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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnography with migrant remote workers in transnational call centers in Greece, this paper examines how virtual labour mobility, employer-organised migrant mobility and forms of territorial and spatial immobilisation intersect in the context of everyday home-based remote work.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among remote workers in Greece's expanding call center industry, this paper examines how multiple, overlapping forms of virtual and physical (im)mobility intersect in the case of non-EU migrant call center workers, many of whom originate from Tunisia. These workers are recruited directly from Tunisia via temporary work permits sponsored by call center firms to perform digital service work from within Greece, under mandated work-from-home (WFH) arrangements. While their labour circulates transnationally through "virtual migration" (Aneesh 2006), their everyday lives as migrant remote workers in Greece are shaped by forms of territorial and spatial immobilisation. EU and Greek migration policies tie their contracts and residence/citizenship rights to call center firms in Greece, restricting their labour mobility and reinforcing their legal dependence on employers. Moreover, as their "globally mobile" digital work is performed from home under rotating schedules and rigid surveillance/control, many of them describe experiencing isolation and confinement to the domestic sphere, contrary to dominant narratives of flexibility brought by remote work.

The paper argues that this configuration constitutes a regime of "bonded" remote work, where borders and territorial-spatial enclosures are not bypassed by outsourcing and digitalisation, but actively mobilised to fix mobile migrant workers in place and enable value extraction for transnational digital corporations. By exploring this specific articulation of migration governance, home-based remote work and digital labour mobility, the paper contributes to panel discussions by showing how remote work regimes reshape everyday (im)mobilities, legal and social belonging for migrant workers in an EU border context.