Thinking through precariousness: work, mobilty and voice reconfigurations in the UK

Dr Gabriella Alberti is an Associate Professor in Work and Employment Relations at the
University of Leeds Business School. Gabriella’s research interests span across the sociology
of work and migration, labour and employment relations, social movements and social
theory.

Her PhD (Cardiff School of Social Sciences, 2011) explored the everyday experiences
of migrant workers in London’s hotels and the possibility to organise low-paid sections of
the service and hospitality economy. Through an intersectional feminist marxist lens her
research focuses on migrant precarious employment, intra-EU mobility, migration and
temporary agencies, trade unions strategies towards migrant workers, community
organising and trade union renewal. She has recently co-edited the Special issue of the
Journal Work Employment and Society “In, Against and Beyond Precarity: Work in Insecure
Times (2018). Gabriella is a member of the Centre for Employment Innovation and Change
at the University of Leeds Business School and a founding member of the Leeds Migration
Research Network. Recent collaborative research funded by European Parliament involved
the social protection of gig economy workers, and the crisis of welfare and free movement
rights in the EU. She is currently conducting the evaluation research for the Leeds City
Council ‘Migrant Access Project Plus’, which aims at improving integration of recent
migrants and promoting intra-community dialogue locally.

Talk: Thinking through precariousness: work, mobilty and voice reconfigurations in the UK

In this talk Gabriella wil draw from the last ten year of research she has conducted on
precarious employment and migrant labour in the UK. She will reflect on the origins and
changing meanings of insecure employment in contemporary Britain, focusing on the
intersections of different forms of precariousness for workers through the lens of labour
market, welfare and migration/mobility. Partly drawing from her recent editorial work with
colleagues ‘In, Against and Beyond Precarity: Work in Insecure Times’ as well as from her
local research engagement with precarious migrants and community organisation in Leeds,
her presentation focuses on the ways in which we can re-think exploitation and vulnerability
of the workforce today not only in light of the ongoing labour market, economic and
technological tansformations but also from the point of view of the differential experience
of mobility, in a context where the free movement of working people across borders
becomes increasingly contexted and restrained. Drawing from evidence from a broad range
of sectors (from the low-paid service migrant economy to the precarising University)
Gabriella will share her propositions for re-thinking forms of voice and solidarity among
workers who are made increasingly different, racialised and fragmented.