Mobile Employment of a Mobile Subject

Abstract

This article analyses the labour trajectories of migrants from Central Asia who have come to Russia’s largest cities for work. The study offers a contrasting perspective to more sedentary analysis by interpreting the activities of migrant workers through the concept of mobility. For this purpose, I introduce the notion of the 'mobile subject', whose specific features include movement, instability, multiplicity of life projects, planning in 'momentary time', autonomy and rejection of integration. The research was carried out with the use of a
qualitative methodology focusing on thirty biographies of migrants observed over an extended period of time. The text examines three cases. Due to structural restrictions at their new place of residence, migrants tend to occupy niche low-skilled labour. By changing national contexts, a mobile subject often starts his or her working career from scratch, without using previous qualifications. According to this research, working migrants are employed in more than one place at the same time; they operate in different professional fields; combine different forms of employment; are not tied to the same job. Migrant labour trajectories do not represent a linear career within a single profession or organisation. The career of a mobile subject is extensive as a migrant accumulates a variety of experiences by changing places of work and professional spheres, which allow them to be mobile, to reactively adapt
to the changing labour market and changing structural conditions. The change in interpretative lens to mobile subjectivity in this artcle offers a new perspective in the understanding of migrant labour and makes it possible to see not only the problems (precarity, instability, (self-) exploitation) but also the agency of migrants in choosing of labour strategies.