Disposable labour? Social reproductive struggles of precarious young EU migrants under neoliberal regimes of mobility, work and welfare

Simola, Anna
(2023) INEQ research seminar “A new class of privileged, yet precarious labour? Mobilities, work and the weakening welfare state in a p — Location: University of Helsinki, INEQ - Helsinki Inequality Initiative (23.May.2023)

Files

No attached file found for this publication.

Details

Authors
Abstract
This paper engages with theoretical discussions on social reproduction under neoliberal regimes of mobility, work, and welfare by revisiting the findings of a qualitative study (Simola, 2021) that investigated university-educated EU citizens’ experiences of free mobility in conditions of precarious labour. The participants were young adults who moved from four EU countries to enter the intensively competitive labour market of Brussels. While all the participants moved in search of work corresponding to their education and their ‘passion’, they subsequently experienced unemployment and worked under precarious arrangements of different kinds, including various forms of non-waged work. Additionally, their precarious labour position exposed them to national policies that hindered their access to social security entitlements in Belgium. Like several other EU countries, Belgium has raised barriers to EU migrants’ access to both welfare rights and residence rights. The study shows how specific conditionality imposed on EU migrants’ rights functioned in interplay with general welfare conditionality, constituting effective barriers in their access to social protection. The paper zooms into the consequent problematic situations in which many participants spent protracted periods of time working without adequate wages, while also unable to access social protection to secure subsistence. How did they sustain their lives under such adverse conditions and why did they continue their endeavours in Brussels despite of them? The paper focuses on three interlinked struggles of social reproduction in the participants’ lives: 1) the temporal struggles related to the substantial time they invested in non-waged work; 2) their material struggles of subsistence, dependency, and debt; and 3) their embodied struggles related to the reproduction of their capacity to work and sustain their lives in both physical and psychological senses.
Affiliations

Citations

  • APA
  • Chicago
  • FWB

Simola, A. (2023). Disposable labour? Social reproductive struggles of precarious young EU migrants under neoliberal regimes of mobility, work and welfare. INEQ research seminar “A new class of privileged, yet precarious labour? Mobilities, work and the weakening welfare state in a p, University of Helsinki, INEQ - Helsinki Inequality Initiative. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/269691