Charalampos (Harris) Paraskevopoulos: “Migrants at Work: How Legal Status and Regional Geography Affect Migrant Labour Market Experiences in the UK”

In Students by General Account

In a context of globalising neoliberalism where global migration is increasing and where the nature of work is being reified, promoting flexibility and casualisation in the place of stability and security, my research aims to explore migrants’ labour market experiences.

Current research has identified that insecure work is increasingly the norm in different sectors of the labour market and that the working-class experiences a generalised precarity directly linked to employment but gradually invading other aspects of workers’ lives. Migrant members of the UK working-class are especially vulnerable to precarity because they have to reconcile employment insecurity with the uncertainty of legal status.

Through several in-depth semi-structured interviews with migrants that live in two big cities of the UK, I aim to explore the following research questions:

– How is precarity in relation to work, and insecurity in relation to legal status, experienced by different categories of migrants? How do experiences of precarity and insecurity intersect for different migrant groups?
– What are the differences and similarities in strategies used against precarity and insecurity between different categories of migrants?
– To what extent do regional differences within the British economy matter for migrants’ experiences of work and shape the kinds of strategies they employ against precarity?