Labour migration, precarious work and liminality

Abstract

Liminality, as originally conceived by anthropologists, is a temporary ‘in-between’ state that acts as a bridge, connecting old roles to new roles, and resulting in a desired new state. The article applies this concept to precarious migrant work. We argue, specifically, that migrants in low-wage and insecure work occupy four main liminal realms following their cross-border mobility: the temporal, the financial, the social and the legal. We explore these four realms using qualitative interview evidence (36 interviews) from comparative research with migrant workers, migrant employers and community stakeholders in Norway and the UK. The article then reflects on the balance between liminality (as a positive, temporary and in-between state) and limbo (as a negative, long-term state). We argue that migrants doing precarious work avoid limbo, but at the same time do not experience liminality as originally conceived. Instead, they experience what we term ‘ambiguous liminality’: where precarious work is encountered as liminal, but where the exact mechanisms and pathways leading to a desired new state are multiple, uncertain and incremental. Liminality, however ambiguous, is a vital expression of migrant agency; but it also serves the interests of capital too: masking the negatives associated with precarious work and helping to underpin precarious migrants’ work ethic.

Towards the platformisation of employment in post-pandemic Aotearoa New Zealand? Evidence from the Future Worlds of Work survey

“…The increasing precarity associated with gig work and rise of the gig economy is experienced unevenly along gender and ethnic lines (Hamilton et al, 2022;van Doorn et al, 2022). Migrants from the Global South have long been recruited into low-wage work in the Global North (Bauder, 2008;Scott et al, 2022;Webster & Zhang, 2021), and the rise of gig work has extended this trend (van Doorn & Vijay, 2021). And concerningly, evidence from overseas is increasingly associating gig work with negative effects on health and wellbeing (Glavin & Schieman, 2022), particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic, when workers were left without protections and, therefore, more at risk of exposure to the virus (Apouey et al, 2020;MacEachen et al, 2022;Stephany et al, 2020).…”