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Paper short abstract

Crew employment institutionalizes gendered labour through moral economies recognizing women only as partners performing intimate obligation. These arrangements generate spaces of resistance where women collectively re-signify legitimate work through everyday refusal and solidarity.

Paper long abstract

What happens when institutions recognize women's labour only through their partnerships? This paper traces how crew employment in European logistics institutionalizes specific moral distinctions that reproduce gendered hierarchies while simultaneously generating spaces where women contest these boundaries.

Drawing on twelve in-depth interviews with Romanian women truck drivers, three interviews with fleet managers, and digital ethnography in WhatsApp solidarity networks, this study examines crew employment under EU Regulations as institutional mechanism through which capital appropriates reproductive labour while naturalizing this appropriation as intimate complementarity. When fleet managers state that "couples stay at work longer," they articulate a deliberate strategy: women's affective labour subsidizes their partners' productivity and company profit, yet this appropriation is legitimized through moral language of partnership rather than economic exploitation.

The industry phrase "the man drives on the woman's card" crystallizes how women are institutionally positioned: recognized primarily through their partnerships, their independent worker status obscured. Legally mandated rest periods become sites where reproductive labour colonizes mandated breaks, leaving workers exhausted. When this exhaustion produces psychological distress, institutions pathologize it: couples seeking counselling are told to "learn how to manage the situation," reframing structural violence as interpersonal deficiency.

Women build alternative kinships through WhatsApp networks where "we understand each other's emotions, problems, offering emotional support." This persistence itself becomes political—"Many tried to make me quit driving. They did not succeed" embodying refusal to accept institutional stigmatization.

This paper contributes to understanding how power, inequality, and affect are embodied, resisted, and reimagined in everyday practices of work and life.