Resilience, Reworking, Resistance: Collective Forms of Agency among Unorganised Migrant Workers

There is a broad debate concerning migrant workers’ forms of agency and organising. This debate, however, is highly polarised between studies looking at migrants’ participation in established and grassroots unions, and others examining informal, subtle and covert forms of everyday resistance. The latter are commonly framed as individual acts, often exercised by migrant workers through mobility, and are therefore sometimes seen as potentially undermining collective organising. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from the agriculture and meat processing industries in Italy, this article explores forms of agency among unorganised migrant workers that fall between union activity and workers’ individual choices. It distinguishes between collective strategies of resilience, reworking, and resistance , and examines when and how migrant workers engage in them. In conclusion, the article calls for a move beyond dichotomous understanding and encourages a view of resistance in general – and migrant resistance in particular – as a fluid, gradual, and ongoing process.