Structural Unfairness or Disrespect and Misrecognition? Theorising the Pathway Between Feelings of Injustice and Collective Mobilisation Among Precarious Migrant Workers

Abstract

Industrial relations scholars have long been concerned with theorising collective mobilisation among workers, and it is well-established that workers’ feelings of injustice can spark collective mobilisation. However, no attempts have to date been devoted to understanding how migrants experience feelings of injustice, although various other attempts have been made to theorise migrant worker collectivism. Through empirically founded field work in three sectors, this article contributes to theorise collective mobilisation among precarious migrant workers by combining Kelly's mobilisation theory with Tapia and Alberti's multi-level approach to intersectionality. It starts from the premise that collective mobilisation begins with shared feelings of injustice and offers novel evidence to migrants’ experiences with injustice in contexts of intersecting precarity. Using a conceptual prism that distinguishes between restorative and retributive forms of justice, I show that although migrants are subject to distinct structural unfairness, they rarely ascribe retribute, class-based struggles for justice as a cause for mobilisation. Rather, migrant workers mainly express feelings of injustice through disrespect and misrecognition resembling a restorative justice logic. These findings offer conceptual clarification to Kelly's mobilisation theory and can potentially move future research forward to a more nuanced understanding of the intersections between feelings, contexts of precarity and collective mobilisation.