals, rubber, pulp and paper, building materials, textiles, garments, leather and foot-wear, and environmental services. That might be seen to be akin to a corporate merger but among its few founding principles we find a commitment to ‘Fight against precarious work’. This was not just a ritual incantation and, shortly after forming, IndustriALL signed a Temporary Work Charter with Volkswagen, a major transnational corporation operating in the North and the South, limiting temporary work to a maximum of 5 per cent of the workforce, along with the principle of equal pay and access to training for contract and agency workers, something which represents a significant blow against précarité. As Elizabeth Cotton (2013) notes: “it’s no revolution but it commits one of the largest multinational companies in the world to putting a limit on insecure work”. Organised labour is clearly part of the solution as well as being a problem at times I would be the first to acknowledge. But even if we are pessimistic about the prospects that trade unions might restructure and re-energise to face the new challenges to labour, we need to acknowledge that they do make a difference for those in a precarious position in the labour market and that agency really does count in terms of shaping the future (Munck 2010). Certainly radical interventions in the broad labour movement, seeking the revival of social movement unionism, for example, seem to be more likely to render a positive outcome for social transformation in the era of globalisation than does trying to frighten the ruling order and liberal professionals with the specter of a monster precariat.

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Neffa, Julio César, María Laura Oliveri, Juliana Persia and Pablo Trucco. “La crisis de la relación salarial: naturaleza y significado de la informalidad, los trabajos/­empleos precarios y los no registrados”. Empleo, desempleo y politicas de empleo Series 1. ­Buenos Aires: CEIL-PIETTE, 2010. Neilson, Brett and Rossiter, Ned. “Precarity as a political concept, or, Fordism as exception”. Theory, Culture and Society 25(7–8) (2008): 51–72. Nun, José. “Superpoblación relativa, ejército industrial de reserva y masa marginal”. Revista Latinoamericana de Sociología 2 (1969): 180–225. Palmer, Bryan. “Reconsiderations of class: Precariousness or proletarianization”, ­Socialist Register: Registering Class, Vol 50, 2014. Perelman, Janice E. The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de ­Janeiro. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976. Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Boston, MA: Beacon Books, 2001. Portes, Alejandro, Manuel Castells and Lauren A. Benton, eds. The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Portes, Alejandro and Kelly Hoffman. “Latin American class structures”. Latin ­American Research Review 38(1) (2003): 41–82. Rosdolsky, Roman. Engels and the ‘Nonhistoric’ Peoples: The National Question in the Revolution of 1848. Glasgow: Critique Books, 1987. Sassen, Saskia. “The informal economy: between new developments and old regulations” Yale Law Journal 103(8) (1994): 2289–2304. Seymour, Richard. “We are all precarious – on the concept of the ‘precariat’ and its misuses”. New Left Project, 2012. Accessed February 18, 2016. http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/we_are_all_precarious_on_the_concept _of_the_precariat_and_its_misuses. Silver, Beverley. Forces of Labour: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Standing, Guy. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury A ­ cademic, 2011. Tsianos, Vassilis and Dimitris Papadopoulos. “A Savage Journey to the Heart of ­Embodied Capitalism”. Transversal 10, 2006. Accessed February 18, 2016. http:// eipcp.net/transversal/1106/tsianospapadopoulos/en. van der Linden, Marcel. Workers of the World: Essays Toward a Global Labour History. Amsterdam: Brill, 2008. Waite, Louise. “A place and space for a critical geography of precarity?” Geography Compass 3(1) (2009): 412–433. World Bank. World Development Report: Agriculture and Development. Washington, DC: World Bank, 2008.

chapter 5

Rethinking Migration in the Context of Precarity: The Case of Turkey1 Nazlı Şenses Introduction The term precarity has become a focus of fruitful theoretical discussions revolving around capitalism, changing class relations and formation, and also around movements contesting neo-liberal hegemony, globally and locally. The term basically refers to insecure labour conditions, which appear in various forms, and accompanying insecure, impoverished living situations that is usually typical of the neoliberal era. This paper discusses the term precarity in its relation to human mobility across nation-state borders. More specifically, I evaluate the discussions on the concept ‘precarity’ as it relates to living and working conditions of irregular migrant workers in Turkey. In other words, the aim is to reflect on the relationships between migration and precarity by using the Turkish context as an empirical ground. Having a perspective from a Turkish context contributes to the theoretical discussions on precarity as there has already developed a critical perspective questioning the applicability of the term in the similar manner to geographical locations with diverging development paths. As an illustration, Munck (2013) claims that there is a tendency in the literature to treat the term precarity as a new development by collecting evidence mainly from the ‘North’ and for that reason failing to recognise the ‘South’s since long prevalent experience of precarity. Also Breman (2013) adopts a similar critical perspective and argues that precarity is a term that could actually speak for the ‘West’ rather than the ‘Rest’ (Hall 1992). Taking these critical perspectives into account, studying the relationships between migration and precarity in the Turkish context appears productive since an analysis of a certain form of precarious labour in Turkey could tell whether emergent theoretical discussions and empirical evidence focused on precarity could speak for a country, which is difficult to place either within ‘the West’ or ‘the Rest’ (or, ‘the North’ and ‘the South’ respectively). 1 The chapter first appeared as “Rethinking migration in the context of precarity: The case of Turkey”, Critical Sociology, doi: 10.1177/0896920515606503. Reproduced by permission of sage Publications Ltd., London, Los Angeles, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington dc.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004329706_006

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‘The North and the South’ or ‘the West and the Rest’ dichotomies are already too rigid for both explaining and understanding global inequalities. However, explaining international inequality and the differing levels of welfare and poverty, by referring to an affluent ‘North’ and impoverished ‘South’ was dominant especially in the 1960s and 1980s (Therien 1999, 723), and still is prevalent. However, the South as a homogeneous, a monolith category has been disputed especially since it has become more increasingly difficult to identify who actually belongs to this ‘South’. The economic development trajectories in certain countries such as Mexico and South Korea bring them closer to the conventional ‘North’. Turkey can be considered to belong to this category as well (Therien 1999, 726). Although, with its fragile and instable socio-economic and political structure, Turkey may not be considered as part of the so-called North (or the West), still its development make its credentials as a ‘Southern’ country debatable. Thus, in the beginnings of 1990s, Turkey was by the us Department of Commerce considered to belong among the ten ‘big emerging markets’, together with China, Indonesia, India, South Korea, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa and Poland (Broad and Landi 1996, 7). This specific condition of Turkey in relation to a global hierarchy offers a rich context for both theoretical and empirical analysis of the relationship between precarity and migration. In what follows I set out to critically discuss relevant theoretical debates on precarity in relation to migration with a specific concern for their applicability to the Turkish context. From there I process to analyse the work and life experience of, mainly irregular,2 migrants in Turkey by reviewing the most recent field research by academia, journalism and civil society organizations. Following that, I conclude by discussing the relation between precarity and migrant agency with a focus on existing counter precarity movements in ­Turkey, and to what extent they incorporate migrants into their ranks.

Precarity and Migration

The contemporary references to the term ‘precariat’, i.e. “a precarious proletariat”, applied as an analytical construct to explain the nature of work and class relations in post-Fordist capitalism are especially inspired by arguments that treat it as a new social agent or a new social class (for an example see Standing 2011). Thus, Standing (2011, 10), describing the precariat as a new social class, argues that the precariat is “a class-in-the-making” which lacks “seven forms of labour-related security”: More specifically, this new class-in-the-making 2 Those, who lack states’ permits concerning entrance, residence and/or work.

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is ­insecure in terms of a macro-level “income-earning opportunities” and long-term contract protection- They suffer from obstacles related to skill ­development and promotion; workplace health and safety, long non-regulated working time and “unsociable hours”. They are barred from developing and reproducing work related skills, obtaining an adequate and stable income and opportunities for collective organizations representing them in the labour market. ­Although, every worker has a potential to become a precarian, the ­precariat is, argues Standing, mainly constituted by youth, women, old age workers, the less educated and, important for the focus of this paper, cross border migrants. The precariat is a heterogeneous group but, maintains Standing, feelings of “anger, anomie, anxiety and alienation” bind them together. The ‘new class’ is considered to be a consequence of neoliberalism and globalisation (Standing 2011). Thus, according to this narrative the world is faced with something new, and something typical of a specific epoch of human history, namely of the neoliberal or post-Fordist epoch. This understanding treating precarity as a new phenomenon (or a new class in the making) derives from an accompanying narrative of how Fordist period and associated welfare state functioned to bring security, stability and social protection in the lives of workers,3 and how the world has ended up with neoliberalism’s insecurity, flexibility, and deregulation. However, this argument has been criticised for ignoring the historical and geographical development of capitalism, and how capitalism just from the start has brought about precarity. For example, Neilson and Rossiter (2008, 54) argue that it was actually Fordism that was something new and an “exception” in the history of capitalism, and “it is precarity that is the norm”. Thus, argue critics, precarity is intrinsic to capitalism: “employment under capitalism has always featured some element of precariousness” (Spencer 2012, 688). Following a similar line of criticism Seymour (2012) acknowledges that the number of people suffering from precarity is increasingly leaving a side only the capitalist class and some very small sections of the middle class. Hence, he argues the idea of the precariat should be treated as a uniting force, reflecting the fact that “we are all precarious” in post-Fordist capitalist society, rather than as ‘a new class’ (Seymour 2012). From another but related ‘geographical’ perspective, Munck examines the meanings associated 3 Actually, such a narrative of Fordism is also debatable, and a more critical look at the Fordist period shows “the rigidity of its command structure, the deskilling of workers, practices of industrial conflict or the relegation of women to the home” (Neilson and Rossiter 2008, 55). Similarly, Breman (2013) argues that the period under concern “involved workers’ compliant subordination to capital, in exchange for regular work and an adequate livelihood for them and their dependents”.

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with the idea of the precariat by comparing it to the notions of “marginality”, “informality”, and “social exclusion”. He traces how the terms “marginality” in Latin America in 1960s, “informality” in Africa in 1970s and “social exclusion” in Europe in 1980s were used in a way to explain “a form of work (and living) which does not appear to conform either to liberal notions of harmonious development or Marxist theories of capitalism generating a proletariat which was to be its gravedigger” (2013, 751). Thus, Munck (2013) argues that the recent debate over THE precariat should be rethought against such a “political geneology”, pointing out that precarity is hardly a new phenomenon, especially from a “Southern perspective”, which lacks the experience of a welfare state capitalism (Munck 2013, 752). While this debate raises important points our contemporary global reality is considerably more complex and hardly adequately addressed in the dualistic terminology of ‘north’ and ‘south’. This pertains indeed to the Turkish case which is difficult to place solely within a ‘south’ or a ‘north’ perspective. Protective social welfare measures were common in Turkey in the postWorld War ii period. This included a controlled international trade, import substitution policies and a large public sector integrating with the private sector (Boratav 2006). According to Boratav, a relatively advanced social security system was established as a product of left populist policies in the 1960s and 1970s. A collective bargaining system and the rise of a relatively powerful trade union activism guaranteed a continued increase in real incomes of the workers. However, after the global economic crisis of the 1970s hit an increasingly world market dependent Turkish economy, the ‘solution’ in the form of neoliberal economic policies came to alter a relatively advantageous position of labour in relation to capital. The imf and World Bank supported neoliberal reform program which Turkey adopted in 1980 was a typical structural adjustment program with a well-known content such as the liberalization of trade and financial systems, the removal of price controls, and introducing constraints on the influence of organised labour. The military regime in power 1980–83 vividly supported this neoliberal restructuring process, especially through targeting organised labour. Trade union activities were suspended, leaders of the trade unions were put on trials, strikes were banned, and collective bargaining rights abolished (Boratav 2006, 124; 148–50). Organised labour from then on have had to heal those wounds and bruise of this initial neoliberal attack coming in the form of an authoritarian state. The oecd statistics depicts that trade union density in Turkey has been diminishing year by year since 1999. In the year 2000, 9.9 per cent of the workforce was a member of a trade union, whereas this number fell to 8.2 per cent, 5.9 per cent and 4.5 per cent in 2005, 2010 and 2012 respectively. The trade union density for

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the same years in a ‘Northern’ country, the United Kingdom, is 30.2 per cent, 28.4 per cent, 26.4 per cent and 25.8 per cent.4 These figures tell in relation to the focus of this paper that with the Turkish trade unions’ diminished capacity to organise local precarious workers, their capacity to organise precarious migrant workers is much lower. This situation is also related with the fact that Turkey has a large informal economy. Against such a backdrop, migrant labour’s contestations of precarity in Turkey and their relation to anti-precarity activities either within institutionalised trade unions or loose networks of social movements emerge as an interesting issue to think about. The relation between migration and precarity points foremost to the link between the nation-state-way of organising politics and the capitalist mode of production. States’ immigration policies prioritising national citizenship above all other forms of memberships deepen precariousness of migrant labour. Migration research have shown that protection of socio-economic and political rights in the case of non-citizens is problematic and this creates a very specific form of inequality in the current nation-state order since the number of people on global move have been growing significantly. This situation is especially apparent in the case of irregular migrants who lack the protection of law as they lack any kind of ‘permit’ concerning entrance, residence, and/or work. People move especially from less developed countries to more developed ones (the so-called South–north migration) as a consequence of the advance of neoliberalism since the late 1970s (Castles 2013, 123). The integration of the periphery countries into the global capitalist economy has brought about significant social transformations in those countries. Traditional relations of production have been dissolving and new forms of economic relations emerging both in agriculture and in the factory. As a result, a population emerges that is “socially and economically uprooted and prone to migration” (Massey et al. 1993). Such transformations could be observed also in Turkey. The impoverishment of the rural areas of Turkey, especially between the late 1940s and the early 1980s, was mainly due to the mechanisation in agriculture, which caused many peasants to become unemployed. Also, the elimination of the “small-scale subsistence-oriented farming” by market oriented production has further increased the unemployment in the rural areas that in turn brought internal migration (Çelik 2005, 139). It was during these times when Turkey has turned into an emigration country as well: Especially during the 1960s large numbers of workers from Turkey moved to countries such as Germany, 4 oecd Stat Extracts, Trade Union Density. Available at: http://stats.oecd.org/Index. aspx?DataSetCode=UN_DEN. Accessed March 24, 2015.

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France, Holland, Belgium and Austria taking part in guest worker programs resulting from bilateral agreements between Turkey and these countries. This position as an emigration country then evolved into that of an immigrant rece­ iving country towards the end of 1980s and early 1990s in tandem with Turkey’s its further integration into the global economy and the development of neoliberal policies. The structural changes brought by integration to the global economy after 1980s increased the share of informal/undeclared employment that in turn eased migrants’ integration to the informal economy in Turkey (Gökbayrak and Erdoğdu 2010, 92). Immigrants came from a wide variety of countries including former Soviet Socialist Republics such as Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Armenia, together with Moldavia, Romania and Bulgaria. These immigrants came mainly as irregular migrant workers and worked in Turkey without a work permit (Toksöz, Erdoğdu and Kaşka 2012). Most of the irregular migrants in Turkey, similarly to elsewhere, ended up in unskilled and insecure work irrespective of migrants’ actual skills. Imperfect protection of rights is not exclusive to irregular migrants and this is depicted in the coining of concepts such as ‘denizens’ (Hammar 1990). However, in the case of irregular migrants, rule of law is absent in most cases. Although the logic of developed national economies demanded unrestricted market regulation for supply and demand of labour, these countries developed more restrictive policies towards international migration. This has happened mainly because of a growing number of migrants, who changed from ‘guests’ to permanent residents and an associated anti-immigrant reflex of the political structure, which is upheld through an ‘imagination’ of a homogeneous nation. Hollifield’s use of the term “liberal paradox” (Hollifield 1998, 2004) refers to such a situation facing the developed countries of ‘the North’: “the economic logic of liberalism is one of openness, but the political and legal logic is one of closure” (Hollifield 2004, 887). However, it could be argued that there is not much of a paradox here for states to ‘escape from’ since closing legal routes to migration increased irregular ways of migration which in turn provided the necessary flexible labour for production under neoliberal conditions. Labour on the move across nation-state borders exposed to a neoliberal order serves the interests of capitalist production, especially when this labour comes through temporary work programs or without any official documents, i.e. in the form of irregular migration, since it contributes to cuts in real wages and deterioration of work and social protection (Ferguson and McNally 2014). In other words, during neoliberal times irregular labour migrants turn out to be ‘functional’ as they accept low-waged, insecure, unskilled and informal work (Overbeek 2002, 3). Also Standing’s description very clearly depicts the significance of irregular migration for the current economic structure:

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Undocumented workers provide cheap labour and can be fired and deported if necessary or if they prove recalcitrant. They do not appear on the payrolls of firms and households, and fade into the nooks and crannies of society when recession hits. Productivity appears to rise wonderfully in a boom, as more are recruited without appearing in the statistics, and employment mysteriously drops less than the drop in output and demand in recessions. They are truly a shadow reserve army (2011, 91). Therefore, the majority of irregular migrant workers end up in employment, which is labour intensive, low-paid, and byond the reach of collective organisation. According to Ferguson and McNally (2014, 9) migration related ­“massive expansion of the global labour reserve” is the most important change, taking place in the neoliberal order. As stated above the Turkish economy as well has started to use this global labour reserve in the 1980s and 1990s.

Migrant Precariat in Turkey

Reflecting on the relation between migration and precarity, this section studies the life and work conditions of Turkey’s international migrants especially the ones who stay and work in Turkey with irregular statuses, and in the early months of 2015 a large group of these irregulars had become Syrian migrants. Taking into account the issued residence permits, the main source countries are Bulgaria, Azerbaijan, Russian Federation, Germany, the United Kingdom, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Iran and Greece (İçduygu et al. 2013). Before the mass influx of Syrian asylum seekers starting as of April 2011, the main source countries of asylum were Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Somali in the 2000s and the total number of asylum applications between the years 2000 and 2010 was around 76 thousand (Toksöz, Erdoğdu and Kaşka 2012, 17). Starting as of April 2011, the number of Syrians has increased significantly in Turkey. According to the official records, as of December 2014, there were 1 million and 650 thousand Syrians in Turkey. Among these nearly 220 thousand lived in 22 refugee camps located in 10 different cities, and others were spread across the country (Erdoğan 2015, 33). Most of the Syrian migrants have already integrated to the large informal economy of Turkey in irregular ways. The legal routes to formal employment for migrants is also complicated and restricted which is a condition increasing the share of informal employment among migrant workers. The law governing the work permits of migrants in Turkey (Law no. 4817) enforces a very complicated bureaucratic process for

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granting work permits to immigrants.5 The law proposes to grant permits only when Turkish workers cannot be employed in the specific job under concern. Additionally, even after satisfying the criteria for any type of work permit, it is in the discretion of the Ministry of Work and Social Security to grant the permit or not. In other words, the law grants a large discretionary power for the authorities of the Ministry. The numbers of issued work permits across the years are rather small, and in fact employers6 do not apply for a work permit either because they consider the process too complicated and think that they would not be able to get the permit or they consider that it is more profitable to have migrants work informally (Toksöz, Erdoğdu and Kaşka 2012, 27 and 52). The asylum regime in Turkey further contributes to the rise of irregular migrants within the country and the following deterioration of living and working conditions. Although Turkey is a signatory to the 1951 Geneva Convention governing the conditions of asylum seekers and refugees, it has not lifted the geographical limitation and still grants refugee status only to those who arrive from European countries. However, as most of the asylum seekers come from non-European countries, they generally add up to the irregular migrant labour population while waiting to be settled to third countries or without even making any kind of application and registration. It is very difficult for them to receive work permits. Currently Syrian migrants7 are protected under a ‘temporary protection’ regime, which concerns mass influx of people who are forced to leave their country as defined in the new immigration Law on Foreigners and International Protection of 2013. The rules and regulations governing temporary protection and the associated rights and liberties of the concerned people were set in a secondary legislation (Temporary Protection Regulation) in October 2014. It is through this regulation that finally Syrian migrants’ legal status has been set and their fundamental rights and liberties protected, including the conditions for receiving a work permit. A report of Amnesty International welcomes the Regulation in that sense, however also attracts attention to the overall discourse of the Regulation, which conditions provision of social services as depending on the capabilities of local governorships rather than as a responsibility of the state (Amnesty International 2014). 5 For a detailed review of the Law no. 4817, see Toksöz, Erdoğdu and Kaşka (2012). 6 Employers should also apply for the work permit at the same time with the migrant, and the permit is given to the employer rather than to the migrant (Toksöz, Erdoğdu and Kaşka 2012, 38). 7 Throughout this paper, Syrians will be referred as migrants, rather than as asylum seekers, refugees and etc. in order not to get lost in discriminatory legal terminology, and to simplify the use of language. However, this

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Work and Life of Migrants in Turkey Research studying working and living conditions of migrants in Turkey has developed especially in the recent years (see among others, İçduygu 2006, Tanyılmaz and Kurtulmuş-Kıroğlu 2007; Akpınar 2010; Lordoğlu 2010). Life and work of migrant women workers in domestic and entertainment sectors has been studied relatively more (see among others, Gülçür and İlkkaracan 2002; Keough 2003; Akalın 2007; Kaşka 2009), compared to research studying conditions of migrant labour in other sectors such as construction (Akpınar 2009), textile (Dağdelen 2008; Dedeoğlu 2011) and tourism (Lordoğlu and Parlak 2008; Ekiz Gökmen 2011). This paper analyses migrant life and work by utilising the findings of the recent research, which is generally conducting in-depth interviews with migrant workers with various backgrounds and by this way depicting both the subjective and objective conditions of migrant life. Newspaper articles and reports of civil society organisations are also utilised. Migrant labour come together in labour-intensive sectors such as domestic care work (child, sick, and elderly) and in manufacturing, specifically textile, garments and construction. Most of the migrant women are employed in domestic care work, and also employed in tourism, entertainment sectors and the sex industry. Construction, on the other hand, is the sector where male migrant labour is employed. Both men and women are employed in textile and garment workshops or as salespersons in textile and garment shops, and in various other service industries, including hotels and restaurants (Toksöz, Erdoğdu and Kaşka 2012). Migrant labour is also employed in agriculture in various regions of Turkey. These are all sectors, where the share of informal work is already large and includes not only migrant workers, but also locals. This widespread informality accordingly determines the nature of working and living conditions of migrant workers. In the first place, as migrant labour work informally they remain outside of any kind of social security system. They work for long hours and in jobs where collective organisation is already difficult. Additionally, child labour is also common in Turkey among migrant workers. A recent report by Amnesty International on Syrian migrants reports that there are a lot of families who are forced to have their children work (aged, 10, 12, 15 and 17) due to poverty that prevent them to meet their basic needs such as housing (Amnesty International 2014, 26). Another research also includes interviews in Istanbul with Afghan child workers, the oldest is aged 17, and an interview with a 12 year old Syrian shoemaker who live in Adana (Akdeniz 2014,8 18–20 and 66–68). 8 This book by Akdeniz (2014) is a journalistic publication and it provides interviews conducted mainly with Syrian migrants and their families dispersed in various cities including

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The precarity of migrant work is determined in the first place by wages. The wages migrants receive do not allow them to meet even their fundamental needs such as housing. According to the findings of 2012 study migrant workers earn between 1000–1500 TL9 per month in Istanbul. Syrian migrants, who were 15 and 17 years old and who work in textile sector, earn 100TL and 150TL per week respectively (Toksöz, Erdoğdu and Kaşka 2012, 93). In Adana, a city in South Anatolia, a Syrian migrant working in construction says that he receives 15TL per day. Another Syrian migrant living in Hatay and working as a porter receives around 18TL per day (Akdeniz 2014, 75 and 81). Additionally, Syrian migrants are reported to be earning relatively less and working for longer hours when compared to local workers in similar jobs (Kirişçi 2014, 30). For example, A Syrian shoemaker in Adana reports that local workers receive 500TL per week whereas he receives 300TL for the same job (Akdeniz 2014, 64). However, still the most important problem of Syrian migrant workers is the fact that employers do not pay their wages on time. For example, there are lots of Syrian migrants working in contracted manufacturing workplaces in the textile sector in the Çağlayan district of Istanbul. Most of these textile workers state that their employers either do not pay their wages on time or do not pay at all (Akdeniz 2014). Another source of precarity comes with de-qualification. Most migrant workers end up working in jobs under their previous qualifications obtained in their country of origin. Migrants from former Soviet Republics especially experience this problem in Turkey. Most of these migrants have university degrees but they end up working in unskilled or semi-skilled jobs (Toksöz, Erdoğdu and Kaşka 2012, 93). Nevertheless, de-qualification is often experienced among other migrant groups as well. For example, there are Syrian migrants, who used to be university students in Syria but who now work in the informal sector in unskilled jobs in construction or textiles (Akdeniz 2014, 49–51 and 75–76). The nature of life of an irregular migrant is determined generally by the nature of his or her work. First of all, low wages and irregular payment result in poor sheltering conditions. They build lives generally in poor districts where they can work and live informally (Toksöz, Erdoğdu and Kaşka 2012). Irregular migrants in most cases cannot afford their rents. In the case of Syrian migrants, who live outside the camps, this problem is especially acute İstanbul, Adana, Hatay, Gaziantep, Kayseri and İzmir. Although, the exact timing of the interviews are not openly stated they seem to be conducted since the mass influx of Syrians in 2011 till the publication of the book in 2014. 9 1 us $ = 2,33 tl (06.01.2015).

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(Amnesty International 2014). Irregular migrants solve this problem by renting houses in very bad conditions and live there in numbers well above the capacity of these dwellings. In addition to that, irregular migrants also face discrimination and xenophobia while trying to rent houses in Turkey. To give an example, it is reported that in Istanbul, in its Çağlayan district, most of the landlords do not want to rent their houses to Syrians, who are present there in significant numbers (Amnesty International 2014). Apart from housing, another problem of migrants is the fact that their children cannot receive any education. This is especially a problem for children who should have elementary school training. Public schools refuse to accept irregular migrants’ children. Thus, migrant children could not continue their education in Turkey if they are undocumented. Even if children are accepted as guest students they cannot receive their diplomas while graduating, as they are not properly registered. For some migrant groups church organisations provide education services for migrant children, such as in the case of Armenian migrants (Toksöz, Erdoğdu and Kaşka 2012). Matters concerning health are also among the most important problems migrants experience. They try to solve their health problems through informal networks by their own means without being able to benefit from public health care (Toksöz, Erdoğdu and Kaşka 2012). Finally, a defining characteristic of migrant life and work is the experience of discrimination and hyper-exploitation. There are reports of employers who openly propose to hire ‘foreigners’ in 3D jobs such as denim sandblasting since locals can open a case as a result of getting seriously harmed (Toksöz, Erdoğdu and Kaşka 2012, 38). Also, cities with large number of Syrian migrants have started to experience xenophobia and violent acts towards migrants on the streets with slogans such as “We don’t want Syrians here”.10 Contesting Migrant Precarity The description of the migrant life and work in Turkey above points towards an inevitable kind of despair related to a condition of precarity. A further implication is a victimised kind of ‘agency’ on the part of migrants without any potential to bring about a change in their precarious condition. As opposed to this description of migrant precarity, it is important to note that there is also a potential among migrants to contest their ­precarious living/working

10

“Kayseri’de de Suriyeli Mülteci Gerilimi” [Syrian refugee tension also in Kayseri], Radikal, July 30, 2014. http://www.radikal.com.tr/turkiye/kayseride_de_suriyeli_multeci_geri limi-1204427. Accessed January 21, 2015.

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conditions, and there has emerged a line of research, which actually focuses on such contestations of (irregular) migrants and their implications for political system (for some examples, see McNevin 2007; Varsanyi 2006; Isin 2009; Laubenthal 2007; Chimienti 2011). McNevin, for one, studies the mobilisation of irregular migrants for political belonging in the United States and discusses the implications of their demands for the practices of the “political”, meaning “a radical questioning of what it means to belong” (McNevin 2007, 656). Similarly, Varsanyi points out to the condition of those irregular migrants, who remain ‘illegal’ in terms of the discourse of the state are, “in many other ways, regular participants in the life of their communities” as neighbors, customers, workers, and parents to school children (Varsanyi 2006, 240). Isin, on the other hand, argues “it is not the claim to participate in public affairs that constitute the originality of sans-papiers [irregular/undocumented migrants] but their claims to justice when they did not have the legal capacity to do so” (Isin 2009, 382). Thus, they challenge the membership-based understandings of citizenship by “usurping the right to claim rights” (Isin 2009, 381). It is rather difficult to comment on the nature of contestations of irregular migrants in Turkey due to the relative novelty of irregulars as actors on the political scene, and an almost non-existent public attention to this issue. Additionally, the venues of collective organisation (i.e. trade unions, civil society organisations and social movements) are not that developed for the participation of migrants. Nevertheless, it worth briefly referring to these venues in order to reflect upon the potential of migrant precarity in transforming the routinized forms of political participation in Turkey. To start with the trade unions in Turkey, research demonstrates that they are not active on matters concerning migrant workers. They have almost no activities concerning migrant workers, nor an incentive to organise them (Gökbayrak and Erdoğdu 2010; Toksöz, Erdoğdu and Kaşka 2012). This situation has structural causes relating to the decreasing power of trade unions in general, resulting from neoliberal policies. Also, the large informal economy of Turkey, trade unions’ incapacity to get organised in informal economy and migrant workers’ integration mainly in the informal sector contributes further to trade unions’ incapacity to act for labour rights of migrants. Thus, trade unions do not offer a real possibility of organising migrant workers, especially the undocumented. However, labour movements with lose, network-type organisational structures offer a promising ground for active organisation of migrant workers. These movements, collectives, and networks through their organising principles do actually indirectly offer a ground for struggle that may incorporate migrant workers as well. For example, the Assembly of Worker Health and Labour

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­Safety organised in order to struggle against illnesses and deaths; or as they call it, ‘murders’ resulting from the lack of workplace safety. The main activity is to inform the public at large about these ‘murders’ and how they are linked with capitalist production. Their website11 also has a specific section, which provides news (gathered from various media agencies) concerning migrant workers. These news concern mainly employment related exploitation and human casualties while migrants try to reach European coasts in overcrowded boats. In 2011, the website entered three, in 2013 thirteen and in 2014 thirty-three news items concerning migrant workers. Informing about migrant workers and the increasing number of news may be signalling a developing interest in the living and working conditions of migrant workers on the part of the organisation. Thus, although, there is not a direct statement of the need to organise migrant workers, the organisation provides a potential ground for such an organisation. Similarly, another loose collective, which aims to strengthen union organisation, Umut-Sen, has an organising principle focused on “defending the international solidarity of workers against capitalism, which exploits labour of all workers of the world”,12 that is subtly related to migrant workers. Thus, there again there is a potential ground for organising migrant workers. Likewise, another network called Precariat Movement provides another such organising ground. The movement has conducted a workshop in 2011 on migrants and migration, where the participants discussed the similarities and differences between ‘internal’ and ‘international’ migration and migrants’ life experiences. One of the conclusions of the workshop was to organise workers without observing the distinctions made between citizen vs. migrant or internal vs. international migration (Güvencesizler Hareketi 2011). Apart from these networks that focus mainly on precarious working conditions there are also similar kinds of lose organisations which are specifically active on migration and migrants and they also attract attention to precarious lives of migrants by pointing to their working conditions.13 The organising motto of one such organisation, the Migrant Solidarity Network, is “a world without borders, without nations, without exile”.14 However, organising on matters concerning migration and precarity at 11

12 13 14

İşçi Sağlığı ve Güvenliği Meclisi [the Assembly of Worker Health and Labour Safety]. Göçmen İşçiler. http://www.guvenlicalisma.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=cate gory&id=154&Itemid=244. Accessed January 28, 2015. umut-sen. http://umutsen.org. Accessed January 28, 2015. For a review of migration related organising at the level of civil society in Turkey see ­Toksöz, Erdoğdu and Kaşka (2012), 111–125. Göçmen Dayanışma Ağı [the Migrant Solidarity Network]. http://gocmendayanisma.org/ blog/. Accessed January 28, 2015.

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the civil society level has started to develop only recently and currently it operates on a rather small-scale. Even though the contemporary migrant precariat seldom formally contests their precarious livelihoods and conditions of work through existing venues for collective organisation, they still carry a transformative potential for politics of citizenship as discussed by McNevin, Varsanyi and Isin. Isin defines “acts of citizenship” as the “deeds by which actors constitute themselves (and ­others) as subjects of right” (2009, 371). Turkey has not yet observed such “acts of citizenship” in the form of an organised collective claims for justice, or a migrants’ rights movement, which could be a Turkish example matching the ones in us, France or else. However, there have been protests and awareness raising activities connected especially with the raise of the number of S­ yrian migrants. For example, xenophobic acts directed against Syrians also triggered counter street protests claiming, “Don’t touch my brother”, u ­ sually by Turks organised in leftist parties and pro-migrant civil society organisations.15 However, what is more important is that irregular migrants do participate into everyday life as workers, tenants, customers, parents sending their children to schools, and while acting in all these everyday contexts they “create” the most precarious “scene” which disturb the “script” of Turkish citizenship (Isin 2009, 379). Precarity is not a novel condition in Turkey and it has not been experienced first by irregular migrants. However, the increasing number of Syrians, their deepening precarity in terms of livelihood and work, and their growing contestations harbours a potential to disturb the routinized, expected responsibilities of the Turkish state, actions of organised labour and counter-precarity movements.

Concluding Remarks

This chapter has discussed the relation between migration and precarity in the Turkish context. The Turkish perspective provides an important opportunity to reflect on the literature on precarity and the applicability of the term outside of the North, which has already been put in question. Although, it is difficult to decide who is who in the North–south dichotomy with ever changing economic structures connected with the neoliberal transformation, Turkey reflects a situation much different from the ‘classical’ North, which actually

15

“Antep’te ‘Suriyeli Kardeşime Dokunma’ Yürüyüşü” [“Don’t Touch my Brother” March in Antep]. August 29, 2014. http://www.bianet.org/bianet/insan-haklari/158172-antep -te-suriyeli-kardesime-dokunma-yuruyusu. Accessed January 21, 2015.

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gave birth to the prevalent academic discussion on precarity. Nonetheless, our description of irregular migrant life and work in Turkey first and foremost ­illustrates an ‘ideal type’ of precarity in work and life as described in the related literature. Irregular migrants in Turkey not only lack Standing’s (2011) seven forms of labour related security but they actually lack any kind of security. Child labour, informal work, low wages, irregular or no payment of wages, discrimination in the form of unequal pay for equal work, and de-qualification is accompanied by poor sheltering conditions, poor health, poor education, exposure to discrimination in general and xenophobia as well. Related empirical research would surely find experiences of ‘anger, anomie, anxiety and alienation’. Such a life and work experience, embodied in precarity, is not just typical of migrants in Turkey. A local construction worker with an identification card, a citizenship status and a relatively higher amount of a low wage also end up in similar working and living conditions. However, currently migrants, as a group, represents the quintessence of precarity, which again demonstrates that precarity takes various forms with varying degrees of vulnerability. A symbolic difference between a migrant and a non-migrant worker is connected with the formal protection of rights: Whereas the latter is formally protected as a citizens the former lacks in most of the circumstances any such citizenship based formal protection but instead a minimal protection under the roof of an unclear and ambivalent regime of ‘human rights’, generally in the form of international conventions. Nevertheless, the agency of irregular migrant workers who cross national borders is politically significant in contesting conditions of precarity. The discussion on precarity provides an important discourse that carries an organising force if it could manage to incorporate into its ranks the contestations of irregular migrant workers of their precarious livelihoods. The political organisation of the current world order into nation states, which is intimately connected with neoliberal forms of with capitalist production, criminalises irregular migrant workers. The ideological structure of the nation state depicts these migrants as the cause of informality and poverty. By this way it also serves to uphold politically constructed distinctions such as internal vs. international migration and ‘illegal’ vs. ‘legal’ migration. Similarly it also serves to create undocumented irregular migrants, without any legal recognition and thus exposed to any kind of labour flexibility. Thus, they the are an essential part of the precariat. Notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’, of ‘citizen’ and ‘foreigners’, are deeply inscribed within the ideological relations of nation-states. Genuinely working-class politics requires and opposition to these categories of bourgeois common sense. ferguson and mcnally 2014, 18

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Therefore, social movements, which target precarity, may attain success only if they could actually incorporate irregular migrant agency not as cultural identities but as workers without borders. In other words, although migrants are not the only group experiencing precarious work or ‘precarious citizenship’, they display the consequences of precarity clearly and for that reason their experience can further contribute to counter precarity movements (Munck et al. 2011, 258) On the other hand, movements that fail to incorporate migrants would preserve Standing’s (2011) “the shadow reserve army”. Currently, in Turkey in a developing precarity movements, although aware of the migrant precariat, there is not much of conscious acts for organising migrants into labour movements. This is clearly related to the fact that there is a very large informal economy in Turkey that includes not only international migrants but also a large number of unregistered local (non-migrant) workers. Thus, irregular migrant workers only add up to this already large informality.16 As a result, labour movements are facing the challenge of supporting the rights of a large group of local workers, together with growing number of migrant workers as of 1990s and especially as of 2011 including growing numbers of Syrian migrants. A challenge of the counter precarity movement is to construct a common ground that would include both a local and a migrant informal precariat. References Akalın, Ayşe. “Hired as a caregiver, demanded as a housewife: Becoming a migrant”. European Journal of Women’s Studies 14(3) (2007): 209–225. Akdeniz, Ercüment. Suriye Savaşının Gölgesinde Mülteci İşçiler. İstanbul: Evrensel Basım Yayın, 2014. Akpınar, Taner. Türkiye’ye yönelik düzensiz göçler ve göçmenlerin inşaat sektöründe enformel istihdamı. PhD diss., Ankara University, Turkey, 2009. Akpınar, Taner. “Türkiye’ye yönelik kaçak işgücü göçü”. SBF Dergisi 65(3) (2010): 1–22. International Amnesty. Hayatta kalma mücadelesi: Türkiye’deki Suriye’den gelen mülteciler. Index no. EUR 44/017/2014, November 20. London: Amnesty International Ltd, 2014. Breman, Jan. “A Bogus concept?” New Left Review 84 (2013): 130–138. Boratav, Korkut. Türkiye iktisat tarihi. Ankara: İmge Kitabevi, 2006.

16

Based on the Labour Force Statistics data of Turkish Statistical Institute (tuik) informal employment is estimated as approximately the 40 per cent of the total employment (http://www.tuik.gov.tr/PreTablo.do?alt_id=1007)

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Broad, Robin and Christina Melhorn Landi. “Whither the North–south gap?” Third World Quarterly 17(1) (1996): 7–17. Castles, Stephen. “The forces driving global migration”. Journal of Intercultural Studies 34(2) (2013): 122–140. Çelik, Ayse Betul. “‘I miss my village!’: Forced Kurdish migrants in İstanbul and their representation in associations”. New Perspectives on Turkey, 32 (2005): 137–163. Chimienti, Milena. “Mobilization of irregular migrants in Europe: A comparative analysis”. Ethnic and Racial Studies 34(8) (2011): 1338–1356. Dağdelen, Görkem. Changing labour market positions and workplace interactions of irregular Moldovan migrants: The case of textile/clothing sector in İstanbul. MA Thesis. Middle East Technical University, Turkey, 2008. Dedeoğlu, Saniye. “Türkiye’de göçmenlerin sosyal dışlanması: İstanbul hazır-giyim sanayinde çalışan Azerbaycanlı göçmen kadınlar örneği”. SBF Dergisi 66(1) (2011): 28–48. Erdoğan, M. Murat. “Türkiye’deki Suriyeliler: Toplumsal Kabul ve Uyum”. İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2015. Accessed February 18, 2016. http://www.hugo.hacettepe. edu.tr/HUGO-RAPOR-TurkiyedekiSuriyeliler.pdf Ekiz Gökmen, Çisel. “Türk turizminin yabancı gelinleri: Marmaris yöresinde turizm sektöründe çalışan göçmen kadınlar”. Çalışma ve Toplum 28 (2011): 201–231. Ferguson, Susan and David McNally. “Precarious migrants: Gender, race and the social reproduction of a global working class”. Socialist Register 51 (2014). Accessed February 18, 2016. http://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/22092#. VsWtIfnhDIU. Gökbayrak, Şenay and Seyhan Erdoğdu. “Irregular migration and trade union responses: The case of Turkey”. ‘İş, Güç’ Industrial Relations and Human Resources Journal 12(2) (2010): 89–114. Gülçür, Leyla and Pınar İlkkaracan. “The ‘Natasha’ experience: Migrant sex workers from the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in Turkey”. Women’s Studies International Forum 25(4) (2002): 411–421. Güvencesizler Hareketi [Precariat Movement]. Workshop Reports. January 15–16, 2011 https://guvencesizlerhareketi.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/15-16-ocak-2011-atolyeraporlari-2/. Accessed January 28, 2015 Hall, Stuart. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and power”. In Formations of Modernity, edited by Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben, 275–333. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. Hammar, Tomas. Democracy and the Nation State: Aliens, Denizens, And Citizens in A World Of International Migration. Aldershot: Avebury, 1990. Hollifield, James F. “Migration, trade and the nation-state. The myth of globalization”. UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs 3(2) (1998): 595–636. Hollifield, James F. “The emerging migration state”. International Migration Review 38(3) (2004): 885–912.

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Isin, Engin F. “Citizenship in flux: The figure of the activist citizen”. Subjectivity 29 (2009): 367–388. İçduygu, Ahmet. 2006. “The labour dimension of irregular migration in Turkey”. Research Report, European University Institute CARIM-RR, Badia Fiesolana. Accessed February 18, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1814/6266. İçduygu, Ahmet, Zeynep Gülru Göker, Lami Bertan Tokuzlu and Seçil Paçacı Elitok. 2013. “Turkey”. In Neighbourhood Migration Report 2013, edited by Philippe Fargues, 243–264. San Domenico di Fiesole: European University Institute. Kaşka, Selmin. 2009. “The new international migration and migrant women in Turkey: The case of Moldovan domestic workers”. In Land of Diverse Migrations: Challenges of Emigration and Immigration in Turkey, edited by Ahmet İçduygu and Kemal Kirişçi, 725–804. İstanbul: Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları. Keough, Leyla J. “Driven women: Reconceptualizing the traffic in women in the margins of europe through the case of Gagauz mobile domestics in İstanbul”. The Anthropology of East Europe Review 21(2) (2003): 73–80. Kirişçi, Kemal. Misafirliğin Ötesine Geçerken: Türkiye’nin ‘Suriyeli Mülteciler’ Sınavı. Brookings Enstitüsü & Uluslararası Stratejik Araştırmalar Kurumu (USAK), 2014. Laubenthal, Barbara. “The emergence of pro-regularization movements in Western Europe”. International Migration 45(3) (2007): 101–133. Lordoğlu, Kuvvet. “Türkiye’deki çalışma hayatının bir parçası olarak yabancı çalışanlar”. In Türkiye’ye Uluslararası Göç Toplumsal Koşullar Bireysel Yaşamlar, edited by Barbara Pusch and Tomas Wilkoszewski. İstanbul: Kitap Yayınları, 2010. Lordoğlu, Kuvvet and Hasret Parlak. “Türkiye Turizminde Göçmenler ve Çalışma Sorunları”. I. Ulusal Çalışma İlişkileri Kongresi. Tebliğ Kitabı. Sakarya University, 2008. Massey, Douglas S., Joaquin Arango, Graeme Hugo, Ali Kouaouci, Adela Pellegrino and J. Edward Taylor. “Theories of International Migration: A Review and Appraisal”. Population and Development Review 19(3) (1993): 431–466. McNevin, Anne. “Irregular migrants, neoliberal geographies and spatial frontiers of ‘the Political’”. Review of International Studies 33(4) (2007): 655–674. Munck, Ronaldo. 2013. “The precariat: A view from the South”. Third World Quarterly 34:5 (2013), 747–762. Munck, Ronaldo, Schierup Carl-Ulrik and Wise, Delgado. “Migration, work, and citizenship in the New World Order”. Globalizations 8:3 (2011): 249–260. Neilson, Brett and Ned Rossiter. “Precarity as a political concept, or, Fordism as exception”. Theory, Culture & Society 25:7–8 (2008): 51–72. Overbeek, Henk. “Globalisation and governance: Contradictions of neo-liberal migration management”. HWWA Discussion Paper 174. Hamburg: Hamburg Institute of International Economics, 2002.

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Seymour, Richard. “We are all precarious: On the concept of the ‘precariat’ and its misuses”. New Left Project. (2012). Accessed February 18, 2016. http://www.newleftpro ject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/we_are_all_precarious_on_the_concept _of_the_precariat_and_its_misuses. Spencer, David A. “Review of: G Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class”. Work, Employment and Society 26: 4 (2012): 688–689. Standing, Guy. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. Tanyılmaz, Kurtar and M. Meryem Kurtulmuş-Kıroğlu. “Türkiye’de göçmen işçiler ve işgücü piyasası üzerinde etkileri”. In Türkiye’de Yabancı İşçiler: Uluslararası Göç, İşgücü, edited by Aylan Arı. İstanbul: Derin Yayınları, 2007. Therien Jean-Philippe. “Beyond the North–south divide: The two tales of world ­poverty”. Third World Quarterly 20:4 (1999): 723–742. Toksöz, Gülay, Seyhan Erdoğdu and Selmin Kaşka. Irregular Labour Migration in ­Turkey and Situation of Migrant Workers in the Labour Market. Ankara: IOM, 2012. Varsanyi, Monica W. “Interrogating “Urban Citizenship” vis-à-vis Undocumented ­Migration”. Citizenship Studies 10:2 (2006): 229–249.

chapter 6

Multiplex Migration and Aspects of Precarisation: Swedish Retirement Migrants to Spain and their Service Providers1 Anna Gavanas and Ines Calzada Introduction In Swedish public discourse, retirees born in the 1940s are represented as a growing cohort of relatively wealthy consumers, with more cosmopolitan preferences and habits compared to previous generations. They are part of a growing number of Northern Europeans who migrate to Southern Europe to retire in the sun. From a relational approach, the authors examine conditions of Swedish retirement migrants in Spain and of their service providers. Social networks, intermediaries and subcontractors are crucial to the organisation of migration as well as for the provision of work and services in retirement migrant destinations. This chapter especially investigates: how do recent trends towards individualisation and internationalisation of job trajectories as well as informalization and precarisation of labour impact the conditions of service providers? And further: how do the strategies for care and services of Swedish retirees interplay with the characteristics of labour and welfare systems along a North–south eu axis? We use the term International Retirement Migrants (irms) (King et al. 2000, 1) to refer to Swedish retirees who currently reside seasonally as well as permanently in Spain, including both those who have migrated before and after retirement. They could also be labelled ‘residential tourists’ or ‘lifestyle movers’, but we use the term irm in order to place the wide set of actors in our study within a field of internationalisation and mobility, where the term ‘migrant’ is not reserved for labour migrants and asylum seekers. The social context of our study – i.e. the destination zones where irms and service providers meet – is conceived as an encounter of two sets of transnational actors with widely different socio-economic backgrounds and 1 This chapter first appeared as “Multiplex migration and axes of precarization: Swedish retirement migrants to Spain and their service providers”, Critical Sociology, doi: 10.1177/0896920516628306. Reproduced by permission of sage Publications Ltd., London, Los Angeles, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington dc.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004329706_007

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­socio-spatial situatedness : (1) irms, most of whom have (officially) left the labour market and have a background in an industrial class structure and Swedish Welfare State society (Thelin 2013); (2) service providers who operate formally and informally on a Spanish labour market, with relatively low welfare provision and a service economy characterised by a high level of informalization and precariousness. Apart from adding a relational dimension to studies on retirement migration, this field exemplifies the gap between Northern and Southern Europe in terms of work and welfare, and our results can be used to reflect about inequalities in labour and welfare rights among citizens of different eu countries as well as third country migrants from outside the eu. Below, after a brief theoretical and methodological introduction, we first describe the varied social and economic conditions of Swedish irms in Spain and how their strategies influence the relations they establish with service providers. As part of this panorama, we analyse three key cases that provide contrasting insights to aspects of precarisation and mobility across a North– south axis: low-income and working irms, Swedish entrepreneurs and migrant workers in jobs with low skill requirements. In this chapter we differentiate the workers and entrepreneurs that provide services to irms along two main axes: (1) one the one hand, we differentiate between those that have a salaried contract, and those that either work self-employed or own a company.2 For the self-­employed, we mention if they work formally (they are registered as self-employed workers and pay the required taxes and social security contributions) or informally (they are not registered and do not pay taxes). (2) On the other hand, we differentiate between Spanish workers and those that are originally from another country, either an eu state or a 3rd country. The three sub-categories of actors in irm fields highlighted here exemplify different degrees and aspects of precarity and illuminate the asymmetric options at work for different types of citizens in irm destination zones. We examine the interplay between labour market conditions and actors’ (lack of) access to public care provision in Spain, shaping the strategies that irms as well as workers/entrepreneurs develop when they reach dependency on extensive elderly 2 Legally speaking, the difference between being self-employed and owning a company has to do with the administrative procedures to be followed, and with the economic obligations in case of bankrupcy. I.e. self-employed workers can own a company without having to hire any worker. However, we decided to distinguish between self-employed workers that do not hire or subcontract the work of others (that we name “self-employed”), and those that do have employees or subcontract work (that we name “entrepreneurs”). This distinction proves to be more important for the lives of our interviewees than the fact of having or not a registered company.

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care. Precarity here refers to precarious labour market situations as well as a truncated citizenship (Schierup et al. 2015). More specifically we use ‘precarity’ or ‘precarisation’ with reference to insecure and unpredictable access to employment and social rights, conditioning the lives of migrant as well as nonmigrant workers. We also use the term ‘precariat’, as defined by Standing (2011), meaning an increasingly numerous and differentiated category who lack labour related security relating to a range of aspects: terms of employment, social protection, mobility, income and representation. As we will relate to closer as we discuss the livelihoods of the actors of our study, they experience a range of precarity aspects through constantly being ‘on call’, ‘unpaid’ ‘extra’ work, being caught up in ‘insecure’ informal work, living off permanently insecure incomes and being subject to unpredictable work schedules, and with poor outlooks concerning social rights in later life. However, the degree of precarity is ultimately conditioned by access to extensive welfare provision, which positions irms and Swedish entrepreneurs in a more secure position as compared to especially Third Country migrant workers.

Welfare and Work in irm Fields: A Relational Approach

irms contribute economically to destination regions through consumption (Coldron and Ackers 2009), but the labour markets in these regions have been insecure and partly informal ever since the beginning of mass tourism in the 1960s. The labour market catering to tourists and irms is highly segmented and characterised by high unemployment and temporary contracts (Breivik 2015). North- to South irm is generally motivated by a wish for living in a warmer climate, quality of life and lower costs as well as health reasons. Most irms choose to settle in coastal tourist destinations with an established infrastructure for them, with services managed by entrepreneurs from Northern European backgrounds (usually as citizens or through family relations) as well as large irm organisations and communities. Different studies point to the lack of everyday social contact between the irm communities and Spanish society, with the language as the main barrier explaining this lack of “integration” (O’Reilly, 2007). Our study distinguishes itself from previous studies on the subject of irm which – with a few exceptions (see e.g. Nudrali and O’Reilly 2009) – adopt an ‘irm-centred’ approach. In contrast to this our study examines how the conditions of irms are interlinked with those of workers and entrepreneurs who provide services to them. We argue that the north-to-south retirement in the eu is conditioned by longstanding features in Spanish touristic regions

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c­ ombined with neoliberalisation of labour markets as well as welfare state care provision. All this results in precaritised conditions especially for migrant workers in jobs with low skill requirements, but also entails limited options to low-income retirement migrants and flexibilised entrepreneurs. This calls for a relational perspective on irm and changing welfare regimes in an increasingly (north–south) polarised European Union. Today’s retirement migration among Swedish elderly can be understood as a (partial) product of the ‘golden years’ of the Swedish Welfare State (Meagher and Szebehely 2010; 2013) as especially those born in the 1940s, spent their working years under a system characterised by job stability, economic growth and welfare state expansion allowing uninterrupted social contributions, and strong social protection. However, Swedish retirees of all generations range between wealthy, middle income to poor and the conditions of low income and otherwise disadvantaged Swedish retirees born in the 1940s have been overshadowed by the discourse on the ‘golden years’. Contrary to popular belief, the proportion of Swedish low income retirees was increasing at the beginning of the 2000s (Thelin 2013). Nevertheless, generally speaking, thanks to their relatively beneficial retirement conditions, a substantial and growing group of Swedish elderly can afford to maintain dual residences (in Spain and Sweden), enabling them to maximise their social/ family resources, quality of life, their wealth and welfare benefits (Åkerlund 2013). However, our research demonstrates that there is a large variety of socio-economic conditions as well as residential arrangements among irms (Blaakilde and Nilsson 2013). Thus, we cannot support the common idea (in media as well as research) that irms solely constitute a case of elite/ privileged migration. Even though all Swedish citizens retain the privilege of returning to the Swedish welfare state, there are irms who struggle to get by in Spain and there are irms in at-risk positions, who are isolated, ill and cannot afford or manage to move back to Sweden, where prices for housing and living costs are much higher than in Spain. The labour and welfare systems that Swedish retirees encounter in Spain are characterised by more job instability and less social protection that the one they were used to. Regarding the job market, and according to official statistics (National Statistical Institute -ine), Spain has suffered from permanent high unemployment since the mid-80s; it has been above 10 per cent almost any year, and higher than 25 per cent in economic downturns. Spanish salaries are well below European standards, they are only lower in Portugal and the Eastern European countries. Moreover, the Spanish labour market is characterised by intensive use of temporary contracts: 23 per cent of all contracts in Spain are temporary, and this number is higher than 30 per cent in regions such as

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Andalucía and the Canary Islands. Furthermore, the Spanish labour market’s extensive informal economy amounts to 20 per cent of gdp (Schneider 2013). Although in the last years these characteristics became even more pronounced due to the economic crisis, they are structural features of the system rather than a punctual product of the economic downturn. As for the Spanish Welfare State, it combines Social-democratic characteristics (Esping-Andersen 1990) such as universal health care and high replacement rates for contributory programs such as unemployment and old-age ­pensions with an underdeveloped safety net for those that cannot enter into the contributory programs (informal workers, housewives) and an almost complete reliance on families for child and elderly care. According to welfare typologies, it can be classified as Corporatist of low development (Esping-­Andersen 1990; 1999) or as a particular Southern European welfare regime named ‘Mediterranean’ (Gal 2010; Moreno 2002). In this respect, Sweden represents one of the highest levels of provision in Europe (as one of the Scandinavian Welfare States), whereas Spain one of the lowest (Lister et al. 2007).3 Due to low levels of welfare state provision combined with targeted labour migration policies, Spain substantially relies on migrant women as a source of labour for domestic services, elderly- and child care (Leon 2010).4 Moreover, in Spain the informal economy covers one third of the domestic service market, i.e. cleaning as well as handyman services and elderly care (Simonazzi 2009, 226). In addition to ethnic segmentation, labour markets are heavily structured by gender, which is crucial in analysing the purposes, experiences and work- and care related outcomes of migration processes, both when it comes to irms as well as their service providers: especially the female dominated domestic service sectors as well as the male dominated handyman- and building sectors (Kilkey et al. 2013; Kofman et al. 2000; Lutz 2011). Domestic work ­carried 3 The path-breaking “Dependency Law” in 2006 was a main intent to establish a public program for elderly care in Spain, but despite attempts at formalization, demand for elderly care is still channelled through the informal market in Spain (Ibañez and Léon 2014). The law granted economic assistance to any resident in need of care due to disability or old-age, leaving mostly to the market the actual provision of services, and conditioning public funding to the individuals’ income. However, with the economic crisis in 2008, lack of funding combined with absence of political will in regions governed by the conservative party (which was opposed to the law) have paralyzed the application of the Dependency Law (Ibañez and Léon 2014). 4 In just four years, migrants grew from being under 20 per cent of formally employed domestic workers in 2000 to over 53 per cent in 2004. In 2010, the percentage of migrant domestic workers was over 60 and almost 20 per cent of third country nationals were in domestic work, compared to just 2 per cent of Spaniards (Ibañez and Leon 2014).

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out by men tends to be more highly valued and paid than domestic work carried out by women (Kilkey et al. 2013, 13), and migrant women and men are differently positioned within labour markets as well as in the social networks that organise domestic services (Vasta 2004). The Swedish and Spanish Welfare States, combined with the structure of the Spanish labour market, affect the strategies and options for Swedish irms when they acquire dependency on elderly care. For instance, the majority of Swedish irms are still registered as resident in Sweden but since 2007 they still have access to tax deductions for domestic services carried out in Spain (which have been very popular among elderly in Sweden), and intend to formalise such services (Gavanas 2013). However, we found that the low salary levels in Spain, combined with accessible and inexpensive informal domestic services, rarely makes irms consider it worthwhile to use these formal options, with the exception of tax deductions for the more expensive handyman services. Methodology Our project uses ethnographic methods focusing on the everyday lives of irms and workers/entrepreneurs while taking into account localised negotiations and contextualised meanings of global processes, shifting welfare regimes and migration trajectories (Agar 1996; Bernard 2006). We use comparable and open ended semi-structured interviews in order to uncover and understand how irms and workers/entrepreneurs perceive economic and social processes in irm destinations, and how they make sense of their own position in it. Many segments of irms and workers/entrepreneurs in this field are unregistered (Rodríguez et al. 2004) but during fieldwork we have been able to reach unregistered migrants (whose residence in Spain is not registered) as well as informal migrant or home-state workers (whose work is not formalised according to labour legislation). We have interviewed 80 irms, 120 worker/entrepreneurs as well as 20 experts5 on the Southern coast of Spain as well as the Canary Islands. The large 5 Interviews with irms were carried out individually, with couples and with groups. However, most interviews with workers/entrepreneurs were carried out individually. The interviews were carried out in the native or preferred language of interviewees, i.e. Spanish, Swedish or English. All interviews are anonymous, recorded and transcribed, with consent forms signed according to the Swedish Board of Ethics. Both irms and workers/entrepreneurs have been contacted independently, i.e. workers were neither contacted through irms nor the opposite. Regarding workers and entrepreneurs, we interviewed 69 workers in the private sector,

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number of interviews corresponds to the existence of a large variation in the conditions of irms as well as workers/ entrepreneurs in the areas under study,6 allowing us to maximise variation. Interviewees are selected through thematic sampling, ensuring variation along relevant parameters, such as age, gender, family situation, socio-economic background, living arrangements and length/ timing of migration. For workers and entrepreneurs, we also maximise variation regarding the type of service provided (health, housing and food), the work status of the person interviewed (entrepreneur, self-employed, salaried worker), and her/his position in the informal economy (formal, informal, combination of both). Interviewees have been contacted through local authorities, associations, businesses as well as the networks of social centres such as the Swedish Church as well as through ‘street approach’ walking up to irm interviewees in residential areas, cafes and contact zones around town.

Panorama of the Field: Actors and Their Positions

In the analysis that follows we select three migration and work scenarios that represent three contrasting cases of mobility and precarity aspects from our interviews within the irm field. We begin by describing the situation of different irms. Subsequently we turn to workers and entrepreneurs. irms There are about 90,000 Swedish citizens living in Spain according to estimates by the ngo Swedes on the world (Hedlund 2011). This number is increasing, especially as the ‘baby boom’ generation born in the 1940s are retiring. According to the latest figures (2013) from the Spanish Statistical Institute (ine), the Southern Coast of Mainland Spain and the Canary Islands are two of the three most popular destination for Swedish irms (together with Alicante, in the region of Valencia). In this year, 6,120 persons of Swedish nationality 18 workers in the public sector, and 43 entrepreneurs. Workers/ entrepreneurs have different national backgrounds: most were from Sweden/ Northern Europe, Spain or South America. Gender, family situation and age are varied. All non-Spaniards had residential- and work permit in Spain, but we found many working informally, especially in the cleaning and care sectors: 22 interviewees were working only informally, or were combining formal and informal jobs. 6 Most welfare services in Spain are responsibility of the regions, and they strongly vary from one region to another. Andalucía and the Canary Islands are two different regions, with different economic structures, political traditions and organization of social and health-care services that may impact the lives of irms.

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were ­registered as residents in the province of Málaga (that covers the largest part of Costa del Sol) and 3,452 were registered as residents in the Canary Islands. Of them, 2,577 in Málaga and 903 in the Canary Islands were older than 65 years. However, these figures are gross under estimations, since irms tend to stay in Spain seasonally and for less than the maximum of 6 months and thus do not register as residents in Spain. The majority of irms are seasonal residents who spend the summer months in Sweden, where they are registered as permanent residents. There are also irms who are registered as permanent residents in Spain, and possibly planning to remain in Spain. The majority of irms are born in the 1930s or 1940s, and our interviewees were men and women in a range of family situations: couples, singles, widow(er)s and with or without adult children and grandchildren in Spain, Sweden or elsewhere. The economic conditions of interviewees ranged between those with high, average and low pensions, resources and savings. Among irm interviewees there were different professional and socioeconomic backgrounds; there were former ceos, nurses, truck drivers, engineers, civil servants, service workers, construction workers, etc. Among irm interviewees there were those who owned multiple houses, for instance in full service urbanisations (where gardening, cleaning, repairs, maintenance and all other residential services are included) with mostly Northern European residents. There were also irms who lived in apartments (bought or rented) and those who lived in camping caravans and even outdoors on beaches, benches and in caves. Some irms travel freely between residences they own and/or rent in Sweden and Spain while others only have a residence in Spain and could not afford to go back to Sweden neither for visits nor permanently. If “the going gets tough”, the majority of Swedish irms tend exercise “exit mobility” (Urry 2007, 201) and return to the more extensive welfare state provision in Sweden when they become dependent on extensive elderly care – all Swedish citizens retain this right, including the very poorest. But until then, they prioritise active and independent ageing according to the current norms and ideals of their age cohorts (Blaakilde and Nilsson 2013; Gustafson 2001; 2009). irms use their eu cards for emergency health care, often in combination with private health insurance or prolonged home insurance. However, low-income irms who stay on in Spain are at risk for falling between the Swedish and Spanish welfare systems. They are left with a limited patchwork of formal and informal, privately funded (and provided), options for elderly care, such as unpaid family care; unpaid social networks/ volunteers; as well as paid informal/formal services. It is very rare for Swedish irms to rely on/ be eligible for Spanish public elderly care. Neither the Spanish nor the Swedish Welfare State provides affordable home based elderly care, or elderly care homes, for

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irms who remain in Spain as age related dependency sets in. irm lives in Spain may thus change abruptly as resources (bodily, economic, social) for active and independent ageing diminish (Hardill el at. 2005). Like previous irm studies (Gustafson 2002; Oliver 2008) we found that interaction between irms and Spaniards was limited beyond consumer oriented relations unless irms had a Spanish partner and/or had worked extensively in Spain previous to retirement. Despite attempt to interact with Spanish locals, most irms mainly tended to interact socially with irms from Scandinavian or Northern European backgrounds. In irm destinations, there is an infrastructure of services that acts mainly in three sectors: housing (real state agencies; home maintenance); health & beauty (general doctors, dental clinics, hairdressers) and food (supermarkets, restaurants and cafés). The existence of these ethnically niched7 ‘swedified’ services substantially facilitates the process of settling and living in Spain for irms. While irms may get by in their destination areas, the importance of speaking Spanish becomes unexpectedly urgent when requiring extensive elderly care – especially if they lack family/ social support (Hardill et al 2005). Among low-income irms options for care and services are limited. Especially singles as well as widows and widowers, become much worse off economically and socially without partners (and in heterosexual relations men usually earn more). Participation in the social life of local irm groups and associations (meetings, trips, lunches, etc) is circumscribed by economic resources (Oliver and O’Reilly 2010). Class (in the sense of economic capital) intersects with gender among irms, which is particularly visible in the case of widows who retired early. It is very common for irms to act as paid or unpaid providers and intermediaries to each other (Woube 2014) and a major motivator, next to solidaristic reasons, is the need for extra income – especially in the case of widows and single irms. This widespread work by irms is part of the informal economy, which merges with the formal economy in the sense that those who are working formally (irms as well as not-yet-retired workers) at real estate agencies, restaurants, etc, are often involved in the informal economy (O’Reilly 2000, 122f). Case a: Gun-Britt, low income, single and working irm: Gun-Britt retired early because her older ex-husband had health issues and wanted to move to Spain. Now, as single, she needs to cut down on expenses and works informally 7 “Scandinavian” services in Spain do not fully correspond to “ethnic enclave economy” (Slavnic 2013) in the sense that immigrant small businesses in irm contexts would seek to reduce unemployment among, and discrimination towards, Swedish immigrants, or to necessarily help integrate immigrants into Spanish society (2013, 13).

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­ roviding home based elderly care (the equivalent of Swedish ‘hemtjänst’) for p other irms. However, she will not be able to afford such services herself when she becomes dependent on elderly care. She neither speaks fluent Spanish nor is she eligible for Spanish elderly care, which she considers inadequate anyways. Even if she would need state funded domestic services, Gun-Britt’s income is too low to deduce tax from and she has no access to Swedish elderly care provision while in Spain. The problem is that she considers her pension too low for the high costs of living in Sweden where she has no family, social network or residence to return to. Workers and Entrepreneurs The workers and entrepreneurs that provide services for Swedish irms compose a heterogeneous mix of backgrounds, trajectories and working conditions. Along with Spaniards, we find Scandinavian entrepreneurs and workers, other migrants from the eu as well as third country nationals. Educational levels and previous professional experience vary greatly; from the Stockholm executive that left friends, family and a career in Sweden to manage properties in Spain – to the Spanish gardener whose complete family lives close-by, or the Uruguayan bank worker that migrated to Spain looking for security and now works as an informal cleaner/ carer. Citizenship, migration trajectory, educational level and gender structure the labour market that caters to irms. In turn we may discern a complex hierarchy of professional positions clustered around the irm phenomenon. In this chapter, we especially focus on aspects of precarity among workers and entrepreneurs: precaritised workers in low-skilled jobs, mostly Spanish or South American, and Swedish entrepreneurs absorbed in unpredictable and ‘flexibilised’ working lives. Low-skilled manual jobs catering to irms, such as gardening, cleaning and handyman work are largely occupied by Spaniards, including workers with a background in South America, who have lived in Spain for many years and who often hold Spanish citizenship. For the most part, these workers speak only Spanish, and their interactions with irms are reduced to friendly ‘hellos’. Workers with Northern European backgrounds can be found in skilled jobs in the administration of service companies with a majority of Scandinavian clients. Citizenship and migration background clearly structures the positions of workers in these workplaces. Thus, jobs that require fluid communication with clients, as well as in-depth knowledge of Spanish society, are occupied either by Northern Europeans that have lived many years in Spain, or by Spaniards that for different reasons spent several years living and working abroad and speak fluent Scandinavian or English languages.

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Notwithstanding the availability of formal options for services, irms also use accessible and inexpensive informal options for domestic services, for instance combining a Spanish or South American cleaner for 8–10 euro per hour with a Swedish or English speaking formal or informal care worker for 15–20 euro per hour. For those that do not want to, or cannot, pay the higher prices at companies managed by Scandinavians, there is a plethora of workers that provide occasional formal and informal services to irms such as translation, repairs, cleaning or elderly care. They do not have a stable source of income and rely on maintaining a wide network of contacts to make a living. Self “employed” Spaniards and South Americans are hired mainly in domestic services such as cleaning tasks, gardening and repairs/ maintenance whilst Scandinavians can be found in translation and skilled care (elder care, massage, nursing, etc.). Of all the groups that provide services for Swedish irms, workers in domestic services have the weakest position. They are mainly Spaniards or migrants from South America with low salaries, working many hours in unpredictable schedules, and facing a risk of poverty in old age due their lack of social security contributions. Case b: Clara, migrant domestic worker from Colombia: Clara works informally as a domestic worker for networks of Scandinavian irms for 10 euros per hour and sends remittances to her family in Colombia. Her schedule and income is unpredictable and irregular and she is constantly “on call”. With almost no social security contributions Clara will be impoverished when she can no longer work. She lacks family support in Spain, which is the standard fallback option for Spaniards considering lack of access to the underfunded and under staffed Spanish welfare provision. In contrast to citizens of Scandinavian Welfare States, she has no ‘exit mobility’ to welfare provision elsewhere when she reaches dependency on extensive elderly care. In contrast to tcn migrant domestic workers like Clara, entrepreneurs (i.e. company owners with at least one employee or subcontractor) typically have a Scandinavian background, having grown up in Scandinavia, or they are Spaniards that spent many years living and working in Sweden and decided to resettle in Spain. Among the entrepreneurs with Scandinavian backgrounds, two groups can be discerned: (a) migrants from Northern Europe to Spain in the 60s and 70s, arrived when they were quite young, settled in a Spanish village (mainly because they married a Spaniard) and have lived many years in Spain; (b) the recently arrived, many in their late middle age, that came to Spain looking for a better quality of living, adventure or a ‘fresh start’. This distinction is important to understand in the various aspects of precariousness and working conditions facing workers and entrepreneurs. Mediation between irms and actors in Spain is based on common language and perceived common culture, and relations are based on notions of quality and trust. Intermediaries are

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workers or entrepreneurs with bi-cultural backgrounds that serve as a connection between the Spanish system and the irm community. This is a relational position that can also be part of work and entrepreneurship. As part of or in addition to the tasks associated with their profession or business, intermediaries offer advice and help on a variety of topics, making “understandable” Spanish society to Swedish residents and translate irms needs to workers. Among entrepreneurs, the recently arrived do not make ideal intermediaries because they are not fluent in Spanish and are still struggling to navigate new norms and regulations. They offer services to irms the ‘Swedish way’, and provide places to speak Swedish, but they cannot help much in solving the complications of daily life (what does this letter from the town council mean? Where can I find a reliable plumber? How do I change the tariff of my Spanish mobile?). Some of these are irms-to-be and share social networks with the irms they serve. In contrast to the recently arrived, the entrepreneurs who have been living in Spain for long periods that have connections in both communities (friends, family, workmates) and with bi-cultural experience are of fundamental importance in the lives of Swedish irms. Case c: Lars and Kerstin: Swedish flexibilised entrepreneurs/ workers: Lars and Kerstin recently moved from Sweden to Spain to start a domestic service business, Kerstin providing domestic- and Lars handyman services. Their clients are Scandinavian but their prices are only slightly higher than the Spanish equivalents and they subcontract some manual tasks to Spanish or migrant workers. They work many hours and have little social security but claim to have chosen this situation and to be satisfied with it because they prioritise quality of life in Spain before income- and career concerns. Lars and Kerstin’s working hours and schedules are unpredictable, they do a lot of extra work for free in order to keep clients and lack of sleep constitutes their strategy to combine work and family life. They have low social security contributions both in Spain and Sweden, no private pension savings and even though Lars charges a higher hourly rate than Kerstin, they both face poor outlooks for livable pensions. They might exercise their exit mobility as Swedish citizens and return to the more generous welfare provision in Sweden eventually, when one of them passes away or they require extensive elderly care.

Managing Transnational Mobility, Work and Welfare Services

Individualisation, Flexibility and Exit Mobility in the Lives of Workers and Entrepreneurs In irm fields, the group facing the highest degree of precariousness, in terms of insecure income and schedules, overwork and underpay, as well as scarce

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social security contribution, are low-skilled migrant tcn workers like Clara. However, even though they possess the legal right to ‘exit mobility’, working low income irms like Gun-Britt and flexibilised Swedish entrepreneurs like Lars and Kerstin also experience shrinking labour and welfare rights due to cutbacks in eldercare by the Swedish welfare state (Meagher & Szebehely 2013). In comparison to entrepreneurs, workers tend to have worse economic conditions: they work a lot, carry out a variety of tasks, have no fixed working hours, and those who are partly or completely in the informal market have no labour protection or social security. However, actors elaborate strategies to minimise risks to themselves and their family members. Some have partners with a stable job/pension that serve as a cushion. Others combine periods working in salaried jobs with periods as self ‘employed’ informal providers, and in some service sectors it is frequent to find workers with part time salaried contracts that supplement their scarce incomes with occasional jobs informally. These strategies are easier to employ by Spaniards and, in any case, being a self ‘employed’ worker is less risky when you can rely on family members close by in case things go too bad. For Scandinavians, to make a living informally as self ‘employed’ workers is riskier unless they have earned some pension rights in Scandinavia. The perception of the job differs according to migration backgrounds among self ‘employed’ workers and entrepreneurs. For Spanish or South American workers that make a living from cleaning, handyman work or caring for elderly, a job is more about survival than about finding ‘the good life’. As for Scandinavian workers/ entrepreneurs, they like many things about living in Spain and possess the exit mobility of returning to their Scandinavian Welfare States, but those that are not receiving a pension from Scandinavia, and rely only on earnings from helping irms, have to always be on call. Problems appear if the person can no longer work due to illness. Although some of the features of the Spanish labour market in these regions have been around since mass tourism emerged in the 1960s, the situation of migrant workers and entrepreneurs corresponds to the analysis of Tsianos (2007), who argued that the worker shaped by an ‘embodied neoliberalism’ is subject to constant demands to embody ‘flexibility’, ‘availability’, ‘multitasking’, ‘multilocality’ and compressed ‘mobility’ across time and space as exemplified by the lives of intermediaries. Intermediaries may work as bilingual hairdressers, bank tellers, care workers and handymen and get to deal with all kinds of issues that might not be part of the primary services they are getting paid for. In contemporary ‘flexibilised’ working life of the neoliberal era, this has become a normalised part of work and as a result, precarity, insecurity and always being ‘on call’ is an adaptive pattern across different sectors (Tsianos 2007, 216). For some entrepreneurs, especially owners of small companies, providing general

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advice and problem solving is strategic because it can bring more clients. For others, mainly those with long established business, it is a positive aspect of their job, and they express satisfaction for being able to help fellow migrants, or to give back the help received when they themselves were migrants in Sweden or elsewhere. But for those with the weakest economic positions, such as self-employed and informal workers, intermediation is a hidden cost that they have to pay if they want to stay in business, leading to plenty of extra unpaid work and extremely long working days. In contrast to entrepreneurs and self-employed, salaried workers in urbanisations and compounds for foreign residents, or in companies oriented to the Scandinavian irm market, value the stability of the job above salaries, novelty or possibilities of personal advancement. They tend to have family in the same municipality where they work and, for the most part, they have lived for many years in the same village. In general, they have shorter working days than entrepreneurs and self-employed, and their depictions of a normal week include activities apart from work (family, friends, strolls, pub, sport). Spanish and South American salaried workers primarily compare their conditions with those in the Spanish labour market, and they feel privileged working at urbanisations/compounds for foreign residents or in companies run by Swedish entrepreneurs. Although salaries follow Spanish standards, working conditions are better in all respects, for instance regarding the predictability of schedules and payments, employer’s respect for the conditions signed in the contract and the absence of ‘hidden’ burdens (like unpaid extra-time). Salaried workers with Scandinavian background (as migrants or citizens) tend to occupy more skilled and better paid jobs than Spaniards or migrants from other countries, but this is not reflected in a higher job satisfaction. Salaries are lower in Spain than in Sweden, and working hours tend to go from 10am-2pm and from 4pm-8pm (with 2 hours for lunch), or from 9am to 6pm (with one hour for lunch). This schedule makes the combination of work and family/social life more complicated than in other countries, something resented by Swedish workers. For them, living in Spain has benefits and disadvantages, and many have considered moving back to Sweden at some point. This is especially true for Scandinavian workers with children, who tend to worry about future prospects for their children if they remain in crisis and unemployment ridden Spain. Very interestingly, salaried workers in urbanisations and companies catering to Swedish irms mention formality and stability as one of the more positive aspects of their jobs. Swedish employers are considered better than Spanish ones: jobs are stable, working hours and social security contributions correspond to what has been signed in the contract, salaries arrive in due time

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and, in addition, Swedish people are ‘good people’ as residents of urbanisations and compounds; more ‘respectful’ and less bossy and aloof than Spanish employers. In our data, such preferences for Swedish clients or employers is a common pattern that also appears among formal and informal workers of all national backgrounds. Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated, through a relational perspective on irms and their service providers, how informalization, precarisation and low wages in Spain fill the gaps between the Spanish and Swedish Welfare States. Despite possibilities for free movement within Europe and despite the migration- and work strategies of providers to improve the lives for themselves and their families, substantial inequalities, within – and between the background and destination countries of migrants across a North–south eu axis as well as between third country- and eu nationals, persist unchallenged (Kilkey et al 2013, 66). Asymmetric working conditions, and possibilities for future mobility and an active and independent retirement, persist within a polarising context of privatisation and shrinking public provision across Ageing Europe as well as economic crisis and austerity measures in Southern Europe. Ironically, both Spanish and Swedish policy attempts at formalising domestic services and elderly care are made useless by privatised irm options and strategies in Spain, where informal and low wage alternatives prevail. In other words, as Slavnic (2010) argues, informalization takes place from above (by corporations, governments and subcontractors) and below (by marginalised actors such as lowincome workers and self-employed/ small business owners) in this field: but also from the middle, through irm strategies. Overall, the different workers and entrepreneurs we have described can be understood as examples of the increasing variation of individual trajectories brought about by recent social trends (Bauman 2000), combined with the long standing structural features of the Spanish labour market. For instance, there are also Scandinavian entrepreneurs who voluntarily left a career in their home country searching for the ‘good life’, or for personal progress, and exemplify new trends towards individualisation of trajectories, broken professional careers, labour mobility and diminishing importance of traditional roots (family and community) (Sennett 1998; Bauman 2000). There are irms like Gun-Britt, especially widows and singles with low income, who may fulfil ideals of active, independent and mobile ageing but can neither afford to live on in Spain nor in Sweden, can neither access Swedish nor Spanish welfare provision and are

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struggling to get by providing informal services to other irms. The new flexible and mobile world is also inhabited by Spaniards unable to find a stable job and that, in order to remain in their communities, have to get by combining informal jobs and short-term contracts. We also find Scandinavians like Lars and Kerstin that came to Spain looking for the good life and found jobs with low pay, long working hours and the hidden cost of having to be intermediaries between Swedish irms and Spanish society. In addition, irm destinations are inhabited by third country nationals like Clara who moved looking for a better economic situation but are left with the hardest and lowest paid jobs. The aspirations of irms are enclosed in the wider conditions of the globalised and informalized labour market of the current neoliberal era where workers/ entrepreneurs (and some irms) operate and precariousness prevails. The alleged neoliberal ‘win-win relation’ between irms and entrepreneurs/ workers where the one is providing labour opportunities for the other, is partly based on the absence of social rights or access to welfare provision as well as the high rates of unemployment, informalization and underpayment in these areas. In addition there are irms who can barely afford to scrape by in Spain while facing financial and social difficulties to move back to Sweden. Migrants unable to be profitable, or to make profit, are excluded from any mobility benefits. In irm destinations, the most precaritised actors are workers in jobs requiring low skills, struggling with unemployment or temporary contracts as well as migrant workers from third countries, because their salaries are lower and their risks of poverty are higher. These dimensions intersect with gendered dimensions of precariousness, since women tend to have lower salaries than men and especially irm widows or single women may end up in difficult social and economic situations. But also irms with low pensions, alone and in need of care, that cannot afford to pay professional care services and are forced to rely on informal carers with uncertain qualifications and with whom, for the most part, they cannot adequately communicate. Thus, irm destinations increase the mobility and opportunities for some generations and groups of Scandinavian retirees and entrepreneurs/ workers, but the corresponding risks and options are strongly associated with gender, citizenship and economic capability. In contrast to the bulk of previous irm studies, we demonstrate the necessity to understand the conditions of all actors involved in irm fields from relational perspectives and taking into account the impact of welfare states (or lack thereof). Thus, we can discern how, at a cross-national level, new inequalities are created between citizens of Northern and Southern eu countries as well as between the eu and the rest of the world.

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In today’s eu, the shrinking Swedish Welfare State mitigates various aspects of precarisation for Swedish citizens, as we have demonstrated by contrasting our three sub-cases. However, fall-back strategies for Spanish and (to a lesser extent) migrant tcn-workers in low-skilled jobs are limited to family support. Acknowledgments For transcriptions and assistance, we are indebted to Virginia Paez (csic) and Gunilla Rapp (LiU). We are also indebted to the special issue editors Martin Bak Jørgensen and Carl-Ulrik Schierup as well as two anonymous peer reviewers for helping us to improve the clarity of our text.

Funding Acknowledgment

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Tsianos, Vassilios. Imperceptible Politics. Rethinking Radical Politics of Migration and Precarity Today. PhD Dissertation. Hamburg: University of Hamburg, 2007. Urry John. Mobilities. Cambridge and Malden MA: Polity Press, 2007. Vasta Ellie. Informal Employment and Immigrant Networks: A Review Paper. Oxford: COMPASS, 2004. Woube Annie. Finding One’s Place. An Ethnological Study of Belonging among Swedish Migrants on the Costa del Sol in Spain. Uppsala University: PhD dissertation, 2014.

chapter 7

Employment in Crisis: Cyprus and the Extension of Precarity Gregoris Ioannou Introduction The discourse of flexibility in the labour market (Standing 1999; Kouzis 2001), although in principle an eu goal and an overall framework for state policy (eu Commission 2007), had not become dominant in Cyprus before the current crisis, not least in the ways or to the extent that it had in other countries. Undeniably, irregular work had expanded, individualist work arrangements had been diffused and trade union power had been eroded, nevertheless, these developments were primarily the consequences of social structural dynamics and less a result of conscious ideological, political or legal agency and action. Since the 1990s neoliberal ideas were evidently spreading in Cyprus and were quite influential within centre-right parties and government circles. However, neoliberalism had not intrinsically managed to dominate fully in the Cypriot political system or oust the enduring Keynesian logic from the state elite which survived throughout the 2000s. Neoliberalism, as a broad and comprehensive policy framework, closer to the third and fourth forms in Jessop’s (2013, 71) typology,1 has really triumphed just recently, in the beginning of the ­current decade and ironically one might add with a government in office headed by akel.2 Although by 2009 the crisis had reached Cyprus as well, its form, magnitude and threat was not realised until 2011 and its consequences turned dramatic only in 2012–2013. The deepening of the recession and the rapid rise of unemployment created enormous pressures on employment and welfare. The Memorandum of Understanding between the Republic of Cyprus and the Troika 1 In his attempt to sum up the debate on the character of neoliberalism, Jessop constructs a typology consisting of four distinct forms: the first refers to a ‘system transformation’ as in eastern Europe in the 1990s and the second to a ‘regime shift’ as in advanced capitalist countries as well as Latin American ones starting in the 1970s and continuing through the 1990s, the third form refers to ‘economic restructuring processes’ imposed from the outside while the fourth one refers to more gradual, ‘partial and pragmatic policy adjustments’. 2 For an analysis of the left in government see Charalambous and Ioannou (2015).

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institutionalised and sealed the framework of crisis management through the imposition of heavier austerity measures paving the way for a declining living standard and expanding poverty, further wage reductions and an increase in unemployment along with the privatisation of public services. Moreover, it created a framework for a more comprehensive labour market, welfare system and industrial relations system restructuring. Already in the currently pursued policies, there are signs of the intended direction of the planned reorganisations – state subsidies to employers for opening temporary, low wage-limited rights job positions, reduction of public assistance and linking state aid to job seeking and a generalised reduction of ‘the labour cost’. Collective agreements, the minimum wage, over-time pay, employer contributions to various funds, the wages themselves are all now under serious threat resulting in the extension of the condition of precarity to broader sections of the population. Trade union power has essentially been substantially eroded. Its limited appeal amongst a growing precarious labour force segment, together with the disrespect shown ever more openly and bluntly by the employers to collective agreements, bi-partite memoranda and tripartite labour relations conventions, the changing institutional context after Cyprus’ entry into the eu and the substitution of some trade union functions by labour legislation were already here before the crisis. Trade unions had organisational difficulties with the immigrant, as well as the young and the irregular workers, and faced indifference and depreciation by a large segment of their own membership. Many of their members viewed them as distant and alien institutions while they were characterised by democratic deficits and extensive delegation of power, duties and responsibilities to the trade union bureaucracy and the professionals as their local workplace committees tended to under-function. All of this was exacerbated by the crisis and the unemployment milieu which caused them further loss of members and further paralysis of the local committees3 while the tougher stance of the state and the employers in the Memorandum era discredited them more in the eyes of their members and society in general as their weakness was gloriously revealed.

The Labour Market in Cyprus in the Early Twenty-first Century

The globalisation processes, especially the increased capital and labour flows into Cyprus and the entry into the eu which has accelerated them, have created new realities on the ground transforming to a significant extent both the 3 sek General Organisational Secretary, 29 January 2014.

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economy and the society of Cyprus by the onset of the twenty-first century. Despite the abnormal political condition in the island (partition and militarisation), Cyprus has been a place of stability in comparison with the turbulent Middle East,4 for financial investments that were encouraged by low tax rates. Agriculture continued its passage of shrinking and became insignificant both in terms of gdp and in terms of employment by the 1990s, while manufacturing also continued to decline at a slower but steady pace largely as a consequence of the customs union with the eu and the inability of Cypriot production to compete with the lower labour and production costs of Asia. On one hand, at the socio-economic level, the expansion of the tourist and construction industries, and on the other hand the transformation of Cyprus into an international financial centre, allowed the increase of living and educational standards of the local labour force, but created labour shortages in manual and unskilled work. The growth of mental work and white collar office, sales and administrative jobs, involving increased cognitive, communicative and emotional aspects, has been effected with the more generalised expansion of services and the corresponding rise in the educational level of the Cypriot labour force. The manual and low skilled jobs were primarily taken over by the ever increasing immigrant workers from South East Asia and the Middle East, from Eastern Europe, with or without eu passports, and more recently from China and Africa who, in their overwhelming majority, remain little integrated in Cypriot society (Trimikliniotis and Demetriou 2011). At the political level the subjection of the country to international dynamics and forces in the setting of the eu accession process facilitated a slow yet steady development of the neoliberal discourse in Cyprus. This was further enhanced with the adoption of eu directives, the harmonisation of the national legislation and the further institutional integration in the context of the entry into the European Monetary Union (emu). By the end of the 2000s, the neoliberal logic entrenched in the mechanics of the eu system had managed to set the framework for policy in Cyprus. The development of the crisis and the stance of akel in government, made this evident demonstrating at the same time how constraining that framework was, especially while being situated in the South European periphery. What is more, owing to the rapidity and severity of the crisis in Cyprus, the cracks appeared in the structural imbalances of its economy and the erosion of the effectiveness of its institutions to regulate a labour process in transition.

4 The civil war in Lebanon in the 1980s led to the transposition of substantial financial processes from Beirut to Limassol and Nicosia.

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Offshore banking corporations that were attracted to Cyprus because of its strategic geographical location and its low-tax financial system were heightened even further in the prequel and sequel of the entry into the eu, completing the tertiarisation of the Cyprus economy (Pegasiou 2013). In addition, the increased integration of Cyprus in the international economy along with the shifting of its geopolitical position from the periphery to the core of the global system also had repercussions on the cultural and ideological spheres. Economic growth was accompanied not only by the expansion of the labour aristocracy and the middle class but by a generalised improvement of the purchasing power of broader sections of the population which, in conjunction with the relative ease of loan-taking, increased consumption and consolidated the ideology of consumerism. This likewise involved the demise of collective values, political engagement and social solidarity and the diffusion of rampant individualism and apolitical materialism. The size of the economy as a whole has expanded and so has the number of firms and jobs available. Yet most new entrants into the labour market of Cyprus either came or have come to face different employment conditions, relatively worse than two or three decades ago. And this seems even more pronounced if one takes into account the relatively higher qualifications and expectations of the new generation of workers as a result of the more generalised improvement in educational level and living standards.5 For many workers in countless sectors the rights and benefits, sometimes even the wages of their older colleagues are simply not applicable or not immediately available to them. Even when there is a collective agreement in the sector or in the firm they are employed, it does not mean that they will be automatically covered by it.6 Often, not to be covered by an existing collective agreement is implicitly a condition for being offered the job in the first place. The fragmentation of the workforce at all levels – workplace, sectorial and national – is not a new phenomenon. And neither, of course, is workers’ 5 The increasing unemployment, underemployment and irregular employment amongst the youth have been observed and are not really contained in the 2000s (Trimikliniotis 2004). 6 This has led peo and sek to agree and prioritise, in the context of the labour relations legislative reform process discussed in recent years, the demand that the Ministry of Labour is given the right to decree the extension of an existing collective agreement to all the firms of the sector. For more details about the bill that was eventually submitted to parliament in 2012 and which included also criteria for compulsory employer recognition and opened the way for trade unions to resort to the courts, if they wished, in a more generalised attempt to strengthen the status of the collective agreements, see peo 2008; peo 2012; Messios and Soumeli 2011 [2010] and peo statement, 18 May 2012. Eventually the bill was withdrawn by the Anastasiades’ government in early 2013 and its future is now pending.

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r­ esistance – individual and collective, organised and non-organised, conscious as well as unconscious. Nevertheless, both fragmentation and resistance have been accentuated in recent decades as a result of the rapidity of the structural change in which existing divisions and factors of hierarchy were transformed. Managerial elaboration and diversification, technical and professional qualifications and ethnic origin brought in new lines of segmentation along with the older ones based on age and gender, seniority and skills. These factors, in addition to social networks and occupational and sectorial identities, form social cleavages upon which notions of common interests and common fate are built within the labour force (Ioannou 2015b). Although the deregulation of employment relations might occasionally cater for the desires of, and give some freedom to, individual workers, in practice it usually means employer arbitrariness and reflects a more general shift in power relations in favour of the employers. It is achieved through the promotion of personal contracts of work and personal contracts of services that involve essentially subcontracting and piece work.7 The institution of collective agreements is undermined both directly through employer refusal to have or abide by existing ones and indirectly through non enforcing particular provisions of, and excluding some workers from, the collective agreements. As a result the workforce is segmented into two parts – one employed on the basis of collective agreements and one that is not covered by them. Thus, the key regulatory mechanism in the labour process – collective bargaining – becomes relativized and the workplace becomes a hybrid space of dual or multiple terms and conditions of employment (Ioannou 2011; Ioannou 2015b). Immigrant workers, at the same time embody not only the victims of employer discrimination in terms of wages, rights and benefits (Carby-Hall 2008) but also serve as the means through which employers threaten the long acquired rights and benefits of Cypriot workers.8 The frail labour market position of immigrant workers and their even more fragile social position render them overtly dependent on their employer, who is often their landlord too, which usually makes it inconceivable for them to join the trade unions. But even when they do, the terms and conditions of employment are usually pre-agreed on the basis of personal contracts, often stipulating longer than the norm hours and lower than the norm wages.9 As a result, relatively few immigrant 7 These are of course global phenomena (Schierup 2007; Wills 2009). 8 This is a constant Cypriot workers’ complaint and is also described in recent trade union research (Antoniou 2010). 9 sek’s General Organisational Secretary stated in an interview on 29 January 2014 that both employers and immigrant workers tend to hide these personal contracts from the trade unions.

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workers out of the majority that join the trade unions only gain cheap medical care and a more formalised access to trade union help in cases of specific problems they might face at work. The more extreme form of irregular and flexible labour is informal and undeclared work which has been steadily expanding over recent years and is, of course, directly related to the more general increase in the number of immigrant workers. Around 30,000 non-Cypriots were estimated to be ‘without papers’ in the area controlled by the Republic of Cyprus in 2009 (iom 2010), while the total number of undeclared ones, that is including those that are entitled to work (from eu countries) but are working without paying social insurance is probably higher.10 Although inspections were increased by the previous government and penalties became more severe, this phenomenon has deep roots and its eradication does not seem to be within reach. ‘Black labour’, characterised by super-exploitation in the form of low wages and even unpaid work, is recognised as a structural element in capitalism in the last analysis – a product of the asymmetry of power between social groups and forces and embedded hierarchies of contemporary societies. The existence of a ‘black’ labour market essentially defines and frames the normal labour market. On the other extreme of the labour force lies the labour aristocracy constituted primarily by a large section of the public and banking sector employees. For a variety of historical, political and socio-economic reasons employees in these sectors, variation in ranking and internal hierarchies aside, are generally privileged enjoying better wages and employment terms and more importantly a series of other monetary and non-monetary benefits. The same applies to a large extent for the semi-public sector which is made up of workers engaged in the municipal authorities and the relatively autonomous public services. These workers of the semi-public sector are employed according to regularly renewed collective agreements, unlike the civil servants proper (including the public education workers organised in separate trade unions) who are employed directly by the state and paid from the state treasury. Trade union density in the public, semipublic and banking sectors approaches 100 per cent and trade unions are particularly strong and especially efficient in securing and maintaining good pay and conditions for their members. The non-profit making rationale of the state and the structural need for the smooth functioning of the state apparatus, on the one hand, and the strong labour market position and associated social power of the civil servants as a whole, on the other, allows and facilitates the benevolent character of the state as an employer and the overall beneficial employment conditions for public 10 In Kathimerini, 20 February 2011 it has been argued that around 40 per cent of eu workers are either working illegally or without being registered (Persianis 2011).

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sector workers. Public sector unions and public sector industrial relations are basically very similar to the banking sector trade union and labour system. Impersonal structures of authority, detailed procedures and regulations govern all aspects of the employment relation, including management and promotions and specifying the remuneration scales and benefits and the rights and duties of the workforce.

The First Signs of Crisis and the Beginning of Austerity Politics

Although the recession had hit the Cyprus economy in 2009 causing an increase in unemployment and some fiscal imbalances due to reduced state income, the depth of the crisis was realised in 201111 when the black holes of the banking system started to be revealed, leading to the exit of the state, which was not in a position to bail them out, from the international markets. The Cypriot banks had expanded much beyond their capabilities abroad and especially so in Greece (Stefanou 2011). In this period the Cypriot bankers’ attempt to profit from the Greek bonds during the dramatic crisis in which the Greek state had fallen in 2010, left the Cyprus banks particularly vulnerable when the eu decided to proceed to the haircut of the Greek debt (Pegasiou 2013). By June 2012 when the banks in Europe had to strengthen their capital base in order to reach the agreed target, it became evident that Cyprus was heading for a Troika administered ‘rescue plan’. By 2011, unemployment at the level of the labour market had become a serious problem. Wages in the private sector had begun to freeze and in some cases even to decrease, while incidents of violation and non-renewal of collective agreements became more frequent. Before the magnitude of the crisis was made evident and perhaps also in order to delay the revelation of the depth of the banking sector crisis (Panayiotou 2013), a generalised attack was launched by employers’ associations, economists and opposition politicians and journalists on the fiscal policies of the government and the public sector workers in an attempt to divert public attention and distort the picture of the crisis. The Christofias government was in an especially weak position after the Mari accident and the pressure to implement austerity measures was largely successful. Additionally, civil servants had, by then, become an easy target as the recession was deepening. They were accused as being too privileged, lazy and unproductive, rendering the state apparatus expensive, and in the hysteria 11

In the broader public this became common knowledge only in 2012 as the media censored references to the private banks’ problems and shifted attention to the fiscal side and the public sector (Panayiotou 2013).

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that followed even private sector employees came out demanding cuts on civil servant salaries. Austerity measures were eventually implemented in the fall of 2011. These included a general freeze of all wages in the broader public sector including the cola, plus a 10 per cent wage decrease to all newcomers in the broader public sector (also affecting all current employees on temporary contracts upon their renewal), a series of small increases on the contribution of public sector workers to various state and social insurance funds, a general temporary and scaled contribution on all wages including the private sector, an increase of 2 per cent on vat, and a tax increase of 3 per cent on income from dividend (peo 2011). These were accompanied with the re-examination of all state benefits with a view to their reduction through the introduction of income criteria, together with the offering of subsidies to business for the employment of unemployed persons, the offering of tax incentives to business for infrastructural investments, reduction of public sector spending, offering state guarantees to small and medium businesses for securing loans and simplifying licensing procedures in the attempt to ‘fight bureaucracy’. These were implemented formally against the will of the trade unions, in violation of the celebrated ‘social dialogue’ and after an unanimous agreement of all the political parties ‘in the common attempt to avert the worst’.12 Not only was the ‘worst’ not averted, but it soon degenerated into a nightmare. The recession deepened in 2012 with unemployment increasing further while employers in the private sector took advantage of the formalised austerity politics and the cuts in the public sector wages and proceeded to analogous and often bigger cuts in the private sector wages. Many refused to pay the cola and the 13th salary, violating collective agreements, conventions and institutional obligations. At the same time, delay in payments, payment with coupons, abolition or substantial reduction of indirect monetary and nonmonetary work benefits, as well as violating not only collective bargaining but also labour legislation, became the order of the day. The trade unions reacted with some sporadic strikes at sectors and firms where they felt they had the strength but in most cases, remained either quiet or restricted themselves to complaints.13 Although they effectively knew by then that the era of social 12

13

Trade union opposition to this, for a variety of structural and political reasons, was however mild and limited. See Ioannou (2015a). The Minister of Finance at the time, Kikis Kazamias said that this would prevent the country from resorting to the Troika and that this would be the last contribution from the world of labour. There was a substantial increase in strike activity in 2011 compared to previous years and an even bigger increase in 2012 (peo 2012). Though the strikes tended to be firm based and generally short in duration with the exception of the construction sector which was hit

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dialogue had ended and that the era of the Memorandum had begun, trade unions continued to act as if little had changed and urged the employers to demonstrate self-restraint. The negotiations with the Troika began in June 2012 after it became clear that the Cypriot banks were in serious trouble and the state was not in a position to bail them out while the state itself, blocked from the markets was unable to renew its older debts, and temporary solutions such as borrowing from Russia were by then evidently both uncertain and inadequate. The threat of bankruptcy of the banks taking with it the state itself and consequently the economy as a whole set the broader frame in which the recession and the political developments proceeded in the autumn. In these circumstances the prevailing uncertainty fuelled anxiety and fear amongst large sections of society and hammered in the sense of despair that strict austerity was inevitable and that the choice was between ‘the painful rescue’ or drowning in the chaos of collapse. It was interesting that this scenario staging the same actors had already been played in Greece (as well as Ireland and Portugal) less than two years earlier and that the Cypriots had watched it – obviously without learning anything from it.

The Memorandum of Understanding with the Troika

The fiscal side of the Troika rescue operation was agreed in November 2012 and, although not formally signed, it was put into operation a few weeks later. It involved heavy cuts in public spending, a further increase in a series of consumption taxes plus another 1 per cent increase in vat, significant horizontal as well as scaled reductions in public sector wages and pensions, and the abolition or substantial reduction of a series of welfare benefits. Furthermore, it raised the retirement age to 65 and reduced the pay for over-time and shift work in the public sector too. Additionally, it increased the contributions of employers and employees in the private sector and established a new property tax and a series of new fees, or increases in current fees, in public services. These measures, with the exception of the property tax, which was delayed for a few months but was finally passed in a worsened version for the small particularly hard by the crisis and where the conflict was more generalised and prolonged throughout 2012. This culminated in a long strike in early 2013 which took an almost existential character, re-educating the workers in the experience of organised struggle as peo’s Central Organisational Secretary stated (interview, 27 November 2013). For the strike and the collective agreement that followed see Soumeli (2013a and 2013b).

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holders in the spring of 2013, were unanimously voted by the parliament in December 2012 into laws instituting the framework of the impoverishment of the Cypriot society until 2016. As expected, the austerity policies imposed in the fall of 2012 in the context of the Troika ‘rescue plan’ exacerbated further the recession as consumption contracted, unemployment rose further and small businesses came under further pressure. In the public sector, fear of additional and higher cuts in wages and pensions and especially fear of heavy taxation on the civil servants’ pension lump sum, increased the number of early retirements, while pasidi which was loudly reacting during the previous period became as quiet and timid as peo and sek. Cyprus had already entered a new age. The Troika was already more or less in control of the situation before even giving the first installment of the loan and before the formal signing of the Memorandum which had to wait for the investigation of the condition of the banking sector and the new government taking over in March.14 In the private sector, employment conditions turned from harsh to dramatic as registered unemployment constituted more than 15 per cent of the labour force and the proportion climbed to as high as 40 per cent among the youth (Ioannou and Sonan forthcoming 2016). These figures are, of course, underestimates as they do not include non-registered unemployment (e.g. recent school, college and university graduates who have never entered employment), persons working only a few hours per month, and those considered by the state as ‘voluntarily unemployed’. More importantly they do not take into account the rapid drop in the number of immigrant workers, who in most cases were the first to be fired and the least able to sustain themselves while being unemployed most of them with little choice but to leave Cyprus. Young Cypriots finishing their studies abroad sought jobs abroad and others who were in Cyprus begun looking for jobs abroad. By 2015 the emigration trend was clearly visible. Those retaining their jobs faced further substantial reductions in salaries and employer contributions to welfare funds, usually more than those in the public sector, while most importantly they lost whatever sense of security they enjoyed before the crisis. Collective agreements that were renewed in this period became shorter in duration and these cuts were formalised. There were

14

The Troika as an external force was largely indifferent and impervious to local dynamics, pressures and politics and as the experience of Italy and Spain has shown even in the absence of a formally agreed Memorandum; its intervention could substantially reshape the employment relations field (Meardi 2014).

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also cases where intermediate agreements were made to revise and make worse existing collective agreements.15 The area of indirect pay in the form of employer contributions, overtime and shift work remuneration and newcomers’ wages were the regulations most successfully challenged by the employers in addition to the 13th salary and the cola.16 The main reason for this is that because these regulations affected primarily future or additional benefits from the perspective of the waged and thus their loss was seen as more palatable, whilst they currently presented running costs from the perspective of the employer.17 More importantly, however, the institutionalisation of such measures, whether formally or de facto, notwithstanding rhetorical references about their supposed temporariness, in addition to measures such as the lowering of the entry wage or the abolition of the 13th salary, were effectively reshaping the employment field for the coming decades.18 The rapid contraction of the banking sector, that began in March 2013 through the bail-in, enforced on the Bank of Cyprus, the closing of Laiki Bank and the state take-over of the Cooperative Credit Societies, sealed the change in the field of employment field and concluded as well formally the Memorandum of Understanding between the Republic of Cyprus and the Troika. Among the great losers of the banking crisis were workers’ Provident Funds which, in all sectors, suffered large and varying losses. For many small Funds the losses were so heavy that it led them to closure. The concept of the Provident Fund itself was shaken in these circumstances as gradually more workers began to doubt the utility and security of collective saving.19 Thus, workers’ 15 16

17 18

19

This was so even in industries that were little or not at all affected by the recession. See for example the hotel industry collective agreement signed on 29 May 2013 (Soumeli 2013c). The 13th salary in Cyprus is part of the yearly remuneration of the employed person and not an extra bonus offered at the will of the employer. For those enjoying this right, it is institutionally protected as a customary labour convention and its unilateral abolition by the employer constitutes a penal offense. The same applies for cola for all those enjoying it, although after its freezing in the broader public sector and the agreement with Troika to extend this until 2016 and then halve it, caused enormous pressures in the private sector with many employers refusing to pay for it with or without trade union consent. peo General Organisational Secretary, 27 November 2013. The 2013 decree fully liberalising working time in retail trade; that is extending the tourist zone shop operating time to the whole country, is another instance of the same process: extending and intensifying work, increasing the pressure for the abolition of regular full time work and extra over-time pay and promoting irregular and flexible employment, part-time and shift work and undermining workers’ rights as protected in labour legislation and conventions. peo General Organisational Secretary, 27 November 2013.

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savings, after becoming an easy target of the employers’ urge for cost cutting, now faced a second blow by the banking crisis which affected actual losses and erosion of workers’ trust who, following their wage reductions, were less willing and less able to contribute to savings. Bank branches began to close one after the other and hundreds of employees were made redundant through the first wave of ‘voluntary schemes’ that offered some compensation – probably more generous than those that will be on offer in the next waves. For those remaining, both in the private banks and the now state owned cooperative sector, wage cuts ranged around 15 per cent in scaled form (Phileleftheros 2013b; Yiannakou 2014). More importantly, however, the uncertainty prevailing with respect to how many and who will retain their jobs cannot but make most banking sector workers insecure and anxious about their future. This is an unprecedented development because until very recently a banking sector work post was considered to be the definition and epitome of ‘the good’ and ‘the secure’ job. After 2013 banking sector employees are working more intensely as fewer employees have increased work load and there is now substantial unpaid overtime work. Moreover there has been a freezing of special benefits enjoyed by bank employees such as cheap loans and there has been an agreed modest extension of the work timetable while one bank has formally proceeded to demand further extension of the work timetable to include afternoons and Saturdays, wider managerial scope in appointments to key positions of professionals from outside the bank, undercutting the prospects of promotions for bank employees and etyk’s mediating role in the process.

The Extension of Precarity

Precarity is effectively a doubled edged concept, with both a theoretical and a political dimension: as a real condition imposed by neoliberalism and postFordist labour flexibility leading to a ‘new’ socio-political and inherently revolutionary subject (Frasanito Network 2005; Standing 2011). Precarity refers to both the positioning of persons in the labour market and the labour process and the economic, social and political terms that are associated with this positioning. Precarity is thus rooted in the realm of employment and work but really has repercussions in the broader life conditions of those subjected to it. For the purposes of this chapter, precarity is approached as a primarily empirical term – used as a category to identify a set of employment/work conditions in the context of labour force fragmentation (Ioannou 2015b). It is not fixated to a labour force fraction, a group of occupations or more broadly a social

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group, although obviously some labour force fractions are embedded in it. It is more prevalent in some occupations than others and it hits disproportionally different social groups. Precarity is rather a general term used as an analytical axis through which the field of labour can be accounted for. This ‘axis’ shifts in the context of the current crisis as the elements which constitute it – weak labour market position, insecurity, poor terms of employment etc – are enhanced. In addition to the banking sector workers there are now two more groups of workers dropping from the world of relatively good salary and benefits into the pit of precarity. The decision taken by the government in 2013 for the privatisation of public services and the revelation of the deep economic problems of most municipalities effectively opened the way for a substantial restructuring that will most certainly involve ‘drastic labour cost reduction’. The privatisation process has already been approved by a parliamentary majority on 4 March 2014 while the drafting of the local administration reform bill constitutes work still in process. This means that many hundreds of redundancies are due ahead as most semi-public organisations will pass into private hands and most municipalities are expected to merge and/or outsource their functions and services, while some will be abolished through the merges altogether. Needless to say those that will retain their jobs in public services and municipalities should expect further cuts in wages and other benefits in addition to those already affected by public sector fiscal re-adjustment. And again, the uncertainty about how many and who can expect to stay in employment in the semi-public sector spreads anxiety and the sense of precarity to a social group previously insulated in the main, from unemployment risk. In fact this anxiety is also spreading to some extent to the public sector proper, although civil servants for the time being, definitely remain protected as the target of the current Memorandum for a reduction of the government sector job positions is being implemented through voluntary early retirements and their non-replacement. The sense that this arrangement is itself precarious is unquestionably widespread as the austerity framework and the logic of fiscal restraint will continue after the formal end of the Memorandum in 2016 as formally announced on many occasions by the government. Moreover, there is an on-going effort by the government to proceed to a comprehensive restructuring of the public sector making all the cuts in wages, benefits, pensions etc permanent while linking any future wage increases to gdp expansion through an automated process. Overall in the period 2012–2014, employment diminished by around 15 per cent exerting significant pressure on nominal and real wages. Part time employment has increased from 10.7 per cent in the last quarter of 2012 to 12.8 per cent in the last quarter of 2013 while the self-employed were hit

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­ articularly hard (inek-peo 2014). The decrease in the purchasing power of p the average wage in the period 2012–2014 is estimated at around 13 per cent with the purchasing power in 2014 becoming equivalent to that of 1996, having retreated thus 18 years (inek-peo 2014). As the economy shrank in terms of real gdp by 10.5 per cent in the period 2012–2014, conditions in the labour market have deteriorated substantially, enhancing and diffusing precarity among large sections of the labour force. Precarious conditions of work were evidently here before the crisis. In the private sector a large section of the contemporary working class in Cyprus did not enjoy the rights and benefits of stable/permanent employment while a substantial section of the waged population, estimated around 20 per cent, was low-waged, that is earning less than two-thirds of the median wage (Ioakimoglou and Soumeli 2008, 206). Those concentrated on the low-waged segment of the labour force were overwhelmingly women. Precarity affected proportionally more women than men, more the younger than the older workers and the overwhelming majority of immigrant workers. More importantly, this condition was also already expanding before the crisis driven by the flexibilisation of the labour market and the associated deregulation of labour relations along with the increasing proportion of migrants in the Cyprus labour force. What the crisis, and especially its climax in 2012–2013 created, was the acceleration and exacerbation of an existing tendency. Immigrant workers were and continue to be particularly vulnerable in the labour market of Cyprus, constituting a legal, semi-legal and illegal ‘labour segment’ at the bottom of the social pyramid, doing the ‘dirty and low-paid work’ that Cypriot workers refuse. This has been more or less established since the 1990s and although occasionally criticised, it has been more or less considered normal. Super exploitation is a structural phenomenon and its incidence, although much more frequent among the immigrants in general and the immigrants without papers in particular, is not restricted to these social groups. It also involves young Cypriots who are entrapped in it, as a result of family or communal connections, dire need and limited choice. The current crisis has led to a decrease in the number of immigrant workers, as they are forced to leave the country due to decreasing work opportunities, and has led to an increase in the number of Cypriots, primarily young and less skilled, who have little choice but to accept regimes of super-exploitation. As the recession set in, leading to a shrinking of the total revenue, ­employers’ immediate reaction was the reduction of their labour cost. This was instrumentalised not only with redundancies and wage cuts but also through changes in employment contractual arrangements. This included the conversion of full-timers into part-timers, the substitution of permanent/regular workers

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sacked with other existing irregular and temporary workers and the increasing use of casual labour, unpaid or low-paid trainees and/or new recruits from the subsidised employment schemes of the government.20 Those already unemployed and under-employed fell into a desperate situation as they witnessed their ranks being swelled by tens of thousands by 2013 and now had to compete with more people for less worthy jobs on offer. Many of them had to resort to the expanding network of charity food shops21 in order to survive. Precarity nonetheless is now no longer restricted to those occupying a peripheral position in the labour force structure. The blurring of the lines between the core and the periphery, which was already underway before the crisis (Ioannou 2011), has been substantially enhanced in the austerity context of the recent past, drawing increasingly more workers from the core labour force segment into an ever growing semi-periphery. This does not mean that core work functions have shrunk, or that the personnel performing them have decreased. The opposite, in fact, might be the case as firms struggle to maintain their operation and product quality with less staff resulting in fewer demarcated work posts, a broader scope of duties and greater responsibilities for their employees. However, it does mean that employment security that once characterised ‘core workers’ diminishes as their experience and expertise, age and years of service does not protect them any longer, or protects them less, from the threat of redundancy. The extension of precarity is at the same time quantitative and qualitative – affecting broader sections of the population and hitting its subjects with an increased severity. It is not only the negative socio-economic conditions that matter here but also the speed of their deterioration. The Cyprus crisis showed some signs in 2009 but it was not until 2011 that it became and was acknowledged as a serious one; while for a substantial section of the population it only bared its teeth in 2012 and 2013. Thus, the extension of precarity for many 20

21

These schemes were started by the previous government in 2012 but were substantially expanded in 2013 by the current government. They target the young and the long-term unemployed who are temporarily employed by firms, paid a low wage covered largely by the state, and the firm takes over the cost of their social insurance and the obligation to keep them employed for a few more months after. For examples see Lambraki 2013; Phileleftheros 2013. For an analysis see Ioannou and Sonan (forthcoming 2016). These were established in 2012 by municipal and Church authorities and expanded immensely in number and size by 2013, run by volunteers who collected donations and contributions from people and provided basic foodstuff to more than ten thousand families that could produce certificates of poverty from the state authorities. The number of families receiving their food from these “social stores” remained steady above ten thousand in 2014 and 2015 as well (Hanni 2015).

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people was a relatively sudden development and this provoked a social shock whose implications have not yet been unfolded and whose consequences lie ahead of us. There are thousands of people who are now unable to service their house mortgages and soon will risk losing their homes; there are thousands more who resort to a greater extent to their savings and family aid in order to simply get by in the face of unemployment, underemployment and lower income; there are many others who see their big plans and expectations indefinitely postponed and in general a majority who is struggling to adjust with earning and living with less. Trade unions, already in a defensive position since the previous decade at best, now find themselves in an impossible position. Often they are not even allowed to retreat in an organised fashion as employers simply ignore them in the restructuring of the employment terms and conditions. Frequently trade unions are simply informed by the state authorities and the employers on what will happen in a sector and are asked to give their consent more as a formality and in order to allow them a face-saving exercise rather than out of any consideration for their possible or potential reaction. In the best case scenario where some negotiation does happen, its limits are so firmly set that what is discussed is the method and the sharing of the direct and indirect wage decreases rather than whether the cuts are necessary or their magnitude.22 Despite the fact that trade unions do not accept without protest the deregulation of labour relations and the associated deterioration of working terms and conditions and now also the dismantling of the welfare and tripartite system, as moderate and pragmatic forces they realise what is possible today and ascertain the distinction between their rhetoric and their action to avoid becoming engaged in battles they fear that they are bound to lose. The current crisis has, in other words, exacerbated the already existing processes of labour market deregulation, trade union decline and deterioration of employment relations. Undoubtedly the recession constituted the main 22

Usually trade unions propose scaled rather than flat wage cuts, temporary rather than permanent, incorporated in the collective agreements rather than as a separate regulation as mentioned by sek General Organisational Secretary (interview 29 January 2014). Analogous and indicative examples involving peo was the case of the strike at Sigma in May 2013 (Ikypros.com 2013) and involving etyk was the case of the Cooperative Central Bank employees in January 2014 (Seitanides 2014). Yet trade unions are not always allowed to save their face. In the builders’ strike, before the final compromise, the employers’ had rejected four mediation proposals by the Ministry of Labour which were accepted by the trade unions. In the case of etyk members in the Cooperative Central Bank, the dispute was eventually resolved with the issue of a decree by the government which imposed the employer formula on the pay cuts.

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c­ atalyst and the Troika sponsored rescue plan the motor of this development. Conversely, it should always be kept in mind that the process was not and could not be exclusively external. Local dynamics and local interests oriented and aligned themselves with the broader international economic trends and political pressures effecting the completion of the shift towards the neoliberal universe, in which Cyprus is subsumed today. This universe is one of rapidly increasing income inequality which has risen from 29 in 2008 to 31 in 2012 to 34.8 in 2014. This rise is by far the most rapid in the eu and in absolute numbers Cyprus now has the highest income inequality in the eu after Latvia and Lithuania. At the same time the proportion of the population threatened by poverty and exclusion has risen from 23.3 per cent in 2008 to 27.4 per cent in 2014 (Hanni 2015). Deteriorating employment conditions, increasing inequality and poverty are developments that are inextricably intertwined with the logic of the neoliberal economic model enforced and the impact of the measures imposed by the Troika. Conclusion It is obvious that the immediate future of employment in Cyprus is not only extremely dispiriting, but might actually deteriorate even further after the more recent developments exhaust their impact on the labour market. What is worse, at the moment, is that there is nothing that points to a possible or potential reversal of the current situation. At the international level, the European crisis has shown no signs of retreat or raised political voices against austerity policies and Troika management seem strong and sincere enough to actually achieve a policy change. The same is true at the domestic level and therefore there seems to be little possibility for subverting the current course and arresting the downturn in the employment and social field. And this situation is because what is at stake here is not a typical albeit extended economic recession, but a structural crisis with deep social and historical causes and implications. It cannot be overemphasised that although the employment crisis in Cyprus has unfolded over the last few years, its causes, main elements and manifestations extend back in time and are of a deeper nature. They are related to the country’s economic model with its imbalances, distortions and inability to develop substantially its human capital and productivity as well as the Cypriot institutional framework with its inadequacy and operational inefficiency in the provision of the preconditions and conditions of social security. Hence, there are historical and structural factors at work that are shaping the field and

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setting the context for the present actors’ agency and current developments. In summing up, the current recession and the rising unemployment have not produced a new field but have accelerated and exacerbated already existing tendencies of labour market deregulation, trade union marginalisation and labour force precariousness. Trade unions harvest currently what they sowed or did not sow in the last two or three decades. The relatively docile stance of the trade unions today cannot, in other words, be explained in terms of the agency of the current trade union leaderships. The role of the leadership is, of course, important and so are the factors of party alignment and systemic integration. However, these are diachronic factors and parts of a broader process of bureaucratisation and autonomisation and distance of the apparatus from the trade union base. In addition, a general avoidance of strikes and the self-restrait of the trade unions in mobilisation exercises (which aim more at putting some pressure rather than imposing terms to the employers) or in symbolic work stoppages (that demonstrate a conception of the strike as a weapon of ‘threat’ more than a weapon of ‘method’, for the achievement of bargaining goals) has led to an insufficient experience of organised class struggle and to the conception of the trade unions as being institutions of labour services rather than vehicles of struggle. Today, while in the middle of a comprehensive employer offensive favoured by the context of the Memorandum of Understanding with the Troika, in which historical work rights and benefits are scrapped and the living standard is dropping, trade unions in their current form are effectively unable to put up even elementary resistance. Under these circumstances the further discrediting of the trade unions and their questioning from both left and right seems inevitable. On the one hand the precarious and peripheral labour force segment, traditionally beyond trade union reach, is expanding while on the other hand the more affluent core segment becomes less and less protected. The view that the utility of traditional trade unionism has expired as a result of increasing legal intervention in labour relations, is being expressed by some employers and workers alike. And this is certainly directly related to the more general weakness of the trade unions, both real and perceived, which come to depend progressively more on the state, with a significant part of their ­activity being to report to the Labour Ministry the violations of labour law and the non-­enforcement of collective agreements. The recently increased role of legislation as a means of labour process regulation both reflects and overshadows the existing reality of deregulation. Effectively there is a new form of regulation through labour law, to the extent that it is being enforced, and which is not at all satisfactory as the state itself admits.

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In theory the law restricts the lawlessness of capital but in practice individualises labour relations and creates a climate in which the role of the trade unions as active agents in the determination and regulation of the terms and conditions of labour is underplayed. Regardless, the production and application of law is not automatic but subject to political dynamics, and the terms of employment relations are not, in the last analysis, a matter of rules but of actual practices and hence decided by the correlation of forces at the workplace, sectorial and on the national level, and most definitely at the international level as well. Organisational forms like trade unions influence but do not affect the balance of power. They essentially express, represent and shape existing dynamics and are themselves subject to change and restructuring. Acknowledgements This chapter was first published as Ioannou, Gregoris. “Employment in crisis: Cyprus 2010–2013”. The Cyprus Review 26(1) (2014): 107–126. We appreciate the permission of the journal to republish the article in this volume. The author acknowledges the project “Framing financial crisis and protest: north west and south east Europe” ran by the Open University (uk) and funded by the Leverhulme Trust, as the discussions that took place in the project’s workshops have enriched the analysis presented here. References Antoniou, Loukas. Διαkρίσεις, Mετανάστευση kαι Eργασία [Discrimination, Immigration and Labor]. Λευkωσία: INEK–ΠEO, 2010. Carby-Hall, Jo R. The Treatment of Polish and Other A8 Economic Migrants in the European Union. Warszawa: Bureau of the Commissioner for Civil Rights Protection, 2008. Charalambous, Giorgos and Gregoris Ioannou. “No Bridge over Troubled Waters: The Cypriot Left Heading the Government 2008–2013”. Capital and Class 39(2) (2015): 265–286. European Commission. Towards Common Principles of Flexicurity: More and Better Jobs through Flexibility and Security. Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities Unit D.2, 2007. Frassanito Network. “Precarious, Precariazation, Precariat?” 2015. Accessed on October 17, 2015. http://05.diskursfestival.de/pdf/symposium_4.en.pdf. Hanni, Georgio. “Pαγδαία αύξηση ανισότητας [Rapid increase in inequality]”. Stockwatch.com.cy, October 23, 2015. Accessed October 23, 2015. http://stockwatch.com .cy/nqcontent.cfm?a_name=news_view&ann_id=238891.

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Ikypros.com. “Aπεργία παραλύει τo Σίγμα [Strike Paralyses Sigma].” Ikypros.com. May 22, 2013. Accessed February 5, 2014. http://www.ikypros.com/easyconsole.cfm/ id/70571. INEK–PEO. Έkθεση για τηνoιkoνoμία kαι την απασχόληση [Report for the Economy and Employment, 2014], 2014. Ioakimoglou, Elias and Evangelia Soumeli. Oι Mισθoί στην Kύπρo: Πρoσδιoριστιkoί Παράγoντες kαι Mισθoλoγιkές Aνισότητες [Wages in Cyprus: Determining Factors and Wage Inequalities]. Λευkωσία: INEK–ΠEO, 2008. Ioannou, Gregoris. Labor Relations in Cyprus: Employment, Trade Unionism and Class Composition. PhD diss., University of Warwick, 2011. Ioannou, Gregoris. “Employment in crisis: Cyprus 2010–2013”. The Cyprus Review 26(1) (2014): 107–126. Ioannou, Gregoris. “The Connection between Trade Unions and Political Parties in Cyprus”. In Party-society Relations in the Republic of Cyprus, edited by Giorgos Charalambous and Christophoros Christophorou, 110–129. London: Routledge, 2015a. Ioannou, Gregoris. “Labor force fragmentation in contemporary Cyprus”. Working USA 18(4) (2015b). Accessed February 17, 2016. doi: 10.1111/wusa.12214. Ioannou, Gregoris and Sertac Sonan. Forthcoming 2016. Youth unemployment in Cyprus. Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. International Organisation for Migration (IOM). Report on Cyprus. Independent Network of Labor Migration and Integration Experts, LMIE–INET, 2010. Jessop, Bob. “Putting Neoliberalism in its Time and Place: A Response to the Debate”. Social Anthropology 21(1) (2013): 65–74. Kouzis, John. Eργασιαkές Σχέσεις kαι Eυρωπαϊkή Eνoπoίηση [Labor Relations and European Integration]. Aθήνα: INE, 2001. Lambraki, Antonia. “Eπιδότηση της απασχόληση kι όχι της ανεργίας [Subsidising Employment and Not Unemployment]”. Phileleftheros, September 15, 2013. Accessed February 5, 2014. http://www.phile news.com/el-gr/oikonomia-kypros/146/161923/ epidotisi-tis-apascholisi-ki-ochi-tis-anergias. Meardi, Guglielmo. “Employment Relations under External Pressure: Italian and Spanish Reforms during the Great Recession”. In The Comparative Political Economy of Work and Employment Relations, edited by Marco Hauptmeier and Matt Vidal, 332–350. London: Palgrave, 2014. Messios, Orestis and Eva Soumeli. “Government’s Final Proposal on Modernising Industrial Relations”. European Industrial Relations Observatory (EIRO), 2010. Accessed February 5, 2014. http://www.euro found.europa.eu/eiro/2010/11/articles/cy1011019i .htm. Panayiotou, Andreas. Oι Tράπεζες, τα MME kαι oι Πρoσπάθειες Συγkάλυψης, Mετατόπισης kαι Λoγokρισίας των Σkανδάλων [The Banks, the Mass Media and the Attempts at Covering, Silencing and Censoring the Scandals], 2013. Accessed February 5, 2014. http://koinonioloyika.blogspot.dk/2013/01/blog-post_23.html.

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Pancyprian Federation of Labor (PEO). ΈkθεσηΔράσης 25oυ Συνεδρίoυ [Action Report 25th Conference], 2008. Pancyprian Federation of Labor (PEO). Tι περιλαμβάνει τo Γ’παkέτo [What is Included in the 3rd Package]. Note, December 2011. Pancyprian Federation of Labor (PEO). “Δήλωση 18 Mαϊoυ 2012 [Statement 18 May 2012]”. 2012a. Accessed February 5, 2014. http://paratiritirioergasias.blogspot.com/ 2012/05/blog-post_20.html. Pancyprian Federation of Labor (PEO). ΈkθεσηΔράσης 26oυ Συνεδρίoυ [Action Report 26th Conference], 2012b. Pegasiou, Adonis. “The Cypriot Economic Collapse: More Than a Conventional South European Failure”. Mediterranean Politics 18(3) (2013): 333–351. Persianis, Michalis. “H αδήλωτη εργασία kαι πάλι στo πρoσkήνιo’ [Undeclared Work Again in the Forefront]”. Kathimerini, February 20, 2011. Phileleftheros. “Διαβάστε τα νέα μέτρα για αντιμετώπιση της ανεργίας [Read the New Measures on Countering Unemployment]”. December 11, 2013a. Accessed February 6, 2014. http://www.philenews. com/el-gr/oikonomia-kypros/146/175643/diavaste -ta-nea-metra-gia-antimetopisi-tis-anergias. Phileleftheros. “Mέχρι kαι 30 percent oιμειώσειςμισθώνστηνTράπεζα Kύπρoυ [Up to 30 percent Wage Cuts in the Bank of Cyprus]”. June 18, 2013b. Accessed February 6, 2014. http://www.philenews.com/el-gr/oikonomia-kypros/146/150072/mechri-kai-30 -oi-meioseis-misthon-stin-trapeza-kyprou#sthash.fwwm6484.dpuf. Schierup, Carl-Ulrik. “Bloody Subcontracting in the Network Society: Migration and Post Fordist Restructuring across the European Union”. In Irregular Migration, Informal Labor and Community: A Challenge for Europe, edited by Erik Berggren, Branka Likić-Brborić, Gülay Toksöz, and Nikos Trimikliniotis, 137–150. Maastricht: Shaker Publishing, 2007. Seitanides, Yannis. “Pήξη ETYK με την Συνεργατιkή Kεντριkή Tράπεζα [Clash of ETYK with the Cooperative Central Bank]”. Kathimerini, January 28, 2014. Accessed February 5, 2014. http://www.kathimerini.com.cy/index.php?pageaction=kat&modid=1& artid=160902. Soumeli, Eva. “Construction Unions Step Up Industrial Action”. Eurofound. EurWork – European Observatory of Working Life, 2013a. Accessed February 5, 2014. http:// www.eurofound.europa.eu/eiro/2012/11/articles/cy1211039i.htm. Soumeli, Eva. “New Collective Agreement for Construction Industry”. Eurofound. EurWork – European Observatory of Working Life, 2013b. Accessed February 8, 2014. http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/eiro/2013/04/articles/cy1304019i.htm. Soumeli, Eva. “New Hotel Industry Agreement 2013–2015”. Eurofound. EurWork – ­European Observatory of Working Life, 2013c. Accessed February 8, 2014. http://www .eurofound.europa.eu/eiro/2013/06/articles/cy1306019i.htm.

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Standing, Guy. Global Labor Flexibility: Seeking Distributive Justice. London: Macmillan Press, 1999. Standing, Guy. Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. Stefanou, Constantinos. “The Banking System in Cyprus: Time to Rethink the Business Model?” Cyprus Economic Review 5(2) (2011): 123–130. Trimikliniotis, Nikos. Aνεργία, Yπoαπασχόληση kαι Eτερoαπασχόληση: Mια Έρευνα για την Eργασιαkή Aβεβαιότητα kαι Aνασφάλεια των Nέων στην Kύπρo [Unemployment, Underemployment and Irregular Employment: A Research on Labor Uncertainty and Insecurity of the Youth in Cyprus]. Λευkωσία: INEK–ΠEO, 2004. Trimikliniotis, Niko and Corina Demetriou. “Labor Integration of Migrant Workers in Cyprus: A Critical Appraisal”. In Precarious Migrant Labor across Europe, edited by Mojka Pajnic and Giovanna Campani, 73–96. Ljubljana: MIROVNI INSTITUT, 2011. Wills, Jane. “Subcontracted Employment and its Challenge to Labor”. Labor Studies Journal 34(4) (2009): 441–460. Yiannakou, Dorita. “Mειώσεις μισθών ύψoυς €16,5εkατ. Στo Συνεργατισμό [Wage Cuts of €16.5 million in Cooperative Societies]”. Phileleftheros, January 18, 2014. Accessed February 5, 2014. http://www.philenews.com/el-gr/oikonomia-kypros/146/180809/ meioseis-misthon-ypsous-165-ekat-sto-synergatismo.

Interviews PEO General Organisational Secretary, Christos Tombazos, 27 November 2013. SEK General Organisational Secretary, Panikos Argirides, 29 January 2014.

chapter 8

Migrant Precarity under China’s New Immigration Law Regime Mimi Zou Introduction Much scholarly and policy attention on Chinese migration issues to date has focused on the internal migration of rural migrant workers to the fast-growing coastal and regional cities. There has been considerably less attention to various forms of economic immigration to China from abroad. In recent times, the world’s largest industrialising economy has seen new and diverse flows of short-term and longer-term immigration (Chung, Qi and Hou 2010). In 1978, only 229,600 foreigners (without Chinese nationality) had entered China that year (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2001). In 2014, there were 26.63 million inbound foreigners, many of whom include tourists, students, and business travellers (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2015). In the 2010 National Census (which for the first time included foreign nationals), there were 593,832 “persons with foreign nationalities” (excluding Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan) lawfully residing in China for at least six months (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2011). Among this group, the number of persons engaged in paid employment has increased from 74,000 in 2000 to 220,000 in 2011 (Xinhua 2012). Despite this continual rise in the number of foreigners in China, a legal framework to regulate their entry, residence, and employment has developed in a slow and piecemeal fashion. At the same time, there has been rising public concern over forms of ‘illegal’ immigration, as embodied in a politically prominent discourse of combating the ‘three-illegalities’ (‘sanfei’) of illegal entry, illegal residence and illegal employment. In 2013, the national border inspection agencies investigated 2,996 cases of illegal entry/exit and another 49,200 cases of persons in violation of exit and entry laws and regulations (Ministry of Public Security Bureau of Exit and Entry Administration 2014). Against this background, the introduction of the Entry and Exit Administration Law 2013 (eeal) is underpinned by a key policy goal of tackling sanfei. Policymakers have considered this new legislation as a major reform in China’s contemporary immigration regime since 1985. The eeal introduces an array of restrictions on the entry, residence, and employment of foreigners (except for

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004329706_009

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highly skilled talent), penalties for violations, and notably, whistleblowing obligations on citizens to report sanfei activities. Furthermore, for the first time in Chinese immigration legislation, the term ‘illegal work’ is explicitly defined as encompassing three types of situations: Working without a valid permit, working outside the scope of occupation and not for the employer as prescribed in the permit, and foreign students working outside the prescribed scope of occupations and/or working hours. Focusing on the regulation of ‘illegal work’ under China’s new immigration regime, this chapter examines the ways in which immigration law produces a variety of precarious statuses that shape particular vulnerabilities in their employment relations and social protections. This chapter seeks to make a novel contribution to the heavily under-theorised scholarship on Chinese immigration law. To date, there have been few critical analyses of the laws and regulations concerning labour migration in China, particularly with regards to how immigration controls intersect with employment and social protections. The chapter also seeks to contribute to an emerging body of international and comparative socio-legal scholarship that is purposively aimed at exploring the complex interaction of immigration law and policy and labour law and labour market regulation. Finally, this inquiry also seeks to cast a spotlight on a (numerically) small but potentially important group of workers in China whose rights and interests have been marginalised, neglected, and undermined in the prevailing anti-sanfei public discourse. Although the numbers of immigrants in the Chinese workforce may be considered as insignificant, the challenges of China’s current demographic transition for its labour market have instigated pressing and critical public policy questions about the need to address imminent labour shortages. For much of the past two decades, rapid industrialisation in China has been able to rely on a large surplus pool of low-cost rural migrant labour. In a country that once had a surplus of low-skilled rural migrant labour, the ‘factory of the world’ is now faced with a rapidly contracting workforce in the context of an ageing population. The number of ‘core’ industrial workers, born in the 1980s and 1990s under the one-child policy, will decrease more quickly than other segments of the population. Some have forecasted that China will hit the Lewis turning point in 2025, with a projected shortage of 137 million workers by 2030 (Das & N’Diaye 2013). The chapter begins by laying out the conceptual framework for under­ standing how precarious migrant statuses are ‘constructed’ through immigration laws and regulations. I then provide a contextual understanding of the evolving labour immigration regulatory regime in China since the 1980s. Following on, the relevant norms, processes, and institutions associated with the

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eeal in regulating ‘illegal work’ are scrutinised. Through investigating the conditions of entry, restrictions on employment, and institutionalisation of uncertainty under this regime, the main part of the chapter seeks to elucidate the ways in which precarious migration statuses, as constituted by the design and operation of immigration laws and policies, may play out in immigrants’ work relations. It should be pointed out that this chapter does not seek to present empirical claims about how China’s immigration law is being experienced onthe-ground by various groups of immigrants. Translations of the eeal and other immigration laws and regulations such as the 1980 Nationality Law have used a range of terms such as ‘foreigners’, ‘aliens’, ‘foreign nationals’, ‘persons with foreign nationalities’, and ‘immigrants’. For the purpose of analysing the eeal, the term ‘immigrants’ is used in this chapter. The usage of this term here not only seeks to highlight the law’s construction of their migration status, but also distinguish this group from the common reference to ‘migrants’ in the Chinese context as rural migrants without urban household registration (hukou) status. The scope of this chapter will not extend to the specific rules and regulations that apply to the employment of Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan residents. It should be noted at the onset that China’s law-making framework consists of national laws (such as the eeal) enacted by the central legislature, administrative regulations of the State Council and lower-level rules by its ministries and departments, and laws and regulations by local legislatures and governments. National laws are commonly framed in general terms, the implementation of which often depend on administrative regulations and rules, as well as supplementary law-making and enforcement measures by the relevant local authorities.

The Legal Construction of Precarious Migrant Status

Precarious work is a multifaceted concept that broadly captures a sense of ‘instability, lack of protection, insecurity and social or economic vulnerability’ and the ‘flux and uncertainty’ associated with certain types of employment relations (Rodgers and Rodgers 2010; see also Anderson 2010). The definition, expression, and usage of the concept have varied between places and over time (Waite 2009). It is not merely a phenomenon arising from the restructuring of contemporary global labour markets but linked the social, political, legal, and institutional choices and structures that shape the context in which such work takes place (Rittich 2006). Vosko offers a multidimensional analysis of the forces that shape precarious work:

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Precarious employment is shaped by the relationship between employment status (i.e. self- or paid employment), form of employment (e.g.  ­temporary or permanent, part-time or full-time), and dimensions of labor market insecurity, as well as social context (e.g. occupation, industry, and geography) and social location (or the interaction between social relations, such as gender, and legal and political categories, such as citizenship). vosko 2010

Borrowing from the literature on precarious work, Goldring, Berinstein and Bernhard refer to the term “precarious migrant status” to convey a “combination of on-going risk and uncertainty, or on-going vulnerability to p ­ recariousness” associated with immigration controls (Goldring, Berinstein and Bernhard 2009). Precarious migrant statuses can be characterised by the absence of features that are generally associated with permanent residence and citizenship in the host state: work authorisation, the right to remain permanently, a right of residence that does not depend on a third party, and social citizenship rights. Instead of a simple binary between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ status, there can be unpredictable, non-linear, voluntary and involuntary movements along a spectrum of “less than full or permanent” statuses (Goldring, Berinstein and Bernhard 2009). Here, the notion of precarious migrant status is useful in capturing an array of complex situations in which status becomes relevant. For example, a temporary migrant worker may have entered the host state with a valid visa and work and residence permits. However, her status can become precarious if she or the employer (advertently or inadvertently) breaches any condition attached to her visa and/or permits. Fudge points out that: [T]he state, through immigration law, creates a variety of different migration statuses, some of which are highly precarious, that in turn produce a differentiated supply of labour that produces precarious workers and precarious employment norms. fudge 2012, 96

Anderson explores how immigration controls construct legal status and “work with and against migratory processes to produce workers with particular types of relations to employers and to labour markets” (2010, 306). She emphasises that immigration controls mold certain types of labour through three main channels. First, the conditions of entry can create categories of entrants based on skills level, earnings, and sector/occupation, as well as certain

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d­ emographics such as age, country of origin, and even marital/family status. The selective nature of such admission regimes has a labour market ‘filter’ function. ­‘Undesirable’ workers without the skills to benefit the economy are prevented from entering the host state, while others are granted privileged ­access (Anderson 2010). Second, immigration controls can directly and indirectly impose conditions and restrictions on migrants’ employment relations. For example, the temporary duration of work and residence permits can typically limit their employment to fixed-term contracts that can be terminated or renewed at the employer’s discretion. Migrants are thus dependent on the employer for their right to remain in the host state. Some visas entail ‘tying’ workers’ employment and residence statuses to a specific sponsor/employer, occupation, geographical location, and even workplaces (such as a requirement to live in the employer’s premises). Immigration rules can also make it difficult and burdensome to transfer a work permit from one sponsor/employer to another. These de jure and de facto ‘ties’ arising from migrants’ legal statuses can increase workers’ dependency on the employer for their authorisation to work and stay in the host state. The concept of ‘hyper-dependence’ has been coined to describe this condition of extreme dependence or subordination of the worker vis-à-vis the employer, in which the worker’s legal status (such as their migrant ­status) critically constrains their freedom to leave a job and exit an employment ­relationship (Zou 2015). Third, immigration laws, policies, and practices can produce ‘institutionalised uncertainty’ through the creation of a category of ‘illegal’ migrants. As Anderson puts it, “As the government makes the lives of those working illegally ‘ever more uncomfortable and constrained’ so the predisposition to precarity increases” (2010, 312). In the context of migrants’ work relations, immigration law “imports into the conduct and regulation of employment relations its own set of offences and sanctions and its own notions of illegality” (Freedland and Costello 2014, 8). The ‘deportability’ of illegal migrants, as enforced by the state, is a significant source of their vulnerability since employers can deploy the powerful threat of denouncing their status to immigration authorities so as to deny them basic employment rights. Furthermore, the operation of legal rules (such as the common law doctrine of illegality) can render the rights and remedies arising out of an employment contract unenforceable where immigration laws have been contravened (Bogg and Novitz 2013; see also Goudkamp and (Zou 2015)). The notion of ‘hyper-precarity’ to refer to the tenuous nature, in law and in practice, of migrants’ entitlements to employment protection, social rights, and transition to permanent residence in the host state, as shaped by immigration controls (Zou 2015).

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The pertinent insights from the above literature point to the ways in which precarious migrant statuses can shape considerable uncertainty in migrants’ employment and residence in the host state; dependence on a particular employer for the legal authorisation to remain; exclusion from a range of employment and social protections in law and in practice; and a broader precarity in their migratory experience that entail the inability to plan for the future and those of their family members either accompanying them or remaining in their home countries. This conceptualisation of precarious migrant statuses turns our normative focus to the pathways through which the multifaceted precariousness of migrants’ work and other aspects of their lives are created and sanctioned by immigration controls. Before applying these conceptual insights to evaluate the eeal regime, it is important to gain an overview of how the regulation of labour immigration has evolved in China over the past three decades of economic reform.

The Regulation of Labour Immigration in China

Until the late 1970s, China had in place cautious and strict controls over the entry and exit and the activities of the very small number of foreigners permitted to be in the country. As economic reform commenced in the 1980s, there were some efforts aimed at attracting highly skilled ‘foreign experts’ to China to be employed by government agencies and departments. The most significant legislation to be introduced was the Law on the Administration of Entry and Exit of Aliens 1985 (‘1985 Law’). The State Council’s Implementing Rules of the 1985 Law further set out the conditions under which foreigners may be granted or refused ‘exit-entry certificates’ and the function of the Z Visa category for foreigners to take up paid employment. In the late 1980s, two further administrative regulations set out the requirement for a foreign immigrant to apply for a Z Visa prior to arrival and prohibited foreigners without a residence permit and foreign students from engaging in paid work. During the 1990s, there was a substantial increase of foreign migrants as China’s economic liberalisation policies expanded. Their countries of origin also became increasingly wide-ranging, which included developed countries as well as developing countries in Asia and Africa. (The State Council’s Rules on the Administration of Employment of Foreigners in China 1996) (‘1996 Rules’) laid down more detailed procedures and rules such as the eligibility criteria for admitting a foreign worker. To supplement the 1996 Rules, a number of administrative regulations, orders, circulars, and implementation rules were also issued. As discussed in the next part, the basic admission ­requirements

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under the 1996 Rules (as amended in 2011) are still applicable under the eeal regime. China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation prompted some reform to immigration law, such as simplifying visa application and approval proces­ ses. The Regulation on the Examination and Approval of Permanent Residence of Aliens in China 2004 introduced a ‘green card’ scheme for long-term foreign immigrants. However, eligibility for this scheme has been restricted to a small handful of highly skilled ‘foreign talent’ who can demonstrate their capability of ‘significantly contributing to fields of great need’, foreign investors, and their family members. The scheme specifically requires skilled ‘foreign talent’ to have held senior managerial or professorial positions for more than a continuous period of four years in China, with an accumulated period of residence of over three years, and a sound taxation record. By the end of 2011, only 4,752 foreigners had obtained permanent residence (State Council 2012). Aimed at further encouraging this small and privileged group of foreign immigrants to stay in China, several government departments further released a Circular on the Equal Treatment with respect to Entitlements of Foreigners with Permanent Residency Status in China in 2012. Although not strictly an immigration law, an Interim Measures for Social Insurance Coverage of Foreigners Working in China was introduced by the Ministry of Labour and Social Security (mhrss) in 2011 to require employers to enrol all foreign employees under China’s social insurance system. This regulation covers all immigrants who are legally employed in China (with a Work Permit) with respect to five types of social security schemes: Pensions, medical, work injury, unemployment, and maternity insurance. Employers must register their foreign employees for social insurance within 30 days after the issuance of the employee’s work permit. An exemption exists where the foreign employee’s home country has signed a bilateral social insurance treaty with China and the employee makes contributions in that home country. Overall, formal channels for foreigners to directly take up paid employment in China have been limited to a few categories of highly skilled professionals and experts, teachers, and employees of joint enterprises and foreign companies. Foreigners in certain sectors, such as cultural activities, journalism and broadcasting, commercialised entertainment performance, medical practice, international transportation, petroleum and gas exploration are subject to different regulations to ‘ordinary’ Z visa holders. A substantial category of foreigners who are lawfully or unlawfully engaged in paid work is the growing number of foreign students coming to China for short-term courses, study exchanges, and university degrees. These students are permitted to engage in internships and other part-time employment during their studies, but are subject

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to ­certain restrictions such as limited working hours and scope of work under the Ministry of Education Administrative Rules on the Admission of Foreign Students by Colleges and Universities. Administrative responsibilities for regulating foreign workers have been spread out between the Ministry for Public Security (mps), mhrss, and Ministry of Foreign Affairs (mfa), as well as these departments’ local branches at provincial, municipal, and county levels. There has been extensive criticism of the uncoordinated and inefficient division of labour (Liu 2011; see also Zhu and Price 2013; Liu 2014). Furthermore, the devolution of regulatory responsibilities (including immigration enforcement) to local governments has seen the proliferation of different practices. Some local authorities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou have established their own policies for attracting highly skilled foreign residents, and anti-sanfei measures which will be discussed later on. At times, local regulations can come into conflict with national laws, which further creates a fragmented and incoherent regulatory framework accompanied by ‘haphazard’ and varied enforcement practices (Zhu and Price 2013). As the 1985 Law was deemed to be an ‘outdated’ legislation to meet the complex regulatory challenges of new immigration flows, the eeal has been seen as a major ‘but still tentative’ step towards a more comprehensive immigration law regime (Pieke 2013). The primary espoused goals of the eeal are stated in Article 1 of the legislation as: Standardising exit-entry administration, safeguarding sovereignty, security, and social order, and promoting international exchange. However, as Pieke observes: The law [eeal] is predominantly driven by public security and foreign affairs agendas, especially the clear regulation of entry, exit, residence and employment of foreigners and curbing of illegal practices. pieke 2013

A prevailing policy objective of the eeal is to control the growth of immigration in recent years, as policymakers grapple with an increasingly hostile socio-political climate towards the presence of foreign ‘enclaves’ throughout the country – in large Chinese cities such as Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing, smaller cities such as Yiwu in the economically prosperous province of Zhejiang, and localities in Yunnan and Guangxi provinces that border China’s neighbouring countries (Pieke 2014; Lefkowitz 2013). For example, unofficial estimates of the number of African immigrants residing in Guangzhou’s booming trading community are as high as 100,000–200,000, many of whom are overstayers and/or engaged in employment without the requisite legal authorisation (Li, Ma and Xue 2009).

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Precarious Migrant Statuses under the eeal Framework

The state may attempt to explain the phenomenon of sanfei in terms of foreigners “not knowing laws and regulations of China” or illegally residing “for malicious purposes” (State Council 2012). Yet, there is little attention to the role of immigration controls in producing sanfei. This part of the chapter examines the regulation of ‘illegal work’ under the eeal framework, which includes the Regulations on Administration of the Entry and Exit of Foreigners 2013 (‘eeal Implementing Rules’) and the 1996 Rules that remain in effect. Some key structural features of the eeal framework are highlighted here: The highly restrictive admission routes in the face of increasing push-pull factors, the tying of migrants’ status to a particular employer, other constraints on migrants’ labour market mobility, the temporary duration of migrants’ residence and employment status, the exclusion of labour law protections where immigration regulations are breached, a variety of harsh penalties on migrants (in comparison to the less severe employer sanctions), and finally, an extensive enforcement network consisting of the state, employers, and members of the public. Conditions of Entry An immigrant working in China may be employed in a number of ways. They may be directly hired by a Chinese entity with a local employment contract, employed by a non-Chinese entity and seconded to work at a corporate entity in China, or ‘dually employed’ by an overseas, non-Chinese entity and enters into an employment contract with a legal entity in China (Lauffs and Isaacs 2014). Regardless of the employment arrangement, the immigrant must obtain the necessary visa and permits to lawfully work in China. The admission procedure for an immigrant working in China involves several steps. The eeal emphasises the need for a work permit and work-related residence permit. Employers are prohibited from employing migrants without such permits (Exit and Entry Administrative Law 2012 (eeal). art. xli). The employer must first apply for a Foreign Employment License from the local labour administration certification authority to hire the migrant concerned (The State Council’s Rules on the Administration of Employment of Foreigners in China 1996) (1996 Rules. art. v.). Prior to entry, the migrant must submit an authorised invitation letter from the employer and a copy of the Foreign Employment License when applying for a Z Visa at the Chinese embassy or consulate in her home country (1996 Rules. art. viii). Immediate family members (spouse and child) of Z visa holders may also apply for a S1 or S2 visa. Within 15 days of arrival, the migrant must obtain a work permit at the original certification authority where the Foreign Employment License was issued (1996 Rules.

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art. xvi). The Z visa holder must then apply for a work related residence permit from the local public security bureau within 30 days of entry (1996 Rules. art. xvi). Under the eeal, a work related residence permit is valid for a period of a minimum of 90 days to a maximum of 5 years (1996 Rules. art. xvi). In comparison, the length of non-work related residence permits varies from 180 days to 5 years (1996 Rules. art. xvi). This difference in the minimum length of the two types of residence permits reflects the policy objective of the stricter monitoring over foreigners engaged in employment. Like other countries, China’s labour migration policy emphasises the admission of highly skilled migrants. A new visa category ‘R’ for ‘high level talents and professionals in short supply’ has been introduced to facilitate this goal (eeal Implementing Regulations, Chapter 2, article i, § 9). The admission regime also introduces a ‘guiding catalogue’ for foreigners working in China, to be formulated and regularly adjusted by the relevant departments under the State Council (eeal. art. xlii). The catalogue will take into account “economic and social development needs”, and “supply and demand for human resources”. At the time of writing, this catalogue has not been released. It is expected to provide more specific particulars regarding the occupations and sectors ‘in need’ of foreign migrants. Currently the 1996 Rules set out some basic conditions regarding the position that will be taken up by the migrant: That the post is in ‘special need’, that it cannot be taken up by domestic candidate for the time being, and that no relevant state regulations are violated (1996 Rules. art. vi). The applicant must also possess the skills and experience for the post. The vagueness of such rules has provided room for different local interpretations. Given the overarching policy goal, it is likely that the admission of migrants under the new guidance catalogue will be restricted to a select handful of occupations and industries. At the other end, a stricter visa issuance framework is aimed at deterring any ‘unwanted’ immigration, namely low-skilled and unskilled migration. Under the eeal, immigration officers have broad grounds for refusing a visa application or denying a foreigner entry to China, without any obligation to provide a specific reason (eeal. art. xxi and xxv). Furthermore, a person may be denied entry if immigration officers believe that the person may engage in activities inconsistent with the visa terms, such as overstaying or working illegally (eeat. art. xxv). Restrictive admission regimes can perversely become a driver of illegal migration, especially where there is employer demand for a cheaper and more compliant labour supply of ‘illegal’ migrants (Ruhs and Anderson 2010). In the manufacturing hub of the Pearl River Delta, an area that has been experiencing rising labour costs in recent years, there has been a growing presence of workers from Vietnam, Laotian, Cambodia, and Myanmar

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found in lower-skilled manufacturing jobs (China Daily 2008). Reports indicate that ‘illegal work’ by immigrants has spread across a variety of occupations and sectors, including domestic helpers, restaurant workers, part-time teachers, entertainers, and seasonal workers (China News Weekly 2012). The links between insufficient formal channels of migration and the growth of sanfei in certain sectors of labour ‘shortages’ have rarely been articulated in policy or scholarly discourses in China. The notable exception being Zhu and Price, who have argued for a regulatory framework to “recognise and convert” irregular workers such as Southeast Asian factory workers into “guest laborers who enjoy a settled range of rights and responsibilities in China law” (Zhu and Price 2013). The creation of more accessible migration routes in the form of guest worker schemes has been promoted as an appropriate policy for addressing strong ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors of global low skilled migration. Advocates of such schemes claim that the alternative would be the channelling of migrants into informal and less regulated sectors of the labour market where they are more vulnerable to exploitation (Global Commission on International Migration 2005). However, past and present guest worker schemes in Western Europe and North America have been subject to various criticisms, such as the restrictions on guest workers’ basic rights and the failure of these schemes to ensure the ‘temporary’ presence of migrants in the host state (Walzer 1983; see Castles 2006); Dauvergne and Marsden 2014. The limited designated legal migration routes for labour migration, combined with restrictive and bureaucratic procedures of admission which pivots on the employer’s sponsorship of the worker, can paradoxically generate more sanfei migrants and reinforce their precarious migrant statuses. For the select group of migrants who are admitted under the Z visa, the primary condition of entry (a job offer with a specific employer) forms the basis of a variety of restrictions on their employment in China. As examined in the following section, these restrictions on migrants’ employment constitute another feature of their precarious migrant statuses. Restrictions on Employment A key restriction of immigration controls upon migrants’ employment relations is the tying of their authorisation to lawfully work and reside in the host state to a specific employer based on having a valid work permit and work-type residence permit. The eeal defines unlawful employment to include “work without obtaining work-permit or work-type residence permits in accordance with relevant regulations” (eeal. art. xliii). The migrant must also work for the employing entity as indicated on her work permit (1996 Rules. art. xxiv). Furthermore, the work permit is valid only in the geographical area specified

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by the labour administration certification authority (1996 Rules. art. xvi). Illegal work is also defined as “work beyond the scope prescribed in the work permits” (eeal. art. xliii), therefore the migrant must work in the specific occupation as approved and certified on her work permit. Should the migrant wish to change employers, occupation, or geographical area of work, immigration controls can make it extremely difficult to do so. For example, if the migrant wants to change employers within the same geographical area and take up a similar position to the one indicated on her work permit, the original local labour administration certification authority must approve such changes. In order for the migrant to change employers outside the designated geographical area or to be engaged in a different position with the same employer, the procedure is even harder as the migrant must apply for a new work permit and residence permit (1996 Rules. art. xxiv). Controls over migrants’ residence status impose further restrictions on their mobility. ‘Illegal residence’ includes circumstances in which the foreigner stays beyond the duration specified in the visa or residence permit, or engages in activities that go beyond the restricted geographical area of residence (eeal Implementing Rules. art. xxv). The tethering of their migration status to a specific employer ‘sponsorship’ can exacerbate the existing power asymmetries in the employment relationship by providing the employer with additional means of control (Anderson 2010). The multiplicity of constraints on migrants’ labour and geographical mobility can further place them in a heightened position of vulnerability, where they find themselves unable to leave an existing employment relationship for the fear of losing their right to work and reside in China. A further implication of these immigration restrictions is the scope for employer practices that could render migrants’ statuses ever more precarious. Advertent or inadvertent breaches of work permit conditions by the employer can give rise to a situation of ‘illegal work’ as defined by the eeal, for example, where an employer direct the migrant to perform duties beyond those of her approved position. Precarious migrant statuses also structure migrants’ ‘temporariness’ of employment and residence in the host state. The duration of migrants’ labour contracts in China cannot exceed five years (1996 Rules. art. xviii). Upon termination of employment, the employer must surrender the migrant’s work permit and residence permit to the local labour administration authority and public security organ (1996 Rules. art. xxi). The migrant’s labour contract is deemed to be terminated upon expiry but may be extended subject to the renewal of the work permit (1996 Rules. art. xviii). To renew the work permit, the employer shall apply to the labour administration certification authority

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to extend the migrant’s employment. This application must take place at least 30 days prior to the expiry of the current contract (1996 Rules. art. xix). The possibility for renewing the migrant’s work permit, based on the employer’s discretion to extend her contract, can enhance the employer’s power of labour retention in addition to the power of dismissal. For the migrant, this discretion of the employer can create considerable uncertainty and instability in their employment and residence statuses in the host state at any given time. Immigration rules provide that the salaries paid to migrants may not be lower than the local minimum wage and that their working hours, rest periods, holidays, safety, and social insurance shall be implemented in accordance with relevant legal provisions (1996 Rules. art. xxii and xxiii). Furthermore, labour disputes between the employer and migrant worker shall be handled in accordance with the Labour Law and the Law on Mediation and Arbitration of Labour Disputes (1996 Rules. art. xxvi). It would appear that the Chinese labour law regime, at least on paper, affords foreign migrant workers the same rights and recourse to remedies as resident workers. However, the precariousness of immigrants’ legal statuses has troubling implications for their access to these employment protections. Article 26 of the Labour Contract Law 2008 explicitly states that a labour contract violating ‘mandatory provisions of laws or administrative regulations’ shall be wholly or partially void. In other words, the rights and remedies afforded to foreign migrants under Chinese labour law are predicated on the existence of a valid employment contract. This non-protection principle has been confirmed in the Supreme People’s Court Interpretation of Several Issues in a Labour Dispute Trial in 2013. Article 14 of the Interpretation states that where a migrant did not have a work permit as required by immigration law and has requested the court to recognise a labour relationship with the employer concerned (for a claim under labour law), the court will not support such a case. Such an approach has devastating consequences for irregular migrants’ entitlement to claim the protection of labour laws to enforce their rights, thus making them particularly vulnerable to exploitative working conditions. A potential avenue for an ‘illegal’ immigrant to claim some form of compensation is through civil damages against the ‘employer’. Article 86 of the Labour Contract Law imposes liability on the party at fault for damages for any harm or loss caused to the other party if the labour contract is declared invalid in accordance with Article 26. This would require the migrant to show that it was the employer’s wrongdoing that gave rise to the invalid labour contract, which may be difficult to establish in situations involving the direct or indirect complicity of the migrant. The employer may even perversely use such a provision against the immigrant. In practice, immigrants in sanfei situations are highly unlikely to pursue any legal claims through formal channels, given

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the ­ever-present threat of deportation, detention, and other immigration sanctions if their precarious legal statuses become disclosed in the process. It is therefore unsurprising that there has not been any reported official cases of migrants with irregular status seeking to claim unpaid wages or any other violations of labour laws by their employers. As examined in the next section, a web of immigration enforcement involving the state and other actors can produce institutionalised uncertainty associated with precarious migrant statuses. Institutionalising Uncertainty A range of punitive measures against ‘illegal’ migrants, situated in a discourse of targeted enforcement by the state and other actors, are instrumental in the production of institutionalised uncertainty that is associated with precarious migrant statuses (Anderson 2010). With a prevailing policy objective of combating sanfei, the eeal introduces harsher individual penalties for illegal work both in scope and in severity. Whereas previous penalties involved fines of less than 1,000 rmb (= 150 $) (Implementing Rules of the 1985 Law), migrants engaged in illegal work are now subject to a fine of 5,000 rmb to 20,000 rmb (eeal. art. lxxx). For serious offences of illegal work, the migrant may now be detained for a period of 5 to 15 days in addition to the fine (eeal. art. lxxx). Furthermore, migrants who: [R]efuse inspections of work permits by administrative departments, change employers without approval, change jobs without approval, or extend the terms of employment without approval’ shall have their work permits withdrawn and residence permits cancelled (1996 Rules. art. xxix). The ‘ultimate’ sanction for the migrant is voluntary departure (if appropriate) or deportation/repatriation (eeal. art. lxii). A person who has been deported is prohibited from re-entering China for one to five, or 10 years in cases of ‘severe’ violations (eeal. art. lxxxi). In contrast to the hefty penalties imposed on individual migrants, employer sanctions are limited to a fine of 10,000 rmb for every foreigner who is illegally employed, up to a maximum amount of 100,000 rmb (eeal. art. lxxx). Any monetary gain resulting from illegal employment will also be confiscated from the employer, although it is unclear how such gains are calculated. Employers are only required to cover the deportation expenses only if the migrant is unable to bear such costs (2013 Regulations. art. xxxii). The eeal also imposes sanctions on persons and companies who “introduce jobs to ineligible ­foreigners” (eeal. art. lxxx). These intermediaries may be fined 5,000 rmb for each job that is ‘illegally introduced’, with a cap of not more than 50,000

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rmb (for a person) or 100,000 rmb (for a company). Illegal gains, if any, shall be confiscated. It is questionable whether the much weaker civil penalties for employers under the eeal regime would achieve any significant deterrence effect as intended by the legislation. For the unscrupulous employer, gaining a competitive advantage from an exploitable migrant workforce may outweigh the risk of ‘getting caught’ and being ‘punished’ with a relatively small fine. The eeal provides local public security bureaus and exit/entry border inspection authorities wide enforcement powers to conduct on-the-spot interrogation, continuous inspection, and detention for investigation up to 60 days of foreigners suspected of illegally entering/exiting, residing or working in China (eeal. art lviii, lix and lx). Enforcement is targeted towards certain groups of foreign migrants, as reflected by specific anti-sanfei campaigns conducted by local authorities in recent years. A notable example is the presence of African immigrants working and residing in ‘ethnic enclaves’ in Guangzhou. Compared to other foreigners, this group has been subject to more frequent on-the-spot inspections such as passport checks and ‘crack downs’ by local public security bureaus. This targeting is in part driven by the criminalisation of Africans in the public discourse, often fuelled by the local media (Lan 2015). In areas with a high concentration of African migrants in Guangzhou, the local municipal government has set up a centralised administrative team of ­government officials from different departments to ‘manage’ sanfei migrants (Liu 2011). The enforcement of immigration law has expanded to involve actors beyond the state and at diverse sites such as the workplace. Employer must report to local public security bureaus, in a timely manner, upon discovering any of these circumstances: (1) A foreigner employed resigns or changes employment location (2) A foreigner employed violates the provisions on administration of exit and entry; or (3) A foreigner employed dies, disappears or other serious circumstances arise (eeal. art xlv. See also eeal Implementing Rules. art. xxvi). This state-sanctioned ‘watchdog’ role of the employer in monitoring migrants’ immigration compliance can be deployed by employers seeking to exert additional control over migrants’ work relations. Another enforcement mechanism that could institutionalise uncertainty on a day-to-day basis for migrants with precarious statuses is the introduction of a ‘whistleblowing’ system of reporting sanfei activities by the general public. Article 45 of the eeal stipulates that: Citizens, legal persons or other organizations who find foreigners illegally entering, residing or working in China shall duly report such matter to the local public security organs.

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This provision has largely been ‘borrowed’ from existing local government regulations and campaigns conducted by local public security organs. Most notably, the 2011 Interim Provisions of Guangdong Province on Administration of and Services to Aliens established a ‘reward and penalty’ system. Individuals and organisations may be rewarded for reporting sanfei foreigners to local authorities. Certain duties are placed on employers, education institutions, hotels, property management offices, real agents, and local residents, such as verifying passports and visas, not hiring or providing services to foreigners without valid documents, and reporting sanfei cases to public security organs. Fines can be imposed if these parties fail to carry out their obligations. An example of less formal practices of immigration enforcement by local authorities is the 100-day ‘sanfei clean up’ campaign launched by the Beijing public security bureau in 2012. With substantial media coverage, the campaign actively encouraged members of the public to provide ‘clues’ and report any suspicious foreigner who may be sanfei or engaged in criminal and other illegal activities (Wiest 2012). Conclusion As the state attempts to regulate who may cross its borders, reside in its territory, and participate in its labour market and the conditions of their entry, residence, and employment in its territory, immigration controls construct a range of personal statuses for non-citizens, beyond the conventional dichotomy of ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ migration. Some of these migrant statuses are highly precarious, and are created, shaped, and reinforced by the intersection of the norms, institutions, and processes of immigration law with other regulatory domains such as labour law, administrative law, and criminal law. Through a close analysis of China’s latest immigration law regime, I have argued in this chapter that the design of the eeal – situated in the context of an anti-sanfei political discourse – can produce migrant statuses that are associated with multidimensional precariousness in their work relations and other aspects of their lives. The chapter has contributed new theoretical insights to the scarce but emerging scholarship on Chinese immigration law and policy, which will become more significant in light of China’s recent experience as a country of international migration. The legal construction of precarious migrant statuses under the eeal regime has wider implications beyond the realm of immigration law. The Chinese government has sought to enhance worker protections through labour law reforms in recent years, with an aim of addressing growing labour conflicts in an increasingly precarious labour market. While it is b­ eyond

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the scope of this chapter, the question of whether immigration law and policy in China may potentially increase employers’ control over local workers and challenge collective worker-protective institutions (which has occurred elsewhere) remains to be seen. It may be that at this stage, the proportion of foreign migrants in the Chinese workforce is fairly trivial that it would not be a concern in the immediate future. The other issue that deserves further investigation is the role played by private intermediaries such as employment agencies in the migratory process and labour supply chain with respect to foreign migrants working in China. While there is one mention of ‘intermediaries’ in the eeal – namely the punishment of those ‘assisting others in illegally exiting or entering China’, there has been very little scholarly or policy consideration to how the Chinese state regulates the different types of intermediaries that play a key role in the flow of international labour migration today. Finally, it is suggested that future qualitative studies (such as interviews and ethnographic research) of the eeal and how different labour market actors interact with the legal regulatory framework can shed important light on the ‘law in action’. References Anderson, Bridget. “Migration, immigration controls and the fashioning of precarious workers”. Work, employment & society 24.2 (2010): 300–317. Bogg, Alan and Novitz, Tonia. “Race Discrimination and the Doctrine of Illegality.” LQR 129 (2013): 12. Castles, Stephen. “Guestworkers in Europe: A resurrection?” International migration review 40.4 (2006): 741–766. China Daily. “Guangdong cracks down on illegal foreign labor”, May 8, 2008. Assessed 1 July, 2015 http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2008-08/05/content_6903503.htm. China News Weekly. “Legislation to deal with three illegalities in China”, July 2, 2012. Assessed 1 July 2015 http://finance.sina.com.cn/china/20120702/182112457251.shtml. Chung KW, Qi J and Hou W. “China. A New Pole for Immigration”. In Segal U, Elliott D, Mayadas NS, eds. Immigration Worldwide: Policies, Practices, and Trends, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, 352–362. Das, Mitali and N’Diaye, Papa. “Chronicle of a Decline Foretold: Has China Reached the Lewis Turning Point?” Working Paper 13/26, 2013 (International Monetary Fund 2013). Dauvergne, Catherine and Sarah Marsden. “The ideology of temporary labor migration in the post-global era”. Citizenship Studies 18.2 (2014): 224–242.

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Freedland, Mark R. and Cathryn Costello. “Migrants at Work and the Division of Labor Law”. In Costello C and Freedland M eds. Migrants at Work: Immigration and Vulnerability in Labor Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, 8. Fudge, Judy. “Precarious migrant status and precarious employment: The paradox of international rights for migrant workers”. Comp. Lab. L. & Pol’y J. 34 (2012): 95. Global Commission on International Migration. Migration in an Interconnected World: New Directions for Action. Report of the Global Commission on International Migration (Geneva: SRO Kundig, 2005. Goldring, Luin, Carolina Berinstein and Judith K. Bernhard. “Institutionalizing precarious migratory status in Canada”. Citizenship studies 13.3 (2009): 239–265. Goudkamp, James and Mimi Zou. “The Defence of Illegality in Tort Law: Beyond Judicial Redemption?” The Cambridge Law Journal 74.01 (2015): 13–16. Lan, Shanshan. “State regulation of undocumented African migrants in China: A multiscalar analysis”. Journal of Asian and African Studies (2014): 0021909614531903. Lauffs, Andreas and Jonathan Isaacs. Employment law & practice in China. Hong Kong: Sweet & Maxwell, 2d ed. 2014. Lefkowitz, Melissa. “Strike Hard Against Immigration: China’s New Exit-Entry Law’” China Brief, Jg 13 (2013). Liu, Guofo. Chinese Immigration Law. VT: Ashgate, Burlington, 2011. Liu, Guofu. “Legislation, impacts and deficiencies of the Law of Exit and Entry Administration of China 2013”. International Journal of Public Law and Policy 4.4 (2014): 381–392. Li, Zhigang, Laurence JC Ma and Desheng Xue. “An African enclave in China: The making of a new transnational urban space”. Eurasian Geography and Economics 50.6 (2009): 699–719. Ministry of Public Security Bureau of Exit and Entry Administration. The steady increase of immigrants and transport movement in 2014, http://www.mps.gov.cn/n16/ n84147/n84196/4311409.html (accessed 1 July 2015). National Bureau of Statistics of China. China Statistical Year Book. Beijing: NBS, 2001. National Bureau of Statistics of China. Data on Residents from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan and Foreigners Covered by the 2010 Population Census. Beijing: NBS, 2011. National Bureau of Statistics of China. Statistical Communiqué of the People’s Republic of China on the 2014 National Economic and Social Development. Beijing: NBS, 2015. Pieke Franck. “Immigrant China”. In Foot R. ed. China across the Divide: the Domestic in Global Politics and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 97–121. Pieke Franck. “Emerging Markets and Migration Policy: China. Report. Centre for Migration and Citizenship”, Paris: Centre for Migrations and Citizenship, IFRI, 2014. Assessed January 26, 2016. http://www.ifri.org/en/publications-cerfa-ifri/emerging -markets-and-migration-policy-china-1.

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Rittich, Kerry. “Rights, Risk and Reward: Governance norms in the international order and the problem of precarious work”. In Fudge J and Owens R eds. Precarious Work, Women, and the New Economy: The Challenge to Legal Norms. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2006, 31–52. Rodgers, Janine, ed. Precarious jobs in labor market regulation: the growth of atypical employment in Western Europe. Geneva: International Institute for Labor Studies, 1989. Ruhs, Martin and Bridget Anderson. “Semi‐compliance and illegality in migrant labor markets: an analysis of migrants, employers and the state in the UK”. Population, space and place 16.3 (2010): 195–211. State Council. Report on the Administration of Entry-Exit, Residence, and Employment of Foreigners, 25 April, Address to the 26th Session of the Standing Committee of the Eleventh National People’s Congress, 2012. The State Council’s Rules on the Administration of Employment of Foreigners in China 1996 (1996 Rules). art. V., 1996. Vosko, Leah F. Managing the Margins: Gender, Citizenship, and the International Regulation of Precarious Employment (Oxford University Press 2010). Waite, Louise. “A place and space for a critical geography of precarity?” Geography Compass 3.1 (2009): 412–433. Walzer, Michael. Spheres of Justice: a Defense of Pluralism and Equality (Basic Books 1983). Wiest, Nailene Chou. “Of ‘Sanfei’, Boxers and a Broken System”, Caixin Online, December 6, 2012. Accessed July 10, 2015. http://english.caixin.com/2012-06-12/100399845 .html. Xinhua. “New law targets foreigners’ illegal presence”, June 30, 2012. Accessed July 10, 2015 http://www.npc.gov.cn/englishnpc/news/Legislation/2012-07/02/content _1728563.htm. Zhu, Guobin and Rohan Price. “Chinese Immigration Law and Policy: A Case of ‘Change Your Direction, or End Up Where You Are Heading’?” (2013) 26(1) Colombia Journal of Asian Law 1. Zou, Mimi. “The Legal Construction of Hyper-Dependence and Hyper-Precarity in Migrant Work Relations”. International Journal of Comparative Labor Law and Industrial Relations 31.2 (2015): 141–162.

chapter 9

Running into Nowhere: Educational Migration in Beijing and the Conundrum of Social and Existential Mobility1 Susanne Bregnbæk Introduction A series of suicides among Chinese migrant workers who leapt to their deaths from the rooftops of the dormitories of their workplace speak forcefully about the precarious lives of Chinese migrant workers. So far at least 16 people have committed suicide and further 20 people were stopped in an attempt to jump from high buildings at Foxconn factory, a Taiwan owned company in Tianjin, China, which is the maker of almost all of Apple’s devices (Moore 2010). The company had laid-off tens of thousands of workers during the financial crisis and the remaining workers have since then had to cope with an even more daunting work load as they face days of up to 70 hours a week carrying out monotonous work tasks. They have practically no spare time. During work shifts they are not even allowed to talk to each other. And yet paradoxically, getting a job at Foxconn is highly competitive. As many as 8,000 people apply for a job there every day, many of whom have university degrees and therefore the factory is sometimes referred to as Foxconn University. Workers have thus struggled to get through the ‘eye of the needle’, but only to find that they have been caught in a trap. As one man put it “I know why all those people jumped. In here nobody gives a damn about you. Too bad I’ve already got on foot on this boat. It’s hard to get off now” (Moore 2010). These suicides share an uncanny similarity with another incident that took place when I started my fieldwork in Beijing among Chinese university ­students.2 In April 2005, a twenty-year-old student at Beijing University wrote 1 This chapter first appeared as The Chinese Race to the Bottom: The Precarious Lives of Chinese University Graduates in Beijing’s ‘Ant Tribe’, Critical Sociology, doi: 10.1177/0896920515604476. Reproduced by permission of sage Publications Ltd., London, Los Angeles, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington dc. 2 I carried out fieldwork in Beijing for 6 months in 2005, 3 months in 2007 and 3 months in 2012. My primary focus was on students from Beijing and Tsinghua Universities but I expanded the analysis to also include students from less high ranking universities and some interviews with migrant workers.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004329706_010

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this message on the intranet of the university before she leaped to her death from a high university building: I made a List Put reasons to live on the left side Reasons to die on the right I wrote many things on the right But found little to write on the left Not willing to imagine Continuing to live like this for decades. Almost every young Chinese person’s dream is to gain a place at Beijing University or Tsinghua University. These are China’s highest ranked universities, and are regarded as being in a league of their own. Yet student suicide rates at these universities are rumoured to be higher than at other universities.3 Beijing University reported the suicide as an ‘accident’. Yet, despite official silence, students talked about the incident and speculated about the causes (Bregnbæk 2016). Some people blamed the cutthroat competitiveness of the educational system for the frequent incidents of suicide. ‘How could she do this to her parents?’ many people wondered. According to one rumour, this girl had left a suicide note for her parents apologising that she could not live up to their expectations. One story had it that she was about to graduate, but was being bypassed in job interviews because she lacked the kinds of connections that can open doors. Some students quietly remarked that suicide was really the only way to escape from the pressure. Pressure (yali) permeated social life in China, it seems, both when it comes to the predicament of migrant workers such as those of the Foxconn factory, but also when it comes to the lives of Chinese university students, even at China’s top universities. In a period of about thirty years, Chinese society has changed from being a poor agricultural society to being the world’s largest economy. These transformations have brought prosperity to many, but they have also come at a cost. One Chinese university student put it like this to me “We are on a train that is going fast, leaving the past, speeding towards the future, but nobody seems to stop and reflect on where the train is going”. The Foxconn suicides and the suicides of Chinese university students are obviously extreme cases that bring into relief the kinds of precarity ­experienced 3 Official Chinese statistics on this matter are not available, but according to Paul Mooney, she was one of 17 college students in Beijing who committed suicide during the first 7 months of that year (Mooney 2005, 1).

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by Chinese citizens as Chinese society is undergoing rapid urbanisation. The difference between being a uneducated migrant worker and being a student or graduate from a top university in China should of course not be underestimated. However, in this chapter I argue that in some instances, both migrant workers and university students take part in what I call a ‘race to the bottom’. Since unemployment has risen dramatically in recent years, even university graduates sometimes end up carrying out tedious manual labour or face unemployment. In other words in some cases university graduates share the predicament of China’s millions of migrant workers in the sense that they are disadvantaged by the migration laws of the house-hold registration system (hukou), stigmatised by the discourse on population quality (suzhi) and face moral dilemmas when it comes to living up the cultural norms of filial piety (xiao). Education has been the road to social mobility for centuries in China, with the exception of when it was abolished during the Mao era (Stafford 1995). Chinese parents, the state and young people themselves invest heavily in the belief that doing well in school can create a better life for the entire family. This ‘educational desire’ (Kipnis 2011) is tied to both internal and external migration. Whereas young people from rural China (and their parents) struggle to create a future in one of China’s major cities, young people from urban China often dream of travelling abroad (Bregnbæk 2011).4 In contemporary China even higher education increasingly falls short of living up to its promise of social mobility as college graduates are outnumbering white collar jobs (Fong 2004, 2011). The economic historian Gregory Clark and his co-authors (Clark et al. 2014), who have carried out a comprehensive study of Chinese surnames, found that the idea that social mobility can be attained through higher-education is very often a fantasy reserved for elite families.5 In his work on education as seen from the periphery of China, Zachary Howlett cites a rural high-school principal who said ‘If we didn’t have the national college entrance exams (gao kao) there would be social revolution in China’ (Howlett 20166). The point he makes is that the national college entrance exams give some illusion of fairness – or in his term fairness is ‘fabricated’. Even though everyone in China will agree that education is in practice unequally distributed, since much depends on having money and connections 4 For some the pressure of obtaining a scholarship to go abroad leads to depression and suicidal thoughts (Bregnbæk 2011). 5 Clark et al.’s study of elite and non-elite surnames in China (1645–2012) indicates that intergenerational mobility, even during the Communist era is much lower than conventionally estimated for China (Clark et al. 2014). 6 Unpublished manuscript cited with permission from the author.

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in order to gain access to the best schools, which give better chances of getting access to the best high-schools, which ultimately give better chances of entering a good university, the college entrance examination none the less implies that even rural students have a chance at beating the odds, by getting high grades and thus being able to climb the social ladder. The idea that this ‘instituted fantasy’, a term he borrows from Steven Sangren is necessary in order to ensure some measure of societal stability is well put. In fact it has been argued, among others by Ruth Cherrington that the 1989 Tian Anmen Incident, where the Chinese army shot student protesters on Tian Anmen Square, strictly speaking, had less to do with a desire for human rights than with a situation of a shortage of well-paid jobs (Cherrington 1991). Furthermore, the Chinese government feared that an alliance could be created between intellectuals and the rural masses and this caused the tragic decision to put an end to the demonstrations through the use of brute force. Today, twenty years after, unemployment for Chinese university graduates has again risen dramatically and this is a serious challenge to the Chinese government. Lian Si (2009) coined the term ‘ant tribe’ in his book China’s Ant Tribe: Between Dreams and Reality, in which he describes the problem of China’s rising unemployment for college graduates. He has argued that many of these young people share fate with China’s many migrant workers, living in lousy conditions in the outskirts of the city, off low in-come jobs or no income at all, yet reluctant to give up the dream of finding work in the capital and finding it to shameful to return to their hometowns empty-handed. Explaining the term he writes “Bees, as they fly, give the impression of upward mobility, while ants are always seen down on earth, stuck to the ground”. Since the intelligent, industrious, yet anonymous and underpaid graduates bear so much resemblance to the feature of ants that he decided to name the book in this way. According to Si, the Chinese government has among other things reacted to this problem by enrolling a greater amount of young men in the Chinese army, thus attempting to create both employment and loyalty to the party-state. President Xi Jinping’s new political slogan of ‘The Chinese Dream’ (中国梦) (The Economist 2013), should, I would argue, be understood in the context of a rapidly increasing lack of social mobility. Chinese slogans are commonly interpreted as depicting the opposite of present social reality (Thøgersen 2003; Steinmüller 2011). Former president Hu Jintao, for example, presented the idea of the ‘harmonious society’ (和 谐 社 会 ) at a time when growing social unrest represented a serious threat to the party (Yan 2009). It seems likely that President Xi Jinping’s new slogan of the Chinese Dream, whereby young people are urged to dream may also be an indication that social mobility is stagnating. It

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involves an attempt to fuel the necessary ‘instituted fantasy’ that social mobility is possible for anyone who is willing to work hard enough. In this chapter, I ask how we can understand the Chinese case of precarity by looking deeper into the lives of particular citizens. I wish focus on the life-words of two key interlocutors, Jing Jing and Bai Gang in order to simultaneously describe the social, political, moral and existential demands placed on them. To capture this perennial tension the term ‘critical phenomenology’ (Desjarlais 1997, 25) is employed: By addressing broader social and political issues to account for subjective experiences, I focus on what happens when educational dreams lead to disappointment. Let me first highlight three aspects that are vital to understanding the forms of precarity at stake in China: The Chinese house-hold registration system, the Chinese state discourse on population quality and the moral imperatives of filial piety.

The Household-registration System and the Discourse on Population Quality (Suzhi)

Arne Kalleberg (2011) has argued that precarious work is a global tendency caused by global macrostructural changes. In the article “The Politics of Precarity: Views Beyond the United States” Ching Kwan Lee and Yelizavetta Kofman (2012) take up the challenge to try to examine precarious work outside of the United States, more specifically in the Middle-East, South Africa and also in China. As for the latter, they point out that precarious labour, rather than being ‘merely’ the outcome of global capital competition, it is an integral part of the Chinese state’s strategy of development (Lee and Kofman 2012, 394). For example, what makes Chinese migrant labour so cheap and vulnerable is not only its immense supply but also its second-class citizenship status (Pun 2005; Lee and Kofman 2012). The Chinese house-hold registration system (hukou) entails that a great majority of migrant workers hold a rural as opposed to an urban hukou. This means that they have to apply for a temporary residence permit while living in China’s urban areas, or else they become part of the floating population (liudong renkou), who live in China’s cities without any legal rights and can in principle be sent back to their home-towns if they are caught by the police (Zhang 2001). Local pension regulations, medical policies and employment practices discriminate against them since they are not urban residents. This system of a ‘two-tier citizenship hierarchy’ was put in practice in the 1950s, enforced locally by a locality-based rationing system under high socialism. It has been gradually banned since the 1980s but the ­vulnerable ­status of rural

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­citizens in the light of their inferior entitlements have not changed. Furthermore, as has been pointed out by Pun Nai, migrants from China’s rural areas also face severe discrimination, since they have been cast as being culturally inferior within the country’s state population quality (suzhi) discourse. In 1978 under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, China started the period of Opening Up and Reform and he introduced the One Child Policy. The aim was not only to reduce the quantity of the population but also to improve its quality. Suzhi 素 质 is a compound of the characters su 素 and zhi 质 (­Kipnis 2006, 296–298). Zhi means ‘nature, character, or matter’, whereas su has many meanings, including ‘unadorned, plain, white and essence’. Andrew Kipnis has clearly laid out a geneology of the concept, showing that while the term used to be associated with inborn characteristics and eugenics, it has increasingly become linked with individual human qualities. The word suzhi7 is usually translated as ‘quality’ and it has become central to Chinese governance. In other words, suzhi has connotations of what is worth striving for both on the individual, familial and societal level, although it’s meaning is far from clear. It marks hierarchies of high and low, rural and urban, educated and ­non-educated, modern and backwards. Andrew Kipnis has argued that suzhi discourse emphasises rather than denies structural differences (Kipnis 2007, 389). According to Kipnis, while a neo-liberal approach masks hidden differences by “blaming the victim”, suzhi discourse rather reifies differences (Kipnis 2007, 389). He sees ‘blame the victim’ discourses as a critique of the neoliberal welfare policies articulated in the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan. This style of discourse works by denying that, for instance, ‘welfare Moms’ are victims at all. It denies the relevance of structural factors to the explanation of their disadvantages and argues that, if welfare Moms cannot get off of welfare, they are just not trying hard enough ­(Kipnis 2007, 389). By contrast several university teachers explained to me that 7 The term is difficult to translate into English, since although in English one may speak of human ‘qualities’, it is de-humanizing to use the singular form to discuss ‘the quality’ of an individual. Though one may speak of the moral qualities of a person using the term ‘character’, the mental qualities using the term ‘intelligence’ and the psychical qualities using the term ‘strength’, there is no term like suzhi that can refer to all of these things at once (Kipnis 2006, 304). As the modern nature/nurture dichotomy influenced Chinese thought during the twentieth century, the term became associated with inborn characteristics and it could be contrasted with the word suyang, which refers to embodied characteristics that results from a person’s upbringing (Kipnis 2006, 297). Since the 1970s, the term has undergone a transformation. Suzhi no longer connotes the natural in a nature/nurture dichotomy, but connotes individually embodied human qualities. The concept of suzhi is slippery and not easily definable but has resemblances to the German bildung, which entails aspects of distinction and class.

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­students from the countryside were often extremely diligent but in other respects they were in fact no better than Beijing students who had been exposed to other aspects of life and had been more developed from early childhood. By this they referred to the fact that they were accustomed to urban life and thus had a higher suzhi. However, as we shall see, from these students own point of view, it is unfair that students who were not Beijing residents had to have higher scores in order to be admitted to elite universities in Beijing and at the same time they suffered from a lack of self-confidence, from a feeling that they lacked a certain cultural habitus. The third aspect, I wish to highlight is how the cultural norms of filial piety, the lifelong duty of a child to respect and care for their parents weighs heavily on the shoulders of China’s youth, and is both fuelled and restrained by migration.

Filial Piety

Family sacrifice has a long history in China, and losses and gains are closely connected. This ethic is linked historically to the ideologies that interwove state legitimacy, filial piety and the teaching of literacy in Late Imperial China (Kipnis 2009, 205).8 One of the most important expressions of filial piety is diligent studying. As the old saying goes, ‘If there is no dark and dogged will, there will be no shining accomplishment: If there is no dull and determined effort, there will be no brilliant achievement’. This saying is often invoked for the benefit of contemporary Chinese primary students and throughout the educational system (Hulbert 2007, 41). Xiao, the moral obligation of children to honour and serve their parents, is a longstanding motif in Chinese life, and stories of children who cut off parts of their limbs in order to prepare a nourishing soup for their parents attest to the moral obligation of children to sacrifice their own well-being for the sake of their parents (Whyte 1997). The character xiao 孝 is composed of two other characters: The top half of the character lao 老 (old) and the character zi 子 (son). When combined to constitute xiao, the ‘old’ is on top of the ‘son’, or the elder on top of the young. The ideograph can be taken to mean that the old are supported by the young. It can also be taken to mean that the young are oppressed by the old. Since Chinese used to be written from top to bottom it can also simply be taken to imply that filial piety is the continuation of the family line (Ikels 2004, 3).

8 For more on ancestral sacrifice and state ritual practices in Late Imperial China, see Zito (1994).

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This theme of reciprocity between the generations9 takes on great significance in China today, as a generation of predominantly only children comes of age. With the breakdown of the cradle to grave social security provided in urban areas during socialism, there is no comprehensive system of support for the elderly and China has changed from a rice-bowl to a risk society. Therefore the desire to instil a sense of filial piety in this generation of young people is of great national concern. Acceptance of the One Child Policy was tied to what has been described as an ‘informal contract’ between parents and the state: By having only one child, who would grow up to become well-educated, parents could expect to see a reversal of the generational contract in the future (Milwertz 1997). In contemporary China a child’s schooling is a family endeavor worth great sacrifices, since it requires an investment of care, resources and time. This is related to what Charles Stafford has called ‘the cycles of yang’. Yang means ‘to give birth to’, ‘to cultivate’, ‘to educate’ and ‘to nourish’ (Stafford 1995, 80). Parents’ yang is to provide food, money and care for their children, who will in time yang them when they grow old. Parents thus make sacrifices, in the sense of working hard to bring up their children, in the hope of making them succeed in a competitive society. For children, educational achievement is a means to make a return to parents, to repay yang (ibid.). This relationship of mutual dependence is connected with the notion of xiao, filial piety. The Chinese educational system plays a substantial role in instilling this sense of indebtedness in children and young people. From an early age Chinese primary students are taught to love and respect their parents, as well as the Chinese Communist Party. They are also taught that that their parents have made so many sacrifices that they must be given endless love (Kipnis 2009, 216). Let me now turn to ethnography as a way of documenting how educational migration inside China’s borders for Jing Jing went hand in hand with an experience of precarity as well as moral dilemmas.

Jing Jing and the (De) Route to Social Mobility

When telling me the story of her life, I was struck that Jing Jing set out by telling me the story of her male ancestors, starting with her great-great-grandfather 9 This relationship is played out differently in different societies. In Europe there is a flow of resources from old to young within the family, and from young to old in state pension schemes. Only a few African states provide pensions for all senior citizens: most often older people are taken care of by their children when they are unable to take care of themselves (Alber et al. 2008).

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who achieved remarkable social mobility through higher education and became a highly respected scholar official and later the manager of a national bank in the 1920s. His (first) son, Jing Jing’s grandfather that is, continued this tradition of social mobility and achieved a master’s degree in the United States. When he returned to China he was appointed a key position within the nationalist Guomindang Government.10 What is notable is that Jing Jing told me the story of her mother’s ancestors, not her father’s patriline, and that she took for granted that she and her mother ought to have been given the same opportunities for higher education as those of her male ancestors. Whereas in imperial China, elite education was limited to male members of a relatively small number of elite families, today both boys and girls from all sections of society are told that they can climb the social ladder if they work hard enough and have the talent (Fong 2004, 2013). Jing Jing then went on to tell me how her grandfather’s entering the Guomindang government entailed a tragic turning point in her family history. The iconoclasm of the 1949 revolution involved an attack on old ideas, old values and bourgeois education. The class categories were to be overturned and the ‘new man of socialism’ was to be created. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) her grandfather was forced to perform ‘self-criticism’. In a staged performance peasants gathered at twilight to watch the confessions of the previous ruling classes and the intelligentsia, who were labelled ‘rightists’, ‘revisionists’ and ‘black elements’. Their houses were confiscated, and any items that did not conform to Mao’s values were smashed. Because of her ‘unfortunate’ class status, Jing Jing’s mother was forced to marry someone with a ‘better’, that is, less bourgeois class background. She fell in love with a landlord’s son, but her parents arranged that she be married to Chen, Jing Jing’s father, instead, since he had a peasant background and was a devoted revolutionary. Jing Jing’s mother had no choice but to agree to the marriage. But this marriage, which was intended to salvage her fate, actually ended up causing her great suffering when her husband was imprisoned after the end of the Cultural Revolution, despite his socialist credentials. After Deng Xiaoping came to power, Jing Jing’s father was imprisoned because the political tide changed and he belonged to the Mao fraction, not the Deng fraction. This caused him to be sentenced to twelve years in prison as a scapegoat for other people’s crimes, Jing Jing said. During the stressful period leading up to the college entrance exams, in 1990, Jing Jing’s father was released from prison. According to Jing Jing he had become bitter and took his anger out on Jing Jing’s mother. Due to the violent 10

The Guomindang is the Mandarin term for the Nationalist Party using pinyin Romanization. The Nationalist Party was founded by Sun Yatsen in 1912.

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conflict between her parents Jing Jing attempted to run away from home several times, and once she also attempted to commit suicide. After this failed attempt, her mother had performed a kowtow (ketou) a ritual display of filial piety whereby a young person kneels before his or her ancestors. As she begged her daughter never to attempt to take her own life again, Jing Jing’s mother was reversing the relationship between parent and child, and Jing Jing remembers this inversion of filial piety as the most harrowing experience of her life. Jing Jing then failed the college entrance exams, but as a result of her mo­ ther’s ability to persuade and bribe local officials, she was allowed to take the exams the following year. Jing Jing passed the test this time but did not get a very high score and was admitted to the University of Minorities in Kunming, where she took a master’s degree in English and received one of the highest grades in the university. However, Jing Jing felt that the level of education there was low, and after graduation she applied to the law school of Tsinghua University in Beijing and was accepted from among thousands of other applicants. Although her mother had always urged her to acquire a higher education, she now wished she would settle for ‘a quiet life’, by which she meant getting married and having a child. Jing Jing none the less pursued her own dream of higher education, and she travelled to Beijing, a two-day-train ride away from her home town. However, when she returned home during the Spring Festival to visit her family during her first year, she discovered that her mother was not well. The family had kept this a secret in order not to worry her and to enable her to focus on her studies. She felt responsible for her mother’s poor health because she had left her alone with her father who acted tyrannically and also physically abused her. Jing Jing felt guilty about being far away from home, and also due to the fact that her parents and her sister were sending her money to enable her to continue studying, money that was also needed for her mother’s treatment. However, she continued to cling to the hope that, by obtaining a good education, she would eventually be able to help her mother live a better life in her old age. Therefore it is easy to understand her desperation when her aspirations seemed to fail and she was unable to find a job after graduation. It seemed as if her social status was blocking the road of upward mobility, despite her talent, hard work and Tsinghua diploma. She suspected that the reason she was being bypassed when applying for positions as a civil servant was to be found in her dang an, the personal dossier of every Chinese citizen, which contains details of a person’s family record. In other words, she suspected that it was her father’s prison sentence that was exerting power over her life. Her road towards social mobility and adulthood was therefore blocked. She spoke of the discrimination of the labour market by referring to the popular

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phrase bei nan dang, a term implying that success comes more easily if one is from Beijing (bei jing), is a man (nan shi) and is a member of the Communist Party (dang yuan). As a Dao minority women with a convicted father and no personal connections, she seemed to be jinxed. About a year later everything seemed to have taken a turn for the better. Jing Jing had married and found a job in a foreign company in Beijing. Having spent the Spring Festival nurturing her husband’s family, “which was expected”, she said, Jing Jing and her husband were happily preparing a room in their apartment for the arrival of Jing Jing’s mother, who was to come and live with them. The idea was also that she should look after the child they hoped to have in the future. However, soon after I returned to Beijing in February 2007 to continue fieldwork, I received the news that Jing Jing’s mother had passed away. She never fully recovered from her illness and she never made it to Beijing. Jing Jing had spent several months taking care of her in her home town. Because she had been away from her job for such a long time, Jing Jing had been fired. Even though Jing Jing had spent several months looking after her mother during her terminal illness, she was full of self-reproach, regretting having spent time on her own further education and neglecting what she saw as her moral responsibility to take care of her mother during the last years of her life. Jing Jing’s wish to be a filial daughter proved to be at odds with her wish to live out her own desires. Jing Jing had hoped that by acquiring a higher education she could eventually ‘give her mother a good life’ by bringing her to Beijing. But time ran out. I now turn to the story of another student from rural China as an example of the precarious struggle for urban citizenship that led Bai Gang become a member of the Chinese Communist Party and how this also went hand in hand with another kind of moral dilemma.

Bai Gang: Stuck in the Ant Tribe11

When I talked to Bai Gang, an undergraduate law student at a café outside campus, he commented shyly that this was the first time he tasted a cappuccino. Bai Gang’s parents were peasants, who worked in the fields and like Jing 11

A version of this story has previously been published in Bregnbæk, Susanne Between Party, Parents and Peers: The Quandaries of Young Chinese Party Members in Beijing’ in Ravinder Kaur and Ayo Wahlberg Eds. The Third World Quarterly, Special Issue: Governing Difference: Inequality, Inequity and Identity Vol. 33 no. 4, (2012):721–735. tandfonline. com.

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Jing, he talked about how they had sacrificed a lot in order to enable him, as the youngest son,12 to receive a university education. He explained that urban students would often go out and spend lots of money on themselves, but that he spent his time studying as well as working part time in a restaurant. As he put it “Students like me can only spend 80 per cent of our time studying”. He also explained that he felt that he lacked the kind of self-confidence that came with being brought up in an urban and highly educated family. “Sometimes people look down on us [students from rural China] because we have not had access to the same things, growing up. Life in the countryside is much simpler and there is really not much to do besides studying”. Bai Gang’s perceived lack of confidence in relation to urban students, who were accustomed to ‘modern’ forms of consumption and distinction, can be likened to the difficulty of a migrant adjusting fully to the norms of the host society. Even though Bai Gang found most students from Beijing to be ‘friendly’, he confessed to feeling estranged from them, like an outsider struggling to be accepted as an equal. Clearly, a feeling of inferiority, reflecting a lack of equal rights, went hand in hand with a sense of having to change one’s habitus in order to acquire more suzhi. Although Bai Gang himself did not use the term suzhi, since this would stigmatise him even more, his comments on having ‘an open mind’, on being accustomed to ‘modern life’, and the value he placed on consumption patterns and artistic abilities, all clearly mirror suzhi discourse. During our conversations, Bai Gang always returned to the issue of social differences as they were played out between students at the university and the ‘hukou question’. He explained with great indignation that people cannot move freely about the country, and rural students have a temporary residence permit in Beijing while they are studying. But unless they are able to find a job after graduation in which their employer can ‘arrange a hukou for them’, they must in principle return to their home provinces. Thus students with a rural background are betwixt and between in hoping to transcend their rural status. One day Bai Gang told me that he was preparing to become a member of the Communist Party: 12

He had a brother and a sister. Coming from a rural area, two children had been authorised, but when his mother was pregnant a third time, they chose to have a third child and to pay a fine of approximately 2000 rmb. It had taken his parents five years of hard work and saving to pay back the money they had borrowed from different family members and friends to pay the fine. Bai Gang spoke very caringly about his parents and he said that he respected them a lot. He mostly talked about his mother, whom he said was a very intelligent woman, even though she was not well-educated. He said that she would often tease him by saying that he had been a very expensive child.

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In fact, I might become a member of the Communist Party before my graduation. I don’t think I will be so conscious of being a member of the party, but I plan to become a member because it will be helpful in order to find a job in the future. Especially if you want to work within a government institution you have to, and this is sometimes written in job advertisements – they call for being a member of the Communist Party. I think this is a good thing for me because there is serious competition for jobs. Coming from a poor rural background with no official connections, Bai Gang’s commitment to join the party was tied to his primary concern of being able to get a good job in an ‘opportunity city’ (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou or Shenzhen) and to obtain an urban hukou, a residence permit. In this way, he also hoped to be able to reverse the generational contract, to be able to send remittances back to his parents and his less fortunate brother and sister, since he had been the youngest and the luckiest child. The family had devoted many resources so that he could receive a university education. The idea of returning to rural Guangxi to live with them and take care of his parents during their old age was very remote to Bai Gang. He thought that he could contribute more to the entire family by finding a good job in Beijing. However, Bai Gang said that his parents were not too impressed with him becoming a party member. Like many of the other villagers, they were frustrated with the corruption of local officials, who taxed their crops heavily and they cynically commented on the sons of cadres who would conspicuously return home driving luxury cars. “My parents miss Chairman Mao because Mao cared about the peasants of China, unlike the current party members, who are busy filling their own pockets”, he said. He said that they had a picture of Chairman Mao in their living room and that they would burn incense for him along with the other ancestors. He said this with a compassionate smile, indicating that he found this practice to be out of tune with reality, although he shared their frustration in relation to the corruption of government officials and the widening disparity between China’s booming urban coastal areas and the poverty of the countryside. When I met Bai Gang again during the second part of my fieldwork in 2007, he seemed more disillusioned than the cheerful boy I had met two years earlier. He had recently graduated and was looking for a job in Beijing. He also said that he felt that he was stuck in a dead-end, since people with a ba degree earned so little that it was impossible to settle permanently in Beijing, let alone send remittances back to his parents and siblings. Although he knew he could probably easily get a job in another part of China, closer to home, he was unwilling to give up the idea of making a life for himself in Beijing.

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Reflecting on the topic of his party-membership he said: What happens is that we recommend our friends. In principle we are supposed to observe them, hold meetings and discuss their assets and flaws, but this is done superficially. It is all about connection (guanxi). By becoming a party member, Bai Gang in a sense ‘became the party’ – he became part of the structural logic of the party, whereby connections (guanxi) were far more important than values and virtues. While he assisted in recruiting new members, in his own case party membership had not provided a means for social mobility. Because of the soaring number of unemployed university graduates without a Beijing hukou, even as a party member, Bai Gang’s aspirations to secure a job in Beijing continuously failed. As a result, like Jing Jing, he was unable to grow up in a moral sense of the term, that is becoming an independent person who could repay his parents sacrifices and achieve full autonomy. The two accounts also tell us something about the gendered differences at play. For Lu Gang, a key concern was that being a man without an income he was unable to marry and set up his own family, and by extension he was unable to grow up and achieve moral standing in his own eyes and in the eyes of his parents. Jing Jing, however, was able to marry despite her situation of financial insecurity but the duty to take care of her mother weighted more heavily on her. She felt great remorse over this during her mother’s terminal illness and after her premature death. Conclusion I started this chapter with a reference to the Foxconn suicides in order to highlight the extreme precarity experienced by migrant workers, who choose suicide as an escape from appalling working conditions and a life of endless struggle. It has also been pointed out that there may be another factor at play. When people commit suicide, their families receive a financial compensation, and for people, who struggle to pay back their parents and to be dutiful children, this bonus might play a role. The average employee earns about 200 yuan (app. 30 $), but the company pays 100,000 yuan compensation to the family of anyone dying (bbc News 2015). For some the race to the bottom ends here. And it is possible that the thought of this money going to one’s family could be a desperate way of providing post-mortem the measure of financial compensation that they could not offer in real life.

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By recounting the experiences of two young university graduates whose aspirations for social mobility played out differently, I have attempted to shed light on some of the structural inequalities that make it difficult for rural students to transcend the rural urban divide. For students from China’s rural areas, such as Jing Jing and Bai Gang very often the dream of higher education as the route to social mobility turns out to be a pipe dream that leads nowhere. Jing Jing’s road to social mobility was blocked by the historical past that kept her trapped for some time, just like her mother had been trapped because of the politisation of class categories during the Mao era. However, when she did manage to get a job in a foreign company, which did not look at her ‘dang an’, the personal-political dossier of every Chinese citizen, she lost that job trying to live up to her filial duty. As for Bai Gang, who was a child of peasants from Guangxi Province, he knew that he was fighting an uphill battle in the struggle to change his residence permit – that is becoming recognised as an urban citizen with equal rights. This made him become a member of the party, but in the end he discovered that he still lacked vital connections and other forms of social capital. Being unemployed or only partly unemployed he was unable to reverse the generational contract, continued to depend on his parents and like millions of other young people like him, was ashamed to return to his home town. Even though he in fact believed that he could find work there he was unwilling to give up the urban dream. Lixin Fan’s documentary The Last Train Home epitomises similar dilemmas. The film portrays the world’s largest migration, at the Chinese lunar New Year also known as the Spring Festival, when 130 million workers return from China’s industrial cities to their homes in the countryside. It does so by telling the story of a married couple who ‘harden their hearts’ in order to leave their children behind and take up work in the city of Guangzhou. They see this as a necessary sacrifice in order to make money that is needed in order to provide for their children’s education, bringing prosperity to the next generation. However, when the parents finally return home for a visit, parents and children are painfully estranged from one another. Their teenage children are full of remorse and feel abandoned by their parents, and the parents are shocked to find that their oldest daughter is about to drop out of school and plans to migrate to a large city in search of work. They have sacrificed so much in order for them to have a different and a better life and they cannot bear the prospect of their sacrifices not paying off and not leading to the planned social mobility for the next generation. However, the daughter blames her parents for only caring about money and refers to school as the equivalent of being in prison. When she refuses to listen to her parents (and grandparents) things go from bad to worse, and finally the whole family gets into a heated argument, which

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culminates by the daughter swearing rudely at her father. He loses his temper and hits her so she falls to the ground. The scene is a complete break-down of filial piety. In the end we see the daughter working as a waitress in a bar in Guangzhou, wearing make-up and dressed in revealing clothes she walks into the penumbra of urban night life, searching a new life as a worker and a consumer rather than through higher education. Ghassan Hage’s work on migration highlights the relationship between physical and existential mobility (Hage 2005, 470–474). He points out that migrants around the world, like everyone in the world move because of a need to be ‘going somewhere’ as opposed to feeling that they are ‘stuck’, ‘going nowhere’ or ‘moving too slowly’. He writes: We do not engage in existential mobility in order to experience physical mobility. The contrary is true: we engage in the kind of physical mobility that defines us as migrants because we feel another geographical space is a better launching pad for our existential selves. We move physically so we can feel that we are existentially on the move again or at least moving better (ibid). This brings home an existential truth about migration- whether internal or external- that it is tied to the struggle for a viable life. Social mobility is surely a great part of this but there is more to it than meets the eye. For Jing Jing, getting an ma in Kunming did not lead to fulfilment, she longed for a richer life, a life full of potentiality. Lu Gang also craved more than mere social mobility. He pointed out that his parents only cared about money. They did not know how to enjoy life, he felt. The dream of creating a life in Beijing was not only a material dream. It was also tied to issues of self-development and a quest for recognition- a desire to feel respected as an equal citizen rather than to feel looked down upon as someone of lower human ‘quality’. In the cases from China I have outlines here, it is worth noting that educational migration is not so much tied to a sense of moving too slowly, it is rather explained as a sense of running constantly, as in the case of the Foxconn workers, who feel enslaved to the assembly line, or as experienced by students who are constantly cramming for exams and each in their ways struggle to get ahead amidst daunting competition and pressure. However, students such as Lu Gang and Jing Jing at some point seem to feel that they rather than achieving social mobility are taking part in a race to the bottom of society. The sacrifices made, in terms of heavy parental investment in education as well as their own hard work does not necessarily pay off and this leads to great frustration. The girl who wrote the suicide note before jumping from the roof of a Beijing University building wrote that she was ‘unable to live like this for decades’. The

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note suggests a rejection of a life of never ending competition. The question as to whether it is capitalism that makes us conceive of our human viability in terms of ‘upward social mobility’ or whether ‘upward social mobility’ is simply the capitalist version of a more universal trait that characterises us as human beings remains open ended (Hage 2005, 472). Hage notes that the latter explanation corresponds to Spinoza’s definition of ‘joy’. For Spinoza ‘joy’ is not a higher state of ‘happiness’ but it is the very movement from one state to another higher state. “Joy is the buzz one experiences in the process of ‘moving existentially’” (Hage 2005, 472). By contrast, the experience of running but remaining socially, economically and existentially stuck seems to be what leads to despair both among migrant workers and unemployed Chinese university graduates. In China, as elsewhere, the project of modernity comes at a cost, sometimes in the form of the mismatch between expectations and genuine opportunities. A painting by the Japanese artist, Tetsuya Ishida powerfully illustrates this point in relation to the Japanese economic miracle.13 The painting portrays a salary man running toward a goal. If he does not run fast enough he will be caught by quality personal in white coats. The bleak portrait shows that he is running on the treadmill, literally running into nowhere. As Teresa Kuan (2014) has pointed out the fact that he committed suicide at the age of 31 by jumping off from a train is even more haunting. Man and machine are one in this image and suicide seems to be the only way out. Acknowledgements I thank the following persons for different kinds of support or inspiration: Anders Sybrandt Hansen, Ane Bislev, Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Martin Bak Jørgensen, Teresa Kuan and Zachary Howlett. I also thank Stanford University Press for permission to reprint part of the material from Fragile Elite: The Dilemmas of China’s Top University Students.

Funding Acknowledgements

I thank the Danish Research Council for Independent Research (fkk) and the Asian Dynamics Initiative (adi) for generously funding my research. 13

I owe this image to Teresa Kuan’s discussant remarks at the panel ‘How Children and Youth Deal with Stratification in China’ organised by Vanessa Fong at the Annual Anthropological Meeting held in Washington d.c. in December 2014.

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References Alber, Erdmute and Sjaak Van Der Geest. Generations in Africa: connections and conflicts. Vol. 33. LIT Verlag Münster, 2008. BBC News. “Foxconn Suicides ‘Workers feel quite lonely’”. BBC News, May 28, 2015. Accessed February 19, 2016. http://www.bbc.com/news/10182824. Bregnbæk, Susanne. “A Public Secret: ‘Education for Quality’ and Suicide among Chinese Elite University Students”. Learning and Teaching 4(3) (2011): 19–37. Bregnbæk, Susanne. Fragile Elite: The Dilemmas of China’s Top University Students. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016. Cherrington, Ruth. China’s Students: The Struggle for Democracy. London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1991. Clark Gregory, Neil Cummins, Daniel Diaz Vidal, Yu Hao, Tatsuya Ishii, Zach Landes, Daniel Marcin, Kuk Mo Jung, Ariel M. Marek and Kevin M. Williams. The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. New Jersey, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Desjarlais, Robert. Shelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood among the Homeless. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pensylvania Press, 1997. Fong, Vanessa. Only Hope: Coming of Age under China’s One Child Policy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Fong, Vanessa. Paradise Redefined: Transnational Chinese Students and the Quest for Flexible Citizenship in the Developed World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Hage, Ghassan. “A not so multi-cited ethnography of a not so imagined community”. Anthropological Theory 5(4) (2005): 463–475. Howlett, Zachary. “China’s examination fever and the fabrication of fairness: ‘My generation was raised on poison milk’”. In Bregnbæk S, Bunkenborg M (eds) Minding the Gaps: Dynamics of Emptiness and Fullness in Contemporary China (special issue of Social Analysis), 2016. Hulbert, Ann. “Re-education”. New York Times 1, 2007. Ikels, Charlotte, ed. Filial Piety: Practice and Discourse in Contemporary East Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Kalleberg, Arne L. Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarised and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s–2000s. New York, NY: Russel, 2011 Kipnis, Andrew. “Suzhi: A Keyword Approach”. The China Quarterly 186 (2006): 295–313. Kipnis, Andrew. “Neoliberalism Reified: Suzhi Discourse and Tropes of Neoliberalism”. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 13(2) (2007): 383–400. Kipnis, Andrew. “Education and the Governing of Child-Centered Relatedness”. In Chinese Kinship: Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives, edited by Susanne Brandtstädter and Goncalo D. Santos. London, Routledge, 2009.

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Kipnis, Andrew. Governing Educational Desire: Culture, Politics and Schooling in China. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2011. Kwan Lee, Ching and Yelizavetta Kofman. “The Politics of Precarity: Views Beyond the United States”. Work and Occupations 39(4) (2012): 388–408. Milwertz, Cecilia Nathansen. Accepting population control: Urban Chinese women and the one-child family policy. No. 74. Psychology Press, 1997. Mooney, Paul. “Campus life proves difficult for China’s little emperors”. The Chronicle of Higher Education, (2005). Accessed February 19, 2016. http://pjmooney.com/che -studentlife.html. Moore, Malcolm. “Inside Foxconn’s suicide factory”. The Telegraph, May 27, 2010. ­Accessed February 19, 2016. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/china-business/ 7773011/A-look-inside-the-Foxconn-suicide-factory.html. Pun, Ngai. “Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace”. Duke University Press, 2005. Si, Lian. China’s Ant Tribe: Between Dreams and Reality. Beijing: Beijing University Press, 2009. Stafford, Charles. The Roads of Chinese Childhood: Learning and Identification in Angang. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Steinmüller, Hans. “The state of irony in China”. Critique of Anthropology 31(1) (2011): 21–42. The Economist. “China’s future: Xi Jinping and the Chinese Dream”. The ­Economist, May 4, 2013. Accessed February 19, 2016. http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/ 21577070-vision-chinas-new-president-should-serve-his-people-not-nationalist -state-xi-jinping. Thøgersen, Stig. “Parasites or civilisers: The legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party in rural areas”. China: An International Journal 1(2) (2003): 200–223. Whyte, Martin King. “The fate of filial obligations in urban China”. The China Journal 38 (1997): 1–31. Yan, Yunxiang. The individualization of Chinese society. Vol. 77. Oxford: Berg, 2009. Zhang, Li. Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China’s Floating Population. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Zito, Angela, and Tani E. Barlow. Body, subject, and power in China. University of Chicago press, 1994.

chapter 10

Necropolitics and the Migrant as a Political Subject of Disgust: The Precarious Everyday of Russia’s Labour Migrants1 John Round and Irina Kuznetsova-Morenko Introduction I am really afraid, honestly! If you are at war it’s easier – you know where you may be shot or beaten from and how to recognise enemies. But here no – here they are laughing and beating you (30 years old male, three advanced education degrees, Tajik, living in Russia for 10 years). There is an urgent need to move beyond the biopolitical when considering the everyday lives of irregular migrants. In 2015 it is clear that in many countries the state, and its attendant media, has moved beyond ideas of controlling the health of migrant populations, be it in camps or restricted health care, for example, and are now actively constructing them as ‘the enemy at the gates’ bringing crime, disease, and having the power to destroy traditional cultures (Esses 2015). This has deep implications for migrants, as it positions them as objects of disgust, upon which the socio-political/economic desires of the powerful can be inscribed. This can take many forms, from placing the blame for the impacts of austerity on ‘the other’ (Carastathis 2015), to the nefarious actions of employers who seek to exploit every possible advantage in order to maximise profits (Lewis et al. 2014). Central to this issue is the idea that irregular migrants (and often formal migrants) are disposable, given their seemingly endless supply, and, as they operate outside of legal frameworks that they can be abused with near impunity (Buckley 2014). They are also disposable in the sense that, as they are operating outside of formal boundaries, there is no imperative to provide health care, insure safety at work, provide education to family members, or offer any form of legal protection. Thus we argue that to more fully understand the actions of those with power, there needs to be a deeper 1 This article first appeared as Necropolitics and the Migrant as a Political Subject of Disgust: The Precarious Everyday of Russia’s Labour Migrants, Critical Sociology, doi: 10.1177/0896920516645934. Reproduced by permission of sage Publications Ltd., London, Los Angeles, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington dc.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004329706_011

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engagement with death, through the concept of necropolitics, than currently exists within the literature. Recent events, such as the increasing number of migrants dying while attempting to enter the eu by sea, and the excruciating human rights abuses they endure prior to embarkation, demonstrate the pressing need to theorise the death of migrants (Kassar and Dourgnon 2014). Death is also central to the eu’s response to the ‘crisis’ with increasing calls for ‘boots on the ground’ to destroy (in every sense of the word) the networks facilitating irregular migration. However, drawing upon Mbembe (2003), necropolitics is not just about death but about those the state deems appropriate to ‘let die’. By developing the framework of ‘letting die’, this paper provides a lens through which other studies can reveal the power and oppression that many migrants face in their daily lives. This framework will enable the development of comparative studies on the issues migrants face in differing contexts/regions, allowing stronger voices to put pressure on states to confront their actions. Arguing that the abuse of migrants must be viewed through the lens of ‘letting die’ is provocative. However, as the discussions below demonstrate that the raison d’être of Central Asian migrants in Russia, from perspective of the state and the majority of employers, is simply and solely as a socio-economic slave body, both individually and collectively, whose labour is abused so political and economic power can be advanced. Russia has the second highest flow, after the usa, of labour migrants and while there are formal channels that migrants can follow (see Malakhov 2014 for a broad overview), such as work permits and a patent system, as we have argued elsewhere it is almost impossible for a migrant to be fully formal. Through a byzantine bureaucracy the Russian state makes it as difficult as possible to formalise; thus migrants have to cope with the actions of employers and landlords, both whom wish to operate informally to avoid tax (see Reeves 2013). Within this nexus human rights abuses are commonplace. These include physical violence, extra-judicial detention, the withholding of salaries leading to penury, the denial of urgent health care, and the emotional stress of family separation and constant fear. Informality also ensures that it is impossible to know how many Central Asian migrants there are in Russia, with estimates ranging from 3–12 million, the majority residing in major cities. Whilst there are some instances of forced migration into Russia, the vast majority are willing migrants, in the sense that they make the journey under their own volition. However, in socio-economic terms there is little choice but to seek work in Russia due to the extremely low salaries, inadequate levels of social protection transfers, and the high cost of essential goods in Central Asia (Tesliuc et al. 2014). The research upon which this paper is based is an extreme case, in terms of both the number of migrants involved and the scale of the human rights

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abuses endured. Furthermore, Russia is an atypical case study, in the global north, given the form of political economy that has developed there since the Soviet Union’s collapse. When talking about the state, and sovereignty, Russia is characterised by the symbiotic relationship between business and political power that leads to accusations of crony capitalism, high levels of corruption, and a socio-economic imperative that is focused almost solely on profit (Williams et al. 2013). Thus when the actions of employers are considered, it must be remembered that their practices are enabled by the state, and often they are one and the same. However, while the severity, and political framework may not be applicable to other regions, this paper has a global relevance in demonstrating how the explicit state led construction of migrants as criminal and diseased provides a framework where such issues can be revealed in less extreme settings. Given the current anti-migrant turn across northern Europe, this is of critical importance. The research took place from 2012 to 2015 and involved in depth interviews with over 300 migrants from Central Asia working in the Russian cities of Moscow and Kazan. They were approached through existing contacts, the snowball method, chance conversations in shops or on the street, and in some instances through ngos. The interviews all lasted at least an hour, and took place in the location where the interviewee was most comfortable. Participant observation also played an important role, with such research taking place in supermarkets, on public transport, metro stations, border crossings, and on the street. Migrants from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan were interviewed, but due to space restrictions this paper will explore in-depth the differences between their experiences. Visual methodologies were also employed, with some interviewees given digital cameras and asked to take images of their daily lives. This proved extremely useful as it gave the authors ‘access’ to living spaces, health care facilities, and work environments which otherwise would have remained hidden. Over 1000 media articles from the leading newspapers and blogs were content analysed, and further interviews were also conducted in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan with the families of migrant interviewees working in in Russia. To reveal the way in which migrants are viewed as diseased and criminal in Russia, and how this impacts their right to life, the paper first brings together the necropolitics literature with the lived experience of migration in cities. This is novel, as by bringing Agamben’s (1998, 2004) work on bare life from the camp to the city, it reveals the threat of death as a banal everyday experience. From this framework the paper then details the rising xenophobia in Russia, and how cultural imaginations of migration are constructed through viewing the migrant as diseased and criminal. Within the constraints of this paper it is impossible to give a full account of xenophobia, and its history in Russia

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(see Zuev 2010; Mykomel 2014; Pilkington, Omel’chenko and Garifzianova 2010; Umland 2008; Shnirelman 2011 for more in-depth discussions), thus to illustrate the ‘xenophobic turn’ against migrants, the spectacle of the 2013 Mayor of Moscow elections is employed. This election saw the main candidates competing to stigmatise migrants, leading to almost daily attacks against Central Asians in the subservient media. The paper then explores the actual construction of migrants as diseased and/or criminal, then continues to explore the lived experience of these constructions before moving to its conclusions.

Necropolitics and the Irregular Migrant

Irregular migration is intrinsically linked to death, be it fleeing from a ‘death world’ (Mbembe 2003) where survival is unlikely due to the genocidal actions of others, the precarious path of migration over land and/or sea, the violent and unhealthy nature of transit camps, and/or the precarious nature of work that many migrants are forced into. There is a significant, and extremely important body of work that explores such issues within the confined spaces of transit and refugee camps, much of which employs Agamben’s concept of bare life as its starting point (Ramadan 2013; Johnson 2013; Minca 2015; Minca and Ong 2015). The migrant living in such places can be considered to experience bare life, as their everyday life is outside of the norms and laws of the state they reside in. Therefore, they do not have the same right to health care, for example, as citizens, and often living conditions are extremely inhospitable (Davies and Isakjee 2015). Within such spaces there is an explicit biopolitical imperative, where health is monitored and controlled with the intrinsic assumption that the migrant body is unhealthy. This can either be because the migrant comes from a place with poor health care, and where infectious disease rates are perceived as higher than in the west, but also, and perhaps more importantly, because it is assumed that the migrant will partake in behaviours risky to health, and/or pays little attention to their own wellbeing. This led Agamben (1998, 102) to state that “today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West” and that those within them experience a bare life as they are stripped of all rights. This is obviously linked to Schmitt’s (2007) concept of the state of exception, whereby the state decides who is outside of the law through the suspension of legal rights for certain groups. This is commonly exemplified by the legal suspensions that surrounded the Nazi death camps, the treatment of prisoners in the Guantanamo holding facility, or the suspension of human rights in asylum detention centres, which leads to Elden (2009, 55) stating that “the ‘state of exception’ is an

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extraordinary legal moment”. However, the use of the necropolitics concept, exampled by the experiences of irregular migrants in Russia, demonstrates that the state of exception can be a more banal, every day, citywide practice, through which people are abused with impunity. Mbembe (2003, 12) states that “to exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power”, therefore, to understand the state’s necro-political actions of exception, the state of siege must be considered. To develop this he considers the bare life of those experiencing colonisation, or regions undergoing exploitative resource extraction, arguing that those with power construct such regions as inhabited by ‘savages’. Such spaces are thus: [T]he location par excellence where the controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended – the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of “civilization”. mbembe 2003, 24

This he argues, drawing from Arendt (1973), ennobles those who kill within the space to do so, with the belief that they are not committing murder as the victim lacks human character. For Mbembe (2003), necropolitics is not just about killing but also the sovereign’s decision on those who can be left to die. Using the example of townships under the apartheid regime, he demonstrates how colonial attitudes towards death were continued into the post-colonial period. Here ‘to let die’ refers to how the individual is restricted in their access to health care, safety, legal processes, and defence from aggressors. One way in which this is achieved is through the socio-political construction of the other through ‘cultural imaginaries’ as he (2003, 26) states: These imaginaries gave meaning to the enactment of differential rights to differing categories of people for different purposes within the same space; in brief, the exercise of sovereignty. Therefore, there is a need to critically examine the way in which those left to die are culturally constructed by the sovereign, in order that their human rights be held in abeyance. Furthermore, Mbembe’s deep engagement with space enables us to take ideas such as exception and bare life outside of the camp and into the city. To date, within migration studies, such engagements have been limited. Issues of necropolitics are investigated, but more in relation to extra-judicial killings in border regions and/or in camps (see, for example, Elden 2014; Morton 2014) and in cases of death in transit. Issues around access

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to health care tend to be more focused on the biopolitical elements around access, rather than the wounded lives of those unable to access treatment (cf. Cuadra 2012). This is not to say such work is not important but rather it concentrates more on the legislation per se rather than how it is experienced). One example, that does make such linkages is Alves’ (2014, 324) examination of necropolitical governance in relation to police linked death squads in Sao Paulo, arguing that to understand black urban life, the “spatial formations precisely constituted by black disposability” must be understood. This reading of necropolitics is crucial for the discussions below, as it is not just the act of killing that shapes urban spaces and networks, but also the permanent threat of violence that subjugates significant percentages of the population. Thus the state of exception is not just confined to the camp, but applies to spaces within cities as well, bounded only by the movements and actions of those condemned to a bare life (see also Smith 2015; Estevez 2014; and/or Bishara 2015). One body of literature that has engaged more fully with the unbounded spatialities of death is queer necropolitics (cf. Edelman 2014; Goessett 2014; Haritaworn, Kuntsman and Posocco 2014; Lamble, 2013). Edelman (2014) reveals, for example, how in Washington dc between 2000 and 2011 only 20 per cent of murders of trans feminine people of colour were solved, well below the normal 80 per cent clearance rates, and the majority of incidents of violence reported against this group were unsolved and/or not taken seriously. He argues that this arises not just because of the phobias both within society and the police force, but that they are: directly linked to racialised and gendered systems of disregard, and disposability borne out of centuries of the enslavement, genocides, and oppression of American Indians, blacks, and coloured ‘Others’, as well as women, queers, and those gendered ‘Others’. edelman 2014, 176

Furthermore, he states, transgender people are hyper criminalised and thus their spatialities compromised. For example, any person convicted, or even just ‘known’, to have engaged in sex work can be detained and removed from areas designated ‘prostitution free zones’ regardless of the length of time ago of the conviction or their purpose for entering the area. Thus he notes that it is impossible for some people to walk from work to home in a direct route because of this zoning. Therefore, resonating with Mbembe’s ‘cultural imaginaries’, transgender women are constructed as criminal simply for the act of ‘walking while transgender’, and as a result are placed outside normal legal frameworks. Shakhsari (2014) also confronts the issue of visibility in her study

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of Iranian transgender migrants waiting in Turkey for resettlement to a third country. While their applications are processed, queer and transgender migrants are often sent to small cities in order to expose locals to difference, while placing the migrant in danger due to their status as other (Shakhsari 2014, 1012): Queer and trans refugees become the guinea pigs of civilizational projects that measure progress according to neoliberal tolerance for queerness in a desire for proximity to Europeanness. The placement of queer and trans refugees in conservative cities (paradoxical to claims of protection of rights of queer refugees), thus serves to prevent queers from crossing lines of public “indecency” and behaving “normal” in order to avoid tensions in conservative towns. Unable to legally work, such migrants are forced into informality, a space where rights are, at best, suspended. Thus, as Shakhsari argues, while they formally have rights as asylum seekers; in practice they are offered little protection, thus exposing them to a bare life and the potential violence from others. While Tyner (2015) argues that within the social sciences, there is a growing interest in death, he notes that the majority of the current research is concerned with the technical aspects of non-life, such as organ smuggling, and the bio-logics of life and death (Hannabach 2013). However, it is argued here that outside queer necropolitics there is a lacuna in understanding the more mundane state practices relating to death (i.e. those outside the actual practices of killing, for example the war on terror or police brutality). Gilbert and Ponder (2013) do address this in their discussion on the delays in financial support that responders in the 9/11 attack have endured. Many died prematurely while struggling to pay medical and other bills, and they argue that in effect they were abandoned by the state, invoking Mbembe’s (2003, 40) argument that many populations endure conditions that place “upon them the status of living dead”. Therefore, and central to this chapter, it can be argued that necropolitics is not just concerned with the violent spectacle but also with the long drawn out struggles that often result in premature death. While the examples above: the township, walking while transgender, and 9/11 responders might seem disparate, they are drawn together by the constructed cultural imaginations about who is worthy of salvation vs. Who should be left to die. This is of crucial importance when considering the irregular migrant’s everyday life, as the cultural inscriptions that are placed upon their body is permanent, condemning them to a bare life within the city where they are seen as superfluous, and not worthy of the rights afforded to other citizens. For irregular migrants, violence is a constant companion, as Carastathis

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(2015) discusses in relation to increasing xenophobic attacks in Greece fuelled by state constructions of austerity, but there is also what Mbembe (2003, 21) terms the triple loss; the loss of home, rights over their body, and political status. While in this instance Mbeme is discussing the death worlds of slaves, this has profound resonance, as shown below, with the everyday life that irregular migrants face in Russia. While there are all too many regular instances of death through violence, or work place negligence, the majority experience a ‘slow death’ whereby they are ‘kept alive’ in order to produce economic value, but in a state which ensures that they are subservient, with the threat of violence an ever present background spectre. These are exacerbated with the feelings of loss of home and family, the disgust that is placed upon them by the state and media, and the lack of support from almost any political agency.

The Cultural Imagination of Disgust

Why is There the Need for a Figure of Disgust? Why do states create a climate of fear around migration? Within the recent uk election, migration was placed at the forefront with the Conservative party promising to reduce the number of migrants, remove access to welfare, and make informal work illegal. This plays into the cultural imaginations of many voters about migrants taking ‘British’ jobs and swamping education and health systems. That there is little evidence of this is of scant concern to the state and media, with the European Commission repeatedly asking for evidence of the latter with no success. The Home Office has even gone as far as saying that “we consider that these questions place too much emphasis on quantitative evidence” (Waterfield 2013). Such scaremongering allows states to deflect attention from austerity budgets, by blaming the other, and promotes ideas of sovereignty. As Mountz and Hiemstra (2014, 383) note, ideas of “chaos and crisis” are often put forward by the state as justification for the continuing securitisation of migration policy, and that “they are tied intimately to geographical assertions of sovereign power”. Such scare tactics of ‘migrant danger’, whether connected to crime, unemployment, and/or the destroying of national identities or not, are common across the globe (Vertovec 2011), but what makes the Russian case atypical is how this is used as justification for the suspension of the legal rights of millions of people. Discrimination of Central Asians in Russia has a long history. Moscow’s Sova Centre monitors hate speech in Russia’s national and regional media, concluding from 2001 that while derogatory language was employed towards many groups in Russia, the most disparaged were the Central Asian states (ahead of people from the North Caucuses, Jews,

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Romans, and citizens of the usa) (Verkhovsky 2002, 2007; Kozhevnikova and Verhovsky 2005; etc). As Shnirelman (2007, 117) pointed out: [I]f in the middle and second part of 1990s Chechens were portrayed as a main enemy of Russia that in the beginning of 2000s after announcing of new war as ‘antiterrorists operation’ mass-media started active cultivation of negative image of migrants. To aid this anti-migrant rhetoric the Russian mass media parroted far right views espoused in the eu in order to justify a thesis about the “capacity of Muslim migrants to integrate” (Mukomel 2011: 98). Abashin argues that the discriminatory language towards Central Asian migrants is a tool of dominance which Russia uses in its post-imperial and post-colonial contexts, considering people from the region as coming from a periphery, as less educated and with almost ‘archaic’ cultural norms and believes (Abashin 2014). The explicit state led demonisation of the Central Asian migrant is, however, a relatively recent phenomenon, demonstrated by the changing public position of President Putin in relation to ideas of a multi-ethnic society. In 2012 he stated: We are a multi-ethnic society, but we are one people. This makes our country complex and multidimensional, providing colossal opportunities for development in many areas. However, if a multi-ethnic society is struck by the bacilli of nationalism, it loses its strength and stability. And we must understand the types of far-reaching effects that can come as a result of condoning attempts to incite ethnic strife and hatred toward people with different cultures and different beliefs. putin 2012

Which can be compared to his position in 2014: We still have quite a few problems here that have to do with illegal, uncontrolled migration. We know that this breeds crime, interethnic tensions and extremism. We need greater control over compliance with regulations covering migrants’ stay in Russia, and we have to take practical measures to promote their social and cultural adaptation and protect their labour and other rights. ria novosty 2014

While his tone is more conciliatory than regional politicians (for example, by discussing their labour rights), he makes unsubstantiated linkages between

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the ‘illegal’ migrant and crime, extremism, and ethnic tensions. The time period between these two statements saw increasing xenophobic attitudes in Russia, the Moscow Mayoral election, which saw a race to the bottom amongst candidates to demonise migrants, the rounding up and public detention of migrants, and attempts to securitise migration policy. The cause of this shift was, this chapter argues, both political and economic, as the state needed to divert attention from the stagnating economy and to move ‘blame’ for the country’s problems away from itself. After years of rising incomes, it came as something of a surprise to the Russian authorities when protest erupted after the elections of late 2011.2 From interviewing protesters it emerged that there was much frustration, not just about the flawed election, but also the fact that Russia’s socio-economic direction places great barriers to personal development. For example, although in the capital it is possible to earn a significant disposable income, it is still not enough to buy an apartment; opening a business is also fraught with difficulties, ranging from corruption to the extremely high rent levels. The government handled the protests extremely well, taking the sting out of them by allowing scheduled legal protests with increasing gaps between them. However, it knew that such frustrations still existed, and, although there is tight control of the media, the lived experience of everyday problems meant that frustrations could not easily be contained.3 This was coupled with the fact that economic growth was beginning to stagnate, as economic programs aimed at modernising and diversifying the economy was failing miserably. To deflect blame away from the state for the socio- economic situation, there was a need for a group to be identified for which the country’s ills could be blamed. With most of the usual targets in exile, and relations with the eu relatively cordial at this point, migrants provided an easy target. There is almost no ‘migrant’ voice in the country, which could protest against such a move, and many of the general public hold what can only be described as xenophobic views towards this group (Abashin 2014). Inter-ethnic tensions were exacerbated through an increasing number of workplace raids, after which ‘illegal’ migrants would be paraded for the benefit of the media, well-publicised sweeps of the metro system to search for ‘criminals’ (i.e. irregular migrants), and a concentrated effort to demonise this group through the press. Within the confines of an article, it is impossible to give justice to all of the events, processes and outcomes that were employed 2 This discussed at length between the first author and senior Moscow city politicians, including on the day of the first major organised protest. It was also discussed with leading Russian political scientists and think tanks. 3 As above footnote.

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to achieve this, thus we concentrate on two separate, though intertwined, mechanisms – the construction of the migrant as diseased and/or criminal. Statistics put forward by the state and media around crime and illness are embellished, repeated, and, by osmosis, became ‘fact’. People publically complain about migrants causing them problems in every aspect of their lives, from medical care (migrants cannot actually access the health care system expect in extreme emergency), to making their shopping take longer, as ‘shop assistants constantly have to explain things very slowly to migrants as they don’t understand Russian’ (after three years of living in Russia the first author never actually saw this happen). From participant observations in supermarkets, in the majority of cases, ethnic Russians would not exchange any pleasantries with Central Asian shop assistants, and often the only communication would be questioning of the cost of weighed goods in a confrontational manner. The majority of those making such statements would consider themselves part of the Russian middle class, and with little self-reflection, often criticise m ­ igrants while they were wanting to leave Russia themselves.4 Disgust is thus inscribed on the migrant body without the need for interaction. For example, during a major festival a volunteer was told to keep migrant Muslims from entering the Mosque. When he questioned why, he was told that it was just for local ­Muslims. To which, taken aback, he asked how he was to differentiate, to which he was simply told ‘by their clothes’. While this is an extreme example of differential treatment of the other, it is symptomatic of the wider society. For example, in a shopping mall it is extremely rare to see someone of Central Asian appearance in a customer service role in shops. The vast majority are employed as cleaners, security guards (though not on the main entrances), and as repair staff. In short the other is to be hidden away from the public gaze.

The Diseased Migrant

Migrants are constructed in the media as bringing disease to Russia; even though hiv infection rates, the most commonly discussed illness, are much lower in Central Asia. For example, the first deputy of State Duma Committee for Ethnic affairs Mikhail Starshinov states that ‘huge number of migrants have dangerous diseases as tuberculosis, hiv infection and various ‘shameful ­diseases’, without any statistics to substantiate this assertion (Chernov 2014). 4 This summary of public opinion is based on numerous conversations with ethnic Russians between 2011–2015, from public discussion at numerous urban development forums and television debate programs.

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hiv in Moscow is portrayed as an ‘imported disease’ with authorities and doctors blaming migrants for increasing of number of cases (Pichugina 2012; tv Center 2013; State Duma 2013). Adding to the clamour, the Moscow city administration even went as far as wanting to put up adverts telling Russian women not to enter into relationships with Central Asian men ‘as they have hiv’ (Basharova 2012). In fact, in relation to hiv, statistically the migrant is more at risk by moving to Russia, as within the 15–49 year old age group, infection rates in Russia are 1.1 per cent of the population compared, for example, with 0.4 per cent in Kyrgyzstan. Despite such evidence the hysteria led to the passing of laws increasing health screening for migrant workers, with those found to be ill simply deported from the country and infection levels trumpeted in the press. For example, one national newspaper headline highlighted that dangerous diseases had been found amongst migrants in the Kostroma region (Trukhanova 2014). However, the article showed that this only applied to 30 people out of 2,500 migrants, which is far below the Russian average for infectious diseases. As usual those found to be ill were deported without treatment. This relates explicitly to Mbeme’s notion of ‘to let die’. One of the ways in which the migrant is constructed as ill is through criticism of the health care systems in Central Asia (in other words they cannot detect or treat illness there, ergo migrants must be diseased). Therefore, if this is correct, the deportation of the ill migrant to a failing health system is simply to let them die elsewhere. Attempts to stop sexual relations, and thus reproduction, castigates the migrant body even further. Migrants are constructed in the media as drunks or drug abusers, lacking in any health education, sexually promiscuous, and overall unable to ‘control’ themselves, therefore putting the native population in grave danger. Within this framework the dominant cultural imagination is of the migrant as a near ‘savage’ figure. Almost all migrant interviewees are aware of such discourses and find them both laughable but distressing. It is the former that one migrant explained well: When do we have the time and money to drink? I work seven days a week for 14–16 hours a day. I sleep and work, sleep and work… After sending money back [to family back in Tajikistan] I hardly have enough to pay for my bed and some food (28 years old man, higher education, Tajik, living in Russia for 6 years). For the vast majority of interviewees, the aim is to remit enough money home to secure the safety of their families and/or to save enough to bring them to Russia. There is simply no evidence of widespread drinking or drug abuse

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amongst the migrant community. Furthermore, this is an example of the extreme double standards that exist, as migrants are labelled in such a way by a country with extremely high levels of drug and alcohol problems, violence, and domestic abuse. The discourse is also extremely stressful and upsetting as it reaches families back home; as one interviewee said: A lot of people back home think we have loads of girlfriends in Moscow and drink all the time. I am sure my wife knows that this does not happen, but at the same time it makes things difficult between us when I am away from home for such a long time (29 years old man, higher education, Kyrgyz, living in Russia for 7 years). Thus a discourse is promulgated by the Russian state in Central Asia that migrants return with infectious diseases and a lower ‘moral standard’.5 Without doubt the average migrant will return home with a lower level of health, due, however, to their working and living conditions rather than from their perceived risky behaviour. Almost all interviewees working on construction sites discussed how they were exposed to unsafe conditions, with little safety training, poor safety equipment, and being overworked. Speaking directly to the concept of ‘letting die’ ngo workers described how if a serious accident occurred in the work place the migrant would often be placed onto the pavement. An ambulance would then be called, but the employer would deny all knowledge of them working there (as they are likely to be paid informally, so there are no records) to avoid having to pay any hospital bills for them. If the injury was serious enough, treatment would be provided, but as soon as it was no longer an ‘emergency’ then the migrant would be forced to leave the hospital and any further treatment would have to be paid for. Interviewees also discussed how they are targeted by people selling medical insurance that turns out to be fake and/or extremely expensive. Migrants are extremely afraid of engaging with the formal health service, as they fear that they will be reported to the migration services and deported (for further discussion see Kuznetsova and Mukharyamova 2014). As well as self-medicating migrants turn to informal health care provided within their diaspora groups. For example, in one city we interviewed Kyrgyz doctors who were running informal clinics, which, while offering paid services were cheaper and safer for migrants to use. This,

5 This was a common theme during interviews and discussions with politicians, senior health policy officials, and academics working in this area.

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however, stigmatises migrants further as such practices are deemed to simply spread disease more easily. With regards to health, the migrant experiences the triple loss described by Mbeme; they are away from their home health care system, they have no rights over their body as it is inscribed with disease, and they have no political rights as they are denied health care. Thus ill health becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as their long working hours, poor living conditions, general stress, and lack of health care all combine to wear down the migrant. Furthermore, there is simply no time to be ill. No migrant would receive sick pay, and almost every interviewee said that they would lose their job if they took time off for an illness. All this demonstrates their superfluous existence to the state and employers, who are respectively primarily concerned with their political value as ‘the other’ and their potential to be worked to exhaustion.

The Criminal Migrant

Criminality is inscribed onto all Central Asian migrants in Russia. Whereas in other regions of the word, it is broadly accepted that as the body cannot be illegal, it is an oxymoron to label someone an illegal migrant. Rather, following the unhcr, it is more appropriate to describe someone operating outside of their visa/passport status as an irregular migrant. Such a distinction does not exist in Russia, with the vast majority of analysed newspaper articles describing migrants as illegal. This is racist in its construction, as, prior to the onset of the conflict, Ukrainian migrants are not described as such. By delineating legality by skin color, it is, of course, easy for everyone of that ethnic group to be to be placed into the same category, in this instance that of an illegal migrant. Reinforcing this is the imagery that the media deploys when discussing any aspect of migration. For example, one article discussing the development of formal migration channels between Russia and Kyrgyzstan was juxtaposed with a photograph of migrants with their hands on their heads pressed up against a police van. Such imageries of power and oppression are common place. After raids on factories, for example, tv news programs will show images of migrants being marched away, again in a pose of surrender, even though they have not been arrested, and many of them will have formal work permits (for an overview see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9pii9qGtSs). The apogee of this was when, after several instances of inter-ethnic unrest, several thousand Vietnamese workers were rounded up and detained in a make shift camp, set up in a public place, allowing people to literally walk up to the

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small barriers and ‘gaze’ on the illegals. While some were deported after several weeks, the majority were allowed to return to work. Given this bombardment of ‘illegal’ imagery it is perhaps no surprise that it becomes embedded in the public consciousness. The criminal ‘other’ is a popular tool in all migrant recipient countries, but in 2013 this went into overdrive in Russia. Moscow became the focal point, and although the overarching discourse was built around the frankly ludicrous idea, put forward numerous times by the Mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, that the city would be the world’s safest capital if only migrants were not there committing crimes (Izvestia 2013). Statistics were manipulated, ignored, or dismissed, for example the governor of Ingushetia claimed that ‘one in ten migrants quite possibly did not come to work, and with criminal purposes, including selling drugs’. There is no basis to this at all, note the use of ‘quite possibly’, but as the below sections discuss, such statements become ‘fact’ if they are repeated often enough. And repeated they were. Mikhail Gusakov, head of Moscow Criminal Investigations, states that residents of ‘neighbouring countries’ are the cause of 99 per cent of all crime committed by foreigners in Russia. Yet in his discussions, there is no mention of any crimes committed by Ukrainians, for example, only those by Central Asians (Boyko 2014). The type of crime ‘committed’ by migrants was also repeatedly highlighted, without any substantiation, with Sobyanin saying that it was not a case of “banal theft” but “crimes against life and health” are committed by “illegal immigrants” (Bogomolov and Nikolaeva 2013), furthermore, a police spokesman said “almost all of the murders, robberies, and rapes are on the conscience of immigrants from the cis”. Again, similar to health, there is a very tenuous link drawn between the migrant’s status and their actions, yet there is simply no explanation why being ‘illegal’ makes you more predisposed to becoming a violent criminal. The situation is portrayed as worsening all the time, painting a picture of an increasingly lawless and immoral migrant population, with a police spokesman claiming that “In the first half of 2013 immigrants made up 40 per cent of crimes compared to the same period last year”, no mention is made about what the previous figure was, or that in the xenophobic climate, migrants were more likely than ever to be arrested; thus artificially increasing the conviction rate amongst this group. Every migrant round up was accompanied in the media with images of migrants forced into stereotypical poses, such as sitting with their hands on their heads, or marching in lines down the streets, no matter that their alleged ‘crimes’ were often administrative rather than criminal. The reality of migrant crime is rather more banal, with the ministry of internal affairs stating that in 2012 foreigners accounted for just 3.8 per cent of all convictions in Russia, with about one fourth of all their crimes consisting of

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the forging of work and residency permits. This is a far cry from ’50 per cent of all crime’, demonstrating that the existing approach of crime statistics in Russia is open for multiple distortions, creating ‘an artificial picture of reality’ (Shkljaruk et al. 2015, 7). Given this discourse it was no surprise that it became a major campaign tool of candidates in the Mayor of Moscow election held later that year. All of the candidates took part in a race to the bottom to demonstrate just how xenophobic they could be towards Central Asian migrants. Sobyanin, as incumbent, repeatedly made statements such as ‘Moscow is a Russian city and it should remain that way. It is not Chinese, Tajik, or Uzbek’ and ‘people who speak Russian badly and who have a different culture are better off living in their own country’. While held up in the West as an antidote to Putin, the prominent blogger and anti-government leader, Alexei Navalny (2013), was particularly vitriolic in his public statements. Given his long standing relationships to nationalist groups, this was not perhaps surprising, but it is still quite unbelievable that a serious challenger for the post of mayor of a major world city can make unchallenged statements such as: From there, they [migrants] commit raids on the nearby districts; they aren’t going to die of starvation if they don’t find work. One can grab a purse in the metro, one can take somebody’s money away in the elevator with a knife. He also spoke of areas where migrants live as “criminal ghettos” and that “people from there commit crimes with impunity” and in his election manifesto, he, adding to the criminal discourse stated “illegal migration is a petri dish for violence and crime”. He even called for the banning of migrants from using the metro system as “they don’t pay taxes” so thus should not benefit from the state subsidies the system receives. All of the candidates talked of, at least, limiting the number of migrants allowed into Moscow, ignoring the need for low paid labour in the capital, though how they planned to achieve this was always left unclear. During 2013 there were several cases of the ethnic cleansing of markets, with non-Russians banned from working in many areas, and Sobyanin waged war on kiosks, often staffed by migrants, in many areas he had them closed down (Judah 2013). The logical conclusion to this continual wave of anti-migrant sentiment from politicians, the media, and commentators was the ethnic violence that occurred in Biryulyovo after an ethnic Russian was stabbed to death by an Azerbaijani migrant (see Guillory 2013 for an overview of the events). After several days of violence, the region’s food market, one of the largest in Moscow, was closed, affecting the employment of many

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t­housands of migrants, and enabling the redevelopment of the market into more profitable spaces – for the landowners. The ethnic tension that followed was seized upon by politicians, who argued that increasing migration was making Moscow an unsafe place for Russians, with over 50 per cent of people polled in the city saying that migration was Moscow’s main problem. When an Uzbek migrant was murdered in similar circumstances the week after the riots the media barely reported the event. In Moscow far right groups began to ‘hunt’ migrants living in informal accommodation (see Salomatin 2013 for further details and photographic evidence). They would act on tip offs as to where migrants were living, and forcibly enter the space and demand to see passports and documentation. Given that, officially though this is totally ignored, migration officials are the only people allowed to ask for your documents, this is clearly against the law (unless there is suspicion that a crime has been committed, which given that migrants are so intensively constructed as criminals, there is thus a certain illogical logic to their constant stopping by the police). Groups such as ‘Moscow Shield’ stated that they did not employ violence, but their own social media has photographs of them forcibly detaining people and visibly intimidating others (see their Moscow Shield webpage). They publish photographs of the conditions migrants are forced to live in, with the subtext – especially as most are from basements – that they are an uncultured subclass. In every instance of such raids witnessed by researchers, the police were in the background waiting to detain migrants. Anyone walking around Moscow will see Central Asian migrants having their documents checked by the police, often resulting in the ‘offender’ been led away (see also Reeves 2013). On the metro system it is even more conspicuous, with the police often waiting at the top of escalators to intercept migrants. On one occasion, the first author witnessed a scene with seven migrants lined up against a wall while the police office waited for more to stop. Many respondents discussed their experience of document checks. Even if they were carrying every piece of documentation possibly needed by law, they were often asked for a bribe by the police. When stopped, interviewees discussed how the police would ask for labour contracts (for which there is no reason to carry under law), or they would reject the presented documents as fakes in order to extort money. As one interviewee said: I was stopped in a city centre in Moscow and was asked to present my documents. I showed them my registration, which was made by my landlord through the post (…), they said that they don’t see it in their database, I tried to explain, but they did not listen, I put on the table 500

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Roubles (…) and they let me go (34 year old man, from Tajikistan with Uzbek ethnicity, a seasonal worker in Russia since 1998). During three years in Moscow, the first author did not once witness an ethnic Russian having their documents checked ‘at random’ on the metro (see Voronkov, Gladarev and Sagitova 2011 for further discussion on police discrimination). Furthermore, the spectacle of passport checks reinforces to the public the illegality of migrants (if the police have stopped them they must be doing something wrong). For migrants, being arrested is a traumatic experience. Civil society leaders told the authors, and migrants attested to this as well, that in order to reach arrest quotas, the police will simply detain migrants and attach a crime to them. By constructing the migrant as criminal, it is much easier for the state to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the group. If they are acting illegally why should the state, they argue, provide any welfare, health care, and/or be interested in work place safety? This obviously places them at risk of ill health and is further evidence of the state’s ‘letting die’ attitude towards this group. It also impacts personal safety, as criminality can be used as an excuse for physical attacks and murder – both of which go under reported and under investigated.

Walking as a Migrant: The Everyday Experiences of Disgust

As a direct result of their demonization, migrants wish to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible. Almost all interviewees discussed that when on the street, every effort is made not to make eye contact with Russians, especially young people or authority figures, for fear that it will lead to conflict. Migrants tend to occupy spaces which are familiar or where there is relative safety in numbers. For example, one migrant, when asked about how they spent leisure time outdoors said: We just walk around our apartment building. It is safe here as people know us and will not cause trouble. The police rarely come here, so there is little danger of getting picked up or getting hassled. It is not very exciting but it is better to be around people you know (28 years old woman, higher education degree, Kyrgyz, living in Russia for 6 years). Many interviewees mentioned that ethnic clothes often create problems and make them more visible for verbal abuse or attention from police, but

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s­ ometimes just having a not-Slavic appearance caused problems even if you have a good job and smart clothes: Recently we went to the post office with my friend Sasha [Russian], he helped me to prepare documents…And there were a lot of people there, and a young woman who works there said to us: ‘hey you, immigrants, you left a paper here’. His father is Uzbek, his mother is Russian, he has a passport. We had good clothes on us, smart clothes…And one old lady was saying as well: immigrants, immigrants… (36 years old man, Uzbek, living in Kazan for 3 years). Interviews with leaders of ngos providing legal support to migrants reveal that the problem of ‘getting picked up’ by the police is a very real one. When in the police station, they are presented with a vast amount of paperwork to sign, and are often told, interviewees said, that if they signed it all there and then they would soon be released. Feeling pressured, those with poor Russian often unwittingly sign away their rights to legal representation and a translator in court, and are simply found guilty and deported. In other instances people who are detained were told that a certain payment will secure their release. Women interviewees, who endured this experience, discussed the increasing level of physical threat they felt as their period of detention increased. Often they would have to wait for a partner, or friend, to finish work (as leaving early would lead to their dismissal) to bring the money needed to secure their release. Migrant interviewees who had been through this process discussed how frightening the ordeal was due to their vulnerability, and many simply pleaded guilty either because they did not understand the charges, or they were threatened with more serious charges. In the vast majority of cases, amongst interviewees, a guilty plea led to rapid deportation. This has a dual benefit for the police, as firstly, it ‘solves’ a crime, secondly, it increases the number of migrants deported, which portrays them positively in the crusade against ‘illegal’ migration. If the migrant is fortunate, then they are returned to their country, from where they can plan how to re-enter Russia. However, during the research, numerous instances were discussed whereby deportees were held indefinitely in transit camps until a payment was made for their release. In the most extreme cases people were detained long term, without their family receiving notification, so the authorities could link the arrest to the war against extremism by holding long term prisoners. It is not surprising, therefore, that migrants stay away from heavily policed areas, such as Red Square, with the majority of migrants having never visited such cultural sights during their stay in Moscow. At the same time, there are some areas in a city which are d­ angerous because lots of cases of violence towards migrants from Central Asia and Caucasus have

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happened there, and respondents know that they cannot rely on the help from police if they are attacked. The endpoints of subways – Khimki, Teply Stan, Shelkovskaya, Domodedovo, Vikhino – these are the ultra boundary places! Where God forbid, Allah forbid to go there after 8–9 pm. (…) I was to be attacked the police laugh from the distance! I cannot rely on them. They [the attackers] could kill me but police would never try to save me. (30 years old man, Tajik, living in Russia for 10 years) Constructed as uncultured, uneducated, and unable to speak Russian, there is almost no chance of career progression in Russia. In reality this construction is simply not true. One ngo recorded the education status of those turning to it for help and over half had completed a higher education. Amongst interviewees, it was common for people to have degrees, yet be working as cleaners with no chance of working in their profession. There is no such thing as job security, and working hours are almost always above legal limits. One interviewee discussed how she had to hire someone to undertake her work while she was in an informal clinic receiving treatment for several hours a day. Travel to the clinic takes a long time, as she uses the bus rather than the metro to avoid the police, and after she has finished she returns to work. As she says, taking one day off sick would probably cause her to lose her job. As is the case with almost all migrants, she receives no holiday pay, which makes it extremely difficult for her to visit her young children back in Tajikistan. All of this demonstrates the attitudes of employers towards migrant labour, as a supply that can be worked to exhaustion. Anyone who is unable to work is cast aside ‘to die’. Overall, migrants are forced to walk the city in a form of bare life as they are operating in a state of exception within which the rules set out by the sovereign do not apply to them. As Mbembe (2003, 21) argues “the humanity of the slave appears as the perfect figure of a shadow”. Migrants are forced to live in a shadow status, as similar to the observations of Edelman (2014) in relation to walking as transgender, the migration body has so much disgust heaped upon it, then hate crimes against them are justifiable by those carrying them out. Conclusions This chapter has put forward the notion of necropolitics, as developed by Mbembe (2003), as a framework for understanding both the actions of the state in relation to migrants, and the construction of them as diseased and criminal. Necropolitics, in our reading, is not just about death, be it violent

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or otherwise, but as Mbeme argues, it is more centred around the idea of ‘to let die’ and to injure almost to the point of death. This can be seen clearly in the health care that is denied to migrants, and, as shown in the discussions above, how they are constructed as diseased, and not to be touched, but not worthy of treatment. While constructing the migrant as criminal might not seem at first glance to be linked to death, it adds another layer of disgust onto the migrant body. Thus the body’s ‘criminality’ negates further the need for protection and lays it open to attack. Without doubt, Russia’s major cities can be read as spaces of exception for migrants, as opposed to the bounded nature of the camp, as they are simply placed outside of the legal framework. Besides the problems this causes for the individual, it has broader implications for the agency of diaspora groups. As Ramadan (2013) argues, within the camp individuals and networks can develop agencies and are thus not passive actors. However, the scale of the issues migrants face in the unbounded city makes it extremely difficult for them to develop meaningful forms of resilience and/ or resistance. Russia is an extreme example of the human rights abuses migrants face, due to the scale of the migration, the corrupt form of political economy that has developed in the country, and the underling xenophobia that exists within the country. However, by shining a light on the ways in which migrants are constructed as diseased and criminal, much is revealed about the actions, priorities, and desires of the state and entrepreneurs. By revealing and developing this framework, it can be employed to note such practices in countries where the abuse of migrants is on a smaller scale or is more hidden. It is essential to remove such obscurifications if we, as a body of academics and/or ngos, wish to improve the rights, and lives of migrants through our research. Given the recent rise of xenophobic discourses in western Europe as a form of sovereign building, and the death worlds many migrants face themselves (in transit by sea for example), the need to reveal the realities is of increasing importance. Given the form of neo-liberalism that has emerged through austerity, such as the removal of worker’s rights in general not just for migrants, the securitisation of borders, diminishing welfare, etc., the issue/scale of migrant abuse is not one which is going to be reduced in the immediate future, and one which must be confronted. Acknowledgements The authors would like to acknowledge the insightful comments of the anonymous reviews as well of those of the journal editor. Thanks is also given to the support provided by Carl-Ulrik Schierup.

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Funding Acknowledgement

The research was supported by the Open Society Foundations through a grant for the project Improving the everyday lives of Central Asian migrants in Moscow and Kazan in the context of Russia’s Migration 2025 Concept: from legislation to practice (OR2013-07263) References Abashin, Sergey. “Dvizhenija iz Central’noj Azii v Rossiju: v modeli novogo miroustrojstva (Moving from Central Asia to Russia: towards the new model of the world order)”. Pro et Contra 18:1–2 (2014): 73–83. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2004. Alves, Jaime Amparo. “From Necropolis to Blackpolis: Necropolitical Governance and Black Spatial Praxis in São Paulo, Brazil”. Antipode 46(2) (2014): 323–339. Arendt, Hannah. The origins of totalitarianism. Mariner Books, 1973. Basharova, Svetlana. “Migrantov s VICh ne pustjat v Rossiju (Workers with HIV will not be allowed in Russia)”. Izvestia, November 14, 2012. Accessed October 20, 2015. http://izvestia.ru/news/539524#ixzz36F8QD0Rg. Bishara, Amahl. “Driving while Palestinian in Israel and the West Bank: The politics of disorientation and the routes of a subaltern knowledge”. American Ethnologist 42(1) (2015): 33–54. Boyko, Alexander. “Etnicheskaja prestupnost’ v Moskve za 10 let vyrosla v chetyre raza (Ethnic crime in Moscow in 10 years has quadrupled)”. Komsomolskaya Pravda. Accessed December 29, 2014. http://www.kp.ru/daily/26211/3095855/. Buckley, Michelle. “On the Work of Urbanization: Migration, Construction Labor, and the Commodity Moment”. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104(2) (2014): 338–347. Carastathis, Anna. “The politics of austerity and the affective economy of hostility: racialised gendered violence and crises of belonging in Greece”. Feminist Review 109(1) (2015): 73–95. Chernov, Ivan. “‘Dlja migrantov vse besplatno’ Deputat Gosdumy rasskazal, za chej schet mozhno uchit’ i lechit’ priezzhih (‘For migrants everything is for free’ Duma deputy told who pays for health care of migrants)”. Vzglyad Delovaya Gazeta, April 24, 2014. Accessed May 16, 2015. http://vz.ru/society/2014/4/24/683687.html. Cuadra, Carin Björngren. “Right of access to health care for undocumented migrants in EU: a comparative study of national policies”. European Journal of Public Health 22(2) (2012): 267–271.

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chapter 11

Mobile Commons and/in Precarious Spaces: Mapping Migrant Struggles and Social Resistance1 Nicos Trimikliniotis, Dimitris Parsanoglou and Vassilis Tsianos Introduction Time is out of joint! Hamlet

In this paper we demonstrate, albeit schematically, that precarity is not only time-related but it is also space-related. We propose that the current expansion of precarity is a manifestation of global fragmentations, which provide pointers in making sense of a world gone astray, a polarized ‘world out of joint’.2 Starting from Hamlet’s aporia, we understand time dislocation as a twin element of space dislocation in the time-space dialectic that constructs the processes at work. We propose to read precarity as a function of time-dislocation spatialized and manifested as the logic of fragmentation, which is structurally connected to the logics of a unifying world. This runs contrary to the misguided depiction of globalization as irresistible, inevitable and linear set of processes of a world increasingly unifying and unified, ‘becoming one’. It is difficult to think of a previous era where there have been such gigantic unification drives, which simultaneously contain within the very same processes, so many elements of multiplicity and fragmentation. The logic of fragmentation takes the forms of dislocated and heterotopian disjunctures of globality. From the early 1990s, it was pointed out that “globalisation’s central dynamic involves the twofold process of the particularization of the universal and the universalization of the particular” (Robertson 1992, 177–8). We are dealing with powerful forces reshaping the world of labor, life and belonging, which are also reshaping capitalism at global, regional and 1 This article first appeared as Mobile commons and/in precarious spaces: Mapping migrant struggles and social resistance, Critical Sociology, doi: 10.1177/0896920515614983. Reproduced by permission of sage Publications Ltd., London, Los Angeles, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington dc. 2 For an attempt to read world-historical interpretations of the continuing polarisations in a globe spinning out of orbit, see Wallerstein (2014).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004329706_012

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local level. Many perspectives embroiled in a Foucauldian pessimism read this as a world succumbing to global elites, a kind of Global Panopticon of a world imprisoned and controlled via technologies of surveillance and control. Such one-sided readings of the world are highly problematic as they are reproducing “paradigms of pessimism” at the expense of a “politics of possibility” (Kyriakides and Torres 2012). Whether from radical Left or Right, or even liberal perspective, such perspectives can be seen as a by-product and result of the defeat, devastation, and destruction of equilibriums, particularly since the end of wwii and the end of the long decolonization period around the 1960s. Hence, we often detect, explicit or implicit, a story of melancholic nostalgia,3 lamenting of the relative stability of world borders, the expansion of welfare and labor regimes of a long labor march forward within an assumed ‘march of progress’ of rights on a global scale. All this seems to have come to an abrupt end with the neoliberal experiment since the 1970s. However, since 2008 we have now entered a new era, the crisis of the neoliberal experiment which happens to coincide with the geopolitical crisis of the American hegemony.4 In today’s fluid and uncertain times,5 we observe an extension and multiplication of the modes and terrains of struggles in what we refer to as precarious spaces. This is a fascinating story, albeit transitional, uncertain and contradictory. In our work, we attempt to capture the ways in which from the very destruction we are witnessing processes of generating and reassembling new forms of subjectivities and resistance, which are transforming social struggles and movements as we have known them (Trimikliniotis, Parsanoglou and Tsianos 2015). It is the reconstruction and reconnection of the fragmentations or disjointed fractures in the specific forms of praxis that allows for the particular to be ‘captured’ as theoretical snapshots allowing for both politics and theory to emerge. The notion of mobile commons (see Trimikliniotis, Parsanoglou and Tsianos 2015) allow us to locate the trail, the marks or scratches punctuated on the global canvas of precarity of people constantly on the move, as precarity is deeply punctuated in their modus operandi. Labor then is not confined to work or the work place; labor is a force or energy propelling us ‘forward’ or ‘back and forth’ that is derived from our vitality-as-existence (survival, pleasure and 3 Wendy Brown (2000) speaks of a ‘Left melancholia’. 4 See Wallerstein (2014); Panitch and Konings (2009); Albo, Gindin and Panitch (2010). 5 We can put aside both now-out-of-place celebratory postmodern of the total relativism; we cannot however not take note of the doom and gloom of the ‘Global Leviathan’ as the antiterrorism hysteria is heavily on the increase, following the new waves of fundamentalist attacks in European cities by small cells of city ‘warriors’.

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revolutionary imagination): it is propelling forces of labor forward in opposition to the sense of death shaping the sphere of praxis – thus time [of labor and struggle] is ‘morphologized’, i.e. it takes a particular shape and form, or it is spatialized.

Mobile Commons in Three Arrival Cities or the Fusion of (Precarious) Time and Space

We draw on the empirical research6 geographically and geopolitically located in the most southern-eastern Mediterranean basin and the boundary triangle connecting Europe, Asia and Africa. We are dealing with a loaded political space, as rubbles of the past are haunting us like ghosts: this is the core of what was once the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, upon which the Ottoman Empire was built. Constantinople, later Istanbul was the center. The Ottoman Empire had been in a long process of disintegration, the small Hellenic state, along with other emerging state, expanded at the expense of the empire. The process was halted with what was termed as the “Asia Minor catastrophe” for the Greeks or the “rebirth of the nation” for the Turks in 1922. The process was completed with the final implosion of two nationalist projects, the disaster of Enosis (union with Greece) for Greek-Cypriots and Taksim (de jure partition) for Turkish-Cypriots, which ended up with a de facto divided Cyprus since 1974.7 Athens, Nicosia and Istanbul share indeed a fascinating past of mobility. The study of migrant social movements in the three cities opens up a much broader than an area-specific terrain, as regards social movements, migration and precarity. Beyond the dichotomy between ‘old’ and ‘new’ social movements, we examine the emergence of germinal social movements. Frequently these are accompanied by moral panics (Cohen 1972, 120), but not necessarily so. The three arrival cities where subaltern migrants, along with other subalterns, deploy their strategies and praxes of social movements; in their turn, they chart out new socialities, new spatialities and reshape new citizenship modes. 6 The paper develops and draws from the fieldwork conducted under the project Transnational digital networks, migration and gender, MIG@NET, work package 9 on Social Movements, funded by the 7th Framework Program, eu dg Research. Some of the themes were further theoretically expanded in our book (Trimikliniotis, Parsanoglou and Tsianos 2015). 7 For the conflict in Cyprus see Attalides (1979); Trimikliniotis and Bozkurt (2012).

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In our endeavor to capture the ways precarious labor is fused with and within precarious spaces, we follow the trails of subaltern migrants; not only because of our expertise, but also because subaltern migrants are very often in an excessive way bridging imperceptible politics of everyday life and visible manifestations of new forms of subjectivity. It is true that precarious labor has always been theorized in the context of time: precariousness is thought to be essentially a product of time-control. The blending of the domestic, virtual and actual workspaces of precarious labor and the virtualization of the workspace “made possible by techno-scientific innovations, principally information networks, global media cultures and new management and organizational structures” (Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos 2008, 228) have been thoroughly examined in the accounts on immaterial and precarious labor. However, the notion of workspace is still thought primarily in temporal terms: the notion of space remains bounded by the tyranny of the work clock. Precarity escapes the time barrier only in negative terms; either as an intruder in the space of leisure since it erodes any distinction between work and nonwork time, or as a total eclipse of the plateaus of struggle for worker rights. Precarity is a conflict between high productivity and low protection, or else intensive creativity and deep vulnerability. Various embodied experiences of precarity constitute the primary terrain on which value creation takes place; simultaneously they are all confronted with the structural insecurity imposed by the system of a nationally organized compromise of normal wage labor (that is, full time, long term wage labor). The system of wage labor and the corresponding welfare system produced a space-fixated work subjectivity (i.e. normal, full-time, wage employment) measured according to work time. Precarious labor implodes this subjectivity on various levels: it is not space-fixated, the precarious worker works in a multiplicity of locales; his/ her work cannot be quantified and remunerated according to the system of wage labor measurement; finally, the experiences of precarious workers cannot be accommodated in the unified subjectivity germane to the national social compromise of normal employment. Precarious labor exists only in the plural, as a multiplicity of experiences variously positioned, exploited, and lived in the system of embodied capitalism, and not as a unified subjectivity or ‘precariat’. As the experience of precarity as a movement has shown us, precarity is not just about work. It is about the precarization of life along many different fields: housing, women’s rights, education, health, social rights, culture, mobility and migration (Papadopoulos 2016). Precarization linked to work and working conditions, but somehow going far beyond the field of work. Taking

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the example of irregular migrants, one can highlight much more clearly these interconnections. During our research in the camps of Pagani and Igoumenitsa (Greece), many of the transmigrants we talked to, used the phrase “I work only for papers”. This seems a bit difficult to understand even if we know that a lot of them work in the worst possible conditions, without being documented and only for money. Moreover, ‘papers’ is not something ‘you work for’; ‘papers’ is something to which you are legally entitled to or not. This phrase challenges two of the most widespread assumptions that underlie mainstream political and academic positions regarding what a (precarious) migrant is: firstly, the assumption that migrants are laborers whose subjectivities are defined by their capacity to offer their labor force in ‘foreign’ labor markets. Secondly, it challenges the distinction between legality-illegality, by questioning the dualism between those who are recognized as legal subjects, i.e. those who have ‘papers’ or as illegal subjects, those who do not have (Trimikliniotis, Parsanoglou and Tsianos 2015, 38). In this sense, precarious work becomes a constituent element of precarious mobility, linking inevitable work with space(s), since mobility is not only about moving within various localities; it is also, and maybe more importantly, about leaving traces, about reshaping spatial and temporal connections between localities, in simple words it is about reshaping spatial relations and processes. A Pakistani asylum seeker we met in a refugee camp in Austria made an illustrative and maybe unexpected comparison between labor opportunities between Austria and Greece, where he was before he arrived in Austria: No, no. Greece is no problem, Greece I was living 2 years, no police problem, no control, nothing. Ok. Working and eating and go sleeping. And I have the good feeling from Greece. But before I was living in Greece I had no good feeling. The Greece … did not good living because they had no facilities (…) and I came here to Austria and I listened to everybody here Austria, Germany, is the refugee people are respected and there are facilities. But no, I came here to Austria and I looked around here and saw that there are no facilities but a very bad situation in the Lager Traiskirchen. And now, I am here since one month in this camp. Two years Greece, four months here, two months from Greece to Austria, in Serbia and Macedonia, because very, lot of problem. I have very a lot of problems, Pakistan problems, here… and… I know, I am here in Austria and my life is here safe. But now I came here and I am not feeling good and my life is not safe. This is for the first time I am sleeping in such place and because no need in this places because Pakistan is my beautiful house and beautiful

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eating. My demand is not sleeping and eating, but my demand is working. From Pakistan to here I work, I need work, because in Pakistan there are political problems. I thank god, that Pakistan will be in good situation and I will not be here one day.8 In our study of Athens, Nicosia and Istanbul we found that precarity and turbulence are clearly reshaping in multiple ways their very fabric. We attempt to understand these processes by locating them within the broader field of critical mobilities. Critical mobilities have emerged as a critique of modernity (e.g. Virilio’s concept of dromology), paving the way for new insights into mobilities (Papastergiadis 2012, 37). More particularly, such insights must be located within the “mobilities paradigm”, which is a systematic sociology of mobility transformations, as developed in Urry’s Mobilities (2007). This paradigm examines a wide range of issues such as “displacement and settlement, networking and conviviality, as well as the effects produced by new communication and practices”. As Papastergiadis (2012, 52) notes, “this new mobility paradigm is not without methodological limitations”, such as “the state-centric views on belonging, and thereby refute the residentialistic claims on social evolution”. According to the definition of Elliott and Urry (2010) the mobility paradigm for rethinking the social sciences can address: all social relationships should be seen as involving diverse ‘connections’ that are more or less ‘at-a-distance’, more or less fast, more or less intense and more or less involving physical movement… multiple forms of ‘imagined presence’ occurring through objects, people, information and images travelling, carrying connections across, and into, multiple other social spaces. elliot and urry 2010, 15

The fascination with mobilities is that they generate socialities: (…) these processes stem from five interdependent ‘mobilities’ that produce social life organized across distance and that form (and re-form) its contours: corporeal travel, physical movement of objects, imaginative travel, virtual travel, communicative travel through person-to person messages. elliot and urry 2010, 16

8

Underlined by the authors.

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The mobile commons as such exist only to the extent that they are commonly produced by all the people in motion who are the only ones who can expand its content and meanings. This content is neither private, nor public, neither state owned, nor part of civil society discourse in the traditional sense of the terms; rather the mobile commons exist to the extent that people use the trails, tracks or rights and continue to generate new ones as they are on the move. The making of the commons, the “commoning” as Linebaugh (2008) calls it, is the continuation of life through commoning the immediate sociality and materiality of everyday existence (Papadopoulos and Tsianos, 2013). This is a flight into a world where the primary condition of existence is the immersion into the worlds you inhabit and share with other people as you move. The enclosures of public, private and civil society aggregates that attempt to appropriate the knowledge and practices of the mobile people stand against and beyond the forms of mobile life. Knowledge and practices of mobility exist despite and beyond these enclosures; they are cooperatively produced in and through the commons (Bollier 2003; Peuter and Dyer-Witheford 2010). This kind of knowledge and practices of mobility must be understood as the practice of producing alternative everyday forms of existence and alternative forms of life (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013). In forms of life (Winner 1986) we encounter a re-weaving of the social and the material through the insertion of new shared exchanges, practices and technologies. The organizational order of these other forms of life depends on the ability to cultivate, generate and regenerate the contents, practices and affects that facilitate the movements of mobile people (Papadopoulos and Vassilis, 2013). We explore this organizational ontology of these forms of life. Our fieldwork in the arrival cities of Istanbul, Athens and Nicosia provides us with a wealth of examples of how mobile commons are generated, used and extended. The invisible knowledge of mobility circulates between the people on the move (knowledge about border crossings, routes, shelters, hubs, escape routes, resting places; knowledge about policing and surveillance, ways to defy control, strategies against bio-surveillance etc.), but also between transmigrants attempting to settle in a place (knowledge about existing communities, social support, educational resources, access to health, ethnic economies, micro-banks etc.). We examine three distinct moments and very different types of movements in the triangle; they are all however operating in transforming space, spatial politics and the right to city. It is well documented that cities are not only spaces of concentrated diversity reproducing new and old types of inequalities.9 They are also spaces of precarity-and-resistance which constantly 9

See Lefebvre (2003); Castells (1973); Touraine (1978); Sassen (2000); Harvey (2012); Butler (2012).

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redefine the notion of ‘rights’ through the constant struggles on the character, the meaning and the use of spaces; beautifully painted by Georgiou (2013, 66) “the city is a canvas” for city dwellers who constantly “mark their identities” in their “struggles to find a place in the city and a place in the world”. We explore the potentialities for these precarious spaces to be transformed so as to assume the intimacy and become ‘home’, affective spaces; in other words, we explore how the ‘roughness of street’, the kind of micropolitics of encroachment of space is turned into ‘commons’. Subaltern and precarious migrants together with other subaltern and precarious subjects are protagonists in these processes. We provide but a small sample from numerous examples of how the notion of mobile commons is an actual frame of praxis that operates at the level of informality of everyday existence in the case of migrants living on the fringes. This can act as subverting official and unofficial borders and it is many times essential for daily survival, particularly if one is undocumented or illicit. It is a common, based on customary knowledge born out of the socialities of migrants themselves and others who support them. Such commons are of different significance, and operational scope; they may last or they may lose their significance as time goes by or as surveillance authorities learn how to extinguish it.

Strolling and Drifting with the Subaltern in Precarious Spaces

Lefebvre (1996, 172–3) writes: Already, to city people the urban center is movement, the unpredictable, the possible and encounters. For them, it is either ‘spontaneous theatre’ or nothing. (…) The ideal city would involve the obsolescence of space: an accelerated change of abode, emplacements and prepared spaces. It would be the ephemeral city, the perpetual oeuvre of the inhabitants, themselves mobile and mobilized for and by this oeuvre. The ephemerality of the city, to which Lefebvre refers as the precondition for its existence, seems to be a constituent element of the three arrival cities under examination. From the perspective of how dominant groups conceive the urban space, ‘inconsistency’, i.e. lack of regularity and predominance of informality, precariousness and disorder, is a major shortcoming that hinders these cities of becoming ‘proper’ metropolises. A massive part of Istanbul is characterized by this; inner-city Athens and Nicosia ‘suffer’ from the ‘invasion’ of impromptu functions that by and large shape the urban tissue. Far from being

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part of a formal economy or the formal state of things, various activities and people inhabit streets, squares, pavements, even buildings. People sell and buy things, gather and exchange information, socialize by improvising, by playing cards on pieces of wood or plastic, listen to music from mobile phones, solicit, evade control, use, abuse and occupy. These are but some of the shadow activities quite visible with the naked eye. In of some districts the shadowy is much more visible than the formal. Subaltern migrants are, among many, protagonists in the production and performativity of this ephemerality; precarity is, among others, a constitutive element and force of these ephemeral spaces and acts. Everyday embodied experience though demonstrates that in these ever-growing liminal spaces, communities of knowledge, affect and sustainable know-how are flourishing in paradigmatic ways for the urban fabric as a whole. Through the production of mobile commons, or better through the commoning processes deployed on the move, precarious spaces are substantial parts of struggles for survival, resistance and moving on. In fact, migrants organize their mobility around their networks of knowledge, connectivity, economy and everyday politics in ways that transcend and therefore transform control. Nevertheless, the incessant war over the border regime is not taking place in specific geo-political border zones; nor is it confined to specific geo-political border zones; the geo-political border zones are not necessarily limited to specific spots of control-entry-exit, but are often diffused all over what is considered to be a sovereign territory. “Athens is the border”, we were told by an Afghan woman, mother of three. Pregnant with her third at the time, she crossed over with her two children on boat via river Evros. Now she is living in Athens for seven months, she is searching for an atypical gateway to another European country (last desired destination the uk); the borderline for her is neither Evros, nor Patras or Brindisi, but Athens.10 This is a common secret amongst thousands of illicit migrants crossing into Greece through the northern-eastern border zone with Turkey: it is this kind of common knowledge that must be thought of as a mobile common transmitted via word of mouth and/or migrant digitalities. Athens is the border, not only in the sense that the whole machine of control is deployed there; it is also the border, in the sense that in certain Athenian districts knowledge on mobility, infrastructure of connectivity, informal economies of temporary survival and – maybe the most important – communities of justice and politics of care are constantly produced. Athens is also the theatre, on the stage of which

10

Interview with two Afghan women conducted by D. Parsanoglou, N. Kambouri and O. Lafazani, Athens, 03/05/2012.

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control of mobility and escape through mobility are performed in much more complex ways than in the bare border-li(n/f)e. An Iraqi refugee, who is for years living with her family in central Athens, stressed the convenience of her neighborhood, as it gathers so many Arabspeaking people, hosts tea houses, food places and an Egyptian mosque. For this Iraqi woman, “there are no Greeks living in the neighborhood. Next to us is a family from Albania, around us there are mainly people from Sri Lanka, Pakistan. Our landlord is from Lebanon”. And she adds jokingly “My husband always says, here is not Greece, it is Kandahar!” So, from the Athenian Kandahar, we fly – we may follow through multiple precarious means of transport11 – with Abdulraheem, who had fled from Darfur as a minor. One night Abdulraheem took us for a walk. He said he wanted to show us Kumkapi. We walked in the neighborhood for a while; every few minutes he greeted someone he knew, migrants and locals. He told us that for him Kumkapi is a safe place as it means freedom for him: Turkish are better than the Kurdish people, but Kurdish want black people here, because that means good business for them. This neighborhood is Kurdish; you don’t have many Turkish people here. But for about 20 years black people are living here and they made this also a black area. In the night when I stay at home and watch tv and the time still don’t pass I come here and walk around. This is a safe place and I enjoy it. I feel better when it is safe, not like Tarlabasi. Yes they fight, but not with us, just between them. They love us. We turned into a street with many internet cafés and call shops. “This is called the ‘Black Street’. Here you see only black people. That’s why everyone calls it ‘Black Street’”. He pointed on one of the call shops: This internet café, Deniz Internet Café is open 24 hours. Migrants who don’t have a place to stay come here for the night and sleep here. They sleep in the chairs. We checked inside for a friend, but he wasn’t there. We continued walking until the main road Gazi Mustafa Kemal Paşa Cadessi. This street leads to the Tramvay Stasiyonu Aksaray and then further to a bridge under which the dolmuş (shared taxis) leave towards Taksim. During daytime it is buzzing with; a very noisy street full of cars and people. At the time we were there, it was calm and street vendors were selling latest fashion sneakers lined out on the side of the 11

For more on the itinerary, see Trimikliniotis, Parsanoglou and Tsianos (2015), 75–80.

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street. Abdulraheem informed us that they always start selling very late around midnight, because they do not have permits; they sell goods half the price than those in the closest day-markets in Istanbul. He and his friends always buy shoes from here. He knew almost all of the vendors and they greeted him warmly: In Kumkapi nothing is going legally. Yea, because, even police they know that it is not legal but because they take money they don’t say nothing. Before we went for a walk through Kumkapi, Abdulraheem had already taken us to a club. Outside illuminated letters read: “heaven bar”. Steep stairs lead to a basement door. When we entered, we noticed that migrants were sitting at different tables; they seemed divided along ethnic or national origin. We asked Abdulraheem if he knew any of them and where they were from. He explained that it is always mixed and that people who come here are mostly from Nigeria, Ethiopia, Eastern Europe, Maghreb and Turkey – mainly Kurdish. There was very loud Nigerian music played; very few people were talking. Further down, two or three men were sitting at the tables surrounding the dance floor and watching each other and those dancing. Late at night, a group of young Ethiopian women entered to join the table with the Nigerian men; until then the only women were the bar keepers and the researcher. The bar keepers appeared confident in the way they handled that room full of men. Later we learned that one of the barkeepers owns the club together with her Nigerian husband. The other women lived in Istanbul for three months. Abdulraheem surprised us when he said that Turkish people are often denied entrance in clubs, bars and restaurants run by migrants. Sometimes they do that and sometimes, because you know, if Turkish people they come inside like just two person, they making trouble there. They fighting, they drink without paying and they do things that is not good. And they using stupid words and they want to dance and they need other table, they want to change table, they want to change table where some people are sitting, they say, Get up we want to stay here. This is our country, we are Turkish. This is typical, because that they don’t allow them enter inside. We enquired further about how people deal with such situations: if there are more than 10 Turkish/Kurdish people in the club, the owner calls the landlord, who is also a local. His presence in the bar prevents the locals from picking up fights. That night, as the place was getting more crowded, two men entered, a young and an elderly; the elderly one stayed behind the bar, assisting a little; however, his main task seemed to be observing. The young man was sitting

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at the bar and in between he went to the nearby shop to get some drinks for the bar. He was mostly observing too; but he joked and chatted with the bar keepers. Abdulraheem informed us that if the strategy with the land lord does not work, the owner calls the police to sit in the bar in uniforms and gear. They are paid by the club to secure the place and not to ask for id or any other questions concerning the legal status of the guests: This is our place. Here we are safe, we are free. When the police is here people start to enjoy even more, because it’s safe. They know they don’t say anything to them. Let’s cross the border now. At the heart of the Greek capital, at the junction between Zinonos and Geraniou streets in a pedestrian road, on a Saturday morning to noon we witnessed the following scene: the street was full of people, mostly migrants, who were either walking around or waiting in queue to transfer money to their country of origin in one of the abounding money transfer companies’ booths or to book/buy a ticket at the existing (ethnic) travel agencies. For someone who is not familiar with the district, this might be a common lively, multicultural district like all similar districts in any contemporary metropolis around the world; a sort of an Athenian Barbès-Rochechouart. We have to note, however, that Geraniou Street or ‘Gerani’, as it has been branded by relevant stakeholders,12 is considered to be emblematic of the urban decay that Athens inner-city is experiencing during the last decade: “Gerani constitutes the most derelict – as far as natural and human resources are concerned – part of the city”. Among vendors, clients and passers-by, several women seemingly from Eastern European countries are standing at the pedestrian road, beside the benches, in front of a hotel. Although they do not say something or they do not make any demonstrating movement towards passers-by, one can figure out that they are soliciting. From time to time men are standing by, asking or saying something, sitting for a while and so on. Less than twenty meters inside Zinonos street, people are gathering around three municipal employees (as we were told), who are distributing prepaid mobile phone cards. In order to obtain one, those interested have to provide a piece of identity,13 mostly residence 12

13

Among which the Ministry of Environment, Energy and Climate Change (ypeka), which is still competent for major interventions in the centre of Athens: see Ministry of Environment, Energy and Climate Change, The actions of ypeka for the Centre of Athens, available online at http://www.ypeka.gr/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=8te3TBouiQ8%3D&. According to Law 3783/2009 on “Identification of owners and users of mobile phone equipment and services and other clauses”, since 8 November 2009, all users of prepaid

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permits. The municipal employees take a photo of the identity and give the prepaid phone card. On the other side of the street, two musicians (a clarinet and an accordion player) and a minor singer are basking with passers-by leaving their tips. Everything is noisy, lively and calm; “business as usual”, one might say. All at once, people start gathering around the musicians and the young boy, while the girls outside the hotel are also encouraged by some men who were around them to join the others. The accordion player announces loudly: “And now, a traditional piece from Epirus!”14 Among exclamations of joy and acceptance, people start to join hands, form a circle and dance. Among the dancers most of the girls who were soliciting outside the hotel, become now part of a small impromptu party, organized in less than a minute. Just an instant later, a pedestrian police patrol passes from the junction watching the people, made up of almost exclusively migrants, who are dancing, asking for a prepaid mobile phone card, transferring money to their country of origin, booking a ticket for an Eastern European country… After a while, when Police officers moved away, everything goes back to ‘normal’; the party is over. We do not know how recurrent such tactics are and whether people performing them are acquainted or not. We also do not know whether Police officers are aware of the coup de théâtre that is taking place before their eyes. It might be a successful “subtle ruse”, as M. de Certeau (1990) would call them, a tactic of resistance through which subaltern subjects divert the objects and the codes of everyday reality and recapture the space and its usage in their way; an art de faire shared among people who are for different reasons and by any means necessary united for the purpose of evading control. Or, it might be the contingent product of the moment, an instantaneous demonstration of collective intelligence deployed in front of an imminent danger. It matters little. What matters here and elsewhere is that control and resistance or – ­maybe better – resistance and control occur in liminal spaces, which constitute real thresholds in urban life (Stevens 2007). These thresholds are very often seen, in public discourse but also in academia, as spots of polarization and/or signs of segregation and decay. There is, however, another possibility: that of approaching these threshold spaces and their ephemeral production as “inbetween areas that relate rather than separate” (Stavrides 2007). According to

14

mobile phone cards have to submit the following information to their provider: Name, address, proof of vat number, id, passport or residence permit. Epirus is situated on the north-west side of Greece in the borderline with Albania. The musicians, probably of Albanian origin, performed pieces from the common musical tradition shared by the people in the Albanian and the Greek side of the border.

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this approach, contingent production of space is not a deviance from a rigid rule or mode of production; contingency is the rule. The antagonisms of class, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, values, desires that shape the urban space are manifested in various, dynamic and most importantly ephemeral ways. Moving to Nicosia, we find a very different example of performativity. This is essentially a kind of solidarity-in-action was revealed by Jo, a Filipino female domestic worker, who managed to remain underground as an irregular migrant for years. Fe persistently avoided downtown Nicosia for fear of getting caught or being reported; she eventually decided to return home. She told us that others have stayed underground for over 15 years without getting caught. She narrated to us a simple practice at bus-stops: when Filipino and other migrant workers are waiting at the bus stop, often the Immigration Police use this opportunity in order to raid and catch the irregular migrants. The common here is an understanding between migrants: when there is a Police raid, the first ones to run are not the irregular migrants but the ones who have their papers in order. In this way, the Police would chase after the regular migrants and this will give the opportunity of the irregular migrants to escape. This remarkable but so simple street-practice is in fact a common; it is an act of resistance-and-solidarity that has allowed many irregular migrants to avoid getting caught. It is obvious that this common may be short-lived. Immigration authorities and Police will eventually catch on as they are also learning from street-wise practices and therefore change or adapt their practices. In recent years, policing in urban centers has become more heavy-handed with the police operations of ‘sweeping’ all migrants they find in front of them in what are coded as ‘operations broom’ [«Eπιχειρήσεις Σkoύπα»]. In this context, at the bus stop they will stop and search all migrants, leaving no room for those without papers to escape. However, such sweeping approaches against all migrants leave them open to criticism of racial profiling, something the Police and authorities deny as it is an embarrassing violation of the law. It would be false to assume that such solidarity exist always amongst migrants; exploitative and oppressive relations exist within migrant communities; also some migrants are used for spying and reporting to the authorities. Nonetheless, the common described remains a powerful example of solidarity-in-praxis.

Conclusion: Precarious Times, Precarious Spaces

The spatial dimensions of precarity are often theoretically, empirically and politically unconnected to worlds of labor and work; only relatively recently has

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there been a research interest in connecting borders, sovereignty, immigration control to world of labor in a concrete manner.15 Despite the dynamism and development of theorization and political connection at an activistic level between the two poles i.e. labor and space (sovereignty, borders, cities), at the theorization level the division of labor has not allowed for a proper balance in the frames of analysis that connect space to labor. Inspired by a rereading of Lefebvre, in the context of the recent revival of interest in his work, we aim to contribute towards connecting labor issues to spatial concerns, which aim to unify time and space in the context of precarity. In this sense, we hope that the integration of the two approaches can theoretically and empirically begin. From our own empirical research, and the research of others, we can confidently claim that there is an abundance of evidence in recording and theorizing the level of praxis of the existence and operations of precarious spaces. These are but manifestations of time-space dislocation and fragmentation of the global. A major source of knowledge and inspiration for rethinking on the notion of precarity derives from the ‘Global South’ and the ‘periphery-within-the-core’: migrant labor and other peripheral workers who are in so-called ‘atypical’ forms of employment were the first to experience and thus had to cope with the realities of precarity. Faced with this reality, scholars working on migration, urbanity and labor, particularly those from the Global South and the Peripherywithin-the-Core, have developed theoretical frameworks that open up vital debates.16 Scholarship drawing on the Global South and migrants in the Global North, illustrates that precarity is hardly confined to labor but extends to all aspects of social life. The notion of “precarious liberation”, for instance, connects labor process to the liberation struggle and the social imaginaries and subjectivities of workers in South Africa (Barchiesi 2011; 2012). The narratives of female workers in Delhi, who are ‘internal migrants’, clearly illustrate that labor processes, including precarity are interconnected with spatial aspects in terms of freedom, imaginaries and belongings (Sharma and Kunduri 2014). It is no coincidence that subaltern and precarious migrants carry with them as a kind of habitus knowledge relevant to the experience of critical post-coloniality back into Europe, the old colonial master: this can be seen as a 15

16

See Honig (2001); Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos (2008); Brown (2010); Mezzadra and Neilson (2013); Chomsky (2014); Trimikliniotis, Parsanoglou and Tsianos (2015). See in particular Mezzadra and Neilson (2013), who brilliantly note how globalisation has resulted in the proliferation of borders and a multiplication of labour. Some important contributions include the following: Alatas (2006); Elizaga (2006); Patel (2006); Sitas (2006); Rosa (2014), Boatcă (2013).

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sociological snapshot that attempts to capture another angle of Chakrabarty’s “provincializing Europe” (2000). This has been thought through quite convincingly by the pioneering works of Stuart Hall and his associates, the studies theorizing migration in conjunction to class, ethnicity and gender (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1983, 1992) and the autonomy of migration school of thought (Moulier-Boutang 1998; Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos 2008; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013). A postcolonial sociology of the Global South allows for the necessary reordering and re-referencing that injects the richness of theorizing from the perspective Global South into the Global North. Any effort to properly capture these processes requires a serious re-imaging of socialities; there is considerable thinking of this kind in the South and the East, where most of these migrants come from. For instance, such ‘re-imagining the social’ from the perspective of post-apartheid South Africa (Jacklin and Vale 2009) can be illuminating. As Sitas (2006, 374) points out, “South Africa, for all its socioeconomic perversions, offers an exceptional social laboratory for the entire planet” as “it has to solve locally, in all its complexity the defining legacies that constitute global racism”. Moreover, the post-apartheid regime contains in Marshallian terms a very advanced framework of citizenship or what is called ‘fourth generation rights’. We require the analytical and practical lenses to theorize modes of livelihoods which produce socialities, solidarities and connectivities long experienced in the Global South, the East and what was thought of as “backward Rest” and not in “the West” or the “Global North” (Hall 1992). Making sense of the new socialities produced by the “wretched of the earth” (Fanon 1963) in the days of austerity and “structural reform” is made possible by listening in on what Sitas called “voices that reason” (Sitas 2004) from the perspective of the “ordinary lives” (Sitas 2010). Contrary to the neo-Schmidtean and Neo-Platonist readings of politics as the exception (e.g. Badiou 2012 etc.), we mount the method of reading “ordinary lives” as resistance: the subaltern can and indeed do speak; they speak back, but most importantly they act and inscribe social struggles. In this sense, “ordinary lives” are perceived as objects for gaze, categorization and classification, no matter how well-intended, as machines reproducing the ways that “the modern, waged and bureaucratic forms of domination have been thought to ‘interpellate’ and ‘socialize’ people as subjects” (Sitas 2004, ix). Our project is precisely to identify, study and theorize the “contranomic instances of sociality” (ibid, ix) shaped by the migrant struggles of passage, which redefine spatially, and mentally the areas, which they have resided in the three arrival cities, we study. Just like South Africa has been “a vicious laboratory of extreme situations”, the crisis-ridden cities of Istanbul, Athens and Nicosia have also been vicious laboratories producing new socialities of livelihoods.

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In this context, we have examined migrant mobility as an illustrative type of underpinnings for the comprehension of the current disjointedness of time and space, in front of which much of our theoretical arsenal is falling apart. We have tried to capture the subversive logic of urban contingency as it is the productive matrix of the ongoing riotous processes and events. In a conjuncture where everything seems to be possible and prediction cannot but be risky, we suggest that the malleable, the unforeseeable lies within the very nature of precarious existence. Far from assuming that precarity engenders inexorably rebellious conditions and possibilities, we suggest however that it is the very liminal character of precarious labor and precarious space that encloses the potentialities for an ever-increasing need and desire for establishing and enhancing commoning processes. For some time now, it is argued from different perspectives that we have witnessed a transformation from industrial to post-industrial capitalism which describes the appropriation of labor as the appropriation of the worker’s subjectivity in its entirety.17 Extending the argument originally developed elsewhere18 and citing our empirical research as evidence, we propose that it is necessary to break completely with the underlying contention that destroys the potential for labor resistance. The precarious regime of labor regulation recombines the working subject and exploits specific segments of his or her everyday existence on a case-by-case basis. Embodied capitalism does not actually exploit the totality of the worker’s experience; it dissects the subject and the entirety of his/her life and appropriates only certain parts of it. It is through these very means of dissecting, selecting, appropriating and discarding subjectivities that control is achieved in precarity. Regulation entails abandoning the subject as a whole and recombining it, or parts of it. The struggles of resistance by mobile subjects are not confined to labor, nor is space free from labor relations. Hence, the right to the city is no longer a claim that will reshape our lives in urban space; it is already an embodied experience that willy-nilly moves the boundaries of our praxis in a constant and relentless way. In this sense, we can revisit Hamlet’s aporia. The mysterious asynchrony that has dislocated time and produced his dead father’s ghosts is that the rationalization of the celebrated madman’s aporia, when confronted in awe with a spectral fragment of the past: this is also read as a hallucination of a deviant, a mentally unstable man, branded as such by all the actors on stage. Yet, we, the audience, also witness the figure of ghostly father as real: 17 18

See Beck (2000); Gorz (2003/2010); Schönberger and Springer (2003). Tsianos and Papadopoulos 2006; and Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos 2008.

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the father is there. Therefore, time, and space, must be ‘out of joint’, even if the actors, except the deviant, cannot or refuse to see. We therefore augment the Shakespearian puzzle so as to capture the processes that (re)produce precarious spaces, in the current conjuncture, even though we suspect that similar processes were operational at least since the times of the great playwright. References Alatas, Syed Farid. “A Khaldunian Exemplar for a Historical Sociology for the South”. Current Sociology 54(3) (2006): 397–411. Albo, Greg, Sam Gindin, Leo Panitch. In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives. Oakland: PM Press, 2010. Anthias, Floya and Nira Yuval-Davis. “Contextualising Feminism – Ethnic, Gender and Class Divisions” Feminist Review 15 (1983): 62–76. Anthias, Floya and Nira Yuval-Davis. Racialised Boundaries: nation, race, ethnicity, colour and class and the anti racist struggle. London: Routledge, 1992. Attalides, Michael A. Cyprus, Nationalism and International Politics. Edinburgh, UK: Q Press, 1979. Badiou, Alain. The Rebirth of the History in our Times of Riots and Uprisings. London: Verso, 2012. Barchiesi, Franco. “Against Job Creation. Precarious Work as a Challenge to Employment-Centered Normativity in Postcolonial Africa”. Paper presented at the Global Labour University conference at Wits University (Johannesburg), September 28–30, 2011. Accessed February 19, 2016. www.global-labour-university.org/fileadmin/…/ Franco_Barchiesi.pdf. Barchiesi, Franco. “Precarious liberation: a rejoinder”. South African Review of Sociology 43(1) (2012): 98–105. Beck, Ulrich. The Brave New World of Work. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Bloom, Clive. Riot City. London: Palgrave McMillan, 2012. Boatcă, Manuela. “‘From the Standpoint of Germanism’: A Postcolonial Critique of Weber’s Theory of Race and Ethnicity”. In Postcolonial Sociology (Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 24), edited by Julian Go, 55–80. Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2013. Bollier, David. Silent theft. The private plunder of our common wealth. London: Routledge, 2003. Brown, Wendy. “Resisting Left Melancholia”. In Without Guarantees. In Honor of ­Stuart Hall, edited by Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie, 21–29. London: Verso, 2000.

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chapter 12

The Working Class and the City as Political Platform in New York Peter Schultz Jørgensen Introduction At an unearthly hour, the 7 subway line is crammed with people. From the terminal in Flushing, Queens Chinese immigrants squeeze themselves together as more Mexicans and Columbians enter at Corona, Junction Boulevard, Elmhurst as do Pakistanis at Jackson Heights. The same thing happens when AfroAmericans, Caribbeans or Puerto Ricans enter on the subway lines in Brooklyn and the Bronx. This is the workaday routine for New Yorkers who get up early to keep Manhattan running another day. As Domestic Workers United (dwu) says, “The work we do makes all other work possible”. Some sit bent over the sewing machines in the sweatshop on 8th Avenue in Sunset Park. Nannies take care of the children in wealthy families in big homes at Upper East Side. Day labourers sit on stools with helmets and tools on Dawson Street in the Longwood section of the Bronx, ready to be picked up for a job for the day. All are ordinary New Yorkers. Most are people of colour and immigrants. They are scattered across the city and have precarious conditions with the lowest wages, the most insecure work situations, temporary and dead end jobs, the fewest or no rights, long hours, are exposed to harassment and are meet with the expectations of courteousness. In this phase of capitalism aggressive neoliberalisation and globalization follow a simultaneous repression and expulsion of large social groups along with concentration of values and thus also of the structuring decision power. This changed the conditions for the majority of people. As Saskia Sassen writes: Historically, the oppressed have often risen against their master. But today the oppressed have mostly been expelled and survive at a great distance from their oppressors. Further, the ‘oppressor’ is increasingly a complex system that combines persons, networks and machines with no obvious center. And yet there are sites where it all comes together, where power becomes concrete and can be engaged, and where the oppressed are part of the social infrastructure for power. Global cities are one such site (2014, 10).

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New York is One Such City

Taking the highly polarised and class-divided nyc as the case – with David Harvey and Henry Lefebvre as my point of departure – I will investigate a few of many perspectives for organising workers in relation to the city and urbanization. The basis of this chapter is an inquiry into the radical urban politics currently taking place in nyc and the potential of these fragmented activist manifestations to (re)build a new form of working-class power today. The chapter asks if the actual myriad of organisms all over the city and in different fields could become a movement which can seize the moment and move from a defensive to an offensive strategy with the city as a political platform? The chapter cannot offer any final answer to this question and can neither account for all the historical processes which have transformed the city and the working-class. What it does offer, is a set of critical reflections of the on-going political mobilization taking place in nyc in the us context of today and an extension of the reflections for speculating on the broader potential. The chapter begins by presenting the data as well as offering a brief outline of the notion the city as a political platform and the of collective narrative analysis instituting the methodological approach used in the analysis. On the backdrop of a class divided global city and the long diversified history of immigration I look at the formation of class unity through urban organi­ sing narratives among domestic workers as well as two organizations based in Chinatown Manhattan, which depart from an understanding of the worker as a whole being with city as a political platform in a holistic perspective. I found that the domestic workers’ use of the collective narratives have become a means which can break the isolation of the individual worker created by the ‘common sense’, in a Gramscian understanding, sustaining racist laws, humiliating practices and perceptions which draws on a history with figures as ‘house negros’ and being somebody’s property. The narratives become a means to alter the consciousness from individual apathy to unity and common action. In Michel de Certeau’s understanding common sense through media gets a urban dimension as “the figure of the City, the masterword of an anonymous law” (1988, 108) reveals what is worth knowing and remembering. ‘The City’ becomes a neutralising and concealing concept for a city without class divisions and antagonisms. In the work done by cswa and nmass I found aspects of workers’ relations to the urban conditions. This is also where Harvey picks up Marx’s analysis of alienation – and with reference to André Gorz – the separation of labour from our lives. With the statement “we are surrounded with ‘weapons of mass distraction’” Harvey adds another dimension to Gramsci’s ‘common sense’ (Harvey 2014, 278). Altering the commons sense in Gramsci, the

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neutralization in Certeau and the alienation in Harvey is a process taking place at different levels starting at ground level. Harvey insists: Only when politics focuses on the production and reproduction of urban life as the central labor process out of which revolutionary impulses arise will it be possible to mobilize anti-capitalist struggles capable of radically transforming daily life (2012, xvi). In my interpretation of Lefebvre this is what expresses ‘the right to the city’. I conclude by pointing to a moment opening up for a qualitative leap in the development of a socio-political movement. The chapter is based on work done previously.1 For this chapter additional material was collected through new interviews and participation in manifestations and celebration of victories alongside the members of different organisations. The chapter is primarily based on interviews with Wing Lam co-founder of Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association (cswa), JoAnn Lum co-founder of National Mobilization Against Sweatshops (nmass), Tracy Kwon campaign organiser in nmass and Priscilla Gonzalez organiser in Domestic Workers United (dwu).2

The Tale of Two Classes

During the post-WWII period, nyc developed as something resembling a welfare city because of the strength of the organised labour movement. Social housing was built. Schools were open in the evenings with social services and functioned as community centers. The public transportation was cheap and the pool of public housing was growing extensively. The health-care system and pension schemes worked to a certain degree. Visiting museums was free, 1 The article is based on research conducted between 2009–11 for my book New York & Kampen for Byen, [New York & The Fight for the City] (Jørgensen 2013). In the book I cover different forms of mobilising in relation to environmental justice, gentrification and displacement, homelessness and housing, immigrant conditions, zoning and urban development, community-gardens, Hip Hop as a form of art and resistance, the struggle for the representation of some ethnic groups in public space and in the public sphere as well as the Occupy Wall Street moment. The work is based on interviews and ethnographic research among organizations in Manhattan, in the Bronx, in Brooklyn and Queens. 2 Moreover, I participated in the conference Justice in the Home: Domestic Work Past, Present, and Future at Columbia University October 16–17, 2014.

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as was access to higher education. But it was a short-lived revival that peeked in the beginning of the 1970’s in the same time as crises breeded. It started to rumble in the city’s deep power structures. nyc went technically bankrupt in 1973. The Daily News penned the headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead!” The city elite realised that this was a crisis with opportunities. They seized the moment for renewed power.3 New York was put under administration with financiers and banks at the head of the table. As ‘midwives’ they took care of the ‘rebirth’ of New York on a neoliberal concept with suppression of workers’ organisations, entrepreneurialisation, city branding, public/private partnerships, zero tolerance, tax abatements, urban development corporations, empowerment zones, privatisation of urban commons etc. New York then became the center for the invention of neoliberal practices of gifting moral hazard to the investment banks and making the people pay up through the restructuring of municipal contracts and services. harvey 2012

New York had changed from being a lab for the New Deal policy to a lab for neoliberal innovation and roll-out. “Cities have become increasingly central to the reproduction, mutation, and continual reconstitution of neoliberalism itself during the last two decades” (Brenner and Theodore 2002). Michael Bloomberg, the richest man in the city, became the mayor. Having earned his money through the company Bloomberg lp providing access to the purchase and sale of financial products and analyses based on real-time data globally around the clock, his fortune and his personal network in the city’s fire industry (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) put him in the mayor’s chair from 2001 to 2013, during which he led an exemplary further neoliberalisation of nyc. The Bloomberg strategy was to attract ‘the best and the brightest’. New Yorkers were told that the city was “a high-end product, maybe even a luxury product” and “the more I learn about this institution called New York City, the more I see the ways in which it needs to think like a private company” (New York Times 2003). With slogans like ‘Finance Capital of the World’, ‘The Cultural Capital of the World’ and ‘Real Estate Capital of the World’ nyc turned into a ‘competitive city’ and became an instrument for the elite’s planetary infrastructure for flows of profits and for tapping into them. The city was restructured to interact with the wider world rather than focusing on the urban society dynamics, the basic needs of its inhabitants, democracy and ecology. As Sennett expresses it: 3 See for instance Harvey (2003); Harvey (2005); Moody (2007); Sites (2004).

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“[C]ities can’t tap into the wealth of these corporations, and the corporations take little responsibility for their own presence in the city” (2001). New York took a global key role in the roll-out of the flexible accumulation and financialisation of the global economy. Of the world’s trade in securities, 95 per cent now takes place in only twenty-four cities such as London, Paris, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Hong Kong and New York (Cadena, Dobbs and Remes 2012). [The poor] must live in the same world that has been contrived for the benefit of those with money. And their poverty is aggravated by economic growth, just as it is intensified by recession and non-growth writes Bauman (2005). In 1980 the top 1 per cent of New Yorkers possessed 12 per cent of the total revenues in the city (fpi Fiscal Policy Institute 2010). In 2007 it was 44 per cent. But even more dramatically, 50 per cent of the poorest New Yorkers’ share of income almost halved from 14.1 per cent to just 7.9 per cent. This creates segregation. A few subway stops separates the Bronx – which includes one of the poorest of America’s 435 congressional districts and where 38 per cent live below the poverty line – from Manhattan, which “is turning into a gated community, the soft white center of a city that increasingly relegates diversity to its periphery” (Sorkin 2009: 47). The urban adds new dimension in the exploitation of the working-class and cities “have become increasingly central to the reproduction, mutation, and continual reconstitution of neoliberalism itself during the last two decades” (Brenner and Theodore 2002). During Bloomberg’s regime, 40 per cent of the city was rezoned. A good part of it was mixed industrial used land at the attractive waterfronts which was transformed for cheap opportunities for exclusive urban development with the further concentration of polluting activities in to poor communities inhabited by people of collar. This urbanisation with ‘spatio-temporal fixes’ plays an increasing role for the reinvestment of the overaccumulated surplus of capital (Harvey 2001). Capitalist urbanisation structures and undermines the working- and living conditions for ordinary New Yorkers through the housing market and shrinking salaries. Many New Yorkers are caught in the trap between low or decreasing wages and rising prices. It is not only a matter of relative differences, but of a real reduction in purchasing power. With a wage of US$ 8 an out the real purchasing power is 30 per cent lower than in 1968. If wages had followed productivity gains, the hourly wage should be US$ 18 (Fiscal Policy Institute 2014). The cost of a basic family budget in New York City has increased by 45 per cent since 2000 while the median earnings of adults increased by only 17 per cent

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over the past 14 years (Women’s Center for Education and Career Advancement 2014). The housing expenses are by far the largest budgetary post. To be able to meet the average market rent on 2,690 $ in 2015 the wage per hour should be 38.80 $ (StreetEasy Blog 2015). People are squeezed together or pushed out of the city they grew up in or came to as immigrants. The bourgeois and upper middle-class takeover of the central city, which they had allowed to decay and left to the poor – in particular colored people in the 1950–1980’s is in Neil Smith’s term ‘the revanchist city’ because it is “a systematic class-remaking of city neighborhoods” (2011). nyc has become an oasis and a platform for the planetary elite that exploits and creates the city in its own image. It’s symbolic capital stimulates investments of enquiring capital that transforms the city. Elitist enclaves through mega projects for command and consumption environments and displacement as a systematic phenomenon through ‘accumulation by dispossession’ and ‘appro­ priation’ (Harvey 2003). The city works as ‘peristaltic pump’ letting money float in a top-up and bottom-down process, whether there is a crisis or a boom. It is the most polarised metropolis in us.

The Working Class

There has always been an urban dimension in the definition of the working class. Historically the working class developed in the capitalist urbanisation and accumulation process in which the city was both a productive force and a productive condition. In the classical definition, the working class is identified by the workers production of surplus value and by its relationship to the means of production (a class-in-itself). Simply said: Those in the heavy industry were considered to be the vanguard, because they could halt society and build the material base of socialism. Others regarded the class constituting through a process of class-consciousness (a class-for-itself). In my perspective, the working class is: objectively a transformative class formed by the economic structural conditions of production and reproduction in ecological systems, subjectively defined by class-consciousness and dynamically through organizing actions. The class issue is important because in its political impact it is about solidarity, strategy, organizing and the perspective of a class-based change of power and transformation of society. New Yorkers working under precarious conditions are part of the working class. When Guy Standing depicts the precariat as a separate class: “We may claim that the precariat is a class-in-the-making, if not yet a class-for-itself” (2011, 7) he also puts forth a delimiting perspective for these workers. Under

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the regime of ‘flexible accumulations’ (Harvey 1990) the precarious conditions are spreading ‘upwards’ in the working class and penetrate more and more groups which become part of a growing flexible reserve army – the surplus population. Many of them are immigrants actually struggling to exist and be recognised as part of the working class and thereby often add a new impetus to this. In the chapter I concur with Harvey’s criticism of parts of the left wing for their definition of the working class as based solely on the production of surplus value. What is produced has no value until it has fulfilled its circulation on the market. The city in many ways becomes a machine of exploitation. Traditionally in the housing market from landlords and financial institutions to new forms though social media repacking neoliberalism as ‘new economy’. Airbnb for example stresses the housing market further by turning regular housing into unregulated hotel units; and leave the profit from this decentralised exploitation in the pockets of the global company. In four zip-codes, covering the neighbourhoods of the East Village, Williamsburg, the West Village, and the Lower East Side, entire home/apartment Airbnb listings comprise over 20 per cent of total rentals (New York Communities for change 2015). It can both be a new form of speculation on the housing market as well as a survival strategy based on renting one’s couch out. For this reason, Harvey writes: The concept of work has to shift from a narrow definition attaching to industrial forms of labor to the far broader terrain of the work entailed in the production and reproduction of an increasingly urbanized daily life (2012, 129). Lefebvre addressed this question already in 1969 in The Explosion when he writes that “the extension of self-management to the ‘users’ of urban reality, to the entire reality viewed under the two-fold aspect of production and consumption, exchange and use” (1969, 99). Consequently, the working class consists of those who produce and reproduce the city. “Why not focus, therefore, on the city rather than the factory as the prime site of surplus value production?” (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 250–251) Harvey asks referring to Hardt and Negri who writes, that “the metropolis is to the multitude what the factory was to the industrial working class” and “[i]n fact, production of the common is becoming nothing but the life of the city itself”. Harvey points to the ‘secondary exploitation’ as for instance housing which is significant in nyc. For immigrants reproduction has a global dimension as many of them have a home in the country they originated from. The major part of the remittances on

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62,4 billion $ that in 2014 was sent to Latin American countries came from the usa low wage workers (The Wall Street Journal 2015). For JoAnn Lum, organiser at nmass, it implies that: We are all exploited, and due to racial, undocumented status, gender, etc. some are additionally exploited. We must gather as a class and we must have control over our workplaces, the communities we live in, our health and time. We are the ones working and with our work we create this city and this society. Therefore, it should be for us to decide how we want to live our lives. We must have control instead of someone always telling us what to do and how. nmass here connects to an array of fundamental needs and repositions there within an urban perspective expressed as the right to the city. This understanding at the same time expands the definition of the working class. The organisation of production, circulation and consumption creates a division of labour between private companies, public and private, fragmentation over geographical distance and geographical expansion of the world market etc. Activities are dispersed, but still connected. Because of the increasing complexity of productive forces and conditions of production – together with harmonisation – the city and the urban system are increasingly a collective producer and a collective product or with Marx a ‘collective worker’ and Harvey ‘the collective body’ of the labour force which is broken down into hierarchies of skill, of authority, of mental and manual functions etc. (2000, 104). In this process, both a specialisation and deskilling of the collective worker take place. This anarchic market, is the largest distributor, urban planner and decision maker in the exchange value regime. In response to the fact that the city has been blown into a fragmentizing complex of exchange values and has become a forest of visible and invisible boundaries and abstractions, Wing Lam from cswa sums this up: Workers are much more than manufacturers. Workers also live here, use their city, need recreation, education, culture, health and fulfilment. We consider workers to be whole human beings with many types of problems and many qualities. We are fighting for control of working hours, our social spaces and our lives. This focus on the human being in its urban context resembles Lefevbre’s use of the term l’homme total – the total man. For him, this is a utopian character. “The total man is but a figure on a distant horizon beyond our present vision” (1991, 66), but is nevertheless necessary as a philosophical framework for the

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human urge to exceed the current division of labour, in an unregistered, splintered existence and the alienating state of exchange value. However, the “total man – will only make sense once it stops being a ‘vision’ and a ‘conception’: once it penetrates life and transforms it” (1991, 251). And “[t]he overcoming of alienation implies the progressive overcoming and suppression of commodities, of capital and money itself, as fetishes effectively ruling over humans” (Elden, 2004, 45). It is the abolition of the current conditions of production which is crucial. Harvey writes about how alienation can be a source of rebellion: “Universal alienation calls for a full-blooded political response” (2014, 279). Was it not what New Yorkers expressed through protests in the street against the nypd’s killing of Eric Garner by shouting ‘we can’t breathe!’. Like the individual should own the right to the product of his own work, the collective worker and the general intellect, should exercise control over the means of production and hold the right to collective product – the city and the urban – and thus the right to decide over it. This has consequences, says Harvey, for the development of the labour movement and thus for the left wing; “The collective labor involved in the production and reproduction of urban life must therefore become more tightly folded into left thinking and organizing” (2012, 5).

The Working Class and the Collective Narratives

Behind the romantic myth of nyc as a colourful patchwork are hidden stories from the us migration machine – which through temporally displaced historical processes of colonialism, imperialism and aggressive globalisation – has helped to create the stratification of the city’s working class. In the early industrial global division of labour African Americans were brought to America from Africa as slaves. The Afro-Americans particular history of racism – still defines the racial division of the us. During the imperialism in the late 1800s, the Puerto Ricans became a major immigrant group in nyc especially in the 1930’s and in the early 1950’s when us corporate investments in Puerto Rico drove out Puerto Ricans that was recruited as cheap labour from factories in us. Also caused by imperialism in Central America the Dominicans have become largest Latino group in the city.4 Under the globalisation and urbanisation process people are distributed to nyc from all over the world. Chinese are the second largest immigrant group but all together immigrants from Latin America, which had to take ‘large doses­ of neoliberal medicine’, represent the largest share of immigrants. Among them 4 Puerto Ricans does not count because they have been American citizens since 1917.

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Mexicans have become the largest group due to the Free Trade Agreement­ (nafta) leading to the outsourcing of industrial labour from the us to Mexico while farmers in Mexico were outmatches by American farmers selling maize for tortilla-making with state subsidies. This diversity in the population with different histories can create subjective difficulties in the movement building within an otherwise general framework forming an objective basis for unity. New York is a city where it is important to have a collective memory. There are many divisions or differences: Geographical segregation, individual workplaces, backgrounds, wage levels, linguistic uncertainties, entry points to the labour market, social networks, ethnic, racial, cultural, social backgrounds, legal matters, documented or undocumented status. It can also be subjective circumstances between individuals and unclear political attitudes and class-consciousness, etc. These conditions – besides the general division of labour influence the formation of a collective class-consciousness, especially among those working under precarious conditions. Together with the home-healthcare industry, domestic work is one of the fastest growing job industries in the global economy with ‘the professional household without a wife’ (Sassen, 2012). Domestic work comprises nannies, housekeepers, and elder care providers. In ny State there are about 200,000 domestic workers. The historical backdrop with ‘house Negroes’ and ‘field Negroes’ is a particular aspect of the housework. The slaves were the property of the house and the plantation owner. As late as the 1930s, Domestic workers and farm workers were not covered by the working laws of the New Deal in the 1930s.5 Domestic workers had no rights and their work no social status. Public narratives can put external pressure on groups and their history which block their opportunities and limit their awareness and self-understanding. As Foucault wrote: “People are shown not what they were, but what they must remember having been” (quoted from Olick, Vered and Levy 2011, 253). Therefore a counter-narrative is important for Domestic Workers United (dwu) formed in 2000 in nyc: Tell them Slavery Done (see figure 12.1.) as a reference to both the history of slavery and the current working conditions: ‘Who take care of the most important parts of their employers’ lives. We care for loved ones and keep homes clean, healthy and sage. Our work makes all other work possible’. Domestic Workers United 2012

5 National Labor Relations Act 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act 1938.

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Figure 12.1 Tell them slavery done Source Peter Schultz Jørgensen.

Domestic workers are isolated at their workplaces. What would they do if they did not get their salaries or were subjected to insults? The women stood alone and were invisible to the public and partly to themselves. It became a personal pressure, which turned inward. Benches, street corners and community centres and other forms of public space were important meeting places in everyday life. It was here that domestic workers talked, and where organisers sought them (Mose 2011). One of dwu’s first steps was to create a base for a unity among the women by collecting their stories of doing overtime without payment or no payment at all, of mistreatment, monitoring, abuse, racist utterances. Just talking to one another, was to move one-step further. The women made themselves visible and came into being for one another and themselves. Priscilla Gonzalez explained this to me in 2010 when she was working for dwu: Who is better when it comes to talking about the impact of race, color, gender, and class in this field than the women themselves? The lived experience is essential. Those who are the victims of injustice are the best positioned to find solutions.

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The stories brought forth a pattern as a collective insight. dwu’s next move was to change the public discourse by diffusing the narratives, add a perspective­ while promoting understanding among the women of their conditions through an exposed narrative. Priscilla said: We moved the media and forced them to report on the situation of women: That they like their work, why it is important work like any other work that must be respected. It is the battle for the dominant narrative. After all, it is us who keep 5th Avenue running. The energy and insight lay in the stitching together of the diversity and the many layers of fragments that grow together in a common memory, which provides a subjective freedom for acting. By being part of a collective narrative, while at the same being co-narrator of a narrative about the world it appears as something that can be changed. It becomes legitimate to raise demands and fight for them. “The moment has its memory” said Lefebvre (2002, 45). The stories enlarge life by setting up a dramatic framework that participants can act in and be proud of. The personal experience is a crucial dimension in the unity as a group and class when they are coupled in an interaction of awareness, relationships and actions. Operational common knowledge becomes transformative: [S]ince words and gestures produce direct results, they must be harnessed not to pure ‘internal consciousness’ but to consciousness in movement, active, directed towards specific goals. lefebvre 1991, 135

Along with a public opinion calling for social justice and alliances with some unions, the activities created a pressure leading to adoption of the first Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in the United States in New York State in 2010. In 2007 dwu was a founding member of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (ndwa). Based on class consciousness their goal is to build alliances with other groups and organisations to change the more fundamental conditions in society. For as they say: “[D]omestic work is a new paradigm for the worker which will become the condition for many more”. The strategy is to build up a power base and take the struggle to a higher scale. The importance of the domestic workers insisting on organizing behind their demand is shown by the fact that the farmworkers still are not protected by a bill of rights.

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Working Class and the City

The unity of the working class, ‘the total man’ and ‘the collective worker’ in the perspective of the right to the city have tactical and strategic implications. As Harvey writes: “The city and the urban process that produces it are therefore major sites of political, social, and class struggles” (2012, 66). It is however still a relative new but fertile territory with political and theoretical challenges which need to be addressed. The global elite confronts the working class including the local transnational immigrants and the growing layers of underprivileged. Also parts of the middle-class are devaluated as labour force and human beings. Neoliberalisation is pushed through as an attack on the working class organisations and rights. Several factors have had a role in this process and contributed to weakening the labour movement; the job-loss in manufacturing during the 195070’ies hollowed out the core of the working class. The globalised division of labour and the outsourcing to other countries and/or the suburbs fragmented the labour force. The settlement in owner-occupied homes in the fast growing suburbs tied the workers to their home. The phase-out of industrial jobs in the city was followed by a ‘low wage’ strategy and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. In 2011, 3.1 million New Yorkers (37.2 per cent of the population) were foreign-born compared to 1.4 million (13 per cent) in 1970. Including the children of immigrants, it is 60 per cent excluding at least 400,000 undocumented immigrants. This was a perfect match for the reborn nyc and its new position carrying with it a need for services from cheap labour. The extensive restructuration of production – and reproduction processes on the scale of the metropol was as well a product of and a producer of globalisation. This was a new situation for the labour movement which had to rethink its position at a critical time. But internal reasons caused problems for the labour movement. The unions limited their work to their professions and workplaces and made themselves dependent on legislation and switched to the Democra­ tic Party’s political machine. Aronowitz sums it up: “In return for that security, workers and their union agree, crucially to surrender their First Amendment right to withhold their labor” (2014). The legal connection meant renunciation of local actions and strikes rather than building on a development of members’ power through dynamic democratic organisations with visions. They lost influence and members. The unionisations in nyc is (2014/15) 25 per cent of the employed. The industries with more than half of the workforce unionised, are bus services and urban transit, postal service, education, hospitals, public administration. Compared to the national 11.2 per cent unionisation

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it is still high percentages (Milkman and Luce 2015). With 37 per cent the Afro-Americans is the most unionised group. While the unionisation in the private-sector sector eroded to 18 per cent, it rose in the public sector to 70 per cent. In response to this roll-back of the welfare, the weakening of the unions, the precarious exploitation and capitalist urbanisations we have seen alternative forms of organizing primarily among immigrants and low paid workers. In its early period in the second half of the 18th century and first part of the 19th century, the labour movement was engaged in the conditions at the workplace, education, health, culture, housing and cooperation’s. Trade unions collaborated with socialist parties and acted together on a broad platform. They saw their activities as a preparation for another society – a socialist society. Marx wrote: Apart from their original purposes, they [trade unions] must now learn to act deliberately as organizing centers of the working class in the broad interest of its complete emancipation. They must aid every social and political movement tending in that direction. marx 1866: Article 6c

Several of New York City’s 27 Workers Centres which have multiplied since the 1990s have this point of departure (Milkman and Ott 2014). cswa was the first workers centre in nyc founded in 1979 by a group of Chinese restaurant workers, who felt they needed an organisation that would go beyond the limitations of traditional union organizing. Wing Lam was and is still the major force. cswa’s base is Chinatown, where they have organised garment workers and workers in the food industry. The result is, according to Wing Lam, a higher salary here than elsewhere in the city. cswa’s and nmass’s walk-in centres are located next to each other in the bustling Grand St. in Chinatown. nmass was formed in 1997 at the initiative of the cswa. “We came from different communities and several nationalities – Latinos, Indigenous Mexicans, Afro-Americans, Chinese – working in restaurants, offices, nail-saloons, supermarkets etc. Here they speak all languages”, JoAnn Lum says and continues: Many unions divide people into professions, race, gender, etc. while we constantly seek to bring all working people together in order to organise and look beyond the particular problems by clarifying the common interest. Together with other organisations they fight for higher wages, but she emphasises the need for enforcing the law from Department of Labor because many

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workplaces pay less than minimum wage, do not pay overtime and keep wages and tips back. When workers started organizing, companies have used different strategies, e.g. transfer values and go bankrupt, use franchising and subcontractors or hire undocumented immigrants. The pressure arising from this development has led Governor Cuome to propose a minimum wage on 15 $ which should apply from 2021 in the state of New York and in nyc from 2018. In New York City it will target 1.25 million workers – 37 per cent of the workforce (fpi 2015). The long-term fixation of wages is nevertheless problematic in a city with rapid increases of living costs and likewise for collective movements based on wage struggles especially. Since the battle for wages seems endless Wing Lam stresses the importance of the working hours as the essential issue: Everyone say more jobs, more jobs! How can they say that when many have two or three jobs?=more slaves. We are fighting not just to survive, but to live longer. The length of the working day was one of the first battle fields of the labour movement. JoAnn Lum explains: Some people call for overtime pay or flex time or shared work, but do not call out what the system does to exploit us, do not call for workers to be able to control our time. A norm of a short working day increases the value of the labour force. And for the worker it will provide more time for participating in social, political and cultural community activities, or for training and education, which will allow for other jobs. For eighteen months, cswa and nmass boycotted Saigon Grill on Amsterdam Avenue on Upper West Side when it fired some of its 70 employees. They organised the campaign Sweatshop Free Upper West Side 2011–2012. From Wednesday to Sunday every week a crowd with colored signs was picketing in front of the restaurant: ‘Boycott Saigon Grill’ and ‘Stop Unfair Labor Practice!’ In front of the restaurant Vincent Cao told me: When we choose our struggle, we are persistent. We win because we insist. Others who work on similar conditions, the other businesses, see we are serious with our turn of the screw. The campaign grew out of an understanding between the activist workers, the residents of the community, small businesses, students, and ethnic and

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religious­groups. They wanted an ethically grounded development of their district. Tracy Kwon from nmass said: This is really about getting the community to be a part of the struggle, so they also care about the jobs that are here. People do not want that kind of businesses in their neighbourhood. Now they are talking to each other about other places where conditions can be improved, and they are more conscious about what is happening in their community. Basically, we help to create a better society. nmass want to spread this model said JoAnn Lum: We are here to lift conditions in general and prepare for a major struggle. Right now there is a good chance to fight against the big chains that have exploited the crisis in order to promote sweatshops across the country. Sweatshop Free Zones is a model for how the community and workers can unite in other communities throughout New York City. Through persistent activism targeting one company seeking to empower and strengthen the active engagement of the community across ethical values which become common. Doing so puts pressure on other companies for ­respecting the local rules of the game. Another workers centre, Laundry Workers Alliance (lwc) has an ‘encircling strategy’ which means it organises the community within a distance of five blocks and in this way links workers within the area. The strategy of connecting workplaces and urban society gives strength and perspective to a labour conflict because it becomes visible, part of the public and takes place locally. As mentioned previously, differences in ethnicity and history play a role in the organizing processes. The same applies to the status as undocumented of the workers. The effect of these differences was strengthened with the implementation of The Immigration Reform and Control Act (irca) in 1986 to exclude irregular migrants from the labour market but simultaneously gave amnesty to close to three million immigrants. cswa and nmass have contested this law consistently. First of all it is not enforced for the employers and secondly has contributed to the creation of a clandestine labour market for undocumented workers as a flexible labour force without rights. Because the law treats workers differently, the employers can make divisions through differences in salaries and working conditions and render collective bargaining difficult or even impossible. cswa and nmass therefore struggle to abolish this law in order to create equal rights and conditions for all workers. As JoAnn Lum stated it:

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“This Law creates slaves – how can we as citizens be free if there are humans without any rights?” Promises to the communities of jobs and affordable housing are often used to advance building projects, without keeping past promises, e.g. the mega-project on Atlantic Yard in Downtown Brooklyn (Angotti 2008). Urban development holds potential conflicts as for instance unions’ interest in building- and hotel jobs versus the negative effect these building projects and the new urban functions these have on the community (MacDonald 2011). The discrepancy between the exchange value of the buildings and use value is made very visible (Harvey 2014). Wing Lam captures cswa’s holistic approach in the following way: It is no use supporting the construction of condos to create jobs if the building contributes to changing the neighbourhood into something, which the workers as residents have no interest in. Higher rents imply that the shops have to pay more for their premises and raise prices, so food becomes more expensive. Gentrification starts, new people move in and push others out. Geopolitical conflicts and climate change increasingly strike back in the global cities – ‘cities as frontier zones’, as Sassen expresses it. When it happens the most vulnerable groups are hit hardest. This was the case following the superstorm Sandy and 9/11. The dust from 9/11 lay over the district and opened new processes with diseases and reinforced gentrification in a landscape of lost jobs and business. Many workers were put to work cleaning Wall Street to be up and running in a hurry. cswa and nmass members knew quite a lot about diseases caused by poor working environment. They were sensitive to the signals. Through door knocking – which JoAnn Lum participated in – they found out that many workers suffered from after-effects of the jobs and the general pollution, but authorities and institutions were downplaying it. The movements organised meetings where people could tell their individual experiences in Chinese, Spanish and English. The stories drew up a larger narrative of a general condition in and around Chinatown. When they took to telling others how they felt supported them to feel better. Through this type of organizing, a community was established which made actions possible. A campaign was organised demanding the Government to recognise depression, trauma, breathing difficulties, stomach trouble or cancer as a result of 9/11 alongside claims of health care, medical research, health coverage, reparations as well as being included in the compensation funds – ‘Health Care not Toxic air’. The struggle was associated with small businesses, which also got problems. But, as Wing Lam explained:

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The funds set aside to remedy the impact of 9/11, have been used to support new hotels, offices and condominiums. They have been spent on taking over parts of Chinatown. Under the heading Rebuilding Chinatown they push the poor people out. The city council and the organisations that are set up as partnerships, use words like growth and development – but is it us, they are talking about? 9/11 was a hard blow. Mange companies shut down and stayed closed – especially the clothing industry. Landlords raised the rent and harassed occupants to leave. The general rent level raised fast and new money rolled in and pushed the gentrification frontier from in Soho, Lower East Side and the Financial District. Chinatown is squeezed between ‘The Historic Chinatown’ (which Wing Lam calls a ‘mummified identity’) – promoted by Chinatown Partnership Local Development Corporation and the city’s tourist strategy – and big business. The history and narrative of Chinatown is contested. As M. Christine Boyer writes: History fixes the past in a uniform manner; drawing upon its difference from the present, it then reorganizes and resuscitates collective memories and popular imagery, freezing them in stereotypical forms. Utilizing its distance from the past, history sets up a fictional space manipulating time and place, and re-presenting facts and events (1996, 66–67). The narrative is related to the interest reflected in the interest in the urban development in Chinatown. Towers with hotels and condominiums spring up. Until now the city has refused to downzone Chinatown as it did in East Village. cswa and nmass have been active in the Chinatown Working Group (cwg). 60 organisations have developed a community plan proposal: “The Plan for Chinatown and Surrounding Areas – Preserving, Affordability & Authenticity” (Chinatown Working group 2013). It is a formally called §197-c zoning plan which can be adopted by the City Council. cswa and nmass support the broad community consensus and have joint organizing manifestations against displacements and to promote the plan to protect the homes, schools and small businesses. Through the Coalition to Protect Chinatown (cpc & les) and the Lower East Side they push for the whole plan and against tax breaks to investors and luxury apartments etc. The response from the de Blasio administration has been that ‘it’s too ambitious’ and therefore propose to work on particular portions of Chinatown/Lower East Side. The plan was in 2012 backed by roughly 10,000 residents and small business owners who signed the People’s First Rezoning Plan, As written on a leaflet for the 25th March Against Displacement!:

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The plan puts height restrictions on buildings to discourage big, tall luxury developments. This will help keep property taxes – and our rents – from shooting up. The plan also prevents the City from selling our nycha buildings and using our land to build luxury apartments. The politics of city planning is about the demarcation of territories and who has the power to formulate strategies and execute them. Or as Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning Tom Angotti told me during an interview: “The city’s strategy is to not stand in the way of ‘the market’ – which means do everything possible to promote new investment and development”. It is a struggle for the direction of development: ‘old’ against ‘new’, ‘stagnation’ against ‘development’, about aesthetics, e.g. the ‘messy’ against the ‘pure’ and ‘good taste’ or the local diversity against global harmonisation – or between value of use and exchange value. cpc & les fights against the planning as zoning for an urban development focusing on investment opportunities for capital and for development based at and aiming at people’s needs and visions. cpc & les seeks to emphasise value of use by supporting a development and priority of the social, economic and cultural live in an area of the city. The organizing of workers within the complex urban context calls for processes that can secure involvement, perspectivate and accumulate organisational capacity in the organised movement. Wing Lam emphasises that the strategy of cswa is to organise the base. “If we cannot change the base it doesn’t matter. The base is what carries these efforts”. cswa and nmass are democratic organisations of paying members and have an unpaid board elected among the members. It takes care of major decisions about the direction of the organisation. The staff is kept small not to give the workers the impression that others are fighting their struggle. The principle is self-organizing. Labor Rights Clinic is open for workers to drop in to seek advice and support. It is also open for community members. It is essential for cswa not to be a place that simply gives services but to help people organizing so that they learn something, they see the bigger picture and then the importance of becoming organisers. “We are also aware of developing the workers who take responsibility into leaders and organisers of the cswa”, says Wing Lam. They regard it as a long-term cumulative building up of a learning organisation, with trials, analyses, training, base building, actions, etc. The coupling of work and reproduction stimulates notions of change and is an education in the democratic process led by the participants themselves as well as in the design of specific solutions. The workers take the leading role through their community-networks and organising committees, which is typical for many worker’s centres. nmass

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for instance has: Women’s committee, caregivers’ committee, committee on anti-displacement, community building. They conduct analyses of conditions in businesses and in neighbourhoods, plan campaigns, conduct training, social activities and other issues. To take care of the common ground they emphasise the development of working class culture. They also produce a magazine where people could publish their stories. Every first Friday of the month they host gatherings with speeches, dancing, karaoke and more to bring the community and families together. In the complex struggle for better working conditions, social protection, paid sick days, living wage and shorter working days, housing, community facilities, schools, common spaces and goods, environmental justice etc. in a city with big money, the Workers Centre seems small but their influence has been genuine and more emerge. In 1992 there were four workers centres in us, in 2002 137 and in 2013 more than 200 (Milkman and Ott 2014). They gain strength through developing collaborations in the city and on state or national level. It is a flexible organisational model where different aspects of the workers’ lives can be emphasised. In the book New Labor in New York edited by Ruth Milkman and Ed Ott (2014) they present a collection of case studies of workers centres. Ed Ott writes in the conclusion “they are experiments in new types of organizing that directly confront the changes in capitalism that have reshaped the world of working people”. In my conversations with organisers from cswa, nmass, Domestic Workers, New York Taxi Workers Alliance (nytwa), Laundry Workers, Make the Road and others it become clear that they regard their work as a long-term cumulative building up of a learning organisation, with trials, analyses, training, base building, actions, leadership etc. The coupling of work and the urban conditions stimulates notions of change and is an education in the democratic process led by the participants themselves as well as in the design of specific solutions.

The City, the Moment and the Movement

The Interregnum New York is not an island but a part of the global urbanisation process in which it plays a key role in the creating of the growing inequality and the precarian conditions for the workers. It is one of the strongholds for the global powerholding elite of 0,7 per cent of the populations owning 45,2 per cent of the global wealth and 8.1 per cent owns 84,6 per cent while 71 per cent of the global population are left with 3 per cent of the global wealth (Credit Suisse. Global

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Wealth Report 2015). Exploitation and expulsion of large groups of people is a product of and a prerequisite for the capitalist mode of production, the capital accumulation and the concentration of values and thus the centralisation of the structuring power and decision-making power (Sassen 2014). This happens in a situation where societies are suffering from the contradictions and blockages that mutually stimulate and reinforce each other (Harvey 2010, 2014). Engels described the general contradiction of capital as: “[I]ncompatibility of socialised production with capitalistic appropriation” (2015[1880]). Capitalist society is not only hit by waves of economic crises but has a ‘web of crises’ as the basic condition. Within this web of crises I will mention four that creates the continuous turbulent condition: − Capital’s over-accumulation crisis based on compound growth, creates ‘the capital surplus absorption problem’ (Harvey 2014). Wall Street has become a main centre and the symbol of the financialisation of the economy, which dominates and amplifies the web of crises. – Ecological crisis which translates into climate change, pressures on eco-systems, the reduction of diversity, etc. Super Storm Sandy made it clear to New Yorkers what the climate crisis looks like when it starts to unfold. – Human crisis with a growing reserve army of workers, a general alienation and the devaluation of people’s abilities and limited possibilities to develop as humans. – Democracy crises with its restrictive formal forms of political participaion and the concentration of power in the hands of an oligarchic domination created ‘a regime of power without responsibility’ (Sennett, 2001). This was expressed when people wrote on posters during Occupy Wall Street: ‘Wall Street has two parties. We need one of our own!’ The web of crises in capitalism, in the human conditions and in the ecosystems are configured by the processes of global urbanisation and conflate in the cities, giving them their shape and structures the economic livelihood, the labour, the physical environment, the democratic opportunities and our possibilities for expression as human beings. Like other cities, nyc is caught in this complex. The crises cannot be resolved or handled separately – one at a time. For instance, the relation capital and nature is what Jason W. More calls “a double internality” since capital produce nature and nature produce capital: “Capitalism is a way of organizing nature” (Moore 2015, 78). Harvey comes to a similar understanding: “Nature and society are internal relations within the dynamics of a larger socio-ecological totality” (2009, 32). From this kind of understandings emerge perspectives for organizing in new fields and scales of connectedness. For instance, environmental justice which is practiced by combining struggles against pollution occurring by bad garbage-management, against diesel trucks and asthma with the struggle for education, jobs, development of small businesses and storm flood protection

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as it has happened in Hunts Point. Just as problems are related, solutions must also be so. For this period of crises Lefebvre coined the phrase ‘the critical zone’ after ‘the industrial city’ and in the phase of the emerging ‘urban society’ (2003, 14–17). Gramsci had the same point: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” (2011, 32) which again is similar to Harvey’s claim: The issue is not, therefore, that capital cannot survive its contradictions but that the cost of it so doing becomes unacceptable to the mass of the population (2014, 264). This begs the question of whether this objective web of crises is a moment for a radical transformation of society, and whether there is a movement – one subjective factor – which can deepen and seize this moment in the offing? In this interregnum, in a state of tension created by the absence of an accumulating political movement, the working class as an organised subjective factor in the city is not in line with the objective possibilities and needs in the present conditions.

On the Move

The Civil Rights movement in the 1969–70s, the anti-war movement and the beginnings of the environmental movement had some visions. In 1967, Lefebvre in Paris was inspired by the dawning urban movements, he wrote: “The right to the city is like a cry and a demand” and it is a “transformed and renewed right to urban life” (1996, 158). For Lefebvre the right to the city was a radical systemic transformation of society towards the urban society, where: “The urban is based on use value” and is “a mental and social form, that of simultaneity, of gathering, of convergence, of encounter” (1996, 131). Almost simultaneous Martin Luther King (1967) spoke out from his experiences from the civil rights movement: We have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights, an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society. We have been in a reform movement […] But after Selma and the voting rights bill, we moved into a new era, which must be the era of revolution. We must recognise that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power.

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In the end of the year King announced plans for a Poor Peoples Campaign bringing together people of all colours and from all parts of the country to create a movement. But what Lefebvre and King hoped for did not happen. Instead a condition emerged due to the neoliberalisation of society where social movements were passive. However, can we not again from many corners of nyc and locations around the world hear fresh cries and demand for a humane society expressed in diverse issues? – Workers’ centres as cswa, nmass and lwc have flourished since the 1990s. They have a comprehensive commitment to the community and are part of coalitions at city, state or national level in the fight for a living wage, health insurance, the right to organise, etc. Eventually it may lead to revitalisation of a new kind of urban labour movement and ‘social movement unionism’ (Moody 1997). – National campaigns have pushed for a ‘living wage’ for the employed in multinational chains like Walmart and Domino Pizza. The national campaign has been combined with organizing at the city-level and has resulted in 15 $ am our in la, Seattle, San Francisco, New York City and other cities. Taxi drivers have through flexible and mobile organizing of drivers carried out strikes and struggled to a result where they now can negotiate conditions with the authorities and large garages. In 2006 Latino migrants organised a series of demonstrations which culminated by a national strike April 10 ‘El Gran Paro Estadounidense’. 200,000 marched from Chinatown to Union Square. This scale-up of the conflict, which several workers centres and others are part of, has pushed the afl-cio into opening up partnerships with non-unionised groups, which are not bound by national labour laws. Among them National Taxi Workers’ Alliance (natw), which was established on the initiative of nytwa. – Occupy Wall Street, in the autumn of 2011, put the issue of inequality and exploitation, combined with the capitalist system and the financial power of capital, on the agenda with the slogan 99 per cent vs. 1 per cent. ows targeted Wall Street directly and Washington. Political discussions once again were ‘cool’. – Environmental Justice has long been a strategic perspective for the communities in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Harlem, etc. also organizing at city-level. This was expressed at the People’s Climate March in September 2014 on the global climate. – The Black Lives Matter movement in cities and at universities in response to the killing of young African Americans by the police has revitalised the struggle against racism and institutional violence of civil rights. The protests­ were not only directed against individual decisions but against deep

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systemic­racial, social and democratic problems in society caused by both racism, political decisions as well as environmental injustice. – The struggle against gentrification and displacement has boiled in Harlem and East Harlem, Chinatown, Downtown Brooklyn and lately in Crown Heights where Tenant Union among the demands have a freeze on rents for five years. Community Land Trusts has been put on the agenda by among others Picture the Homeless. The process is now taking off in the Bronx as well. – Community based organisations have for several decades and from a holistic perspective, worked in the Bronx and other boroughs to improve deprived neighbourhoods by building an organisational infrastructure and participatory processes. – New fields for struggles are popping up. The movement for the public school system and against charter schools and tests are growing. The taxi company Uber grew out of the ‘social media’ and ‘the new economy’. The National Taxi Workers’ Alliance’s (ntwa) have organised a defence against Uber’s undermining of the industry in the cities and the erosion work and the serious precarious conditions for many Uber-drivers who no longer are workers but so-called ‘sub contractors’. Both the Domestic Workers and taxi-drivers warn that their workings conditions will come to apply to many more. Precarity will spread, as argued elsewhere in this volume. Do these partial movements constitute a skeleton of fragments that come together as an outline of new qualities? All these and many more movements bring different aspects of an urban reality into the daylight and call for a broader and more powerful united movement.

The Need for a Platform, Trials and Imagination

For a long time, however, the political left has been fragmented with weak structures for unity and vague visions, even though there is a striking need for new strategies and organisational approaches that match society’s basic conditions and can break with and break out of a society deformed by the capital’s destructive struggle for survival in the web of crises. The situation calls for a turning of the game and new narratives. In New York the tension field between Mayor Bloomberg’s cooperative city and its effect on the working class and communities and the underwood of grass root initiatives, caused a remarkable backfire for Bloomberg’s 1 per cent and placed Bill de Blasio as Mayor. His promise during his election campaign that he would end ‘the tale of two cities!’ has faded and left many communities­

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and organisations in the mood of things being ‘business as usual’. Since a strong factor for the election of de Blasio was the engaged and long-running community work all over the city the frustration is growing. This also exposes the weakness in the organizing of strong and lasting positions-struggle and common perspectives to push the agenda of the working-class. Harvey points to the impact of the mode of production on the organisation since: [I]ts current political articulations define both the spaces and the forms of its own primary forms of opposition. The hegemonic practices of neoliberalism […] have given rise to decentralized and networked oppositional forms (2014, 281). The place-based struggles open crags of possibilities. MacDonald writes that the neoliberal city “provides social and physical infrastructure” for: Capital’s need for urban territories that combine these elements can create an opportunity for union bargaining leverage as well as a basis for coalition formation between unions and communities (2011, 199). The challenge for the labour movement is – beyond reformulating the political platform – to react to and rebuild on actions facing the complex living conditions workers in the city cope with. It is both a question of developing a holistic perspective and a scaling up of the labour movement as a living dynamic organism able to meet the current challenges. Since the unions has failed to respond to the conditions under neoliberalism and globalisation and the newer forms of working-class exploitation: [W]e now have a choice: mourn the passing of the possibility of revolution because that proletariat has disappeared, or change our conception of the proletariat to include the hordes of unorganized urbanization producer […], and explore their distinctive revolutionary capacities and power. harvey 2012, 130

This situation opens up for – despite of the fragmented organisations – opportunities for a coming-into-being of something else that can resonate the essence of socialism in the old labour movement. In nyc I have met a searching restlessness and an incipient new departure where the dreams of the life in the city are still larger than the organisational abilities. As asked in the introduction could the emergence of new movements and organisations­

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unite and become a collective actor with the potential for building urban working-class power today? The process takes place in a potentially transformative state of upheaval in “the critical zone” with “the urban society” as: “[A] horizon, an illuminating virtuality” and “we must first overcome or break through the obstacles that currently make it impossible” (Lefebvre 2003, 16–17). To Lefebvre only social classes and class fractions capable of revolutionary initiative can take over and realise to fruition solutions the urban problems. The working class is the key: It cannot but depend on the presence and action of the working class, the only one able to put an end to segregation directed essentially against it. lefebvre 1996, 154

But what is a city, Christian Schmid asks when “the urban level is at risk of being eroded between the general and private levels” (quoted in Brenner 2014, 70). It happens through a planetary urbanisation, where the ‘city’ as a category cannot be demarcated geographically. Consequently “the city in itself has to be embedded in the context of society as a whole and its content redefined” (quoted in Brenner 2014, 70). In accordance Harvey stresses that “to claim the right to the city is, in effect, to claim a right to something that no longer exists” (2012: xv). Schmid further claims that the city is an: “[E]ssential device for organizing society” (quoted in Brenner, 2014: 70). To claim the city is a political platform does not imply it is closed space but a democratic space for essential decision making. The right to the city is an extensive organizing perspective which can tie together many of the separate movements and activities at the community level, in workplaces, in campaigns, cultural activities, etc. into a radicalizing and accumulating urban based movement heading for more than the right to the city. Together, and in combination, these fields open transformative perspectives for the city as a political platform. This was actually what The Right to the City Alliance (rtc) set as a goal when the organisation was formed in 2007 by a number of organisations, among them a handful from nyc, which mainly worked with colored people and communities with low incomes (2011): RTC-member groups are building a dynamic municipal front with the involvement of social justice organisations, environmental groups, research think tanks, and labour to create a sustainable 21st century city. In practice, however, it is a challenge to balance the need for the necessary national campaigns on single issues and a necessary complex front with the city as a political platform. This is not a strategy for a ‘community’, but towards

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the maximum development of a leftist movement for systemic change and not just structural change. The philosophy of cswa, nmass and others show that the use of the city as a political platform is fruitful. It is here that the working class lives. The city is their place with roots, stories, culture, memories and a vivid insight into the complexity of moods, rhythms, relationships, etc. The working class and the city are inseparable, though suburbanisation and gentrification extend the concept so that ‘the right to the city’ both addresses a general centrality and the power in the centre (Merrifield 2013). The city is a site of class struggles and therefore an essential political platform of decisions and actions. In a us with big political and historical differences some cities are riper than others, some cities can have a particularly progressive role. The theoretical political clarification and new organisational models for democracy and leadership must develop in the process in the emerging structures. At city level (and higher) and in a transformative perspective, democratic organisational structures are essential. They must be conceptualised beyond the delimiting community thinking, silos, single issues, the idea of non-hierarchical organisation, non-profit organisation, etc. When the goal is democratic power, an outline of what this power looks like must also be commenced in practice. Experiences can be stitched together to form a theory of change from ‘below’ in a democratic culture which also includes some kind of managerial systems on a larger scale. Harvey poses this challenging question concretely: [I]t is precisely here that the question of how one organizes a whole city becomes so crucial. It liberates progressive forces from being organisationally locked … and forces upon us a completely different way of both theorizing and practicing an anti- capitalist politics (2014, 152). Is there any better framework than precisely the city for analysing society and to develop conceptions and practicing the ethical values of an alternative urban society? The distance from the current society to an alternative can seem enormous; therefore the alternative must be concrete and present. Lefebvre regarded utopia as a method: Only a kind of reasoned but dialectical use of utopianism will permit us to illuminate the present in the name of the future […] [can be] a basic element in revolutionary thought (1995, 357). Departing from utopia at once carries a critique of the present and a process for organizing and strategic perspectives. Harvey shares the potential of the utopia and writes there is a rich tradition of urban utopias and need for: A

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dialectical utopianism (2000). It is an approach and basis for developing and articulating counter-narratives which challenges the dominating and closed narrative on ‘there is no alternative’, to mark new roads and possibilities for an alternative society. The environmental justice movement, some of the community planning initiatives, the community gardening movement etc. have generated holistic oriented thoughts and small scale practice-based alternatives. More and more organisations are becoming aware that it is essential to have an idea of what an alternative society looks like. JoAnn Lum said that in their activities they have made it clear how the political system works in order to “open a fresh perspective – a different path with an alternative to what is out there”. rtc emphasises that their strategies and campaigns have transformative qualities and are part of a long term visioning. They work for instance with visualisation of alternatives based on analyses and on people’s dreams and aspirations. What does a city look like according to their desire and hearts? What does our commons looks like? In Rebel Cities Harvey point to the urban commons as an alternative which can unity various forms of organizing and goals for a movement (2012, 67–90). Susser and Tonnelat have concretised this suggestion in three paths and conclude that “urban commons is a possible route out of neoliberalism” (2013, 66). All neighbourhoods have enormous resources – and underutilised potential – of knowledge, hands, technology, experience, stories, culture, etc., which can be set free. What would such an urban socialism look like? The city and the urban system are tangible for applying this insight in contrast to other more abstract political levels as for instance the national level. What I experienced in New York City was a reservoir of untapped potentials for the city as a test room, where political, organisational and practical models can be scaled up and developed in processes of trials. The ground is fertile and with an objective need for developing ideas about a different society – an urban society – or an urban civilisation. Remember what the geographer Neil Smith (2008, 266) once wrote: One of the stunning things about the present is the extent to which the prospect and effect of revolutionary social change have been blanked from the imaginary of political possibility. It may not be too optimistic to begin again to encourage a revolutionary imaginary. References Airbnb in NYC Housing Report 2015. New York Communities for change. Accessed March 2 2016. http://nycommunities.org/sites/default/files/Airbnb percent20in percent20NYC.pdf.

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Angotti, Tom. New York for Sale. MIT Press, 2008. Aronowitz, Stanley. The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Worker’s Movement. Verso Books, 2014. Bauman, Zygmunt. Work, Concumerism and the New Poor. London: Open University Press, 2005. Boyer, M. Christine. The City of Collective Memory. MIT Press, 1996. Brenner, Neil. “Implosions/Explosions”. Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Jovis Verlag GMbH, 2014. Brenner, Neil and Nik Theodore, eds. Spaces of neoliberalism: urban restructuring in Western Europe and North America. Blackwell, 2002. Cadena, Andrés, Richard Dobbs and Jaana Remes. “The growing economic power of cities”. Journal of International Affairs (2012): 1–17. Certeau Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 1988. Chinatown Working Group. Comprehensive development plan for Chinatown and the surrounding areas Preserving, Affordability & Authenticity, 2013. Credit Suisse. Global Wealth Report 2015, 2015. Domestic Workers United. We Care! DWU and Center for Urban Pedagogy, 2012. Elden, Stuart. Understanding Henri Lefebvre. A&C Black, 2004. Engels Friedrich. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Project Gutenberg Ebook, [1880], 2015. Fiscal Poliscy Institute. NYS Should Act to Raise the Statewide Minimum Wage and Al­ low Localities to Set a Higher Minimum Wage. Fiscal Policy Institute, 2014. Fiscal Policy Institute – Fact Sheet. Governor Cuomoøs Call for Raising New Yorks’s Mini­ mum Wage to 15 $ Statewide, 2015. FPI Fiscal Policy Institute. Grow Together or Pull Further Apart? Income Concentration Trends in New York, 2010. Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks Vol II. Columbia University Press, 2011. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Belknap Havard, 2009. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Blackwell, 1990. Harvey, David. Space of Hope. Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Harvey, David. Spaces of Capital. Edinburgh University Press, 2001. Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford University Press, 2003. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2005. Harvey, David. Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom. Columbia University Press, 2009. Harvey, David. The Enigma of Capital. Profile Books, 2010. Harvey, David. Rebel Cities. From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso, 2012. Harvey, David. Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Profile Books, 2014. Jørgensen, Peter Shultz. New York og Kampen for Byen. Copenhagen: Frydenlund, 2013. King, Martin Luther. “Remarks to the SCLC staff in May”, 1967.

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Lefebvre, Henri. The Explosion. Monthly Review Press, 1969. Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life vol. I. London: Verso, 1991. Lefebvre, Henri. Introduction to Modernity. London: Verso, 1995. Lefebvre, Henri. Writings on Cities. Blackwell, 1996. Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life vol. II. London: Verso, 2002. Lefebvre, Henri. The Urban Revolution. University of Minnesota Press, 2003. MacDonald, Ian Thomas. “Bargaining for Rights in Luxury City: The Strategic Dilemmas of Organized Labor’s Urban Turn”. Labor Studies Journal (2011): 0160449X11404075. Marx, Karl. “The International Workingmen’s Association”. Instructions for the Del­ egates of the Provisional General Council, The Different Questions, 1866. Merrifield, Andy. The Politics of the Encounter. The University of Georgia Press. 2013. Milkman, Ruth and Luce, Stephanie. “The State of the Unions 2015”. September 2015. The Murphy Institute – CUNY, 2015. Milkman, Ruth and Ed Ott, eds. New labor in New York: Precarious workers and the fu­ ture of the labor movement. Cornell University Press, 2014. Moody, Kim. Workers in a Lean World. London: Verso, 1997. Moody, Kim. From welfare state to real estate: Regime change in New York City, 1974 to the present. New Press, 2007. Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of LIfe. Verso. 2015. Mose, Tamara R. Raising Brooklyn: Nannies, Childcare, and Caribbeans Creating Community. nyupress. 2011. New York Times. “Mayor Says New York Is Worth the Cost”, New York Times January, 8. 2003. Accessed March 2 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/08/nyregion/mayor -says-new-york-is-worth-the-cost.html. Olick, Jeffrey K., Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and Daniel Levy. The collective memory reader. Oxford University Press on Demand, 2011. Right to the City Alliance. “Building 21st Century Cities”. Oktober 2011. Accessed March 2 2016. http://righttothecity.org/about/our-work/. Sassen, Saskia. “Urban capabilities: An essay on our challenges and differences”. Jour­ nal of International Affairs (2012): 85–95. Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions. Harvard University Press, 2014. Schmid, Christian. Implosioins/Explosioins – Towards a Study of Planetary Urbaniza­ tion. Jovis, 2014. Sennett, Richard. “A flexible city of strangers”. Le monde diplomatique (2001): 23–5. Sites, William. Remaking New York – Primitive GFlobalization and the Politics of Urban Community. University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Smith, Neil. Uneven Development. Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. The University of Georgia Press, 2008. Smith, Neil. “In Williamsburg, Rocked Hard”. New York Times, May 28, 2011. Accessed March 3 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/nyregion/gentrification-brings -discord-to-williamsburg-brooklyn.html?_r=0.

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Sorkin, Michael. Twenty Minutes in Manhattan. Reaktion Books, 2009. Standing, Guy. The Precariat – The New Dangerous Class. Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. StreetEasy Blog. The High Burden of Low Wages: How Renting Affordably in NYC is Impossible on Minimum Wage. September 8, 2015. Accessed March 3 2016. http:// streeteasy.com/blog/the-high-burden-of-low-wages-how-renting-affordably-in -nyc-is-impossible-on-minimum-wage/. Susser, Ida and Stéphane Tonnelat. “Transformative cities: The three urban commons”. Focaal 2013.66 (2013): 105–121. The Wall Street Journal. “Remittances to Latin America Rose in 2014”. February 25, 2015. Accessed March 3 2016. http://www.wsj.com/articles/remittances-to-latin -america-rose-in-2014-1424901951. Women’s Center for Education and Career Advancement (WCECA) (December 2014) Overlooked and Undercounted, 2014.

chapter 13

Under the Rainbow. Migration, Precarity and People Power in Post-apartheid South Africa1 Carl-Ulrik Schierup Our communities are so broken. Millions of South Africans go to bed hungry. There is so much despair. We live with so much inequality, poverty, hunger and unemployment. When real movements emerge, this infuses humanity and social consciousness in our people. They provide a terrain of urgency as opposed to the politics of the messiah. Kota Ayanda, Chairperson of the Unemployed People’s Movement kota 2014



Ubuntu Shattered?

‘Apartheid’ was the ideological keystone of white supremacy in South Africa between 1948 and 1994. It has been recycled as a negatively loaded metaphor in numerous studies of the political economy of migration, citizenship and labour in the global ‘North’ as well as in the ‘South’.2 It remains an ideotypical signifier for ‘unfree labour’3 founded on class violence, exclusion from rights 1 This is an expanded version of an article that originally appeared as Under the Rainbow: ­Migration, Precarity and People Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa, Critical Sociology, DOI: 10.1177/0896920515621118. 2 E.g., ‘American apartheid’ depicting the conditions of a radicalized ‘underclass’ in the United States (Massey and Denton 1993), the ‘European apartheid’ of the 21st century citizenship regime of the European Union (Balibar 2004), the ‘economic apartheid’ of ‘multicultural’ Canada (Galabuzi 2006), ‘social apartheid’ in Brazil (Hunt 2007), Saudi Arabia read as ‘The Middle East’s Real Apartheid State’ (Greenfield 2014), and the declaration of an ‘independent’ Palestine as a ‘bantustan in disguise’ (Eid 2015). 3 Thus contradicting the Marxist doctrine seeing ‘free labour’ as the quintessential character of labour under capitalism. That is the wage labourer’s ‘freedom’ from ownership of the means of production, but also her basic freedom to sell her labour through negotiating, signing or terminating an employment contract (Marx 1976 [1885]). More broadly, reflecting on new trends in the international migration of labour in the 1980s, Robert Miles (1987) and Robin Cohen (1987) argued that ‘unfree labour’ more appropriately reflects the actual

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004329706_014

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of citizenship and expulsion into subdued ‘homelands’, legitimised through mythologies of race, culture, ethnicity or national identity. Simultaneously, the anti-apartheid movement and its struggle for a democratic non-racial society was one of the most important emancipatory anti-colonial struggles of the twentieth century. In both senses, the memory of apartheid has remained crucial for critical social studies and it remains essential to examine the challenges, disjunctions, social struggles and still undecided trajectory of South Africa’s post-apartheid development when researching migration, p ­ost-coloniality and imperialism in its neo-liberal appearance of ‘globalisation’, allegorically dubbed ‘global apartheid’ (Bond 2004; cf. Richmond 1994). At the end of the 1980s the long struggle against apartheid in South Africa, led by the African National Congress (anc), headed towards victory. Supported by an alliance with the South African Communist Party (sacp) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (cosatu), the anc entered negotiations in the early 1990s with the former enemy and political pillar of apartheid, the white Afrikaner-led National Party. This resulted in the formal termination of apartheid in 1994, followed by free democratic elections and the rise of a new anc led government. The South Africa born out of this ‘National Democratic Revolution’ was to be transformed into an inclusive ‘Rainbow Nation’; a metaphor coined by Nobel Prize Winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu to designate the new multicultural community of a ‘Rainbow People of God’ in a state earlier defined by apartheid’s deep rift between white and black. It was a dream of a non-racial South African ‘exceptionalism’ embodied in the Ubuntu philosophy that speaks of “the very essence of being human” (Tutu 1999, 31) in terms of universal bonds of compassion, sharing, caring and generosity. It embraces the value of African hospitality illustrated through Nelson Mandela’s parable of a “traveller through a country” who “would stop at a village and he didn’t have to ask for food or for water” (Mandela 2012). It cherishes the qualities of forgiveness and appeasement guiding the celebrated South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission which was supposed to close the era of apartheid’s race-class oppression and internecine violence. In a more laconic mood this has been depicted as a South African variety of a humanitarian discourse coming in “as a consensual bridge between the

conditions of a wide range of workers under capitalism, past and present, exposed to social exclusion, racism, discriminatory labour market segmentation and differential forms of formal and informal coercion, and thereby not having the capacity to freely circulating their labour in the market.

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reformed colonial racist traditions of the outgoing White nationalist elite and the reformed African nationalism of the incoming one” (Neocosmos 2011, 368). However, for leftist political forces in the movement against apartheid, the establishment of liberal democracy and the formal equality of citizens stood for a still ‘unfinished revolution’ (Neville Alexander 2010).4 From this perspective Ubuntu means more than a humanitarian gospel. As enshrined in the Congress of the People driven Freedom Charter5 from 1955, it enveloped the wider vision of a sustained activist countermovement contesting a predatory capitalism; a countermovement that would build ‘power to the people’ (Amandla Ngawethu) on the basis of unbounded processes of cooperative and collectivist organisation (Richards 2012). It included promises to harness South Africa’s extraordinary natural wealth to create dignified livelihoods for all, through nationalising the mines and redressing centuries of white land grabbing by redistributing the land ‘to those who work it’. Dreams apart, the Rainbow Nation actually became a rocky edifice designed by ‘architects of poverty’, contends political economist, Moeletsi Mbeki (2009). Riches and power for today’s elites stem, as before, from South Africa’s gargantuan underground resources of metals and minerals. Yet, there is no ‘pot of gold’ under the Rainbow’s end,6 but a toxic trap of a predatory extractionism that continues to drive poverty and precarity of work and citizenship in a still deeply racialised society. There is in substance ‘no black in the rainbow’7 argues human rights fellow, Reshoketswe Mapokgole (2014), in another critical exposé which depicts a multifaceted ‘xenophobia’ as ‘Afrophobia’ or ‘Negrophobia’; pitting poor black ‘natives’ against poor black ‘aliens’ in a society where inequality remains oceans deep and where a hyper-exploitative migration regime continues as one of the most controversial issues.

4 The idea of the ‘National Democratic Revolution’ was first formulated by the sacp in 1928 and was later adopted as a political charter for the broad anc led anti-apartheid struggle. The cpsa originally departed from Lenin’s understanding of the French revolution and later ‘bourgeois revolutions’ – including Russia’s first revolution of 1905 – as a still ‘unfinished’ (socialist) revolution (Sewell 2004; Slovo 1988). 5 See anc “The Freedom Charter. As Adopted at the Congress of the People, Kliptown, on 26 June 1955 ” African National Congress, http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=72. 6 This metaphor was also used by Alexander (2013, 181), arguing that “[w]e will have to demonstrate to the people of South Africa and the world that the rainbow is nothing more than ‘the united colours of capitalism’ and that the pot of gold does not lie at the end of the rainbow, but that it is an ideological construct that benefits the owners of the gold mines of South Africa and their associated multinational investors”. 7 Echoing Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (London: Hutchinson, 1987).

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Figure 13.1 Goldmining in South Africa – Archival. Gallo Images/Alamy.

Against the background of these and other outspoken voices in debates over a current crisis of economy, polity and society, in this essay we tap into a rich fund of critical research on South Africa. Without pretentions to reviewing an extended polemic of often mutually conflicting positions on the post-apartheid transformation, the objective is to merge perspectives on populist politics and migrant labour with a dialectic take on the precarity of work and citizenship. The essay starts with a condensed review of the post-apartheid transition focusing on systemic drivers of poverty, inequality and precarious livelihoods. We discuss the transformation of South Africa’s labour force management and its migratory system from a centralised regime of unfree labour run by the apartheid state bureaucracy to a post-apartheid state of precarity, driven by ‘flexploitation’ (Bourdieu 1999, 84). We stress (with Goldring and Landholt 2011) the complex intertwining of precarious work and a fracturing citizenship; a synthetic merger of two trends in contemporary globalisation. It represents a ‘duality of flexibility’ (Lazaridis and Psimmenos 2000) linking practices of employment and labour control to areas like welfare benefits, citizenship status, political participation and informal livelihoods, applicable to migrants and natives alike, but with migrants being particularly ‘flexible’. We go on to look

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at the politics of xenophobia as a stratagem for retaining hegemony at a moment marked by fierce labour struggles and by an insurgent citizenship of the poor, beyond the reach of neoliberal governance. Our argument concentrates on ‘precarity’ as representing “both a condition and a possible rallying point for resistance” (Waite 2008, 412).

Unfree Labour as Colonial Legacy

Apartheid, installed as the ruling ideology in the Union of South Africa with the ascent to power of the Afrikaner-dominated National Party in 1948, was a re-forged white hegemony founded on an alliance between English speaking capitalists and an Afrikaner political elite. It integrated a white working class, benefiting from citizenship, social welfare and privileged access to skilled occupations but exposed the republic’s black majority population to deepening disenfranchisement, segregation and unfree labour. It represented, as such, a new exceptionally austere phase in the accumulation strategy of capitalism in South Africa, in the dispossession of black Africans from their land and in the making and remaking of a system of migrancy designed for the ­hyper-exploitation of cheap, unfree labour. Differential Afrikaner practices for “turning indigenous people into unfree wage labourers” (Terreblanche 2003, 9), with roots back in 17th century white settlement, were fundamentally remoulded in the context of a state driven and institutionally embedded racial capitalism under 19th century British colonial rule (Keegan 1982). Gold mining, a central interest of British imperial capitalism from the late 19th century, created an increasing demand for cheap, unfree labour. Politics for controlled proletarianisation and a steady supply of cheap African labour for the mines under late colonial rule progressively crafted a centrally monitored system of oscillating rural-urban migrant labour covering large swathes of Southern Africa. It was an antecedent of and model for the management of labour in the South African economy in later times (First 1982; Jeeves 1985; Terreblanche 2003, 239ff). After the end of the South African War and the establishment of the Union of South Africa as a British dominion in 1910, an Afrikaner political elite with skills and interests in the procurement of cheap, black, unfree labour became a strategic ally of white Anglo-capitalists who controlled the mining industry. It was at the time favoured over a potential alliance with a black professional and business elite with roots in 19th century British colonialism (Mbeki 2009). ‘Native Reserves’ – instituted through the Land Act of 1913 and based on an alliance between Anglo-controlled mining companies and Afrikaner

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l­ andowners – meant a critically extended legal-institutional step in politics for controlled proletarianisation of Africans and the enforcement of unfree migrant labour. The Land Act forced the majority of black South Africans to live in restricted rural areas, functioning as downsized reserves for cheap labour. Men of working age were forced to work in the mines outside of the restricted reserves in order to secure the livelihoods of rural households. A ‘free rent’ was attained by capital through the continuous partial reproduction of this predominantly male migrant labour force through unpaid female labour in the subsistence economies of the rural reserves (cf. Meillassoux 1981 (1975); Wolpe 1972). Thus, Sampie Terreblanche (2003, 261)8 concludes in summarising accomplishments of the Land Act: [t]he fact that the African ‘reserves’ and foreign southern African countries originally bore part of the cost of gold production made it possible for the gold industry to create an extremely successful system of plundering not only African men but also African land. It was a racial capitalism that was progressively consolidated politically and made to serve not only capitalist mining but the labour needs of Afrikaner farmers. It was underpinned through systemic disenfranchisement and discrimination of non-white South Africans. It built a pervasive order of racial segregation, designed to accommodate the particular interests and harness the loyalty of a growing white Afrikaner proletariat9. Apartheid, formally instituted in 1948, remodelled and further exacerbated this historical process of alienation. Rationalised through a politics of so-called ‘separate development’ it turned former ‘natives’ into ‘foreigners’ contained in shrunken native ‘Homelands’ or ‘Bantustans’; by design phony nation states under the spurious authority of ‘native chiefs’ and, in actuality, a revamped system of colonial indirect rule. Apartheid barred black Africans from citizenship in the ‘white’ Republic of South Africa, and – through a centralised statemonitored labour regime powered by a forceful state bureaucracy and draconic security trapped millions of ‘foreign natives’ (Neocosmos 2015) in a permanent condition of rural-urban migrancy and unfree labour (Wolpe 1972). White farmers’ control of the vast majority of agricultural land (progressively grabbed by settlers during centuries of colonial rule) and a range of discriminatory measures directed against black peasants, r­emodelling colonial ­precedents, 8 With reference to, among others, Harold Wolpe’s (1972) work on the political economy of racial capitalism and cheap labour in South Africa. 9 Influenced by parallel politics of segregation in the United States.

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deprived the African rural population of the security of land ownership. This was combined with temporary labour contracting administered by centralised agencies, a system of quasi-military regimented male migrant workers’ compounds in mining areas and peri-urban townships, together with restrictive pass laws designed to contain black urban settlement (Frankel 1979). The policies of urban segregation included bulldozing racially mixed neighbourhoods in favour of establishing securitised black peri-urban townships. Through an administrative Bantustanisation of townships many black urban dwellers lost their right of residence in ‘South Africa’ and were in effect made subject to the contractual labour regime. ‘Forced removal’ of ‘surplus people’ involved the resettlement of black South Africans from mixed townships and white rural areas to the Bantustans (Henrard 1995–96; Platzky and Walker 1985). Apartheid’s system of migrant labour within South Africa was paralleled by a wider southern African regional regime procuring contracted migrant labour for South Africa’s mines, commercial agriculture and industries. Like migration within the territory of South Africa, this took off in the late 19th century, connected with colonial diamond and gold mining industries and it continued throughout the 20th century. In the colonial period, sending communities across the southern African region were controlled through ‘indirect rule’ in alliance with ‘native’ authorities (e.g., Mamdani 1996). It continued during apartheid through Pretoria’s collaboration with ‘traditional chiefs’ in the Bantustans and its political influence across the region. The republic had struck bilateral recruitment agreements with most bordering territories and states,10 from which migrant workers were drawn (Wentzel and Tlabela 2006). In the South African mines 40 per cent of the workforce was not South Africans throughout most of the 20th century, and about the time of liberation this had gone as high as 60 per cent (Crush 2003, 3). Migration to the mines was mostly formally regulated during apartheid, while undocumented labour was more common in agriculture. A prevailing circular migration was consistent with the control of settlement by blacks in urban areas. Like Bantustanised ‘internal’ migration, it engaged countless unsalaried workers, mainly females, labouring in the sending communities. This constituted a precondition for the reproduction of a mainly male, underpaid and hyper-exploited migrant labour force (Wolpe 1972). But whereas the control of urban influx was relinquished for migrants from the Bantustans in 1986, cross-border workers were never granted urban residence.

10

Among others, what are present day Mozambique, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Swaziland.

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From Racial Fordism to Neoliberal Precarity

Apartheid with its comprehensive system for mobilising hyper-exploited unfree black migrant labour was designed primarily to serve the labour needs of the mining industry and capitalist agriculture. Yet it came into conflict with rival capitalist claims as South Africa was developed into Africa’s most industrialised state through a policy of import substitution (e.g. Legassick and Wolpe 1976). It was a particular version of ‘peripheral Fordism’ (Lipietz 1982). Gelb (1987) referred to it as a ‘racial Fordism’, the industrial dynamism and economic differentiation of which was curbed by apartheid’s deep racial dualism and a political economy grounded on a path dependent (post-)colonial accumulation scheme. This disjunction has been identified as an important driver for a long-run economic decline in the 1980s and it has remained an exacerbating structural predicament following the democratic South Africa into the new millennium in spite of a radically changed political framework and changing relations of race and class (Mbeki 2009). The decade preceding the final caving in of apartheid in the early 1990s was marked by recession, international sanctions and widening cracks in the white hegemony. The exclusion of black Africans from qualified professions had become increasingly inopportune for influential factions of capital, and a powerful anti-apartheid popular mass movement – in particular, the growing strength of a ‘community unionism’ breaching workplaces and black townships, city and rural areas, with migrant workers on the forefront (Bramble 2003) – had turned apartheid’s strategy for procuring cheap labour down a cul-de-sac. The Convention for a Democratic South Africa (codesa), negotiated between the anc and the National party in the early 1990s, brought an end to apartheid and eventuated in the first universal multiparty elections in 1994. It established a non-racial political democracy and universal citizenship and avoided a protracted civil war but it came at the price of a compromise with domestic and international corporate capital that, seconded by pressure from the international monetary institutions, was to sell out on values of social equality and policies of redistribution that had been pivotal for the trade unions, the sacp and left factions of the anc. It pertained moreover to the ditching of demands for nationalisation of the mines and land reform to benefit the rural poor. It actually speeded up, a development that had already taken off under the crisis-ridden apartheid of the 1980s and transformed a state-regulated regime, characteristic of Africa’s post-colonial developmental state, into a neoliberal one (Buhlungu 2010). In 1996 this was inscribed in a neoliberal structural adjustment programme, the Growth, Employment, and

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­ edistribution programme (gear), which led to the dismantling of national R currency regulations, the adoption of free trade agreements, tax reduction, corporate restructuring detrimental to labour rights and the organisation of workers, welfare state retrenchment and the privatisation of public services. cosatu initially won the battle to embed social democratic labour market institutions in economic governance but lost the battle within the anc government to pursue corresponding fiscal and monetary policies (Fine 2014, 336). The tripartite alliance’s original neo-Keynesian Reconstruction and Development Programme (rdp), spearheaded by cosatu, was put on the backburner together with the vision of a social democratic, post-apartheid ‘social compact’ which prioritised employment growth, labour rights and an inclusive redistributive policy for combating poverty and social inequality (Barchiesi 2011; Fogel 2015; Maharajh 2011). One strand of South African critical research focuses on ‘elite transition’ and shifting race-class alliances driving this development: from “white Afrikaner political rulers to blacks in Pretoria, with Johannesburg’s white Englishspeaking capitalists retaining overall control of the economy, yet permitted to disinvest their apartheid-era wealth” (Bond 2000, 575). The transition reflects, argues Mbeki (2009, 39–100), the persistent post-apartheid power and influence of the South African ‘Minerals-Energy Complex’ (mec). It was, argues Terreblanche (2003, 95ff) in his monumental work on the history of inequality in South Africa, headed by the powerful Anglo-American Corporation in a ‘fourth phase’ of the search for an advantageous accumulation strategy at the point when apartheid’s centralised bureaucratic state and its vast security ­apparatus had – under the impact of unionisation and the anti-apartheid struggle– played out its role in procuring cheap labour for the mining industry. mec ‘oligarchs’ now intensified a search for a new alliance with a modern liberal black South African urban middle class with its roots in British colonialism. It had historically been a driving force within the anc. In the political and business strategy of late apartheid since the end of the 1970s it had, although discontented with the political arrangement, come to be seen as a social layer with vested interests in the prevailing economic system, essential to promoting a perceived “buffer zone” between the privileged white elite and “the ­hungry and oppressed black multitudes” (Mngxitama, et al. 2008). Following the post-1994 political settlement a politics of affirmative action adopted the old regime’s racial categorisation, but turned its rationale topsyturvy; from a bureaucratic tool for racial segregation and white supremacy into an instrument for social justice and inclusion, explicitly aiming to guarantee the entry into qualified jobs and to fuel the mobility of members of ‘­previously

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disadvantaged’ population groups up the occupational hierarchy (Black ­Africans, Colored, Asian/Indian).11 At the same time, a muscular lynchpin of the new post-apartheid elite alliance was to become ‘Black Economic Empowerment’ (bee). It meant a transfer of corporate shares to a limited number of selected black so-called Previously Disadvantaged Individuals (pdis), including prominent union leaders, with the manifest aim of supporting the making of a prosperous black bourgeoisie. Its effects were supposed eventually to ‘trickle down’ and alleviate poverty among the black majority. An initial step in its realisation was the setting up of the Black Economic Empowerment Commission (beec) in 1998 chaired by Cyril Ramaphosa. In the 1980s he was a prominent trade union leader credited with the building up of one of South Africa’s most important labour unions, the National Union of Mineworkers. Today he is deputy president of the anc and the country, and one of South Africa’s wealthiest and most powerful individuals.12 Through their alliance with an emerging black political and economic elite the white mec oligarchy could retain their grip on the huge natural resources of South Africa, while at the same time, aided by the provisions of the neoliberal compact, they could safeguard their capital against possible political perturbations through transferring corporate headquarters and profits abroad (Bond 2013,575). The deal provided a radical opening for the importation of manufactured consumer goods. This lowered the cost of labour for the mec but resulted in overwhelming international competition with the domestic non-MEC manufacturing sector shedding permanent jobs and creating precarious ones mainly located in retailing and services (Barchiesi 2011; Mbeki 2009; Newman and Takala-Greenish 2014). It produced a multi-million ­post-apartheid South African precariat caught between a toxic web of agencies forging temporary, contingent and insecure employment and the commodification of ­‘de-racialised’ policies for combating poverty and inequality. Growing welfare transfers and policies of service delivery and the provision of housing for poor South Africans during the 2000s13 may, seen from this perspective, have served to secure survivalist livelihoods, to boost the hegemony of the anc and to safeguard its victory in consecutive general elections. With 11

Yet, argue critics (e.g. Maré 2014), passing over the structural underpinnings of social ‘class’ and potentially at loggerheads with the target of transforming South Africa into a ‘non-racial democracy’. 12 Formal bee legislation passed in 2003 and later consecutively amended. 13 For details see The Republic of South Africa “Millennium Development Goals. Country Report 2013. Minister’s Report”, (Pretoria: Statistics South Africa, 2013).

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“the sons of the nation… in charge after all”14 it has kept the poor anticipating a more prolific ‘trickle down’ of the wealth of the nation, which will, however, hardly materialise under the conditions of the prevailing political economy. [B]lack people who had been reduced to an impoverished and vulnerable proletariat by the cruel system of apartheid were now exposed to the relentless tyranny of ‘free market’ forces. terreblanche 2003, 77

In the final analysis, contended Terreblanche, the Rainbow Nation reproduced a despondent condition of multidimensional poverty and systemic exclusion among poor blacks, passed down from the late crisis ridden phase of apartheid. Similarly, a report by oxfam (2013) ten years later concludes it has only marginally faced up to a “triple challenge” of “poverty, inequality and unemployment”. According to World Bank statistics,15 in 2011 over half of all South Africans lived below the national poverty line of around four US$ a day; more than twice as many as in Mexico, Brazil or Peru. This exceptionally high level of poverty for a middle income country reflects South Africa’s apparent inability to reduce inequality. South Africa has one of the highest rates of inequality in the world. Measured by a Gini coefficient close to 0.70 it outdoes the United States (Gini 41), Brazil (53) or Russia (40 in 2009); themselves three of the globe’s most unequal societies. Inequality in incomes is not limited to wages and wealth, but also encompasses the means of obtaining access to, and use of, services, public goods and natural resources (oxfam 2013). One factor pushing poverty and inequality is unemployment which is measured at 25 per cent according to official statistics but is closer to 40 per cent if those who have given up applying for formal employment are counted. Unemployment is particularly high among poor blacks, black youths and in former Bantustan areas (Leibbrandt, et al. 2009,12; oecd 2013). A profound race-class inequality is reproduced through a two-tiered public-private health service and through a school system which fails to favour poor black youth in terms of quality of education, pass rates and employment prospects. Average interracial income inequality has decreased during the postapartheid period, but remains massive. In comparison intra-racial inequality among black South Africans has risen. Black representation among the professional and managerial strata has grown substantially. Increasing numbers have 14 15

Paraphrasing Ayi Kwei Armah’s (1968, 10) reflection on Africa’s post-colonial predicament in The Beautiful Ones are not yet Born. World Bank Poverty and Inequality Statistics, April 2015.

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e­ ntered the nation’s professional and business elites through, among other factors, affirmative action and the bee but at the expense of the continued exploitation of a huge reserve army of cheap, precarious labour, particularly amongst black women, youths and internal and cross border migrants (Gentle 2011). Poverty and unemployment remain concentrated in former Bantustan areas, but increasingly tilt towards peri-urban informal settlements; black ‘townships’ with conditions similar to ‘shanty towns’ or ‘favelas’ in the globe’s least favoured states, and with a high inflow of internal as well as African crossborder migrants. Poor people who have been evicted, as their homes have been seized on the frontlines of housing privatisation, gentrification or prestigious governmental projects, have, time and again, become concentrated in the ‘blikkies’ (new build corrugated iron shacks) of depressing so-called ‘temporary relocation areas’ (Ranslem 2015). These trends notwithstanding, a more adequate analysis than that which is mostly offered by critics of South Africa’s alleged neoliberal trajectory, contends Habib (2013) in South Africa’s Suspended Revolution, should build on a thoughtful understanding of shifting constellations of power energised by progressive democratisation. The side-lining of the anc’s leftist partners ­(cosatu and the sacp) within the tripartite alliance in the 1990s must be seen against the background of the global neoliberal political surge of the time, an overwhelming power of corporate capital at the moment of the republic’s initial democratic transformation, along with the National Party’s continued grip on the army and police. Made possible through democratisation the balance of power has changed during the 2000s with the strengthened clout of cosatu and the sacp and the empowerment of a differentiated and critical ­post-apartheid civil society. It has meant a progressive reorientation in social policy and infrastructural development, in particular after the election of a supposedly left leaning Jacob Zuma as leader of the anc in 2007 and as president of the republic in 2009 (pushed by cosatu, the sacp and the anc Youth Alliance). It has brought forth a change from neoliberalism to a factual social democratic neo-Keynesian regime with ‘hopes and prospects’ for the formation of a new inclusive social compact. This alternative narrative seems however to have missed what has, in the European context, been discussed in terms of social democracy’s ‘Third Way’ neoliberal turn, rationalising a transformation of northern welfare states through the commodification of social policy, health, public services and infrastructure, with widely polarising consequences in terms of class and ‘race’ (Schierup, et al. 2014). A similar policy of “commercialisation by stealth” ­(McDonald and Ruiters 2012, 170) has been applied by the imf and the World Bank to transform the developmental state in the global South. A comparable

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trajectory in South Africa has been analysed by critics in terms of Zuma’s Own Goal (Maharaj, et al. 2011); that is losing the Rainbow Nation’s ‘war on poverty’ through devising a “talk left, speak right” commodifying policy agenda embedded in an austere fiscal policy (Bond 2014). The argument relates to a policy of providing ‘Free Basic Services’, guaranteeing a minimum of water and electricity to poor households; yet jeopardised through its marriage to a neoliberal doctrine of ‘cost recovery’, which allows service providers to demand exorbitant prices for everything over that minimum and to subcontract public service delivery to private corporations or ngos plus the option to establish austere systems of prepayment for basic necessities. It runs in tandem with ‘Corporate Welfare’. This means providing discounted electricity to industrial users, the mec in particular, while “citizens cannot get a dependable supply at any price” (also Bond 2012; Bond 2006). It amounts to the public policy promotion of an ‘electric capitalism’ with adverse consequences for health, gender equity, environmental sustainability and socio-economic justice (McDonald 2012). ‘Microcredits’ is another instrument supposedly combating poverty. However, this operates through distorting microcredit rules and mechanisms administered by the large South African banks and according to several in-depth studies functions as another medium for ‘accumulation through dispossession’,16 driven by an oversized post-­apartheid financial sector. It pushed survivalist strategies over the brink to debt peonage and ignited combustible divisions of race, class and gender in the process (Bateman 2014; Hietalahti 2013). It relates, finally, to the embeddedness of amplified state-funded welfare transfers in a dysfunctional wedlock between path dependent paternalistic regulations, reminiscent of the apartheid era, and disciplinary means testing circumscribed by fiscal rigor. Although de-racialised and greatly extended in breadth it is seen as largely ‘tokenistic’, without the capacity to lift the weight of the World17 off the backs of South Africa’s poor (Bond 2014). It is a stalemate, argues Barchiesi (2011), which needs to be discussed with a synthesising focus on the nexus of a disciplinary citizenship and precarious labour.

Vagaries of Flexploitation

A critical element in South Africa’s post-apartheid transformation was the deracialisation of labour legislation during the second half of the 1990s, through 16 17

Referring to Harvey (2005). My allusion to Bourdieu (1999).

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which apartheid’s labour legislation (introduced to protect unionised skilled and semi-skilled white workers), was reformed and extended to cover all unionised, skilled and semi-skilled South African workers. Thus legislation that formerly protected the privileges of an elite of white workers should in ­future ensure privileges for an elite of post-apartheid workers, of “whatever race or skin” (Seekings 2007, 18). But in the same instance it moved, argues Seekings, “vestiges of the apartheid era’s division between insiders and outsiders inside the workplace [to the] outside of the workplace, so that the (formally) employed were now all insiders whilst the unemployed, casual workers and informally employed remained outsiders”. Here Seekings, following from his work with Nattrass (2005), focuses on one of the drivers of poverty and inequality in post-apartheid South Africa. Yet the argument succumbs to a weakness similar to that of Standing (2011), who sees the ‘precariat’ as a particular ‘class’ beyond the insider interests of what remains of Fordism’s protected, privileged blue-collar working class and the unions representing them; whereas, following Seymour (2012), “precarity exerts effects right up the chain of class strata, throughout the working class and into sections of the middle class”. Seeing an enduring opposition between privileged ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ without skills and formal employment, comes up short when facing a post-apartheid intellectual and political discourse on ‘flexibility’ that has entered social reality as a ‘material force’ (Bezuidenhout, et al. 2004; Bezuidenhout and Kenny 2000). This ‘force’ poses, as elsewhere (Schierup, et al. 2015), an immense challenge to unions. It is manifest in legislation pushing the commodification of labour, but no less through installing a quo ante bellum state of flexibility through informalization, disregarding or covertly circumventing formal regulations. Employment triangulation, ‘externalising work’ through outsourcing, subcontracting and the displacement of responsibility for recruitment, employment, salary and working conditions from large, profit-making corporations to the practices of a multitude of private labour brokers have been identified as drivers of the informalization of labour and the growth of new forms of unfree labour (Benjamin 2013; Benjamin 2013) perpetuating colonialism’s and apartheid’s ‘legacy of systemic exploitation’ (Terreblanche 2003). Thus, a multitude of opaque corporate practices of ‘informalization from above’ (Theron 2010) has replaced apartheid’s top-down extra-economic force as driver of a casualised, socially insecure and disempowered multitude, bound into unfree labour (Benjamin 2013). This prescription is established by the repression of organised agency. It is contingent on systemically embedded de-regulation, de-unionisation and an ethno-racially rationalised disbanding of broader solidarities.

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A composite precarious labour pool is overwhelmingly black, to a considerable degree migrant, and increasingly female. The spaces it occupies become, in turn, sites for active reproduction of ‘informalization from below’ where the poor employ inventive livelihood strategies which are beyond the reach of ­formal regulatory frameworks.18 A widening grey area has come into existence “where the boundaries of formal and informal production become hazy and undistinguished […] and where employment is hardly conducive to social inclusion and citizenship” (Barchiesi 2010, 68). A majority of the employed have been recorded as falling into the precarious category of ‘working poor’ (Altman 2006, 11ff). In the wide zone of informality and the vortex of temporary agency work migrants have a ‘comparative advantage’ for many employers, as they make a particularly cheap and flexible labour force. This pertains to cross border migrants who are bereft of powers to negotiate due to their dispossessed status (Fine 2014; Gordon 2010), above all the undocumented, but is also matched by the ‘comparative disadvantage’ of domestic migrants, squeezed into unfree labour through forces of unequal regional development, poverty, debt, and their desertion by organised labour (Xulu 2010). Migrants from the Bantustans were at the forefront of the struggle against apartheid and yet they remain among South Africa’s most disadvantaged and are currently neglected by the unions (Fine 2014; Xulu 2010). Abject conditions in former Bantustan areas drive them into poverty stricken townships. Here they share spaces with a medley of South Africa’s most disadvantaged, including a growing population of irregular, trans-border labour migrants and refugees and asylum seekers whose lives in informality are conditioned by an ostensibly liberal, but allegedly unreliable, asylum regime flourishing with corruption (Amit 2015; Northcote 2015). Trans-border migrants travel from neighbouring regions, whence the apartheid regime used to recruit labour but come also as undocumented labour migrants and as refugees from more distant parts of Africa, such as the Congo and Somalia (Tati 2008). Their concrete situation and opportunities depend on the geographical hinterlands they migrate from, the specific dynamics to which they respond, their claims on the South African state, and their respective skills, qualifications and networks (Kok, et al. 2006). But as a general trend, the centre of gravity of African cross border migration has shifted from a preponderance of formally regulated contract labour under apartheid to the employment of undocumented workers in the 2000s (Fine 2014; Gordon 2010; Tati 2008). The adoption of internationally monitored structural adjustment programs across sub-Saharan Africa, often combined with internecine conflicts, has produced increased 18

Theron (2010; cf. Slavnic 2010). See also Schierup (2015).

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­reliance on informal livelihoods, premised on cross border migration and petty trading, with South Africa as the prime destination. The prevalent South African response has been to stem migration through a reaffirmation of state sovereignty, exclusionary migration policies and securitisation (Evans 2010,105; Trimikliniotis, et al. 2008); a condition reinforced by new legal restrictions on cross-border migration and the acquisition of citizenship in 2014 (Dube 2014). This reflects the anc’s efforts to craft a new national identity after liberation and a politics of confirming citizenship rights for insiders through exclusivism towards neighbors, which consequently incites xenophobia (Fine 2014; Johnson 2007). Throughout the post-apartheid period ‘illegal migrants’ have been vilified by politicians and the media. They are exposed to daily harassment by black ‘native’ township dwellers. Educating the citizenry in ‘migration issues’ and encouraging them to “‘root out’ and report ‘illegal immigrants’ to state authorities”, together with empowering police officers, has allegedly exacerbated the situation (Neocosmos 2006, 96–7). Yet inconsistent border control and institutional practices across the political and administrative apparatus give rise to “permeable borders” (Tsianos and Karakayali 2010) in spite of restrictions. A ‘Fortress South Africa’ (Crush 1999; Trimikliniotis, et al. 2008) is thus similar to ‘Fortress Europe’ and ‘emerging economies’ of sub-Saharan Africa (like Nigeria, Ghana and Botswana), in “profiting from irregular migration while denouncing it”.19 Unlike earlier times when trans-border migrants were concentrated in mining and agriculture they have now become a preferred cheap and flexible labour force in a range of low wage economic sectors, including municipal services, construction, retailing, and health care (Fine 2014). Police round-ups in informal peri-urban townships and continuous deportations reign in tandem with entry through the clandestine practices of private transporters, labour brokers, the police and other public agencies (Kihato and Landau 2006; Tshabalala 2015) which are allegedly shot through with corruption (Amit 2015). Thus the mostly formal and centralised regulation of cross-border African migration under apartheid has been replaced by a predominantly informal regime (Segatti 2011,56) according to the logic of which “periods of ‘tolerance’ and ‘crackdowns’ appear to conveniently alternate with periods of labor needs and labor surplus” (cf. Gordon 2010). Undocumented migration is neither an entirely new phenomenon nor is it far from being the only route for African labour migrants into contemporary South Africa (e.g., Fine 2014; Vigneswaran 2007). At the same time migrants need not be ‘undocumented’ in order to be incorporated in novel types of informalized precarious labour. They may be formally recruited through ­temporary 19

Tobias (2012, 6) quoting Guilfoyle (2010, 1).

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contracts, they may be refugees or asylum seekers, and yet be entangled in covert webs of informal labour relations. A range of studies has scrutinised the differential impact of informalization, spurious labour relations and the manipulation of migrant status, race and gender in, among others, capitalist agriculture (Theron 2010), municipal services (Barchiesi 2011; Miraftab 2004), hospitality (MiWORC 2014), manufacturing (Barchiesi 2010) and the building industry (Cottle and Rombaldi 2014), all confronting the South African labour unions with strenuous predicaments and vexing dilemmas. Still, it is the precarisation of work and livelihoods fuelled by the post-­ apartheid accumulation strategy of the mec that could bring these predicaments and, in connection with this, the anc’s ‘social contract’ with South Africa’s poor to breaking point (Robert Cohen 2013).

Marikana and the Demise of Community Unionism

On August 16, 2012 this was put under national and international spotlight owing to the massacre enacted by the South African Police Service on striking mineworkers protesting against the management strategies of the Lonmin mining company20 at its site of operation bordering the township of Marikana in the Rustenburg platinum belt. It was the macabre climax of a protracted labour conflict, involving – on the one side – the company management, leading cadres of the anc and the National Union of Mineworkers (one of cosatu’s most important affiliates), and – on the other side – the breakaway Association of Mineworkers and Construction Unions (amcu), mobilising the protesting workers, including numerous migrant workers. This fatal act of police violence tarnished the glorious reputation of South Africa’s exceptionalism internationally and brought a looming crisis of the anc and the labour movement to a head. Yet this was only, comments Frankel (2013, 163) acidly in a piercing study of the South African mining industry, one “small massacre” amidst an ocean of less reported everyday destruction of labour, human lives, land and money related to the mec. Beyond polished corporate reports portraying sustainable labour force management and responsible community development, this ‘vast scale of things’ (Frankel 2013, 163) underlying the Marikana imbroglio exposes an extended illicit undercutting of labour standards (Forrest 2013) causing frequent work-related ­accidents, injuries, illnesses and early deaths with both the unions and the government complicit (Frankel 2013, 24ff). It is contingent on methodical strategies 20

London registered with its operational base in Johannesburg.

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of ­‘informalization from above’, on inept management of migration (Frankel 2013, 82ff) and a proliferating micro-financial industry’s “deliberate and programmed engagement with some of the most vulnerable and exploited individuals in the country” (Bateman and Sharife 2014). Migrant workers are recruited to the industry’s most arduous jobs from the same impoverished regions across South and Southern Africa whence the apartheid regime drafted migrant labour. They are exposed to illicit practices of labour brokers, traffickers, township landlords and usurers. Many are undocumented and unprotected ‘irregulars’. Others belong to the most vulnerable among the mining districts’ numerous temporary ‘contracted workers’. The contracted workers are, contends Frankel (2013,99), the precarious labourers who are for fear of dismissal, “persuaded” to enter “hazardous areas where permanent workers will not go […] and do not have to go under existing legislation”. Migrant workers make up, he reports, a rising proportion of the contracted workers. Their factual conditions will depend on the “unscrupulousness of brokers and end-users, the nature of demand in the market, the availability of men, women and children desperate for work under any circumstances, and in the last analysis, the capacity of the Department of Labour to monitor its own laws and regulations”. Dependence on criminal networks of traffickers, local or international, and on community-based money lenders, debt collecting thugs and tight-fisted landlords, forces them into debt peonage and a position of de facto unfree labour. This means a state of insecurity and bondage, which may apply to many locally domiciled workers and to South African migrant workers alike, but to which trans-border migrants are particularly at risk due to their conditioned and often ‘illegal’ residence. The employment of a mainly male labour force reaps, as under apartheid and the colonial regime, hyper-profits through the subvention of sub-minimal wages by unpaid productive and reproductive work of women in poor migrant hinterlands. Young women trafficked to the mines have scant opportunities for employment and often end up as prostitutes in destitute shanty towns surrounding the mines. Thus colonialism’s and apartheid’s migration systems, built on hyper-exploited unfree precarious labour, are reproduced under the current informal conditions. The Marikana crucible became the ultimate proof of Sakhela Buhlungu’s (2010) piercing analysis in A Paradox of Victory depicting a post-apartheid demise of South Africa’s inclusive community unionism. Alongside acts of overarching labour solidarity in the fair new world of ‘flexibility’, ethno-nationally rationalised conflicts loom; in the mining industry as well as in other economic sectors and across townships. This mirrors the refurbished politics of labour force control as well as jeopardised union strategies for the containment of

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informal labour (Theron 2010). In retrospect, 1994 was a moment when union leaders and activists started to move into positions within the anc and state institutions, and many black workers climbed the occupational ladder to take up key positions in enterprise hierarchies. But it ushered in, as well, new modes of corporate control. Control in the apartheid period was, c­ ontend ­Bezuidenhout and Buhlungu (2011), subject to centralised bureaucratic and police containment whereas today’s corporate control is dominated by a fragmenting differentiation driven by ‘the market’. It is inscribed in a political economy of re-racialisation, with the black political elite as well as the labour movement being complicit. Under cover of a discourse on working class unity and ‘decent work’, ­c osatu  – leaving its community unionism behind after the demise of apartheid  – has, according to its critics, failed to address the conditions of ­precarious workers and poor township dwellers in general and migrants in particular ­(Barchiesi 2011; Buhlungu 2010; Fine 2014; Hlatshwayo 2010). It has taken a defensive stance, rather than an active one, on the organisation of crossborder migrants in South Africa and across the region. They are the people who, through their ‘foreign’ backgrounds, the informality of their livelihoods, their precarious position in terms of rights and their exposure to vigilantism and harassment, represent the embodiment of today’s South African precariat. The labour unions have, in general, not been willing or able to include in their ranks this multi-ethnic precariat of ‘natives’ and ‘foreigners’ embroiled in informal conditions of work and vulnerable livelihoods (Barchiesi 2011; Fine 2014; Theron 2010). Migrants, in particular, are – as recorded by several critical studies – seldom seen by unions as social agents to be included on their own premises in a broader struggle for changing the balance of forces in workplaces and townships; therefore the unions share responsibility for the persistence of a fragmenting xenophobia (Fine 2014; Hlatshwayo 2010).

Xenophobia – A Strange Fruit of Democracy

What conventionally figures in the South African debate as ‘xenophobia’ has been a feature of the post-apartheid era since its beginning and remains a persistent daily reality (Crush 2000; Neocosmos 2015). It is reflected in a strange discursive transition from ‘Kaffir’, a pejorative term for black South Africans under apartheid with colonial roots, to KwereKwere; today’s principal derogative term for the black African ‘foreigner’, with a ‘peculiar speech’, an ‘alien culture’ and with an imagined darker pigmentation than ‘native’ black South A ­ fricans;

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here in Ndumiso Mbatha’s (2013) Chronicles of a Slave Chain condensed as a lived migrant experience: My accent is ridiculed and I am mocked as I walk by the street; greatly prejudged and discriminated because my skin is different. I am called Nigger, Kaffir, Nyukunyuku, Kwerekwere, Cockroach and Chocolate by my brothers of my blood. Far from being shared by all South Africans, so-called ‘xenophobic attitudes’ have been proved common and equally represented among “the poor and the rich, the employed and the unemployed, the male and the female, the black and the white, the conservative and the radical” (Crush and Pendleton 2004, 2). Yet, it is a violent, repeatedly deadly, black-against-black harassment and looting across poor black townships which has come to embody the image of a virulent ‘sickness of xenophobia’ (Neocosmos 2015); or read with Fanon (1967) as an internalised white ‘Negrophobia’ (e.g., Mapokgole 2014; Mbembe 2015). And it is Alexandra – one of South Africa’s most destitute black townships – bordering Sandhurst, one of Johannesburg’s richest residential areas, and South Africa’s prime business centre, with the stock exchange and the gold and diamond exchange – that continues to figure as its corporeal symbol. In May 2008 attacks on migrants in the township hit the headlines of the South African and the international press. From this ‘spark’ it spread like wildfire to townships across the country. It left more than sixty dead migrants, hundreds injured, more than 150,000 homeless and much demolished or looted property; most of the victims were cross border migrants, but they also included victims belonging to groups of internal South African migrant workers deemed not to belong to the local community. Although brutally separated and seemingly worlds apart, today no less than during apartheid settlements like affluent Sandhurst and shanty town Alexandra are intimately connected (Mingxitama 2008, 197). Similar to other global cities of the world, the historically accumulated wealth of areas like Sandhurst, Johannesburg – under apartheid all white, today shared by whites and a growing class of wealthy blacks – is produced through the backbreaking labour of a sprawling multi-ethnic precariat in destitute townships like Alexandra. At the same time, whites and the wealthy black middle class were the ones that “expressed the most surprise and disgust at the violence that had taken place” (Mapokgole 2014, 45). They quickly, notices Mapokgole, “in an act of bad faith, separated themselves from the Alexandra residents who committed the violent acts” which were judged “incomprehensible”. This placed, she concludes,

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the violence in a vacuum “disconnected from the lives they, the wealthy, lead”, thus absolving them of any responsibility. These widespread 2008 so-called “pogroms” (Neocosmos 2008) were, actually, only one instance of violence inflicted upon the bodies, shelters and ­property of labour migrants, refugees and street vendors across South African townships. Xenophobia remains a persistent daily reality and a painful ­political issue. A new extensive wave of violence in 2015 started with attacks on Somali petty traders in Soweto and rolled on with deadly attacks on foreigners living and working in Durban. It was allegedly fanned by malign statements directed against foreigners on the level of regional governance and ministers of the republic. We are concludes the African Diaspora Forum (adf 2015) in its aforementioned letter of appeal to the president of the republic, worse off as a society than in 2008, as xenophobic attitude and speeches have now penetrated state institutions and affected both the basis and the top of the state. South Africa’s poor-against-poor violence has been projected as the consequence of persistent race-class inequality (Bond, et al. 2010). Others have, with reference to Franz Fanon and Steve Biko, depicted today’s ‘xenophobia’ as Apartheid Vertigo (Matsinhe 2011); a ghost from the past representing “[a] ‘darker’ as you can get hacking a ‘foreigner’ under the pretext of his being too dark – self-hate par excellence” (Mbembe 2015). The urgency of “exorcising the demons within” (Landau 2011, 2) is, however, about more than a wretched state of a black post-colonial psyche. It concerns “cracks in the contemporary legal order and social compact” with roots in the history of “South African statecraft”. This is manifested, argue Misago et. al. (2009), in practices of the postApartheid bureaucracy in the form of labelling, marginalising and separating populations, with ‘non-nationals’ as the ‘functional equivalent’ of black South Africans under the old regime. It is reproduced through and exacerbated by a micro-political clientilism in local communities that, under certain conditions, may turn these ingrained divides between ‘aliens’ and ‘natives’ into ‘resources’, through violence and looting. Gordon (2010), for one, advances a synthetic explanatory framework of law, political economy and struggles over privileges of citizenship embedded in the prevailing post-apartheid hegemony. The ‘division between citizen and foreigner’ is, he argues, stipulated through legal discrimination, echoed in common sense political discourse, the media and in popular lore shared across the nation. Yet this all functions not simply to highlight cultural or genetic “difference” but to “create the particularly intensive vulnerability that

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leaves migrants open to forms of violence and exploitation” (Gordon 2010, 7). In order to perform this function “such migrants must be exempt from constitutional norms that were designed to protect individual liberties”. It is a condition forged through a “‘state of exception’ seen as a state’s right to its own self defence”. ‘Xenophobia’ emerges in this account as a precondition and tool of a legal-political regime’s engineering of a ‘xenoracial’ multitude of ‘new black’21 alien working poor. It is evidenced by the daily harassment of migrants in black townships, and increasingly the inner-city ghettos of Pretoria, Johannesburg, and Durban. They become victimised as struggles over realising citizenship, social and economic rights, benefits and access to public services promised by the transition to democracy grow callous across townships exposed to un- and under-employment, informalization of livelihoods, commodification of public services, and the debt-trap of a microcredit industry destroying “thin reserves of intra- and inter-ethnic community trust, mutuality, reciprocity and solidarity” (Bateman 2014, 94). Thus apartheid’s racist system “maximising cheap labour with little financial burden on the state”, contend Desai and Walsh (2010, 12), has been supplanted by “a cheap labour pool without rights within a cheap labour pool of black South Africans”. They are the alienated members of society without recourse to the state […] policed through violence both by the state and by other poor South Africans who see themselves as bearers (and possible beneficiaries) of certain rights and concessions. A multitude of marginalised actors, sharing lack of protection, extreme vulnerability and dependence on opaque institutional arrangements, may appear a fertile ground for the proliferation of a society with the “psychology of violence” operating “on the basis of the weakest link” (Mingxitama 2008, 196). But discriminatory politics engineering precarity for flexploitation can “lead to all sorts of different reactions from self-immolation to class struggle” (Neocosmos 2015). In spite of the apartheid state’s determined efforts to exploit and engineer ethno-racial divisions, labour migrants from the wider southern African region have been mobilised in the anti-apartheid struggle alongside de-­ nationalised “foreign natives” (Neocosmos 2006). Is not this the conundrum 21

Sivanandan (2001) coined in ‘Poverty is the new Black’ the notion of ‘xenoracism’ in an attempt to analyse the plight of the new poor, stigmatised and hyper-exploited population of phenotypically ‘white’ eastern Europeans in terms of British theory on race and class traditionally focused on post-colonial migrants of ‘colour’.

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at the centre of the xenophobic puzzle from where should one embark on a complex analysis, asks Neocosmos (2006)? From this perspective the xenophobia of today emerges as the strange fruit of the ‘National Democratic Revolution’. It encapsulates a discrepancy between a broadly mobilising pan-African discourse and inclusive activist ideas of citizenship during the struggle against apartheid with a community-anchored trade unionism as vanguard, and an exclusive xenophobic conception of citizenship marking the post-apartheid ideology of nation building. Here, in the name of human rights and settling the bill of historical injustices, the ghost from the past is represented, not as xenophobia, but as migration, in the Rainbow Nation’s narrative of nation building associated, per se, with apartheid’s malign system of forced labour.

Whither the ‘Unfinished Revolution’?

“A society comes through fire a nightmare and it ought to heal through dreaming; not a dream of sleep but the dream of vision”, avows the Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri (2012) in his memorial lecture in honour of Steve Biko; a critical message at a junction when unceasing xenophobic violence has brought the contradictions of a deepening political and social crisis into the open and lent momentum to critiques of disjunctions between dream and reality. The embrace of neoliberalism has ‘stolen the South African Dream’, bewails Satgar (2011). The past two decades of the republic’s integration into global circuits of accumulation has, he contends, brought an end to any substance in the positive post-apartheid discourse of a ‘South African exceptionalism’. South Africa has become one of many ‘laboratories’ of a discriminatory ‘neoliberalism with African characteristics’ (Satgar 2012); an “ugly world of […] capitalist barbarism” marred by “racist and xenophobic dog-eat-dog conflicts”, mourns Alexander (2010) in “South Africa: an unfinished revolution”. Yet South Africa remains ‘exceptional’ in the wider regional and African context; that is to say in its role as a sub-imperial hegemon inherited from the apartheid state, albeit dressed in new clothes (Bond 2012; Samson 2009). The republic figures as a regional force in the 21st century’s new ‘Scramble for Africa’ with demands for ‘regime change’ as strings attached to the politics of investment and loans. It is a ‘Fortress South Africa’ that has refurbished a system of migrancy and unfree labour with colonial origins across the Southern African region and sub-Saharan Africa (Evans 2010). It is at the same time a society where xenophobic imaginations represent the embodiment of an idea of exceptionalism, depicting South Africans as superior to the rest of the continent […] [and] fellow human beings who exhibit differences from the supposed norm as

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o­ utsiders to community and therefore as enemies of the nation who can then become legitimate targets for violence. neocosmos 2015

Marikana’s bloody Thursday – labelled ‘democracy’s Sharpeville’ (Frankel 2013)  – can be seen as a ‘turning point’ (casac 2012) in the short history of post-apartheid South Africa; ‘a final disillusion’ as foreshadowed by the late Neville Alexander (2010). It exposed the need for South Africa’s political and social crisis to be understood against the background of a crisis of neoliberal globalisation in general and of the post-apartheid accumulation strategy in particular, with a continued dominance of the minerals-energy complex (Mohamed 2007). It has been described as situated within a corporatist “triangle of torment” (Peter Alexander, et al. 2013, 146), the perimeter of which circumscribes the extractionism of a globalised corporate business, a political elite directing a chilling security apparatus, and a canonised trade union movement corrupted through capture by the power of covert elite alliances (Bell 2016). From this perspective we may see Marikana as the crucible from which arose a new increasingly violent phase in the search for a viable accumulation strategy with no accord, so far, in sight. But twisting the optic, we may as well, in a Polanyian mood (1944), discern a crisis of the neo-liberal accumulation strategy riding in tandem with a multifarious popular ‘countermovement’ which contests the accumulation-through-dispossession that has shattered the dream of and struggle for social justice, welfare and dignity invested in the National Democratic Revolution. It heralds, read through Gramsci, a moment of crisis where the still not so old post-apartheid hegemony may be dying, but where what is yet to be born remains obscure, and with plenti of morbid symptoms. The post-apartheid trajectory has meant A Paradox of Victory for the labour movement (Buhlungu 2010); bled through complicity in elite transition and corporate restructuring and with a promised dawn of dignified work and inclusive citizenship clouded by precarious labour and debt peonage. The events at Marikana broke the camel’s back, agitating large swathes of union members, including many migrant workers stuck in the most arduous jobs for a pittance. A subsequent storm of labour unrest across the country resulted in a deep split in the movement which eventually manifested itself through the dramatic splintering of cosatu, the political consequences of which remain indefinite (Bell 2015; Fogel 2015; Jim 2015). In the meantime the informal precariat persists on the margins of a labour movement which has sold out its celebrated ‘community unionism’ once rooted among the township’s poor. ‘Insurgent citizenship’ (Miraftab 2009) erupted as a new political subject with We are the Poors (Desai 2002). It is manifested as daily micro-political resistance, with thousands of protests by the ‘surplus

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people’ of current times against housing privatisation, forced evictions and the commodification of basic needs like electricity or water. In contrast to ‘invited spaces’ for ‘stakeholder deliberation’ between civil society, business and the state, the poor create their own ‘invented spaces’ as sites for protest and unsolicited community action (Miraftab 2009). This informal movement of the South African precariat, on the margins of substantial social rights and beyond state control, deserves, intimates Neocosmos (2011),22 the honourable designation of an ‘uncivil society’; often met by rubber bullets, pepper-spray and criminal charges (e.g., upm 2013). It is one seen to stand out from a ‘civil society’ of csos and ngos, streamlined by conforming to a legalistic and depoliticising human rights agenda, and bounded through incorporation in neoliberal governance as service providers or as ‘think tanks’ financed by the state or international donors. It signifies a conspicuous divide, conclude Fioramonti and Fiori (2010, 35), between: well-resourced ngos that enjoy quite limited popular support (and often refrain from taking a direct political stance) and widespread grassroots movements with few resources and a strong focus on socio-economic rights, which have become increasingly vociferous on issues of social justice and have not hesitated to enter the political terrain. No matter whether we subscribe to Guy Standing’s (2011) controversial designation of the precariat as a new dangerous class, we may agree with the proposition that it is indeed dangerous. But ‘dangerous’ in being a floating and yet genuinely political ‘uncivil society’, situated on the borders of informality and beyond the reach of a governance co-opting, disciplining and depoliticising an authorised ‘civil society’ (Neocosmos 2011). Thus the creative ‘informalization from below’ by the poor may carry with it more than a flexible and affirmative adjustment to a corporate ‘informalization from above’; a transmutation from facilitator of ‘flexploitation’ to a ‘politics of informal people’ (Bayat 1997) resisting ‘the tyranny of the market’ (Bourdieu 1999). A composite South African ‘uncivil society’ harbours, beyond volatile and localised day-to-day service delivery protests, a range of articulate social movements. Among them is the Unemployed People’s Movement (upm) taking inspiration from Martin Luther King’s dream of building a coast-to-coast poor people’s alliance, and the Landless People’s Movement – a member of

22

Relating to Chatterjee’s (2002) The Politics of the Governed, and recirculating Bayat’s (1997) term for the ‘politics of informal people’.

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the international Via Campesina movement. Faced with the current historical ­moment’s “farce of economic apartheid” replacing the “tragedy of apartheid”, a new social movement of the poor needs to develop, declares the chairman of the upm, Ayanda Kota (2012). It will require complex and long-term counterhegemonic strategies from the ground up for the revolutionary transformation of the “whole society”, the “participation of the people”, and the “sharing of political power and control over resources”. Such strategies must, explains Kota (2014), merge everyday informal confidence with a “second task” of creating a wider oppositional subjectivity. This will eventuate only through linking informal every day action for the improvement of livelihoods (e.g. starting community bakeries, crèches and urban gardens) with “infusing political and social consciousness and building a mass movement”, potentially in alliance with a rejuvenated Labour movement. These movements of ‘the poors’ came in 2015 to be seconded by the flaring upsurge of a rebellious student movement heralding “the re-emergence of people’s power” (Naicker 2015). Using the slogan #RhodesMustFall – and with reference to the radical literature that inspired the anti-apartheid struggle, like Fanon, Biko and Cabral – it has recalled memories of colonialism’s chilling “rainstorm” down the spine of black people and contested today’s political elite’s alleged subservience to the colonial legacy (Kunene 2015). Operating as #FeesMustFall, demanding the reduction of prohibitive tuition fees, it went on to contest race and class-based prerogatives and disadvantages that continue to permeate the post-apartheid educational system and to protest against the outsourcing of service work on the campuses to private entrepreneurs employing sub-contracted workers for “poverty wages” (iol 2015). By stirring memories of the students fighting fierce street battles in the liberation movement against apartheid, this struggle for affordable education is intricately connected with broader struggles for economic and social transformation in today’s South Africa. It links a “struggle against tuition fees to everyday struggles for survival occurring in the country’s most impoverished communities” (Webb 2015). A multifarious insurgent citizenship may at times hold a ‘xenophobic’ component but often embodies civic organisation in solidarity with African non-citizens, highlighting commonality beyond origin or nationality, and thus ­contesting the politics of xenophobia (eac 2008; Payn 2015). South Africa’s defiant multitude counts also vibrant organisations and a critical movement born out of African diaspora communities, raising their voices against Afro-phobia, in defence of precarious livelihoods and for an inclusive non-racial South Africa (e.g., adf 2015). These voices of a defiant migritude (Willén 2015) are, however, too often marginalised, contend Desai and Walsh (2010), in favour of civil recommendations to the state by polished reports funded by international human

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rights organisations; the same state that – while officially denouncing it – plays with fire through both fanning and exploiting xenophobic violence. As South Africa’s deep social divisions are heading towards breaking point and a widening gulf of mistrust has opened between the anc leadership and its constituencies, ‘xenophobia’ enters as a stratagem of a still hegemonic power block in an on-going political contest. As elsewhere – not least across the changing political landscapes of an Integral Europe (Holmes 2000)  – ­nationalist endogeneity has become the ideo-political bedfellow of ‘fast capitalism’: ersatz for a social policy undercut by commodification. Marking out boundaries of belonging operates a populist stratagem for boosting legitimacy and containing the social crisis through co-opting, redirecting, pacifying and exploiting a multifarious, but politically volatile, poor people’s upheaval (Hart 2013). It represents a specific South African articulation of the general problem of elite transition in post-coloniality raised by Fanon. It authorises a ­re-traditionalisation of society and expounds a post-modern style of patriarchy and conspicuous consumption among the political elite as role models for poor, black, broken families (Hart 2013). It is perceived as being en route to reinventing the British colonial regime’s hated ‘indirect rule’; already once replicated in apartheid’s attempt to bond with ‘traditional chiefs’, and manipulated as a counter-force against those days’ township rebellions and an increasingly powerful trans-ethnic community unionism. In this sense a current day retrograde politics of indigeneity may loom in the shape of a Balkanising ethnonational fragmentation of the rainbow nation’s liberal ‘non-racial democracy’, of which the ‘native’ versus the ‘alien’ from beyond the nation’s border will be only one facet (Motsepe 2015).23 Yet, the anc does not stand alone in vying for the bodies, minds and souls of South Africa’s unruly precariat. The reigning tripartite coalition is riven with deep internal conflicts and has been challenged by major emerging counterhegemonic political projects growing out of deepening fractures in the postapartheid political hegemony itself; out of a disenchanted anc, and out of a traumatised labour movement.24 At this juncture of social and political crisis, with the presidency itself in the eye of the storm25, the fortunate days of the 23 24

25

As, e.g., foreseen by Marais (2001[1998]). Notably the Economic Freedom Fighters (a party founded by the former chairman of the anc Youth League, Julius Malema, who was expelled from the anc after having criticised its leadership for complicity in the Marikana crucible) and the United Front (a coalition of left leaning forces with its spine in unions that have ceased toeing the line with cosatu). At the time of writing with all across the country demonstrations mounting a mass petition for the resignation of president Zuma under the hashtag slogan ‘#Zumamustfall’

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particular class-race alliance on which the post-apartheid South African hegemony was first founded may be counted, it begs the question of whether ‘hopes and prospects’ for a refurbished social compact are likely to be carried forward from within the original tripartite political coalition, promising a “more radical phase” of the national democratic revolution to come (Umsebenzi 2015), or alternatively out of nascent forces of contestation challenging it from beyond. In any event, precarious labour, poor people’s movements, migration and xenophobia are crucial stratagems of the moment. They relate to the need for building inclusive alliances with movements of a precariat of ‘natives’ and ‘aliens’ in a society where the politics of xenophobia and a twisted nationalist narrative, reading migration as the specter of South Africa’s apartheid past, has become a smoke-screen covering up the ‘suspended revolution’ of its present. Acknowledgements I am grateful for critical comments and suggestions by David Johnson, The Open University, Aline Mugisho, African Diaspora Forum and the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy, Raúl Delgado Wise, University of Zacatecas and by the Editor of Critical Sociology, David Fasenfest. I appreciate the many valuable suggestions made by colleagues participating in the remeso seminar 11 November, 2015. I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Martin Bak Jørgensen, Aalborg University and to Xolani Tschabalala and Aleksandra Ålund ­(remeso) for their critical readings.

Funding Acknowledgements

I acknowledge generous funding by the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare [forte grant No. 2006-1524] and through a Research Links Grant by The Swedish Research Council [No. 2013-6682]. (ironically paraphrasing the earlier ‘#Rhodesmustfall’). Yet, in spite of a widespread demand for Zuma’s resignation (e.g. Jara 2015) this campaign has been denounced by several critics of Zuma and anc hegemony. It is a petition “initiated by white capital which called #Marikana workers criminals”, intimates Malema, the head of the opposition party, the Economic Freedom Fighters. “Zuma will fall from office”; but, contends Malema, “it will be the work of the black majority and not a hashtag of white capitalists… [G]enuine revolution against the #ANC and #Zuma will be black-led and will ultimately overthrow the white monopoly capital and transfer land” (quoted as referred by Jacobs 2015).

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Index Abashin 206, 207, 219 Abdulraheem 233, 234, 235 access 200, 202–3, 205, 208, 219, 221, 230, 247, 248, 297 Accessed 26, 49, 50, 74, 75–77, 96, 97, 111, 115, 156–59, 197, 221–23, 304, 305, 306–14 accumulation 9, 12, 17, 53, 83, 84, 87, 89, 90, 96, 288, 298 activists 6, 7, 54, 55, 65, 71, 294 actors 110, 112, 118, 119, 120, 124, 128, 130, 133, 135, 146, 155, 173, 174, 240 non-immigrant 71, 72 addition 109, 122, 129, 132, 133, 141, 142, 148, 150, 155, 172, 173 administration 127, 168, 174, 175, 178, 248 Administration of Employment of Foreigners in China 165, 168, 178 admission 167, 169, 170 African cross-border migrants 287 African immigrants 167, 174 African labour migrants 291 Agamben 22, 200, 201, 219 agency 2, 7, 18, 53, 54, 61, 63, 72, 95, 109, 113, 134, 155, 218, 235 agenda 91, 267, 268, 269 decent work 91, 92, 97 Agustín 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 58, 61, 68, 73 Akdeniz 107, 108, 114 Akpinar 107, 114 Alexander 77, 219, 222, 223, 278, 304 alienation 101, 113, 246–47, 253, 281 aliens 15, 20, 21, 85, 115, 162, 165, 166, 175, 278, 296, 297, 302, 303 alliances 7, 17, 22, 34, 38, 58, 63, 66, 68, 70, 256, 277, 280, 282, 285 Ålund 17, 19, 21, 22, 55, 57 Amnesty International 106, 107, 109 anc 277, 278, 283, 284, 285, 287, 292, 294, 302, 303, 304 Anderson 3, 5, 13, 22, 135, 162, 163, 164, 169, 171, 173, 176 apartheid 276, 277, 278, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 286, 289, 290, 291, 293, 294, 295 apartheid state 297, 298 asylum seekers 17, 66, 106, 118, 204, 290, 292

Athens xi, 18, 226, 229, 230, 232–33, 235, 239, 308 centre of 235 austerity 2, 3, 11, 12, 52, 59, 72, 198, 205, 218, 219, 239 Austria 104, 228 Bai Gang 183, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193 banks 144, 146, 149, 157, 248 Bantustans 281, 282, 290, 307 Barchiesi 5, 23, 96, 238, 241, 284, 285, 288, 290, 292, 294, 304 bare life 22, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 217, 219 basic income 35, 50 Bayat 21, 23, 300, 304 Beijing 14, 15, 167, 175, 177, 179, 180, 185, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194, 197 Benjamin 289, 305, 307 Bezuidenhout 289, 305 black people 233, 301 bodies 45, 197, 201, 203, 204, 205, 211, 218, 220, 296, 302 Bond 277, 284, 285, 288, 296, 298, 305, 306 Boratav 102, 114 border control 7, 39 borders x, xii, 5, 7, 22, 24, 38, 39, 49, 54, 70, 232, 235, 236, 238 Bourdieu 1, 2, 3, 4, 23, 32, 48, 279 Likic-Brboric 24, 28, 29, 313 Bregnbæk 180, 181, 182, 184, 186, 188, 189–90, 192, 194, 196 Brenner 248, 249, 270, 273 building 21, 31, 39, 47, 232, 257, 261, 263, 268, 270, 285, 300, 301, 303 businesses 124, 129, 131, 145, 200, 207, 259, 260, 261, 262, 264, 300, 308 campaigns 21, 58, 69, 92, 175, 259, 261, 270, 272, 303 decent work 91 camps 17, 71, 108, 198, 200, 201, 202, 203, 218, 220, 228 Canary Islands 122, 123, 124–25 candidates 69, 207, 213

318 capacity 7, 21, 63, 79, 103, 109, 206, 228, 277, 288, 293 Cape Town 305, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 314 capital 25, 36, 37, 44, 45, 85, 87, 91, 92, 101, 102, 156, 265, 266, 273 capitalism 7, 8, 31, 32, 48, 50, 65, 67, 82, 101, 102, 264, 265, 276, 277 capitalist 14, 41, 42 care 45, 48, 73, 118, 120, 122, 185, 186, 189, 191, 192, 245, 254, 263, 264 care workers 11, 130 Casas-Cortés 3, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44, 45–46, 48, 50, 56, 57, 73–74 cases 24, 25, 72, 108, 109, 128, 129, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 160, 172, 173 Central Asian 199, 201, 205, 206, 208, 209, 211, 212, 213, 214, 219 certification authority labour administration 171 local labour administration 168, 171 cheap labour pool 297 child 107, 122, 168, 185, 186, 188, 189, 193 children 109, 112, 131, 185, 186, 190, 193, 232, 245, 257 China 12, 13, 14, 25, 160–63, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 174–87, 193, 195, 197 foreigners working in 166, 169 hukou migrant workers 15 labour migration policy 169 rural 181, 189, 190 China’s Top University Students 195, 196 Chinatown 258, 261, 262, 267, 268, 273 Chinatown Working Group 262, 273 Chinese 179, 183, 185, 186, 213, 253, 258, 261 Chinese government 175, 182 Chinese Immigration Law 161, 175, 177, 178 Chinese migrant labour 183 Chinese migrant workers 179 Chinese society 180, 181, 197 Chinese university students 179, 180 citizens 8, 60, 61, 70, 73, 111, 113, 115, 119, 120, 128, 131, 133, 204, 206 citizenship xi, xii, 6, 8, 9, 17, 18, 26, 27, 28, 116, 127, 163, 177, 298 city 12–14, 18, 19, 66, 68, 69, 231, 242, 246, 247, 248–55, 257, 267, 269, 270–75 accessible x arrival 226, 230, 231, 239 autonomous 67, 77

Index centre 17, 214 council 262 movement 67, 68 planning 263, 273 the right to the xii, 19, 271 City Alliance 270, 274 civil society xii, 28, 61, 91, 111, 287, 300, 306, 307 civil society organisations 19, 107, 110, 112 class 2, 10, 11, 26, 27, 47, 52, 53, 56, 83, 84, 156, 157, 241, 250 class-consciousness 250, 254 class-for-itself 55, 250 climate change 235, 261, 265 collective agreements 139, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 153, 155 collective worker 252, 253 commonalities 38, 55, 69, 71, 72, 73, 301 commons xii, 2, 17, 18, 21, 22, 59, 230, 231, 243, 272 Communist Party 189, 190, 191 communities 23, 68, 129, 132, 133, 232, 258, 259–61, 264, 267, 268, 269, 270, 274, 276 companies 37, 119, 128, 131, 173–74, 179, 192, 259, 260, 262 complicity 299, 302 concentration 87, 245, 249, 265 conflict 21, 54, 66, 70, 71, 146, 167, 188, 196, 211, 215, 226, 227, 267, 283 Congress 277, 278, 304 Contemporary China 181, 186, 196 Contemporary Migrations 221, 313 contestations 8, 26, 54, 72, 110, 113, 303 migrant labour’s 103 Contesting Migrant Precarity 109 contracts personal 142 precarious 32, 37 control 171, 174, 176, 206, 207, 221, 222, 232, 233, 236, 252, 281, 282, 293, 294 cooperation 34, 36, 41, 44, 258 Cooperative Central Bank 153, 158 Corsani 35, 37, 48 cosatu 277, 284, 287, 292, 294, 299, 302, 306, 314 counter precarity movements 114 crimes 198, 205, 206, 207, 208, 212–16 criminal 16, 17, 175, 200, 201, 203, 207, 208, 212, 214, 215, 217, 218

Index crisis 97, 98, 138, 139, 140–41, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 151, 157, 248, 266, 299 current 138, 150, 151, 153, 279 social 1, 298, 299, 302 web of 265, 268 Crush 282, 291, 294, 295, 306 cswa 19, 246, 247, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 267, 271 Current Sociology 75, 241, 242, 243, 244 Cyprus 138, 139–41, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159 labour market 141, 151 death 16, 17, 179, 180, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 213, 217–18, 220, 222 Decent work 84, 91, 92, 294 Deleuze 46, 47, 49 democracy 25, 59–60, 72, 74, 96, 115, 242, 248, 294, 297, 304, 306, 307, 308, 314 demonstrations 65, 70, 182, 267 depoliticising 300 deterioration 104, 106, 152, 153 developed countries 81, 103, 104 development 30, 97, 98, 103, 104, 153, 154, 262, 263, 264, 265, 283, 284, 313, 314 diseases 16, 198, 208, 211, 261 disgust 16, 198, 205, 208, 215, 217, 218, 295 political subject of 16, 198–99, 201, 203, 205, 207, 209, 211, 213, 215, 217, 219, 221, 223 dispossession 9, 14, 17, 84, 86, 87, 90, 96, 280, 288 diversity 19, 53, 244, 254, 256, 265 domestic labour 10, 13, 42, 89 domestic services 81, 122, 123, 128 domestic work 42, 122–23, 135, 254, 256 domestic workers 46, 116, 122, 128, 246, 254, 255, 256, 264 Domestic Workers United 19, 245, 247, 254, 273 dreams 181, 182, 194, 197, 269, 277, 278, 298, 299 Durban 242, 296, 297, 304, 306, 314 economic development 81 Economist 182, 197 economy xi, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12, 13, 27, 35, 38, 140, 141, 146, 279 global 27, 55, 63, 104, 249, 254

319 Edelman 203, 217, 220 education 13, 14, 109, 181, 188, 189, 194, 196, 198, 257, 258, 259, 263, 264, 265 Educational levels 127, 140, 141 Educational migration in Beijing 15, 179 eeal 160, 162, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176 Framework 168 regime 165, 166, 174, 175 eiro (European Industrial Relations Observatory) 157 Elden 201, 202, 220, 253, 273 elderly care x, 122, 123, 125, 127, 128, 132 extensive 125, 126, 128, 129 emigration country 103, 104 employees 119, 128, 143, 146, 149, 152, 166, 259 foreign 166 municipal 235, 236 employer contributions 139, 146, 147, 148 employers 106, 108, 139, 142, 146, 148, 153, 163, 164, 168, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174 actions of 199, 200 employment 83, 120, 138, 142, 150, 154, 157, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 170, 171, 290 in crisis 11, 138, 139, 141, 143, 145, 147, 149, 151, 153, 155, 156, 157, 159 of Foreigners in China 165, 168, 178 relations 142, 144, 153, 156, 157, 161, 162, 164, 170 enforcement 173, 174, 281 entrepreneurs 119, 120, 123–24, 127, 128–33, 218 entry 41, 139, 140, 141, 160, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 174, 175, 284, 291 Erdoğdu and Kaşka 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111 eri (European Research Institute), 26 Esso-Häuser 68, 70 ethnicity 13, 69, 237, 239, 241, 260, 277 Europe 2, 3, 23, 27, 30, 31, 71, 73, 74, 115, 116, 135, 136, 158, 159 European Industrial Relations Observatory (eiro) 157 European Observatory 158 European Research Institute (eri) 26 European Union 10, 15, 27, 134, 156, 158, 276 everyday, precarious 16, 198 everyday life xi, 33, 41, 65, 112, 201, 205, 227, 242, 255, 273, 274 irregular migrant’s 204

320 Evicted South Africans Rally in Support of Immigrants 307 exception 8, 16, 17, 34, 35, 98, 101, 145, 146, 201, 202, 203, 217, 218, 219 exchange value 252, 253, 261, 263 exit mobility 125, 128, 129–30 experiences 53, 54, 71, 108, 109, 113, 114, 135, 136, 146, 147, 195, 201, 227, 238 factories 14, 36, 44, 103, 179, 211, 251, 253 families 107, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 151, 152, 188, 191, 192, 193, 209, 210, 233 family members 130, 165, 166, 168, 190, 198 family situations 124, 125 feminisation 31, 43, 87 feminists 42, 44, 46 fight xii, 32, 69, 233, 234, 247, 256, 258, 260, 263, 267 filial piety 183, 185, 186, 188, 194, 196 flexicurity 35, 156 Fordism 8, 26, 42, 57, 76, 81, 84, 86, 98, 101, 116, 289 Foreign Employment License 168 foreigners 160, 162, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171, 173, 174, 175, 178, 212, 294, 296 foreign immigrants 165, 166 framework 16, 63, 138, 139, 140, 147, 199, 200, 209, 217, 218, 256 Franco 23, 96, 241, 304 Frankel 282, 292–93, 299, 307 Frassanito-network 53, 54, 55, 57, 74 Frassanito-network claims migrant labour 54 freedom 40, 41, 49, 50, 53, 61, 70, 71, 72, 75, 91, 233, 238, 273, 276 Frontex 70, 71, 72 Fundamental Labour Rights in China 25 Gavanas 11, 120, 122, 123, 124, 126, 128, 130, 132, 134, 135, 136 geneology 30, 31, 47, 184 generations 4, 15, 90, 95, 118, 133, 186, 193, 196 Geneva 97, 177, 178, 305, 306 gentrification 13, 19, 66, 67, 70, 77, 247, 261, 268, 271, 287 geographical area 170, 171 geo-political border zones 232

Index Germany 2, 11, 39, 70, 71, 103, 105, 228 Global Commission on International Migration 170, 177 Global Governance xi, 24, 28, 76, 136, 306, 313 globalisation xi, 24, 25, 26, 27, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 85, 87, 89, 91, 93, 97, 98, 115, 116, 224, 243, 245, 308 era of 79, 81, 95 Global Labour Journal 78, 97, 274 global labour reserve 105 Global Labour University 241, 306 global north 13, 200, 221, 238, 239 global precaricity 14 global scale 86, 87, 89, 90, 225 Global South 8, 9, 78, 84, 90, 238, 239, 287, 311 Goldring 6, 8, 25, 163, 177, 279, 308 government 32, 47, 63, 73, 132, 138, 140, 143, 144, 150, 152, 153, 156, 162, 164 graduation 188, 190, 191 Gramsci 74, 75, 242, 246, 266, 273, 299 Gramscian Perspectives on Migration 22 civil society alliances x, 73 Greece xi, xii, 17, 21, 59, 105, 144, 146, 205, 219, 226, 228, 232, 233, 236 groups 53, 56, 57, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68–69, 128, 149–50, 162, 174, 207, 215, 256 Guangzhou 24, 167, 174, 191, 193, 194 Hamburg xii, 7, 8, 29, 54, 65–69, 77, 116, 136 rights to the city movement in 67, 68 Hardt 49, 56, 64, 74, 97, 242, 273 Hardt and Negri 35, 53, 56, 60, 62, 88, 251 Harvey 18, 19, 25, 60, 62, 66, 67, 74, 242, 246–53, 257, 265, 269, 271, 273 health 18, 124, 126, 134, 135, 198, 201, 210, 211, 212, 227, 230, 252, 287, 288 health care 198, 199, 201, 202, 203, 211, 215, 218, 219, 220, 261, 291 higher education 15, 181, 187, 188, 189, 194, 197, 209, 210, 217, 247 history xi, 1, 8, 58, 79, 89, 91, 93, 97, 101, 241, 246, 254, 260, 262 global labour 89, 98 Hlatshwayo 8, 294, 308 Hollifield 104, 115 home countries 165, 166, 168

Index Hong Kong xii, 160, 162, 177 housing 18, 67, 68, 70, 107, 108, 109, 121, 124, 126, 227, 247, 258, 261, 264 market 249, 251 politics 67, 74 hsrc Press 308, 309, 314 İçduygu 105, 107, 116 identity 7, 19, 46, 54, 63, 66, 235, 236 identity politics 22, 47 illegality 164, 176, 177, 178, 215 illegal work 161, 162, 168, 170, 171, 173 immaterial labour 31, 34, 35, 36, 42, 43, 44 Immigrant China 177 immigrant group 253 largest 253 immigrant rights marches 62 immigrants 29, 57, 58, 61, 71, 104, 126, 151, 162, 168, 172, 212, 216, 250–51, 253 illegal 172, 212, 291 undocumented 257, 259 reproduction 251 immigrant workers 73, 142, 143, 147, 151 increasing 140 Immigration xi, 73, 116, 156, 167, 176, 177, 242, 246, 257, 306 controls 22, 163, 164, 165, 168, 170, 171, 175, 176, 238 laws 12, 161, 162, 163, 164, 166, 172, 174, 175–76 officers 169 imperialism 26, 253, 277 informal economy 8, 9, 11, 81, 88, 98, 104, 110, 122, 124, 126, 223, 232 Informal Employment and Immigrant Networks 137 informality 38, 40, 78, 79, 80, 81, 102, 107, 199, 204, 231, 290, 294, 300, 304 informalization 11, 55, 88, 89, 118, 119, 132, 133, 289, 292, 297, 313, 314 integration x, xii, 4, 12, 23, 103, 104, 110, 120, 238 intermediaries 118, 126, 128–30, 133, 173, 176 intermittency 34, 35, 45 internal migrants, underemployed 79 International Labour Organisation 81, 97 international migration x, xi, xii, 4, 23, 25, 111, 113, 115, 116, 135, 136, 170, 175, 177

321 Ioannou 138, 140, 142, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149–50, 152, 154, 156, 157, 158 irm destinations 123, 126, 133 irms 11, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124–29, 132–33 majority of 125 Irregular Labour Migration in Turkey and Situation 117 irregular migrants 103, 104, 106, 108, 109, 110, 112, 115, 116, 198, 201, 202, 204, 205, 237 Istanbul 18, 107, 108, 114, 115, 116, 117, 109, 226, 229, 230, 231, 234, 239 Italy 3, 17, 33, 35, 37, 51, 54, 65, 66, 71, 147 Izvestia 212, 219, 220 Jing Jing 186, 187, 188, 189, 192, 193, 194 JoAnn Lum 247, 252, 258, 259, 260, 261, 272 jobs 42, 108, 130, 131, 133, 141, 147, 173, 179, 189, 191, 193, 245, 259, 261 good 191, 216 Johannesburg 96, 241, 284, 292, 295, 297, 304, 307, 309, 310, 311, 312 Jørgensen 6, 7, 8, 18, 20, 21, 22, 58, 60, 61, 62, 68, 74, 75, 76 Kaşka 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 116 Kipnis 181, 184, 185, 186, 196, 197 knowledge 37, 38, 48, 210, 230, 232, 238, 272 Kofman 12, 14, 122, 135, 183 Kumkapi 233, 234 Kurdish 233, 234 Kuznetsova-Morenko 200, 202, 204, 206, 208, 210, 212, 214, 216, 218, 220, 222 Kyrgyzstan 200, 209, 211 labor x, 10, 156, 157, 158, 159, 225, 226, 228, 238, 240, 244, 251, 257, 258 world of 224, 237–38 Labor Integration of Migrant Workers in Cyprus 159 labor processes 238, 247 labour 4, 5, 9, 10, 12, 28, 40, 43, 80–81, 85, 86–87, 90–91, 95, 149–53, 276 casual 3, 152 cheap 105, 253, 257, 281, 283, 284, 297 child 107, 113 contemporary 54, 86, 94 female 87, 281

322 labour (cont.) flexible 14, 30, 104, 143, 260, 290, 291 forced 2, 75, 89, 221, 298 global 87, 307 industrial 35, 254 informal 3, 9, 12, 294 male 135, 293 organised 26, 95, 102, 112, 290 unpaid 42, 89 wage 40, 89, 92 waged 33, 37 labour aristocracy 80, 141, 143 labour brokers 291, 293 labour conditions 37, 57, 66, 111 labour conflicts 2, 260 Labour Contract Law 172 labour contracts 81, 171, 172, 214 migrant’s 171 labour costs 8, 151, 169 labour disputes 172 labourers 42, 43, 103 casual 3, 56 precarious 293 labour immigration 161, 165 labour law xii, 12, 81, 155, 161, 172, 175 violations of 155, 173 labour legislation 123, 139, 145, 148, 288 Labour market and housing segregation and precarious employment 13 labour market deregulation 153, 155 labour markets 3, 5, 6, 55, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 149, 151, 161, 163, 164 clandestine 66, 260 precarious 15, 175 urban 15 labour migrants 118, 199, 296, 297 internal 14 trans-border 290 undocumented 290 labour migration 161, 170 policies 122 labour movements xi, 61, 95, 97, 110, 114, 253, 257, 258, 259, 269, 292, 299, 306 organised 95, 247 labour organisation 14, 34 labour party 58, 75, 94 labour process 140, 142, 149 labour reform 31, 32

Index labour regime, centralised state-monitored 281 labour relations xi, 31, 89, 141, 151, 153, 155 labour rights 31, 32, 88, 110, 206, 284 labour shortages 140, 161 labour standards 86, 292 labour struggles 32, 280 labour unions 10, 12, 20, 94, 285, 294 Lam, Wing 247, 252, 258, 259, 261, 262, 263 Lampedusa 54, 65, 68 Lampedusa in Hamburg. See LiHH Landau 309, 311, 313 Late Imperial China 185 Latin America xi, 79, 82, 88, 89, 94, 102, 253, 275 law 103, 104, 105–6, 122, 156, 161, 162, 164, 165, 167, 172, 201, 214, 260–61, 312 Lazzarato 35, 37, 49 Lefebvre 19, 25, 75, 230, 231, 238, 242, 247, 251, 256, 266, 267, 270, 271, 274 Legal Construction of Hyper-Dependence and Hyper-Precarity 178 Legal Construction of Precarious Migrant Status 162 life 41, 44, 45, 113, 120, 121, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 194, 228, 230 precarious 44, 111 precarization of 41, 44, 227 Life and work of migrant women workers 107 Life of Migrants in Turkey 107 Lifestyle Migration 135, 136 LiHH (Lampedusa in Hamburg) 54, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71 livelihoods 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 19, 239, 243, 292, 294, 297, 301 precarious 14, 112, 113, 279, 301 local authorities 124, 167, 174, 175 local public security bureaus 169, 174 London 22, 23, 24, 25, 29, 50, 73, 74, 96–99, 157, 196, 241–44, 273, 274, 311 London and New York 73, 74, 135, 136, 244, 305 Loose Space 244 Lordoğlu 107, 116 Lorey 57, 60, 63, 64, 75 lumpen-proletariat 80, 93

Index Madrid 45, 48, 49, 50, 51, 68 management 5, 10, 12, 13, 20, 35, 39, 144, 279, 280, 292 Mapokgole 295, 310 Mapping migrant struggles and social resistance 224 marginality 9, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 90, 96, 98, 102 Maribel 24, 30, 48, 73 Marikana 292, 293, 299, 302, 304, 307, 313 Marx 4, 6, 25, 79, 90, 93, 97, 252, 258, 274, 276, 310 Marxist 81, 82, 93, 102 Mbeki 280, 283, 284, 285, 310 Mbembe 16, 25, 199, 201, 202, 203, 205, 217, 221, 295, 296, 310 McDonald 33, 287, 288, 311 McNevin 110, 112, 116 media 121, 144, 205, 207, 208, 209, 212, 213, 214, 242, 246, 256, 291, 296 megacity 14, 15 members 66, 68, 69, 72, 95, 139, 143, 189, 190, 191, 193, 257, 263, 297, 300 Memorandum 138, 146, 147, 148, 150, 155 Mexico 11, 100, 222, 254, 286 Mezzadra 39, 40, 50, 53, 59, 64, 75, 97, 238, 239, 243 migrancy 280, 298, 311 migrant body 201, 208, 209, 218 Migrant care workers in private households 135 migrant children 109 migrant communities 210, 237 Migrant Conditions 1, 72 migrant digitalities xii, 232, 244 migrant flows 19, 309 Migrant Incorporation and City Scale 28 migrant interviewees 200, 209, 216 migrant labour 9, 11, 39, 53, 76, 103, 107, 217, 279, 282, 307 Migrant Labour, Alan H. 309 migrant labour contracted 282 drafted 293 foreign 13 hyper-exploited 282 irregular 24, 105 low-cost rural 161

323 low-skilled rural 161 male 281 rural-urban 280 unfree 281 Migrant Labour in South Africa’s Mining Economy 309 migrant labour work 107 migrant life 107, 109 migrant precariat 57, 61, 112, 114 global 28 in Turkey 105 new 15 migrants 16, 17, 18, 39, 53–55, 106–14, 164, 168, 170, 171, 172, 173, 198–201, 206–19, 237 migrants in Moscow 219, 222 migrants in Turkey 100, 105, 107, 113 irregular 104, 110, 113 Migrant Solidarity Network 111 migrant status 164, 292 migrant statuses 175 migrant struggles 18, 54, 71, 239 migrant tcn-workers 134 migrant women 107, 116, 122, 123, 243 migrant work 40, 108 migrant workers 15, 16, 24, 107, 108, 110, 111, 129, 130, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 293 Migrant Workers in Cyprus 159 Migrant Workers’ Struggles 24 migration x, xi, xii, 1, 3, 7, 24, 28–29, 39, 40–41, 76, 100, 111, 276, 313 autonomy of 25, 39, 40, 48, 49, 243 border 290, 291 irregular xii, 5, 27, 28, 104, 116, 158, 199, 201, 291 Migration & Civil Society Alliances 22 migration and domestic work 135 Migration and Migrant Workers 307 Migration and mobility 38, 65 migration and precarity 7, 15, 39, 54, 72, 99, 103, 105, 111, 112, 226 Migration in South and Southern Africa 309, 314 migration policies 7, 39, 177, 205 migration research 103, 135 migration studies xii, 5, 28, 134, 202 Milkman 258, 264, 274 mines 278, 280, 281, 282, 283, 293

324 Mineworkers 285, 292, 305 Ministry 106, 141, 153, 166, 167, 235 Minnesota Press 49, 50, 51, 76, 220, 242, 274 Miraftab 292, 299, 300, 311 misuses 28, 50, 76, 98, 117, 313 mobile commons 18, 224, 225, 226, 227, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 235, 237, 239, 243, 244 mobilisation 7, 12, 13, 21, 54, 60, 61, 62, 65, 66, 71, 110 mobility 6, 7, 38, 39, 40, 41, 45, 53, 54, 65, 118, 119, 136, 229, 232–33 critical 229 existential 15, 179, 194 knowledge and practices of 230 physical 194 mobility and migration 134, 227 Mobilization of irregular migrants in Europe 115 money 181, 186, 188, 190, 192, 193, 194, 209, 213, 216, 228, 234, 248, 249, 253 Moscow 15, 16, 22, 200, 209, 210, 212, 213–16, 219, 221, 222, 223 movements 32, 36, 41, 42, 44, 68, 71, 72, 110, 111, 230, 231, 266, 267, 268 Multiplex migration and axes of precarization 118–19, 121, 123, 125, 127, 129, 131, 133,  135, 137 multiplicity 13, 38, 47, 171, 224, 227 Munck 26, 78, 80, 81–82, 84, 86, 88, 90, 94, 95, 96, 97–99, 101, 102, 116 municipalities 131, 150 nation 17, 27, 28, 68, 111, 220, 223, 241, 286, 287, 296, 299, 310, 311 National Bureau of Statistics of China 160, 177 National Democratic Revolution 277, 278, 298, 299, 303, 313 National Taxi Workers’ Alliance 267, 268 natives 21, 68, 278, 279, 281, 294, 296, 302, 303 necropolitics 16, 25, 198–99, 201, 202–5, 207, 209, 211, 213, 215, 217, 219, 221, 223 queer 203, 204, 220, 221 Neergaard xi, 22, 27, 28, 76, 313 Negri 7, 26, 35, 53, 56, 59, 60, 62, 64, 67, 74, 75, 88, 251, 273 Neilson 8, 26, 75–76, 98, 116, 238, 239 Neilson and Rossiter 52, 55, 57, 64, 86, 101

Index Neocosmos 278, 281, 291, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 311–12 neoliberal 13, 19, 83, 101, 102, 154, 283, 285 neoliberalism 25, 26, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59, 138, 248, 249, 269, 272, 273, 298, 305 new class 52, 83, 84, 101 new dangerous class 3, 28, 50, 77, 79, 92, 93, 98, 117, 136, 159, 275, 300, 313 nmass 19, 246, 247, 252, 258, 259, 260, 262, 263, 264, 267, 271 non-migrants 18, 57, 114 North 8, 9, 10, 12, 19–20, 22, 81, 85, 86, 89, 90, 95, 99, 100, 112 North and South in terms 89 North–south 117, 118, 121, 132 occupations 5, 25, 67, 77, 81, 149–50, 161, 163, 164, 169, 170, 171, 197 oecd 26, 312 Oliver 126, 136 order 43, 44, 46, 47, 110, 111, 144, 153, 182, 185, 190, 193, 204, 237, 260 social 70, 82, 167 O’Reilly 120, 126, 135, 136 organisations 63, 64, 94, 111, 243, 247, 248, 252, 256, 258, 262, 263, 269, 270, 272 migrant groups church 109 organisers 71, 247, 252, 255, 263, 264 organising 30, 111, 113 organising migrant workers 110 organizing 250, 253, 256, 258, 261, 263, 264, 265, 267, 269, 271, 272 Oxford 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 76, 134, 135, 177, 242, 308, 312, 313, 314 Pakistan 229, 233 Pancyprian Federation of Labor 158 Papadopoulos 5, 26, 36, 37, 39, 50, 86, 227, 230, 238, 239, 240, 243 Papastergiadis 229, 243 parents 15, 110, 112, 180, 181, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194 Parsanoglou and Tsianos 225, 226, 228, 230, 232, 233–34, 236, 238, 240, 242, 244 party 60, 172, 175, 182, 189, 191, 192, 193, 236, 265, 302 Patrick 305, 306 payment 113, 131, 145, 216, 255 peo 158 people power 20, 21, 276

Index permit 103, 106, 161, 271 perspective 3, 4, 5, 9, 18, 40, 41, 86, 89, 90, 148, 225, 239, 240, 250 critical 5, 11, 99 Phileleftheros 149, 152, 157, 158, 159 police 183, 203, 211, 214, 215, 216, 217, 234, 235, 237, 267, 287, 291 police officers 236, 291 political analysis 7, 52, 70, 71 Political conflict 61 political economy xi, 6, 9, 11, 25, 53, 200, 218, 276, 281, 283, 286, 294, 296, 310 political elite 280, 299, 301, 302 Political Geography 220, 221 political parties 21, 30, 59, 60, 61, 145, 157 political platform 18, 19, 66, 67, 246, 247, 249, 251, 253, 255, 257, 259, 261, 269, 270–71 political subjectivities 18, 55, 56, 61, 62, 67 politicians 210, 213, 214, 291 politics xii, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 49, 59, 60, 61, 75, 93, 135, 281, 311 consensus 59 laboured 77, 243 of austerity 3, 11, 144, 219 of informal people 21, 300 Politics of Migration and Precarity 29, 77 Politics of Migration in Sub-Saharan 28, 314 Polity Press 23, 29, 48, 73, 75, 96, 115, 134, 136, 241, 242, 243, 244, 306 populations, irregular migrant labour 106 Post-Apartheid South Africa 20, 23, 239, 244, 276, 289, 299, 307, 310, 311, 314 poverty 3, 4, 82, 152, 154, 276, 279, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 310 power 62, 136, 197, 198, 199, 202, 221, 245, 263, 265, 269, 271, 278, 280, 287 praxis 64, 225, 226, 231, 238, 240 Precarias 30, 38, 41, 42, 44–45, 50 precariat 3, 28, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 60, 61, 63, 76, 78–79, 83–87, 93, 117 immigrant 60 multi-ethnic 294, 295 Precariat Movement 111, 115 Precariat Strikes 7, 52, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77 Precaricity 13 precarious conditions 66, 71, 151, 245, 250, 251, 254, 268

325 precarious employment 3, 13, 163, 177, 178, 196 precarious groups 59, 63 precarious labor 227, 240 precarious labour 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 30, 32, 42, 44, 99, 183, 287, 288, 299, 303 exploited 9 growing 139 hyper-exploited unfree 293 informalized 291 Precarious Legal Status 25, 308 Precarious Migrant Labor 159 precarious migrants 115, 231, 238 precarious migrant status 12, 162, 163 Precarious migrant status and precarious employment 177 precarious migrant statuses 13, 161, 163, 165, 168, 170, 171, 173, 175 precariousness 53, 57, 64, 75, 78, 98, 101, 109, 128, 129, 133, 155, 163, 227, 231 precarious position 56, 57, 95, 294 precarious spaces 18, 224, 225, 227, 229, 231, 232, 233, 235, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 243 precarious work 73, 91–92, 96, 97, 114, 162, 163, 178, 183, 228, 241, 279 precarious workers 3, 5, 56, 67, 163, 176, 227, 274, 294 precarisation 6, 7, 11, 13, 47, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 61, 63, 64, 66. 74, 75, 76, 118–19, 121, 123, 125, 127, 129, 131, 133, 135, 136, 137, 227 processes of 52, 54, 57, 67 Precarisation and Migration in Hamburg 66 precarisation of labour 9, 14, 17, 85, 118 precarisation of life 41, 45 precarité 2–3 precarity 2, 4–11, 20–21, 23, 30, 38, 41, 44, 45–49, 64–65, 71–72, 75–77, 84–86, 99, 113 context of 99, 101, 103, 105, 107, 109, 111, 113, 115, 117, 238 discourse of 34, 38, 46, 86, 87 embodied experiences of 5, 227 experience of 54, 186, 227 extension of 138, 139, 141, 143, 145, 147, 149, 151, 152, 153, 155, 157, 159 geneology of 6, 30, 31, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51, 73 migrant 12, 109, 110, 160 politics of 1, 6, 17, 25, 91, 96, 183, 197

326 precarity (cont.) post-apartheid state of 20, 279 understanding of 1, 16, 32, 43, 54 precarity and migration 7, 39, 100 Precarity and People Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa 276 precarity-and-resistance 18, 230 Precarity in Russia and Labour 23 precarity movement 53, 57, 64 Precarity of Migrant Labour 39 precarity struggles 6, 7, 35, 37, 45 Precarity Struggles in Practice 52, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71, 75, 77 pressure 32, 138, 144, 147, 148, 150, 155, 180, 181, 194, 199, 256, 259, 260, 265 Pretoria 244, 284, 285, 297, 304, 314 primitive accumulation 12, 14, 90 production 35, 36, 37, 43, 44, 45, 80, 92, 94, 103, 232, 250, 251, 252, 253 relations of 84, 93 proletarianisation 86, 87, 88, 90 proletariat 60, 62, 82, 88, 94, 102, 269 protests 20, 49, 62, 64, 66, 68, 72, 74, 76, 153, 156, 207, 253, 267, 299–301 provisions 31, 32, 80, 118, 122, 154, 172, 174, 175, 285 public sector 14, 33, 56, 124, 144, 146, 147, 150, 258 broader 145, 148 public services 139, 146, 150, 284, 287, 297 Puerto Ricans 245, 253 purchasing power 141, 151, 249 qualities 120, 121, 128, 184, 194, 195, 252, 277, 286 queers 203, 204, 220 race 12, 13, 25, 26, 38, 192, 194, 237, 241, 255, 258, 287, 288, 311, 313 racial capitalism 281, 310 Radical Politics of Migration and Precarity 29, 136 raids 211, 213, 214, 237 rainbow 20, 21, 278, 307 Rainbow 276, 277, 278, 279, 281, 283, 285, 287, 289, 291, 309, 310, 311, 313, 314 Rainbow Nation 277, 278, 286, 288, 298, 302, 314 Rancière 59, 61, 70, 76 Raunig 63, 64, 66, 76

Index recession 56, 105, 138, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 153, 249, 283 reciprocity 186, 297 reduction 139, 145, 146, 147, 150, 151, 265, 301 reference list 52, 120, 123, 126, 163, 164, 167, 170, 176, 178, 181, 196, 197, 201, 261 refugees 2, 5, 17, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 106, 290, 292, 296, 312 regions 107, 120, 121, 122, 124, 130, 200, 202, 206, 211, 282, 294 Regulating Illegal Work in China 12, 161, 163, 165, 167, 169, 171, 173, 175, 177 Regulation of Labour Immigration in China 165 regulations 4, 5, 106, 144, 148, 153, 155–56, 160, 161, 162, 164, 165, 166, 168, 173 administrative 162, 165, 172 relation 91, 99, 100, 102, 103, 190, 191, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 217, 246, 247 capital-labour 9, 89 social 37, 87, 163 remaking 5, 83, 86, 87, 280 rents 108, 109, 125, 262, 263, 268 reproduction 12, 34, 43, 44, 45, 84, 89, 91, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 253, 263 republic 24, 74, 280, 282, 287, 296 residence 10, 123, 125, 127, 160, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171, 173, 175 residence permit 165, 169, 171, 191, 193, 236 residents 122, 123, 125, 132, 160, 177, 212, 259, 261, 262 permanent 104, 125 resistance 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 18, 19, 23, 24, 53, 54, 61, 71, 142, 236 resources 14, 19, 35, 44, 125, 126, 186, 191, 272, 296, 300, 301 restaurants 107, 126, 190, 234, 258, 259 restrictions 160, 162, 164, 167, 170, 171, 291 retirement migration 119, 121, 134, 135, 136 international 11, 135, 136 rights 2, 3, 7–8, 18, 19, 61, 66, 67, 68, 69, 76, 172, 204–6, 256, 297 civil 266, 267 social 12, 17, 18, 120, 133, 164, 227, 300 Robinson 52, 58, 63, 64, 76 Round and Kuznetsova-Morenko 200, 202, 206, 208, 210, 212, 214, 216, 218, 220, 222 rules 8, 35, 84, 104, 106, 156, 162, 165–66, 168–73, 178, 222, 237

Index immigration 164, 172 Russia x, xi, 2, 16, 198, 199–200, 202, 205–13, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 221, 222 Russian 205, 207, 208, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 221, 223 ethnic 208, 213, 215 Russian migrant precariat 15 Russian state 199, 210 Russia’s Labour Migrants 16, 198 sacp 277, 278, 283, 287 sacrifices 185, 186, 193, 194 salaries 40, 44, 131, 133, 145, 147, 148, 172, 195, 199, 255, 260, 289 sanfei 160, 168, 170, 173, 175, 178 Sassen 3, 13, 18, 19, 27, 98, 230, 243, 254, 261, 265, 274 Scandinavia 75, 128, 130 Scandinavians 126, 128, 129, 130, 133 Scandinavian workers 130, 131 schedules 128, 129, 131 schemes, guest worker 170 schools x, xi, 66, 109, 112, 181, 193, 247, 262, 264, 310 Schultz Jørgensen 246, 248, 250, 252, 254, 256, 258, 260, 262, 266, 268, 270, 272, 274 sectors 31, 33, 34, 38, 88, 90, 107, 126, 141, 143, 145, 148, 166, 169, 170 informal 80, 81, 88, 108 private 102, 123, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 151 semi-public 143, 150 textile 108 sector workers banking 149, 150 public 144, 145 Şenses 10, 100, 102, 104, 106, 108, 110, 112, 114, 116 service providers 118, 119, 122, 132, 288, 300 services 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 152, 153, 175, 285, 305 Seymour 6, 28, 50, 52, 56, 76–77, 98, 101, 117, 289, 313 Shakhsari 203–4, 222 Shukaitis 56, 65, 77, 243 situation, precarious labour market 120 slavery 254–55, 308 slaves 205, 217, 253, 254, 259, 261 Smith 203, 222, 274, 275 Sobyanin 212, 213

327 social exclusion 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 27, 28, 29, 81, 82, 83, 102 social groups 47, 143, 150, 151 socialities 229, 230, 231, 239 social mobility 15, 181, 182–83, 187, 188, 192, 193, 194, 196 upward 195 social movements 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 22, 23, 30, 48, 49, 61, 62, 73, 74, 226 social policy x, xi, 21, 27, 82, 135, 287, 302 society 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 27, 135, 244, 265, 266, 268, 296, 297, 298 alternative 272 multi-ethnic 206 uncivil 21, 300 solidarity x, 7, 22, 24, 39, 45, 62, 68, 69, 237, 239, 250, 297, 301 Soumeli 141, 146, 148, 151, 158 source countries, main 105 South 8, 9, 10, 11, 15, 78, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 90, 95, 96, 99, 100, 102, 241 South Africa 20, 239, 277, 278–83, 285, 286, 288, 298, 304, 305, 306, 307, 310, 311, 314 South Africans 276, 277, 280, 282, 284, 286, 292, 293, 294, 295, 298, 300, 312 black 281, 282, 286, 294, 296, 297 South America 124, 127, 128 South American 127, 128, 130, 131 Sova Centre 222, 223 sovereignty 26, 49, 167, 200, 202, 205, 220, 221, 238 spaces 18, 28, 29, 37, 38, 48–49, 178, 202, 227, 230, 231, 238, 240, 242, 290 Spain 11, 31, 118, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 132, 135 Spaniards 122, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 133 Spanish labour market 29, 119, 121–23, 130, 131, 132 Spanish society 120, 126, 127, 133 Spanish Welfare States 122, 123 Stafford 181, 186, 197 Standing 2, 3, 5, 55, 57, 77, 83–85, 91, 93, 94, 96, 100, 101, 117, 159 state 16, 143, 146, 173, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 207, 215, 217, 297, 300 higher 195 host 163, 164–65, 170, 171, 172 state apparatus 143, 144 state authorities 70, 152, 153, 291 State Council 162, 166, 168, 169, 178

328 State Duma 209, 222 State regulation of undocumented African migrants in China 177 Statistics 105, 160, 177, 208, 212 status 38, 40, 65, 141, 162, 163, 164, 168, 204, 260 Stephenson 39, 227, 238, 239, 240 Stevens 236, 244 Stockholm 17, 28, 127, 135 stories 17, 180, 185, 186, 187, 189, 193, 225, 255, 256, 261, 264, 271, 272 St. Pauli 65, 68 strategies 52, 54, 71, 118, 119, 129, 130, 132, 134, 256, 259, 260, 263, 270, 272 streets 17, 32, 66, 70, 86, 109, 200, 212, 215, 233, 234, 235, 236, 253, 295 students 57, 66, 69, 160, 166, 179, 180, 181, 185, 189, 190, 193, 194, 259 foreign 161, 165, 166–67 subaltern 18, 19, 226, 231, 238, 239 subject 44, 61, 76, 78, 112, 120, 130, 152, 156, 166, 170, 173, 174, 239, 240 subjectivities 36–37, 116, 225, 227, 228, 238, 240, 243 suicide 179, 180, 188, 192, 194, 195, 196 surplus population 4, 26, 90, 251 suzhi 181, 183, 184, 190 Sweden x, 11, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136 Swedish 17, 118, 121, 123, 127, 128, 129, 132 Swedish citizens 121, 124, 125, 129, 134 Swedish entrepreneurs and migrant workers in jobs 119 Swedish irms 11, 119, 123, 124, 125, 128, 129, 131 Swedish Retirement Migrants 118 Swedish retirement migrants in Spain 118 Swedish retirement migrants to Spain 118 Swedish Welfare State 11, 119, 121, 125, 130, 132, 134 Syrian migrants 105, 106, 107–9, 112, 114 Syrian migrant workers 108 Syrians 105, 106, 108, 109, 112 Terreblanche 280, 284, 286, 289, 314 territory 6, 27, 40, 175, 220, 263, 282 Theron 289, 290, 292, 294, 314 Third World Quarterly 23, 78, 115, 116, 117, 189, 304, 305, 314 Toksöz 28, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 117

Index Toronto Immigrants 25, 308 townships 202, 204, 282, 287, 292, 293, 294, 295, 297, 299 trade union density 102, 103, 143 trade union power 138, 139 trade unions 58, 60, 94, 95, 102, 110, 139, 141, 142–43, 145, 146, 153, 155, 156, 258 transformation 32, 34, 54, 58, 61, 63, 82, 85, 180, 184, 240, 244, 250, 287, 288 political 19, 60 transmigrants 228, 230 Transversal 51, 74, 75, 97, 98, 244 treatment 10, 16, 156, 201, 209, 210, 217, 218 Trimikliniotis 140, 141, 159, 225, 226, 228, 230, 232, 233–34, 236, 238, 240, 242, 244, 291 Troika 138, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 154, 155 Tsianos 5, 6, 51, 52, 56, 130, 225, 226, 228, 230, 233–34, 238, 239, 240, 244 Turkey xii, 2, 10, 17, 24, 28, 99, 100, 102, 103–17, 136, 204, 232, 234 Turkish people 233, 234 uncertainty 3, 33, 41, 44, 48, 55, 92, 146, 149, 150, 162, 163, 165, 172 underclass 29, 92, 276 undocumented migrants 219, 314 unemployment 74, 133, 138, 139, 144, 145, 147, 153, 155, 157, 159, 181, 182, 286, 287 unfree labour 20, 276, 279, 280, 281, 289, 290, 298, 305, 311 unions 26, 32, 60, 62, 66, 256, 257, 258, 269, 274, 289, 290, 292, 294, 302 unity 246, 254, 255, 256, 257, 268, 272 urban development 247, 261, 262, 263 urban life 185, 236, 244, 247, 253, 266 Urban Revolution 74, 242, 273, 274 urban society 260, 266, 272 utopia 42, 271 variations xiii, 2, 124, 143 Varsanyi 110, 112, 117 Vassilis xii, 18, 50, 224, 243, 244 Verkhovsky 206, 222, 223 violence 7, 39, 202, 203, 204, 205, 210, 213, 214, 216, 222, 295–97, 299, 309, 312 Virno 35–36, 51, 59 visa 163, 164, 165, 168, 170, 171, 175 vulnerability 6, 16, 40, 41, 43, 45, 163, 164, 171, 177, 216, 227

329

Index Wacquant 5, 13, 14, 19, 29, 63, 77 wages 108, 113, 139, 141, 142, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 249, 250, 259 living 264, 267 Wall Street 265, 267 wceca (Women’s Center for Education and Career Advancement) 250, 275 welfare state 4, 30, 73, 84, 86, 133, 274 Wolpe 281, 282, 283, 314 women 42, 43, 44, 101, 107, 116, 123, 125, 133, 151, 234, 235, 255, 256, 293 Women’s Center for Education and Career Advancement (wceca) 250, 275 Work and Life of Migrants in Turkey 107 Work-Citizenship Matrix 25, 308 workers 101, 111, 123–24, 127, 129, 130, 133, 141, 143, 148–49, 164, 259, 260, 261, 263 contracted 293 employed 2, 130 groups of 150, 161 immaterial 36, 38 informal 2, 88–89, 122, 131, 132 local 108, 114, 176 low-skilled migrant tcn 130 migrant sex 115 migrant women 107 non-migrant 113, 120 salaried 124, 131 self-employed 119

workers and entrepreneurs 119, 120, 123, 124, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132 workers centres 258, 260, 264, 267 workers/entrepreneurs 119, 123 working class 56, 57, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94–96, 249, 250–53, 257, 258, 268–71 global 86–88, 115 Working Life xi, 22, 134, 158, 303 work permit 104, 106, 124, 164, 166, 168, 170, 171, 172 migrant’s 171, 172 workplaces xi, xiii, 30, 65, 141, 142, 174, 179, 252, 255, 257, 259, 260, 289, 294 work relations 162, 164, 174, 175 work rights 55, 58 workspaces 45, 47, 227 world 1, 2, 3, 13, 18, 46, 95, 101, 111, 134, 224, 225, 230, 248, 295 World Bank 90, 98, 102, 223, 286, 287, 313 World Social Forum 27 xenophobia 109, 113, 200, 278, 294, 296, 297, 298, 302, 303, 306, 307, 312, 314 young people 31, 57, 181, 182, 186, 193, 215 Zuma 288, 303, 308, 309, 310