Unreliable infrastructures of transnational social reproduction for precarious young EU migrants under neoliberal regimes of mobility, work, and welfare

Simola, Anna
(2025) Migration and Social Reproduction: Critical junctions between labour, border and reproductive struggles — ISBN: [978-1-0353-5689-8], published

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Abstract
This chapter engages with discussions on social reproduction with a subject-oriented, transnational orientation, centring on the experiences of university-educated Italian and Spanish young adults who moved to Brussels searching for work corresponding to their ‘passion’, but worked under precarious and non-waged arrangements. Firstly, it analyses the unsustainable material, temporal and embodied conditions of EU migrants trying to sustain their lives without a living wage. Secondly, it addresses the unreliability of social protection infrastructures in the transnational context, demonstrating the ways work-related conditionality enforced on the rights of young precarious workers, could block their access to social protection both in the country of destination and that of origin, thus rendering them self-responsible for their own survival. The relational and intergenerational aspects of this intricate social reproduction problematic are further analysed in the context where neoliberal restructuring and austerity have undermined the ability of families to provide alternative safety nets for precarious mobile workers.
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Simola, A. (2025). Unreliable infrastructures of transnational social reproduction for precarious young EU migrants under neoliberal regimes of mobility, work, and welfare. In Gabriella Alberti, Lisa Riedner and Gwyneth Lonegran (ed.), Migration and Social Reproduction: Critical junctions between labour, border and reproductive struggles. Edward Elgar Publishing. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/269796