The affective fields of working class among ‘Eastern European’ migrants in the UK

Abstract

Eastern European migrants’ affective relationship with the idea of working class remains poorly understood. This article demonstrates how neoliberal ideology – which shaped postsocialist change – produces certain affective class processes among Central and Eastern European migrants. Migrants often do not share class ramifications in Latvia or the UK but divert their felt class towards the notion of a better life. The article challenges the ‘East’ and ‘West’ dichotomy found in much contemporary class analysis by examining specific spatiotemporal relations, transformations and subjectivities. The qualitative data derive from my long-term (2010–2018) engagement with Latvian migrants in the UK. I offer nuanced insights into labour migrants’ affective class subjectivities at the bodily scale, spatial scale and temporal scale. This framework helps us understand how class subjectivities shape individuals and societies in Eastern Europe and beyond.

Introduction

This article examines Latvian labour migrants’ working class subjectivities, struggles for existence and spatiotemporal relations and establishes the relationship between affective or felt class and the more Marxian ideas of ascribed class. My research concerns with how migrants themselves express their feeling of class. It draws from a rich body of interviews and observations conducted over a 10-year period of engagement with numerous Latvian participants in the UK. Most of these migrants left the Baltic state after 2004, when the country joined the EU. Prior to that, Latvia was occupied by the Soviet Union for half a century before undertaking neoliberal market reforms in the turbulent 1990s and 2000s. This historical context generated specific social experiences and positions that do not easily fit into Western concepts of class.

The working class category is neglected, silenced and pushed out of existence in contemporary Latvian political rhetoric. There is also a dearth of academic publications explicitly examining Eastern European migrants’ relationships to the working class. Meanwhile, the UK’s media coverage of Eastern European migrants is mainly about ‘them’ without knowing (or even trying to know) ‘them’ (Fox et al., 2012, 2015), adding to this problematique. However, migrants see their lives as filled with struggles for a decent income and hopes for a better future. Therefore, I ask how labour migrants feel about class, and what their affective subjectivities reveal about the ramifications of emerging postsocialist class relations.

Answering this question requires understanding the relational making of class through spatiotemporal relations, subjectivities and broad ideas about what constitutes a good life (Raibley, 2018). The good (or, at least, better) life is understood differently across diverse contexts, particularly when also juxtaposed against time. Therefore, I began looking for relational affect in my participants’ narratives. I wanted to know how people pursue a good (or better) life through their bodies and intersubjectivities across spaces and over time (Ahmed, 2004; Richard & Rudnyckyj, 2009). Economic and social transformations have ushered in hopes for a better life (Burrell, 2008; Dzenovska, 2018). This study joins this special issue’s broader collection of articles in unpacking the affect, subjectivities and marginalisation of the ‘Eastern European’ working class.

The article proceeds as follows. First, it unpacks working class as a contested concept in the context of postsocialist transformations and transnational migration. Most of my participants did not class themselves, did not identify as working class, and did not see themselves as ‘unskilled’. Interviewees had far more nuanced subjectivities that went beyond the dichotomies of domination–subordination and East–West. By foregrounding ‘Eastern European’ migrants’ longitudinal experiences and perspectives within biographical and historical contexts, this article offers new understandings of class, both in the UK and Central and Eastern Europe. Secondly, I explain the study’s data and qualitative methodology. Third, I analyse affective class relations at the bodily scale – class and hard work are felt in the body, intersubjectively shared and contrasted with other bodies. Next, I unpack the spaces and temporalities of class, differentiating between private spaces (e.g. the dwelling), public spaces and abstract spaces of representation (e.g. media representations). The migrants learned how to leave dirty and brutal jobs but also struggled against class representations in the UK. Many achieved a more liveable life by enthusiastically embracing neoliberal ideologies that laud perseverance, entrepreneurship, resourcefulness and independence. Hence, through this study, I aim to provide the wider theoretical intervention for Eastern European class, which moves beyond the dominant Western interpretation of class.

The contested concept of ‘postsocialist working class’

Bourdieu’s (1987, 1997) concept of the social ‘field’ is widely cited in studies on social class and transnationalism. In the field, relationships are formed, embedded and morphed through ‘habitus’ (i.e. dispositions, lifestyles and everyday experiences). However, the French ‘le champ’ (field) directly translates to ‘battlefield’ (Thomson, 2012) – a site of competition, domination and struggle (Dumais, 2002; Thatcher, 2015, p. 3). This alludes to the power and struggles central to Bourdieusian-inspired studies of social class.

The battlefield shaping the transnational postsocialist working class has historical and political roots. Soviet ideology rhetorically insisted on a classless society, despite very real differences in the workers and the nomenklatura’s living conditions (not to mention official stratification between civil servants – mainly city and administrative workers – and peasants in the rural working class). Inequalities also existed in the distribution of and access to goods (within conditions of shortage) (Smith, 1994). Considerable differences divided the centre, outskirts and rural areas. Widespread Russification meant that better jobs, urban lifestyles and proximity to the nomenklatura required Russian language skills; meanwhile, Latvian was seen as a largely optional language of the countryside. However, this all changed in the early 1990s, when Latvian (and good English skills) became legally required for many public professions. English language skills were scarce among middle-aged people and those residing outside larger cities (e.g. see Rubin et al. (2014) on the overlooked relevance of ethnicity and rurality in class studies). Changing politics of professional hierarchies and required skills also gave rise to intersubjectively shared social relations: in an economy of shortage, those who worked as shop assistants or in warehouses held considerable power to access goods and distribute information about when goods would be available for others. These workers wielded power through blat, the exchanging of favours for access to goods and services. Blat was a prominent and influential feature of Soviet social class relations (Ledeneva, 1998). However, almost immediately after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the working class lost this power. Blat was now wielded by capitalist rulers who controlled information and undertook privatisation. This (and other) fundamental processes shaped a feeling of class among postsocialist Latvian migrants.

Recent literature on the working class has noted the (rhetorical) invisibility of postsocialist working classes (cf. Stenning, 2005a, 2005b). In light of trends like downskilling and low wages (Ciupijus, 2011; Moore, 2013), many migration scholars have turned to new processes of transnational middling (Manolova, 2020; Parutis, 2014) to demonstrate how Eastern European migrants willingly seek to become middle class. However, this middle class thesis fails to fully incorporate the dimension of time. Stratification arises from historically formed macro-social structures and individuals’ everyday experiences in particular social milieus and patterns of action (Goldthorpe & Marshall, 1992, p. 383). Recent historical shifts in postsocialist stratification cut across all domains of life – economic (e.g. Evans & Mills, 1999), political and cultural – but with dissimilar temporalities and spatialities.

As Stenning (2005b, p. 990) argues, understanding the working class in many European postsocialist countries requires considering ‘social and economic shifts, [the] rise of identity politics and “individualisation”’. Yet, the subjectivities of working class migrants – informed by the rise of identity politics of neoliberal capitalism – are often neglected. Therefore, we should focus on practical action, that is, what people believe and do (Smith, 1987, p. 10). This study considers the practical act of migration and how it reinforces a belief in the virtue of hard work and individualised goals for a better life. As Crăciun and Lipan (2020) have shown, the notions of ‘middle class’ and ‘good life’ have become interchangeable in Eastern Europe. This further evidences how far the discourses of working class virtues have been pushed from the debates over what constitutes a good life for workers and how they should achieve it.

Looking from the UK, Datta et al. (2007) claim that low-paid migrants constitute London’s new working class. Yet the migrants I interviewed often saw themselves more ambivalently. Most were secondary or vocational level-educated (though many had higher education) and striving to achieve a better life by moving into better jobs and climbing career ladders. Significantly, they also used their low wages to buy properties, durable goods and fund education for themselves or children back ‘home’. Extant literature on migrants’ transnational positioning suggests that higher- and medium-educated migrants advance the good life/middle class dyad both ‘here’ and ‘there’ (Moroşanu et al., 2021; Parutis, 2014). Yet, the relationship between residence and class gets even more complex when we include migration processes (Dowling, 2009). Everyday British discourses and media representations portray ‘Eastern Europeans’ as working class due to their low-paid jobs. However, for transnational migrants, their difficult work does not lock them into a class; rather, it is a temporary modality in the pursuit of a future good life.

The field of class subjectivities is temporal and scalar. In terms of temporality, prior to ‘free EU movement’, Latvian migrants were often confined to sector-specific, low-paid jobs as third-country nationals in the UK. In terms of scale, class subjectivities are also shaped by the migrant’s place of residence: did they leave city life to go abroad or emigrate from the countryside (their destination in the UK also has an effect)? Other factors include the length of work abroad and the amount of savings accrued into properties in Latvia. Generational inequality also matters: those who obtained education and experienced careers during Soviet times had different class subjectivities than those who only had formative life experiences in postsocialism. The postsocialist, transnational sense of class is scaled and stretched across space (Dowling, 2009).

Affective class processes in labour migration

Feminist approaches have been at the forefront of conceptualising bodily scale – classed bodies are categorised through gender, race and sexuality (Skeggs, 2004). Additionally, class scholars unpack when, where, how and whose bodies suffer, wear out and get tired (Simonsen, 2000). Feminist attention to the bodily scale directly shapes the next conceptual building block: affective subjectivities of class.

We can use a relational understanding of affect (Ahmed, 2004; Bottero, 2020) and Richard and Rudnyckyj’s (2009) concept ‘economy of affect’ to reflect on the economic transformations and (embodied) affective subjectivities of postsocialist class. Affect – while often associated with the non-verbal, emotions and feelings – is a broad phenomenon that reveals how inequality interweaves everyday lives. While affect certainly concerns bodily affects and individual feelings, it is also shaped by culture and, therefore, is intersubjective (i.e. shared with others in the social field). The affects working migrants experience are often culturally shared and experienced among (emerging) class lines. These include affective subjectivities concerning property, cultural capital, consumption choices and a felt dimension (e.g. anger) directed at the ruling political and economic class back ‘home’.

The ‘economy of affect’ operates across different spatial fields. Labour migrants in the UK come ‘in touch’ with affective ‘atmospheres’ and narratives about Eastern European migrants. These representational spaces (media and public spaces) overwhelmingly portray migrants as the UK’s new ‘low-skilled’ working class (Harris et al., 2019; Lefebvre, 1991; Scott & Rye, 2021). Back ‘home’, migrants encounter media and everyday discursive fields ‘about them’ that reconfigure class relations between stayers and migrants, who are seen as no longer fully ‘ours’ (Lulle, 2021b). These (often racialising and stigmatising) affective atmospheres tend to be disconnected from migrants’ daily lives. However, they can be illuminated through an analysis of affective class processes.

Notes on methodology

This article draws on two extensive projects. The first dataset comes from my doctoral fieldwork in Guernsey, where several thousand Latvian migrant workers resided between 2010 and 2012. Many Latvians laboured in working class jobs on the small island, creating a ‘spatial laboratory’ where class processes could be closely observed. Manual workers – like those working in the horticulture or packaging industries – could reside on the island for nine months each year. However, these restrictions actually coincided with migrants’ transnational preferences. Many wanted to spend some time at home with their families or combine work in Latvia with shorter spells of intense work and better pay abroad. Employers recruited migrant workers from postsocialist countries since they accepted lower salaries and frugal housing conditions that were unacceptable to many ‘locals’. Wage differences in Latvia also fostered affective dispositions that encouraged people to rush toward inclusion at the edge of capitalism (cf. Bhattarchayya, 2018; Lulle et al., 2022).

The migrants formulated a hierarchy of industries and jobs available in Guernsey. Greenhouses and packaging were at the bottom, while cleaning jobs were somewhat higher due to slightly better wages and less control over workers’ living conditions and free time. These job categories were fundamentally gendered, and most workers were female. Next came male-coded jobs like handiwork, driving and construction. Eldercare was considered a good job due to higher wages (again, almost exclusively women). The next level was the hospitality sector, though internal divisions placed chamber maids and dishwashers at the bottom and waiters higher up. Similar divisions were displayed in service work like retail (shelving was the lowest entry point, while serving customers was said to be a decent and desirable job). Others worked in other servicing jobs across the island or in a factory. A few migrants managed to establish entrepreneurial activities or work in banks and managerial office jobs. In total, I interviewed 96 Latvian migrant workers, observed daily activities, and completed follow-up interviews for almost a decade to capture relevant temporal changes in class subjectivities.

This project provides deep insights into the spatiality of class affect: Guernsey is a relatively small space offering both rural and urban service jobs and some opportunities to climb up the job hierarchy. The interviewees’ ages and socio-demographic profiles were mixed: many came from Latvia’s small towns and countryside, but others were from the capital city, Riga, and other larger cities. One-quarter of interviewees were young (up to their mid-30s), though most were middle-aged, with significant formative experiences from Soviet times. About one-quarter of my interviewees, mainly women, were older. Some had reached retirement age but travelled to Guernsey to supplement their meagre pension income with several months of salary from abroad.

The second dataset comes from the larger project ‘Youth mobility: Maximising opportunities for individuals, labour markets and regions in Europe’ (YMOBILITY, 2015–2018). I interviewed 24 young Latvian migrants (aged 18–34) in the London metropolitan area. Seven were medium-educated or had not completed vocational education; others were students or had completed higher education. I re-interviewed half of the interviewees after the Brexit Referendum in 2016 (when British voters, by a slight margin, elected to leave the EU). These data revealed valuable insights into city jobs. About half of these interviewees came from Riga, though some had moved there from smaller towns. Others came directly from small towns and cities in Latvia. Most of their formative experiences and class aspirations were formed during the postsocialism era. From the British point of view, migrants are seen as ‘low’ or ‘unskilled’ and, thus, are equated with a working class. Yet, many migrants were medium- or even higher educated, even if they worked in low-paid jobs.

Ethical procedures outlined by the University of Latvia and the University of Sussex were thoroughly observed, and all participants were anonymised. I reread the transcripts several times to understand working class subjectivities and to compare the two projects and fieldwork locations. The central lines of enquiry emerged from interviewees’ expressions of the feelings around working class and moralities. Representations and views about migrants as working class only appear when migrants themselves reflected upon external representations. The remainder of this article presents its analysis along three main axes: bodily scale, the spatiality of class feeling and the temporal dimension.

Bodily scale

In this section, I draw on the experiences of middle-aged and young Latvian migrants in the UK to demonstrate how feeling class is felt in the body. Hard work hurts and exhausts the physical body; it also marks gendered and ethnicised bodies.

Gunita was in her mid-40s when she decided to go work abroad. She had worked on a farm and in a factory when her children were small and, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, she tried farm entrepreneurship. However, she could not make ends meet and moved to a town to jump between auxiliary office jobs in several small companies. She was desperate to earn money, pay back debts on her unsuccessful businesses, and make headway toward a better life. Then, some acquaintances told Gunita about an office in Riga where women are given work in greenhouses and farms abroad. Gunita was not afraid of hard work – the farm was her work. However, she believed the jobs abroad would be facilitated through blat and she did not have any contacts in the Riga office. Gunita recalled:

I risked and went there, sat in a queue, and lied when the office manager asked me whether I had been recommended for a job or something like that. I said that I had called her on the phone some time ago and she promised to give me a job. In two weeks, I was on the plane.

What followed was hard work and few days off. Gunita worked on a private farm, doing almost every task, from tractor driving to shovelling, planting and harvesting. Her wage in the late 1990s was £3.50 per hour, and she worked as many hours as possible over the nine months to accrue savings to take back home. She dramatically lost weight to save on food; in the most extreme weeks, Gunita survived on only £5. After the nine-month stint ended, Gunita could not imagine returning to such hard work. However, other farmers noticed her physical strength and invited her to work in better conditions with (gradually) better wages. She continued working in Guernsey, with some spells in Latvia (including an intermittent return for two years until 2020). Over these two decades, she raised children, two of whom joined her in working on the island. She worked many jobs, including cleaning and eldercare. As retirement approached, Gunita was contemplating taking one last job so that she could afford to move to Germany. Her old-age social support remained uncertain due to her numerous jobs and the time spent in Latvia.

Many migrants in the agriculture sector shared similar stories of arduous work and harsh living conditions – their bodies suffered from the effects of chemicals, heat and cold. As Jurate, who worked with flowers in a greenhouse, explained:

My hands were too stiff to cut the last rows of flowers in a day shift. The only way to achieve the productivity norm was to get on the knees and break the last ones with bare hands.

However, these same migrants would eventually conclude that ‘work is work’ or ‘I am not afraid of work’. They internalised the capitalist imperative to achieve at the edge of body exhaustion. In other sectors, the time pressures were emphasised over physical difficulties. Many cleaners ate lunches while driving to their next house. Yet, they extolled their virtue of cleanness, which was juxtaposed with the supposed laziness of locals ‘who cannot even wash their bathrooms’. Cleaning work was dirty but the money was good and ‘money does not stink’. Dirty jobs have long been associated with a heavily gendered migrant working class (Farr, 2015; Giles, 1993; see Gildart [2018] on historical representations in the UK). Most interviewees did not associate their dirty work with a dirty body; dirt was simply a means to another, more critical means, money.

Migrants participated in two main bodily scale activities to get out of feeling dirty: dressing up and speaking English. The first option – shower, blow-dry one’s hair, dress up and go out to the town – would seem to be easier. However, dressing up could not be taken for granted since women working in packaging and horticulture often slept on bunk beds in four-to-six-person dormitories (in the late 1990s through the late 2000s). Some employers only took women shopping once a week. Dzintra, who I first interviewed after she had become a shop assistant, recalled:

It was very humiliating. We were in work clothes, all looking the same, sweaty, tired, and had to do a week’s shopping. Latvian women are used to dressing up when they shop.

Thus, personal styles, preferences, consumption choices and habits do not reveal how migrant workers felt about class (Kraus & Stephens, 2012). These affective subjectivities also divert from Western feminist body battlefields (cf. Simonsen, 2000), where the dignity of ‘not-so-Western’ self-presentation is largely overlooked. Being dirty in public was humiliating. Additionally, the women’s styles of dress were ethnicised and sexualised by locals and other migrants. Liene, who also started in agriculture but moved to a shop, recalled, ‘local boys had learnt some Latvian words, and when we walked back from the field, they shouted: “Maukas!” [whores in Latvian]’. Liene and Dzintra forced themselves out of the Latvian community by speaking English with locals and walking around with a dictionary. This was a bodily effort to fit in and move on. Both women had local partners, spoke English in their family life, and moved out of the jobs they (and locals) perceived to be at the bottom of the migrant working class hierarchy.

Arvis, a young man in his late 20s, moved to London and then onto Brighton during the 2008 economic crisis. He had been a shop assistant in Latvia, but was fired without his last salary or compensation. The social welfare system – severely weakened by neoliberal transformations – was unable to help the newly unemployed masses and others whose salaries were slashed by 30–50%. The Latvian state rescued a bankrupt bank and turned to the International Monetary Fund for a loan to maintain state functions. There were almost no public protests against this decision; ¹ instead, many people simply emigrated. Arvis, furious with his boss, ended up in a fistfight – the only way he could express his individual anger:

As there was a reduction in staff, I was accused of laziness, slacking around, and losing some valuables. So I got in a physical fight with my boss. But I was pissed off because he came and said that because you are our younger employee, one of the youngest, the others are older, so you need to go! And then [the boss] invented all those accusations. The guy who was the boss was a lot younger than me; he was 20, and I was 26 at the moment. So, a green juniper is going to teach me a lesson? So, word after word, he became rude, I became harsh, and some pushing around started because I believe the superiors are immoral and try to humiliate you all the time. And the only way to let him hear you is to hurt him physically. So after that, I went home, lived there for three months and understood that I needed to go to England.

He soon bought low-cost Ryanair tickets to London, paying just €1.99 per flight, as he desperately needed to save money. The series of flights, with several changes, took almost 20 hours; Arvis laughed, ‘I was exhausted, will not do this anymore.’ In his first year, he worked day jobs assigned through a work agency. He never knew what job was coming next: doing dishes at a university, carrying luggage for wealthy migrant schoolgirls, or cleaning offices. During our first interview, he proudly told me that he was already a shop manager. After a year, when we met again, he was behind the till and shyly said, ‘see, I am still here’ – shyly, because standing behind the till contrasted to an image he wanted to portray during the interview of what a shop manager does. A manager rules, a manager does not do the everyday service work.

The bodily scale captures migrants’ most direct experiences with working class as a struggle. The ethos of hard work and virtues of frugal living and savings resulted in bodily expressions of exhaustion, weight changes and classed and ethinicised markers. However, migrants also learned how to move on from dirty and brutal jobs. Following neoliberal ideologies brought a more liveable life: a good migrant is not only hard-working, but persevering, entrepreneurial, resourceful and independent.

Spaces: Private, public and representational

The spatial field is central to the classic question of inequality: ‘Who gets what, where and how?’ (Smith, 1987). However, social class researchers still tend to frame class as contained within a nation-state (Breen & Rottman, 1995). Thus, the conditions of ‘free EU movement’ – necessarily transnational – pose considerable challenges. This section reflects on two major spatial distinctions: (1) who engages in class processes to build a property capital, and (2) how migrants struggle for and against classed representations in UK public space.

For many migrants, working abroad was directly linked to housing, land and other properties (or a lack of ownership) in Latvia. Indeed, homemaking is a crucial battlefield where socialist-era ideologies and materialities crash into neoliberal ideologies and imaginaries of a good life. Individualisation profoundly manifests at the home scale. Agita (in her later 30s) explained why she first went to Guernsey: ‘I changed the roof and renovated the whole kitchen [with] the money I earned during the first year.’ There were numerous micro-narratives of home renovation in the interviews (e.g. saving for a loan deposit, buying flats for oneself or one’s children, and earning rental income in Latvia) that link back to pre-Soviet home ownership priorities (Lulle, 2021a). They also reveal the material inequalities of Soviet material heritage and post-Soviet privatisation, which shattered class relations at their core – the ownership of properties and means of production. Migrants who worked in the service sector, agriculture or cleaning were proud that they managed to become homeowners ‘back home’. Dzintra first worked in greenhouses, then in hotels and care homes (on-and-off for eight years), and finally in a clothing department store, a job which migrants considered as an achievement in hierarchies of jobs. She had studied and worked as a designer in Latvia, ‘but nobody cares here who you were in Latvia’. This education and work background sketches how Dzintra felt class as a migrant who lived in rental places in Guernsey. She kept her private flat in a Latvian town to herself (rather than renting it out). This was not an economic choice; rather, Dzintra emphasised the importance of ‘my own bathroom’, even though she visited Latvia for relatively short spells:

I did not have savings; all money went for my daughter’s education, then for a flat in Latvia, for renovations. I don’t rent it out; I want this only clean place [emphasised] for myself, but I do not often travel back to Latvia. Travel and holidays cost; I seldom go to Latvia, but I want to keep the flat only for myself.

Many migrants hoped to achieve future stability (to protect themselves in older age) through investments in private housing in Latvia. Over the years, I observed the emergence of financialised, neoliberal tactics spanning spaces across the UK and Latvia. The goal was to be an independent owner of a property, and this was possible through hard labour in the UK.

The money was needed in Latvia, where it could buy a flat or a house, where one would not do such a dirty job for money due to widespread scorn of the working class. Similarly, Stenning (2005b, p. 995) documented how Krakow’s bourgeois dwellers called those living in the nearby socialist-era purpose-built factory town, Nowa Huta, ‘gumiaki’ and ‘blokniki’ (those who walk in muddy Wellington boots and live in block-houses). Clearly, housing is key to class formulation. This is also demonstrated in Rogaly and Taylor’s (2009a) ethnography of three estates in Norwich, England. While the residents themselves did not necessarily identify as working class, others defined them as working class based on their housing. Systems also use housing to reproduce inequality (e.g. school allocation and quality of services).

In a different, but typical, case, Aivars (in his 40s) inherited a large dilapidated house in a Riga suburb. He could not renovate it on his Latvian bartender salary; the pay was too little to comfortably meet his family’s daily needs. Aivars quickly realised that his cook’s salary in the UK was also too small for a proper renovation, and he abandoned his dream of living in a posh Riga suburban house. Nevertheless, Aivars felt secure in owning a home – even one that required daily maintenance – since he could sell it if necessary. Aivars also inherited a small plot of forest, which he called his ‘pension fund’. When large winter storms damaged some of the woods in 2009, Aivars travelled back to check whether his ‘pension fund’ was still standing. Owning a growing forest and having a place to live made him secure enough in Latvia to continue his lifestyle as a migrant bartender. He could stay in the UK or go to another country through his network of migrant cooks. This case shows that affective subjectivities are not exclusively related to living well in Latvia now or in the near future. Aivars’ sense of place was open and global (Massey, 1991); his spatial displacement, combined with professional emplacement, gave rise to a different way of living (Hall, 2021). Living well can also mean living in flux, particularly if it is enabled by a sense of security through home ownership. Similar affective dispositions were widespread among young migrants both in Guernsey and in London. They saw Latvia as a secure fallback in case their endeavours abroad failed but preferred the work and social and cultural life abroad.

Whilst property ownership in Latvia maintained a sense of self as an owner and not just a worker, other class struggles took place in UK representational space and within migrant communities. The most important social distinction in Guernsey was rural versus town. These spatio-structural lines assigned working class distinctions to people from the Latvian countryside. For instance, Inese, a woman originally from Riga who worked in a Guernsey cafe, judged her counterparts harshly:

How much they spend on cigarettes and in bars! I spend that money on my flights back to Latvia, and I can see my relatives. I sometimes go even for two days, and it’s worth it; I go to a theatre, a concert in Latvia. The [Latvian] people are terrible here, and the fame of Latvian women is awful. If someone asks me where I am from, I say: ‘I am from Russia’ [not to be associated with other Latvian women]. The saying goes here: ‘Get one, and the other comes for free.’ It’s shameful to look at Latvian women in bars. They are from the countryside; they have not seen anything [cultural]. City dwellers don’t stay here, so those from the country represent us, Latvians. Horrible.

I regularly heard Latvian migrant workers make aggressive remarks to distinguish themselves from ‘rural’ co-nationals (e.g. ‘Those women from the countryside’, ‘too loud’, ‘does not know how to behave’, ‘a flock of women’, ‘all looking the same: white sneakers, bleached hair’). The speakers needed to distinguish themselves as ‘good’ migrants, who spoke English, did decent work and ‘more naturally’ blended in with locals. Some, like Inese, expressed disdain for those ‘from the countryside’ who ‘spoiled’ the image of good Latvian migrants. This need to emphasise one’s decency was also motivated by affectively gendered media reports that Latvian migrants participated in abortions while working on the island.

The women who worked in greenhouses or packaging did not scorn their counterparts working in bars, shops and offices. They kept silent and did not fight back. In interviews, these women spoke at length about the conditions back home that pushed them to work abroad and the different battles they faced in the UK. They struggled for a moment of privacy – impossible in an overcrowded room of bunk beds – and were hurt by supervisors and migrant bosses shouting at them and controlling their every move. They resented that a migrant woman, just like them, could become a tyrant. However, the oppression was almost never challenged. Working women only spread rumours about the harshness of their (fellow Latvian migrant) supervisors or British bosses. Only one woman publicly challenged a boss who pushed their employees to work beyond their previously agreed daily schedule during the agricultural low season. She took the case to court but stood alone against the power of business and a foreign state and lost the case.

These distinctions evidenced struggles over the symbolic power to define who was a ‘good migrant’ in a shared social space (cf. Bourdieu, 1989). However, the punching down, rumours and back-biting only resulted in individualised battles against each other, not those who oppressed and exploited low-paid physical labourers (cf. Powell & Robinson, 2019; Wacquant, 1996). Postsocialist neoliberalism severely weakened organised solidarity and the bargaining power of the working class (Lulle & Ungure, 2019), luxuries practically non-existent in transnational migration. Without strong trade unions caring for migrants, it was often impossible to challenge power asymmetries.

In contrast, several interviewees in London praised their work protections, due to support from trade unions that did not exist in Latvia. Arvis (in his 30s) was an educated linguist but worked as a driver in London’s public transport system. He said it was the best job he ever had. This shows that ‘Eastern European’ workers can benefit from working class rights and institutional support like trade unions, but only if they are already relatively privileged and based in more centralised geographic places.

Another dominant spatial practice was the choice to leave Latvia to become a better person. I interviewed Ernests (in his early 20s) in the London metropolitan area in 2016. He had left a Latvian regional town before turning 18. The youngest of three brothers, his mother was constantly working, while his father drank and worked intermittently. Ernests studied at a vocational school but dropped out. He became involved with street gangs and got into a few fights before deciding to move out of Latvia and become a better person. He saw this as an opportunity to deliberately work hard abroad. He came to England with only a few pounds in his pocket and was cheated by people who had promised a job but did not deliver.

In the beginning, Ernests was informally washing cars and experienced a range of harsh initiations toward becoming a working migrant. Ernests subconsciously subscribed to the neoliberal capitalist logic that one must move away from home and acquaintances to become a decent person. The path to decency must involve hard work. Such logic was widespread among many interviewees, regardless of education level, place of residence in Latvia or location in the UK. People willingly submitted themselves to hard work away from home, moved willingly ‘out of their comfort zone’ and were ‘not scared of hard work’. However, Ernests also admitted that such exhausting work must be temporary. He said it would be, ‘ideal. . . to retire [in one’s] 30s’, meaning that by 30, he wanted to own several properties, live off the rental income, and enjoy his hobby of yoga retreats. I therefore now turn to the temporal affectivity of the working class.

Temporal subjectivities

This section further unpacks how temporalities shape the working class. The questions of ‘when and how long until one can achieve a better life’ cannot be reduced to postsocialist working class sensitivities (Chelcea, 2015; Ringel, 2022). These temporalities require closer reflection, beginning with the most dramatic chronos, the break from the Soviet Union toward postsocialist neoliberal capitalism. Temporality is revealed through individualised efforts to sell one’s work for as many hours as possible to quickly move toward a better life. Armands (in his 40s) explains a typical temporal tactic:

I work 10–12 hours in a factory and usually finish around 10 pm or midnight. And then I go to clean bars. My English language skills were limited, so I searched for extra jobs like cleaner or dishwasher. [. . .] Some Latvian women suggested that a dishwasher is needed in a night bar. So I went there, but they said: ‘We don’t need a dishwasher, we need a chef.’ I can cook for myself, but I have never worked as a chef. So I began; around midnight, I arrived from my factory job to prepare food; at the beginning, I had post-it cards everywhere to learn ingredients in English. Quite stressful, I don’t remember much from that first summer.

When Guntars (in his 30s) came for his interview with us, his discourse and body posture seemed defensive, almost aggressive. He had a lot to say about Latvia’s politics, going well beyond the normal sentiments like ‘who does not want to live in Latvia, the problem is that it is simply unliveable’. He began by telling a story about the kolkhoz (a Soviet collective farm) where he grew up. His frail father had worked there all his life, and was highly regarded for doing so: ‘I took him around in a car so he can see with his own eyes. Ruins and abandonment of what was once his highly praised kolkhoz and thriving land and working community.’

Guntars continued, ‘I have a plan [for a better life]’, without revealing any specifics. He later told me about his music hobby and the expensive gear it required. He did manual and factory work in Latvia and Guernsey and said he was close to completing his ‘plan’ to afford his musical hobby lifestyle. Nevertheless, Guntars was adamant that Latvian neoliberalism and the erasure of Soviet-era working class dignity was fundamentally wrong. He insisted, ‘people need decent work, decent salaries. And then they would find their way to opera and theatre if they had these.’

Several other interviewees followed this thinking. Generally, they praised kolkhoz or factory workers during Soviet times and lamented the breakdown of temporal relations. Honest, hard workers seemed to have no place in today’s Latvia with its rapidly growing inequality. An oft-repeated lament encapsulated how the powerful treat unwanted people (whether through Soviet totalitarianism or capitalist inequality): ‘Latvians were deported to Siberia by Soviets, but now we are forced to leave Latvia because we cannot survive there.’

Perhaps the most widespread temporal tactic was to increase one’s income through accelerated paid labour. The only migrants who could afford not to think about the temporal gains of hard work abroad had things to sell other than their labour, savings, or the bio-social (youth) and cultural resources to experiment with migration (these positions were common among the young people and higher-skilled workers I interviewed in London). For others, a bigger salary in a shorter time was the critical temporal instrument for making life back in Latvia more liveable. For instance, Skaidrite, a former small-town bartender, spent all her waking hours in Guernsey earning money. She would take one, two or even three extra jobs, usually cleaning, in addition to her main job in packaging. She chuckled, ‘we had some periods of [a] raw food diet but then quickly found more jobs’. To save money, migrants sometimes ate the produce they farmed in Guernsey; many found this ironic, as it mirrored trendy expensive raw food restaurants in Latvia. After a couple of returns to Latvia, Skaidrite realised that she was spending too much money on massages (to treat her back after hard work) and stylish goods to fit into Latvian society. She decided to pay extra money for housing, which allowed her to stay in Guernsey all year. This gave her more significant savings for a serious purchase if she was to return to Latvia. However, she never returned. Concerned by ever-rising prices in Latvia and used to everyday life in the UK, she resolved the idealistic ethical challenge of where to belong (cf. Carens, 1996) through a spatiotemporal approach. Skaidrite would rather continue as a working class migrant than chase the unbridgeable gap between the idea of a good life in Latvia and its realities.

Dzintars (in his 50s) also claimed that he would rather be proud and working class in the UK (or elsewhere) than return to a sedentary, ‘middle-class’ retirement lifestyle in Latvia. He gave the following biographical account:

My mum sent me to a vocational school to become a cook. She said: ‘At least you won’t be hungry in your life.’ But then I went working on inter-city trains during the Soviet times, I had that urge to see different places, and I have been through many places in the Soviet Union. I like a free life, I want to travel, and I can learn all kinds of jobs. Higher education is not a requirement for a good life in the UK. The UK itself is my higher education. [. . .] I began as a landscape gardener here but managed just nine months; my back was damaged, and the work was hard. I went back to Latvia to have an operation on my back. The Guernsey boss saw that I am [physically] struggling and found a job for me in an internet store. As long as my eyesight allows, I’ll do all kinds of hardware reparation jobs which does not break my back. I’ll get a UK pension; I can learn something new if the current job fails.

Others wanted to return as entrepreneurs, a common sentiment among postsocialist migrants (Croitoru, 2020). Most did not self-identify as working class (Rubin et al., 2014) and refused to be classed (cf. Rogaly & Taylor, 2009b). However, they also rejected new middle class norms in Latvia – ubiquitous reminders of stylish tastes and exclusivity (Eglitis, 2011). Ilze and her husband saved money in Guernsey to return ‘only as entrepreneurs’. She hated showing off and the Latvian dressing-up culture, and adopted scornful Western gendered attitudes toward poor but well-dressed Eastern Europeans. As a former migrant cleaner, she could not imagine doing paid work for somebody else in Latvia after all she had gone through abroad. She wanted to establish a cleaning company in Latvia and was determined to achieve a better life as a boss.

Conclusion

Latvian discourses suggesting that the working class disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union are distorted and conceal the working class’s continued relevance to struggles. The working class did not disappear. It emigrated. This article unpacked the distorted views and knowledge production about class by emphasising the moral dimension of class from migrants’ own viewpoints. Much of the working class has become surplus in a rapidly changing post-industrial, neoliberal economy. It is geographically multi-scalar, shaped by forces that deny decent lives in some spaces so that people are pushed to move elsewhere. The working class is also temporal – migrant bodies suffer for the chance at a decent future.

There remains a dearth of substantial analysis about how people feel and experience class. The supposed non-existence of the working class frames the archetypal ‘good citizen’ in Latvia as middle class. Meanwhile, most Eastern European migrants are classed as working class in UK representational spaces, a broad-brush categorisation that is also distorted (Rogaly, 2015). This paradox reveals more about class ramifications in British society than the lived class experiences of migrants themselves.

Using the concepts of relational affect (Ahmed, 2004; Richard & Rudnyckyj, 2009), this article investigated how large-scale transformations produce affective subjectivities and cultural patterns of inequality (Bottero, 2020). I then examined migrants and their class struggles in a transnational, spatial and temporal social field (Bourdieu, 1987). This article demonstrated the value of studying working class migrants’ affective subjectivities at various scales beyond objectified Western categorisations. Latvian migrants’ resistance to being classed in the UK’s representational spaces adds to Wacquant’s (2022) powerful account of the invention of the ‘underclass’. However, in some cases, migrants value and assert a working class identity (though not the UK’s more localised versions). They valued professional pride and the freedom to live outside Latvia, as they felt alienated from emerging class relations and representations in the country.

Hard work and class are primarily experienced at the bodily scale. Structural processes of inequality and injustice constitute a field (e.g. wage inequalities, ethnicisation and physically difficult entry-level work for migrants to claim dignity and respectability). Labour migration gives rise to specific spatiotemporal patterns: people work hard abroad to return with enough money for properties and durable goods. Through accelerated savings, they spatialise and temporalise the good life differently from those who stay in Latvia (and from the working class in the UK).

The dystopian Latvian postsocialist society without a working class is an unsustainable imaginary. Many migrants choose not to return due to these unsustainable class relations; others are only willing to return as home and business owners. It is impossible to have a thriving society without a working class. Future work should connect these reflections on affective subjectivities with serious debates on the state’s morality and functionality. Latvia, an ageing and depopulating neoliberal emigrant state, now faces an existential question about whether the working class has a meaningful place.