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- Axelsson, Linn, et al.
(författare)
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Emerging topologies of transnational employment : 'Posting' Thai workers in Sweden’s wild berry industry beyond regulatory reach
- 2018
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 89, s. 1-10
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper suggests a need to pay closer attention to the fact that employment is increasingly stretched across several regulatory regimes. This may help explain why governments, which rely on national legislative frameworks, struggle to protect the interests of transnationally mobile low-skilled workers. By adopting a topological approach to state regulation and authority, the paper demonstrates how powerful actors have reconfigured employment in Sweden’s wild berry industry in a spatial sense by engaging transnational subcontractors. It argues that transnational subcontracting inserts distance into employment relationships, thereby creating precarious migrant workers whose simultaneous absence and presence in several regulatory regimes places them partly beyond the regulatory reach of any one nation-state or nationally based trade union. The paper also argues that the Swedish government’s response to precarious working conditions in the wild berry industry can be understood as a series of attempts aimed at bringing transnational employment relationships within its regulatory reach. Drawing on topological spatial vocabulary, it shows how these attempts are less about the movement of state infrastructure into transnational space than about the stretching and folding of space itself, in an attempt to establish a powerful Swedish presence across distance. On the other hand, the paper concludes that transnational subcontracting opens up a space which enables wild berry actors to circumvent regulations and, as such, it remains very difficult for the Swedish government to reach into employment relationships in this industry.
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| 2. |
- Axelsson, Linn, et al.
(författare)
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On waiting, work-time and imagined futures : Theorizing temporal precariousness among Chinese chefs in Sweden’s restaurant industry
- 2017
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier BV. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 78, s. 169-178
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper explores the precarious working conditions in the Chinese restaurant industry in Sweden – a country considered to have one of Europe’s most liberal labour immigration policies. Drawing upon a theoretical framework inspired by scholarship on precarious work and time geography, the paper argues that precarious work performed by migrant labour can be usefully understood through three interrelated temporal processes that, when they work together, produce and maintain precarious work-life situations. They are: (1) work-time arrangements: that is, actual working hours per day and over the annual cycle, the pace and intensity of work and the flexibility demanded of migrant workers in terms of when work is carried out, (2) the spatio-temporal ‘waiting zones’ indirectly produced by immigration policies that delay full access to labour markets and in which precarious work-time arrangements consequently arise, and (3) migrant workers’ imagined futures, which motivate them to accept precarious work-time arrangements during a transitory period. The paper thus also illuminates that the Chinese chefs in Sweden’s restaurant industry are not just passive victims of exploitative work-time arrangements. Rather, waiting – for a return to China or settlement in Sweden – may be part of migrants’ strategies to achieve certain life course trajectories.
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| 3. |
- Zhang, Qian, 1977-, et al.
(författare)
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Channelling through bureaucracy : How migration intermediaries and state actors (re)shape Chinese migration to the Swedish restaurant industry
- 2021
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier BV. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 123, s. 14-22
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The role of migration mediation in the global circulation of labour has been receiving increasing attention. Channel is a frequently used, but under-theorised, concept in such studies. Drawing on mobilities perspectives, especially migration infrastructure and three aspects of mobility (route, speed and friction), this paper fosters a framework – channelling through bureaucracy. It seeks to go beyond seeing channels as structure and mechanism to argue channelling is a productive and differentiating process whereby both state and intermediary actors actively intervene in migrants’ mobilities. Based on documentary analysis, interviews and participatory observation in Sweden and China, we demonstrate how, in the last decade, migration intermediaries and state actors channel Chinese migrants’ mobilities in relation to three major shifts in Swedish immigration bureaucracy. The empirical findings illustrate that, as a concept, channelling illustrates, specifically, how conflicts and collaborations between the regulatory and commercial dimensions of migration mediation drive new modes of operation and self-reinforcing of migration infrastructures. Additionally, the study indicates how channelling operates through these three specific aspects of mobility to include, exclude, favour, disadvantage, filter and direct different intermediary actors and migrants. Future research could draw on mobilities studies and the specific forms of interactions between state actors and migration intermediaries to deepen the understanding of migration mediation.
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