Q: How did you find yourself in academia?
A: This question is related to the birth of the book, The Precarious Migrant Worker. By 2015, I had worked in many low-wage, precarious jobs in Bradford. I started trying to organise other migrant workers in these jobs to defend our labour rights, which were routinely trampled. The bosses were relying on our lack of knowledge of labour rights to get away with atrocities. However, even though the migrant workers I was working alongside experienced daily injustices, getting them on board any organising drives was difficult. I therefore applied for an MA in Equality and Human Rights at the University of Glasgow in 2016 to study precisely why this difficulty arises. Glasgow then offered me a PhD scholarship and stipend to continue this research.
I was very lucky; many others who are much more ‘academically capable’ than I am do not receive these opportunities. I returned to Greece in 2021 for a year, but due to the ongoing economic crisis I could not find a job I wanted. As an EU migrant with settled status in the UK, I therefore had the luxury of coming back, and academia is – still – a sector that allows me to pursue my sociological interests while maintaining some degree of freedom to contribute to social movements on the ground. I am still very precarious, without a secure contract, but I am riding the wave for as long as it lasts. The opportunity to make a living by studying and teaching sociology is a privilege that should never be taken for granted.
Q: Did you have any aims when you set out to write the book/how did you come to write the book?
A: I was trying to find answers to a question that has been gnawing at social movements for more than a century: how do we organise the most precarious and exploited sectors of society, and what are the barriers that prevent us from doing so? When I started reading about this in relation to migrant workers in the UK, I noticed that most academic texts were completely detached from the realities on the ground. Many tended to analyse the lives of migrant workers without actually speaking to them; and the few that did, did so without really appreciating the complex ways in which precarity’s daily grind shapes your understanding of yourself and your position in the world. As a precarious migrant worker myself, I could very easily spot these omissions.
I therefore decided to address these gaps by finding work, covertly, in Glasgow’s warehouses, factories, and kitchens, and deeply observing how the drudgery of precarity sculpts workers’ subjectivities. I also spoke with hundreds of migrant workers through formal and informal methods. Eventually, I arrived at two main conclusions. The first is what I call the socialisation of precarity (which is the book’s subtitle). This basically refers to how precarity is naturalised and comes to be perceived as a component of our identities. In the course of daily labour, as your body sweats and fatigues fighting for a job that is by no means guaranteed, with your ability to work being your sole vehicle for achieving some semblance of security, I saw that people converted their exploitation into a badge of self-worth: they came to identify the difficult conditions they faced not as something to be changed, but as something one must survive through, alone. Their self-worth, their identity as powerful, autonomous humans, became fused with their daily, solitary toil.
This is the insidiousness of capitalism: it imprisons us precisely by relying on our desires to feel free. To put it succinctly and rather crudely, in the same way that men become socialised to oppress women – and each other, and their own selves – while feeling that we are somehow doing things ‘the correct way’, workers can become socialised to oppress and exploit themselves, while being proud of it.
The second main conclusion concerns the absence of social movements and unions from the environments in which most working class people live and work. I argue that it is precisely due to this absence that the socialisation of precarity can take root. This is crucial, because in most texts that are written by social movements and progressive academics, they tend to put the cart before the horse. They write eloquently about two million different theoretical topics and approaches, about so many things that we should do, think, or address, but they ignore the fact that social movements are entirely absent from most people’s lives. As some of my interview participants told me, ‘we don’t know that you exist’.
The more I spoke with academics and organisers in the UK, the more I felt that these conclusions could be relatively valuable contributions to existing discussions within the movement. I therefore wrote the book as a mostly political intervention in the matters that concern us. I am happy to note, however, that I am not alone. Groups such as Notes From Below and the Angry Workers are exploring similar issues, and I am very happy that this work is being carried out in the UK.
Q: How can the findings in the book inform the current social and political attitude towards migration, but also in regards to welfare cuts and increasing poverty in the UK?
A: What a book does in practice is largely outside the control of the author. I hope that the book convinces people of five main things:
1) That immigrant labour is essential to the British economy, by design. Migrants are not taking your job. Rather, the economy is structured in a way that inherently relies on migrants for specific jobs in specific sectors. However, this is only part of the picture. I want to unsettle the entire concept of seeing humans simply in terms of their economic contributions. If you judge a migrant based on how much they are ‘contributing’ to your economy, you are also judging yourself based on that criterion. You are helping to normalise an entire way of looking at human beings. It is not a surprise, then, that as these mentalities are allowed to fester in the social body, we increasingly see cuts to public services that attack precisely those who are seen as not ‘contributing enough’, such as the disabled and the unemployed. As long as we remain tethered to a conception of humans as ‘value-producers’, we will not be equipped to counteract these adverse attacks on the majority of the population.
2) That, similarly to how migrant labour is essential to the British economy, so is poverty. Poverty is not an aberration; it is a systemic component of capitalism. Our bosses understand, and value, the fact that our insecurity forces us to overexert ourselves – this anxiety directly supports their profits. Furthermore, our desires to feel free and empowered within the confines of the existing socioeconomic system may, paradoxically, fortify its foundations.
3) In light of the above, that we need to seriously reconsider how we value certain behaviours, and why. How do we identify with our oppression, and how are we complicit in reproducing it?
4) That, despite all the above, and despite the tendency to identify with components of precarity, workers nevertheless remain acutely critical of the existing social system. As Agnes, an interview participant who worked in hospitality, told me, ‘You can’t be friends with your boss’. This awareness emerges through their experiential, material understanding of their lives as workers – in short, migrant workers understand that their exploitation is tied to their wider socioeconomic position. It is only in the absence of an empowering alternative narrative that they then may re-internalise this exploitation and convert it into a badge of self-worth.
5) Departing from the above, that social movements must become firmly embedded in the social body; only then can the socialisation of precarity begin to be dismantled, through the development of new cultures and narratives of collective value, care, solidarity, and resistance. Alongside Notes From Below, and drawing on my experiences in the anarchist movement of Greece, I argue that these ‘narratives’ must emanate from accessible, physical institutions in workers’ communities, such as workers’ centres.
Q: Your book intertwines theory with personal narratives, blending prose with sociological evaluation. How did you arrive at the form you’ve used in the book?
A: I wanted the book to be accessible to most humans. This book is firstly a tool in the arsenal of social movements and anyone concerned with emancipatory social change; secondly, it is a narrative that foregrounds the voices and experiences of those most impacted by the processes I am discussing; and third, it is hopefully a useful sociological intervention. I employed social theory to the extent that I considered it useful for understanding what was going on in the ground and in the interviews; and I used what was going on in the ground and in the interviews as a way of corroborating, enhancing, or criticising existing social theory. Mostly, I wanted the book to be enriching both as a learning but also as a reading experience. In this, I was inspired by John Berger, Hsiao-Hung Pai, and the writings of my former supervisor, Professor Andrew Smith – who is a very fundamental reason that I stayed in academia. Jonathan Skerrett, my editor from Polity Press, also helped a lot in the final form of the book.
Q: What do you hope to achieve in the book launch?
A: I am a member of the Interregnum collective, a group of organisers, academics, musicians, and writers (frequently all at once) that aim to make critical perspectives accessible to the wider public, with a view towards contributing to the development of the ‘alternative narratives’ that I talked about above. This launch is seen as a part of this process. We will be joined by important academics, but also by people who have extensive experience organising in some of the most precarious workplaces of the UK’s economy. They will discuss the book and its implications, but the most exciting part of the book launch is the open discussion at the end. We will wrap up the speaker contributions quite quickly and open it up to the floor. I therefore hope that the launch is a dialogic process that contributes to wider questions that organisers and social movement scholars are engaged with currently.