Certain studies also highlighted the gendered and cultural experience of precarity and resistance. For example, Xhaho et al. (2021) focused on the strategies Albanian migrants use to cope with the needs of reconciling work and family duties. The challenges of managing childcare responsibilities are exacerbated by deficiencies in welfare and care provisions, particularly for individuals with regular and even more so for those with irregular migrant status.
Structural barriers like the illegal status, informal employment, excessively long hours of work, and the lack of access to family-friendly policies make necessary the search for individualized solutions, such as the delegation of care to older children and the reliance on social and family networks or even leaving the children (under the age seven) alone in the house to care for themselves. Other studies on migrants’ agency also highlight the influential dynamics of social networks and the “irregularmigration-chain” (Tahir et al., 2018; Wissink et al., 2020) in determining unpredictable and non-linear trajectories of migrant groups due to policy constraints and experience of critical events.
As such, alongside traditional labour market segmentation and labour process theoretical approaches, social capital theory is valuable for capturing the norms within and between groups (employers, recruiters, and employees), resulting in segmented outcomes, as informal networkbased arrangements facilitate, build, and reinforce the segmented labour market structure (Groutsis, 2009). This is evident in the body of literature that examines the working and living conditions of migrants in Greece, focusing on themes such as individualism, collective agency, employer strategies towards migrant labour, and the roles of labour market intermediaries and networks established by trade unions and migrants (Xiang & Lindquist, 2014).
The common denominator of those studies is that migrants are not emerging as passive subjects of exploitation in the disorganized capitalist setting of Greece, but instead, as active agents of social and political mobilization. As such, the relationship between precarity and agency creates patterns and mechanisms of self-organizing and resistance, survival, and adaptability. Nevertheless, such mechanisms do not minimize the ongoing risk recognized in the traditional Marxist theory of subordinating workers’ initiative and creative agency to a production process designed by and for capital (Umney, 2018).
2 MIGRANT LABOUR IN THE GREEK GIG ECONOMY
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