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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.