Paper short abstract

This paper unpacks how authoritarian State-led industrialisation and corporate strategies in the automotive industry in Tangier, Morocco are shaping a precarious industrial workforce while simultaneously shaping new subjectivities and possibilities for labour activism beyond union activity.

Paper long abstract

Based on four months of fieldwork in Tangier, Morocco, this paper explores how the State-led industrialisation process in the city and region since the arrival of a major European automobile manufacturer and the development of its local ecosystem of suppliers has brought about a growing industrial workforce at Europe’s doorstep.

It will analyse how the entanglement of State and corporate strategies ensures continuous labour supply for the growing labour-intensive automotive sector as well as the ongoing weakness of labour contestation through a variety of recruitment and managerial practices aimed at differentiating and hierarchising workers as well as the construction of isolated special economic zones and de facto bans on trade unions. This strategy is paralleled by the acceptance of chosen unions in some factories, often as a means to integrate and discipline workers in the aftermath of labour conflicts.

Finally, I will reflect on how this rapid industrialisation process and concomitant corporate strategies have reshaped local social and labour relations and ask in what ways it has led to the emergence of new worker subjectivities, thereby posing major challenges for union activity but opening new avenues for worker resistance and solidarity networks in and outside of factories at a rising hub of the European automotive industry’s supply chain.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how the war in Gaza reshaped moral boundaries of legitimate artistic labour in Greece. Focusing on musicians’ refusals, boycotts, and public controversies, it explores how artistic work, complicity, and solidarity are renegotiated under political polarisation

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how war-related political polarisation reshapes the moral boundaries of legitimate work, drawing on debates surrounding Greek musicians and singers’ labour during the war in Gaza. While some artists publicly withdrew their labour as an act of solidarity, others continued to perform, triggering intense public criticism, calls for boycott, and moral condemnation. Public debates intensified around high-profile cases, including the renowned Greek performer Glykeria, whose decision to continue performing became a focal point for wider disputes over artistic responsibility, complicity, and professional autonomy.

Based on ethnographic research and analysis of public discourse, the paper explores how music labour became a site of moral judgement, where continuing to work was framed as an ethically charged stance. Rather than focusing on formal labour organising or union action, the paper examines refusal, withdrawal, and public denunciation as emergent forms of resistance and solidarity in contexts where traditional labour politics are limited or ineffective. It argues that artistic labour, often framed as autonomous and apolitical, becomes deeply politicised in moments of war, revealing how artists are compelled to align their livelihoods with broader ethical and geopolitical demands. By foregrounding musicians’ experiences, the paper contributes to anthropological debates on labour, resistance, and moral economies under conditions of war and political polarisation.

Paper short abstract

Under austerity and political polarization, Romania’s far-right AUR hijacks labour grievances, racializes migrant workers, co-opts union activists, and forges neo-corporatist alliances, transforming worker precarity into moralized and racialized hierarchies.

Paper long abstract

Under austerity and neoliberal precarity, the far-right party AUR (Alianța pentru Unirea Românilor) has seized labour politics as a terrain for moral reordering. Drawing on ethnographic observation of rallies, media discourse, and union activity, this paper traces how AUR hijacks worker grievances, redirecting them into moralized and racialized hierarchies that valorize domestic labour while casting migrant workers as illegitimate competitors.

A vivid instance is the 2024 Baia Mare furniture factory conflict, where tensions between Romanian and Sri Lankan workers flared amid weak union mediation. The void left by unions allowed AUR to escalate the dispute into a nationalist moral drama, framing migrant labour as a threat to domestic livelihoods. Meanwhile, some domestic labour activists, still tethered to unions, are co-opted into AUR’s populist orbit, revealing how post-union precarity becomes fertile ground for fascist hegemony.

Paradoxically, AUR’s neo-corporatist labour platform addresses grievances that other parties ignore, staking out a dangerously expansive social-justice terrain while channeling worker representation into nationalist governance. From the standpoint of political economy, two conjoined processes emerge: first, the reordering of the working-class political field through moralized categories, which foment intra-class conflict and obscure deeper structural alliances based on shared exploitation; second, politically engineered fascist neo-corporatist alliances linking segments of the “virtuous” working class with factions of domestic capital.

Through a Gramscian lens, these dynamics constitute a form of cultural and political leadership, securing consent, reshaping norms, and racializing solidarity under structural crisis, revealing both the fragility and emancipatory potential of labour politics in polarized, precarious contexts.

Paper short abstract

The paper analyses how in Colombia and Ecuador, waste pickers’ associations have gained legal status and secured work for their members by mediating with governments and industries, while engaging in forms of unionisation and association that promote unique forms of solidarity and resistance.

Paper long abstract

Waste pickers constitute a workforce of up to 40 million people globally. In Latin America in particular, waste pickers known as recicladores have achieved recognition and the legal formalization of their status as workers, through decades of struggle and the work of their cooperatives, associations, and movements. In this process, they have combined knowledge of waste management, radical and entrepreneurial visions and identity-based forms of labour and environmental struggle, while also engaging in hybrid forms of local associationism and international unionisation as part of the International Alliance of Waste Pickers (IAWP).

The paper focuses on two specific cases: RENAREC, the Ecuadorian national waste pickers’ association, and two of the largest constituents that make up its Colombian equivalent, GAIAREC and the ARB. It compares the different forms of labour organisation in each field site and examines the role of recicladores as agents of social change. Their organisational efforts in different local contexts demonstrate the potential for more inclusive urban futures, based on forms of association and collective action that don't conform to a traditional trade union model.

The waste pickers’ association as an organisational form provides a privileged standpoint to observe shop-floor dynamics and workers' perspectives on collective action praxis, as well as to investigate the tensions between workers’ individual and collective goals. The ethnographic data on workers' efforts to gain visibility for their work and its environmental impact at a local and global level show how new forms of solidarity and resistance can emerge from this kind of labour association.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how workers adapt to an oppressive labour regime that forecloses collective resistance. It argues that workers and employers reach a negative class compromise, tacitly accepting individual resistance. I propose that these acts carry significant meanings and negotiate oppression.

Paper long abstract

Industrial work in a contractor-run match factory in north-western Pakistan is organised through oppression (zulm) and virtue (sawab). Oppression encompasses physical violence, unpaid labour (begaar), the usurpation of state benefits (haq khwarral), terror, and inhumane working conditions. Virtue, on the other hand, denotes a moral economy of charities, worker solidarity, and the foreman’s discretionary leniency. This paper asks how oppressive labour regime affects the struggle (possibilities?) for collective organisation—including kinship solidarities and unionisation—and how workers adapt their methods of resistance when collective action is foreclosed. Based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork as a manual worker in the factory, alongside archival data and in-depth interviews with trade unionists, activists, state officials, and female workers, I argue that the state and management deploy terror to rule out collective resistance. Workers, however, continue to resist harsh working conditions through idiomatic expressions and everyday practices. The idioms blend political, moral, religious, ethnic, and, rarely, radical narratives, while practical resistance is aimed at temporal sabotage and temporary relief. Hence, such acts pose little threat to oppressive labour regimes because they can be contested and accommodated by the factory management. This accommodation produces a negative class compromise in which resistance does not end, but is individualised. This individual resistance, then, is tacitly accepted as the status quo by workers and employers. The paper concludes that while acts of individual resistance do not subvert oppressive labour regimes, they carry significant meanings and negotiate exploitation and oppression in workplaces.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines irregularised Brazilian migrant women in informal domestic work in Lisbon, showing how migration regimes and labour precarity limit unionisation while fostering alternative forms of resistance and solidarity through care-based networks and everyday survival strategies.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the labour experiences of irregularised Brazilian migrant women employed in informal domestic work in Lisbon, analysing how contemporary polarizations around migration, citizenship, and care reconfigure labour conditions and possibilities for resistance. It argues that restrictive migration regimes, combined with racialised and gendered labour hierarchies, produce forms of precaritization characterised by informality, bureaucratic violence, and systematic exclusion from labour rights and protections.

Based on critical ethnographic research drawing on participant observation, in-depth interviews, and life histories, the paper explores how domestic workers navigate and respond to these conditions in contexts where formal labour organising and unionisation are largely inaccessible. Rather than treating informality solely as a space of vulnerability, the analysis foregrounds the everyday practices through which workers enact alternative forms of resistance and solidarity, including mutual aid networks, care-based relations, informal knowledge-sharing, and collective strategies of survival.

The paper is grounded in feminist theories of social reproduction, racial capitalism, and critical anthropology of migration, positioning reproductive labour as a central yet persistently devalued dimension of contemporary economies. By situating informal domestic work at the intersection of migration governance, labour precaritization, and gendered regimes of care, the paper contributes to debates in the anthropology of labour on how resistance and solidarity are reconfigured under conditions of legal exclusion and political polarisation. It suggests that in settings where institutionalised labour organising is constrained or ineffective, workers reimagine solidarity through relational and care-centred practices that unsettle conventional boundaries between work, politics, and social reproduction.

Paper short abstract

This paper surveys a migrant solidarity movement in Naples, tracing emergent forms of labour-based resistance that unsettle the Fordist figure of the citizen-worker. It invites rethinking social struggle beyond wage labour, through the strategies of informality and irregularity unfolding today.

Paper long abstract

In Naples, traditional labour mobilisation was hardly the answer to encroaching precarisation. The city’s semi-peripheral labour landscape has systematically been described by high rates of unemployment, sub-employment and informalisation; a symptom of the “Southern Question” that compounds socio-economic disparities between North and South Italy. Where labour unions found limited support, structural marginalisation has made Naples an important centre for social struggles spearheaded by the disempowered.

This paper surveys one such emergent organisation, a migrant-led social movement whose radicalizing linchpin foregrounds not citizenship, but labour. Taking after a socially embedded radical tradition, Movimento Migranti e Rifugiati Napoli (MMRN) strives to construct a mutual-aid platform that actively de-ethnicises migrant struggles. From this angle, a migrant is first and foremost a worker, (more or less) independently of ethnic origin and administrative status. By focusing on common experiences of labour exploitation and social discrimination, MMRN has built a movement that legally represents over 10,000 people in the Neapolitan hinterland and enjoys direct communication channels with local institutions, in an attempt to override (or at least limit) exclusionary national prerogatives. In tracing this renewed form of political organization and its inherent tensions, this paper points to the potential disentangling of the worker-citizen as the political subjectivity par excellence and, consequently, investigates the potential for solidarities beyond wage labour strictly defined.

In troubling times, the aim of the paper is to shed ethnographic light on a hopeful case that synthesizes a radical labour tradition with new possibilities for collective resistance, grounded in "digging where you stand".

Paper short abstract

This paper examines the intersections between informal labour, migratory status, and the tourism monoculture in Barcelona, drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork. The research situates informal tourism labour within broader transformations in urban political economy.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the intersections between informal labour, migratory status, and the tourism monoculture in Barcelona, drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork. While tourism has long been promoted as a cornerstone of Barcelona’s post-crisis economy, its expansion has relied heavily on forms of labour that remain invisible, unregulated, and structurally marginalised.

The research situates informal tourism labour within broader transformations in urban political economy. As Barcelona has consolidated a tourism-driven growth model, informal work has proliferated as both a survival strategy for migrants with limited access to formal employment and as a cost-saving mechanism for actors operating in the tourism value chain.

Methodologically, the research combines participant observation in the public spaces surrounding the Sagrada Família with semi-structured interviews conducted with informal workers, local residents, and institutional actors. This ethnographic approach seeks to capture the lived realities of workers who occupy a liminal position between visibility and erasure: visible to tourists and police in public space, yet largely invisible in official accounts of the tourism economy. Through their narratives, the study explores how workers negotiate risk, sustain livelihoods, and develop informal organisational practices under conditions of social exclusion.

By foregrounding the experiences of informal workers in one of Europe’s most iconic tourist landscapes, this paper argues that any analysis of contemporary tourism must grapple with the labour regimes and migratory realities that make it possible. Ultimately, the research contributes to a grounded perspective on how touristified urban spaces are produced and sustained through unequal and often invisible forms of labour.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how undocumented workers and their allies in Belgium create alternative forms of social protection and resistance through mutual aid, amid precarious working conditions, hostile migration politics and shrinking welfare provision.

Paper long abstract

In this research note I will explore how undocumented workers and their supporters prefigure and reimagine different forms of social protection and resistance amid shifting (informal) labour regimes, hostile migration politics, and shrinking welfare provision in Belgium. Centring ‘La MASP-BXL’ (La Mutuelle Autogérée des Sans-Papiers à Bruxelles), a self-managed mutual aid initiative concerning health care support for and by undocumented workers, this paper discerns what alternative social relations, practices and imaginaries of resistance emerge in conditions of labour precarity. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021, mobilisation efforts for collective regularisation by sans papier movements were met with state inaction, resulting in widespread exhaustion among activists, and support organisations to engage in public protests. While undocumented migrants can access regular mechanisms of labour organising that aim to protect workers’ rights, such as traditional labour unions, their effectiveness is increasingly undermined by the expansion of flexible and platform-based forms of labour. At the same time, civil society organisations defending migrants’ labour rights are confronted with defunding. Hence, drawing on political ethnography and desk research, this paper scrutinises how the current moment of undocumented labour struggles has transformed and is ambiguously inhabited, by building on the concept of ‘commoning infrastructure’ (Berlant, 2016) and adopting the lens of social reproduction.