The precarious migrant worker

Hsiao-Hung Pai argues that this new book on the working lives of migrant workers is much more than a piece of academic research and should be read as a call to arms

When I first saw the title of this book, I thought it was going to be just another piece of academic research on migration and migrant labour. I thought it was going to be dry and detached. But what I found when I started reading it was the contrary. It is familiar and warm. There is temperature in the written word. There is so much empathy through the pages. I’m hooked. 

The book opens with the dreams and aspirations of a worker working shifts in a printing press, producing greeting cards, in Bradford. Her warm smile made the work environment less intolerable for her fellow workers – and her tears at the thought of not having enough time to spend with her son and get to know him. Behind the colourful cheery products that the migrant workers sacrificed their family life in order to produce, lies the alienation and anxiety resulting from the extremely flexible and dispensable position in which the workers found themselves. 

The humanity of this book keeps you from putting it down. The language is refreshingly approachable. The first-hand research methods are most unusual and unconventional for an academic author: Panos Theodoropoulos went undercover in a variety of workplaces, such as printing presses, kitchens, factories and warehouses. It is moving to read how he documents in great detail the work conditions and the precarious life in which workers live. It must have taken an incredible amount of determination to last through these strenuous jobs. During his job as a kitchen porter in a Glasgow kitchen, for instance, he was physically injured: 

I have sustained a few more cuts and burns. The cuts are particularly problematic because they are on my fingers, which always are in use and in contact with warm water, chemicals and leftovers. It means that almost every action that I have to perform hurts, and I have to just keep working ignoring the pain. Apart from these injuries, I have been working with cramps on both my calves as a result of not having a chance to take a seat, and my shoulder blades are burning from the constant lifting of heavy plates. As I look at my arms and hands, I can’t help thinking about the fact that these conditions are directly attributable to the rhythm of the work, combined with contractual precarity and the business’s unwillingness to pay more staff…

‘I need the jobs to live’ 

When I met with Panos Theodoropoulos, we discussed his method and he told me that it didn’t set out as subterfuge. Panos left Greece, his country of origin, due to the economic crisis there and started working in Bradford in 2013. Two years down the line, by 2015, he had worked in many low-wage, precarious jobs there. He really did need the jobs to start with. His financial situation only changed after getting funding as a PhD student in 2017. Prior to that, ‘I needed the jobs to live,’ he told me. 

When you need a job to survive, you carry that ‘there is no way out’ sense of mission with you and aim to last through the job, however tough the conditions are. This is very different to a situation where you work undercover as a researcher or journalist and know that you will leave the job when your publication deadline nears. I know that from my own undercover experiences that the ‘there is an end point to it’ scenario can save you from mental collapse. Panos’ years of ‘working to live’ contribute to the book being an authentic representation of the reality it seeks to portray. 

Panos talked as an activist rather than an academic. Although he is a lecturer, he has the way of talking of a labour organiser. That following weekend after we met, he went to Great Yarmouth to talk to a group of Roma workers about their rights and how to organise. That was part of the activism in which he has been engaged. I realised that Panos is an activist-turned-academic, rather than the other way round. 

Originality

One of the first things that stand out for me about Precarious Migrant Worker is the group of migrant workers with whom Panos worked with and wrote about. In the popular mind, a ‘migrant’ is usually someone who is subjected to immigration controls. The term can carry connotations of clandestine activity and connections. In the current anti-migrant climate in Britain, a ‘migrant’ often refers to someone from a BAME background and despite this person having lived in Britain for all their lives, the far right rhetoric suggests that theywill always be a ‘migrant’. Panos’ book focuses on mostly European migrant workers, who are also found in the most precarious sector of the labour market in Britain. They can also be subjected to racism and xenophobia, such as during Brexit and in its aftermath. 

‘We are always migrants,’ said an Albanian worker who migrated to Greece and then had to migrate again to Britain to escape the economic crisis in Greece. These words ‘we are always migrants’ also tell the story of how their position of precariousness and second-class status is maintained in society, as demonstrated in the case of another Albanian worker Panos met in a Glasgow kitchen. The account of their flexibility and vulnerability in British workplaces provides a really useful depiction of how European migrant workers differ from as well as are similar to migrant workers from outside the European Union in terms of their working conditions and social position as migrant workers.

The core of Panos’ book is his investigation into how individual migrant workers see their place in work and in society and the way they make their choices and decisions in industrial relations. Their sense of belonging, their identities and class consciousness – or the lack of it – is what stands out. 

Back then, Panos started trying to organise fellow migrant workers in these jobs to defend their labour rights. However, although they experienced daily injustices, they often responded with reluctance and apathy to efforts to unionise them. Panos felt he needed to answer these questions: how do we organise the most precarious and exploited sectors of society and what are the barriers that prevent us from doing so? 

Panos explained the idea of ‘socialisation of precarity’ in the book:

All labour regimes socialise workers: they aim to sculpt specific behaviour traits that will increase workers’ productivity… In the context of our daily labour, class is now experienced individualistically rather than as an aspect of a wider collective identity and narrative. This is a structural feature of precarious contractual relations: it breaks workers into units, atomises them and renders them individually responsible for rights and securities that were previously guaranteed.

…The scars, pain, fatigue, anxiety and isolation experienced in the daily precarious labour turn to badges of self-worth: this is the socialisation of precarity. It is a socialisation that, beyond forming workers that are trained to respond to the demands of flexibility, availability and overexertion, leads to a proud internationalisation of, and identification with, the precise conditions that one is attempting to overcome.

In doing so, the foundations of neoliberalism are fortified, having emerged victorious as unchangeable… The socialisation of precarity sculpts workers whose identities are attached to surviving conditions, rather than changing them.

Panos quoted A Seventh Man by John Berger: ‘If he is aware of a current, a tide which is stronger than his volition, he thinks of it, in an undifferentiated way, as Life… That is not to say that he will never resist, that he will accept every injustice. It is to say that tragedy is more real to him than explanations.’

During his jobs in Glasgow’s warehouses, factories, and kitchens, Panos tried to find the answers – ‘how structural constraints curtail migrants’ abilities to resist exploitation, how subjective understandings of their migration impact workers’ actions/decisions,’ and ‘how they subjectively identify themselves as workers and as migrant workers,’ and lastly, ‘what tools need to be developed so that social movements, NGOs, and trade unions can better represent, empower, and organise (with) migrant workers.’ 

Workers’ struggles

As I found out, this book, different to most academic works, is tied to workers’ struggles and has a clear aim of contributing to the discussion about organising migrant workers. 

With his research interest and activist background, Panos introduced the concept of the “socialisation of precarity” by describing the conditions of the working-class in the East End of London at the turn of the twentieth century. He adopted Rudolf Rocker’s idea of how material conditions may translate into psyches of workers – and how an ‘inferno of misery’ does not necessarily lead to collective action. 

Panos saw Rocker as representing a beautiful legacy of migrant workers’ organising. I was fascinated with his interest in the history of the migrant working-class movement in the East End. When we were planning to meet, I suggested that Panos come to my neighbourhood in Whitechapel. Here, we went to see the Jubilee Street Club, the migrant workers’ social centre back at the beginning of the twentieth century where Rocker and many other anarchist activists gathered. Many Latvian and other migrants who escaped from repression under the Russian empire had come to East London and Jubilee Street Club was their centre of activity – a place for having friendly social interaction, stimulating political discussions as well as organising against appalling working conditions. This place occupied a central place in the history of workers’ struggle in the East End – struggles of migrant workers as well as British workers. At the height of the movement, Jewish workers famously supported local dockers’ strikes, held joint meetings, and helped with their childcare. As Panos quoted Rocker’s London Years at length, I saw the importance of connecting past struggles with the present in his book.

Pano works with Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and is also a founding member, editor and author of the Interregnum Collective, an autonomous platform that aims to make critical theory relevant and accessible. ‘A platform for the radical imagination – the belief that another world is possible, combined with ideas of how to bring it about.’

Knowing about Panos’ activism and the clear aim of his writing, Precarious Migrant Worker should be seen as a call to arms. As he wrote:

Neoliberalism is unable to circumvent workers’ experiential awareness of class-based injustice, daily confirmed through the fatigue of the mind and body… It is possible to imagine intersectional solidarities and alliances… No matter how deeply the socialisation of precarity penetrates our sense of self, it cannot dispel our awareness of the fundamental inequalities that we are subject to.

The book questioned the role of the majority of trade unions and was puzzled by the lack of effort on their part. Panos puts forward the important question of whether migration has the potential to develop into a politicised identity – an identity encompassing political understandings that leads to organised action. The question has been answered in this book – as well as by examples of current migrant workers’ struggles and the growth of grassroots migrant workers’ unions, such as United Voice of the World (UVW), Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB). These unions are member-led and believe in direct action. They are the places where workers are able to break out of their isolation, insecurity and individualisation which Panos talked about and affirm their collective interests and build their collective power. 

It is no longer merely ‘you swim or you drown,’ but collectively you have the potential to reach the shore. Through industrial struggles, the victories that these migrant workers have won are a clear testimony to their place in society – they are the model of militancy for local workers to follow. They’re no longer merely marked by their transience. Contrary to the right-wing propaganda of the majority of British media, migrant workers are able to raise wages and improve working conditions for all workers.

The Precarious Migrant Worker: The Socialization of Precarity by Panos Theodoropoulos was published in May 2025 by Polity Books