‘They laughed at me, but I left that job’: occupational agency of Latvian migrant workers in the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on migrants’ occupational agency in the UK labour market. In particular, the article explores the experience of Latvian migrant workers who together with other Baltic and Central European migrants have filled the low-skilled and low-paid employment sectors in the UK. The article follows a realist approach that provides different conceptual layers to better explain occupational agency. Drawing on survey data and semi-structured interviews, the article demonstrates how Latvians have exercised their occupational agency over the past decade, building relations with co-workers and UK employers. It is argued that Latvians’ position taking in the workplace and occupational mobility are directed by various forms of capital that are embedded in a transnational social field. The emergent structural properties of employment field guide migrants’ trajectories towards the accumulation of particular capital. Eventually, as this article also argues, such structural conditioning impinges on migrants’ personality traits and motivations that either foster or constrain transformative agency in the UK employment field.

KEYWORDS:

• Occupational agency
• employment field
• Baltic and Central European migrants
• workplace relations
• labour market mobility

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this article, I use the category of Baltic and Central European migrants for heuristic purposes. That is, my intention is to single out Baltic migrants as a specific category that exists on its own rights. For the sake of structural homology, migration scholars often include Baltic migrant communities into homogenizing East and Central European or A8 clusters. Such typology is primarily based on geopolitical and ahistorical scales that overlook relevant social, cultural, and economic differences.

2 Interviews were mostly conducted at interviewees’ houses in Peterborough, Bourne, Doncaster, Leeds, Wakefield, Bradford, Burnley, Rishton, Castleford, and London.

3 Limited consciousness of the class system, as Lopez Rodriguez (2010, 351) argues, may physiologically ease occupational mobility in the UK as this provides migrant workers with an advantage which manifests itself as falling short of self-inhibition due to no class prejudice.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by European Regional Development Fund: [Grant Number 1.1.1.2/VIAA/1/16/103].