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Abstract

Using the analytical frame of ‘temporal dispossession’, in the present article, I examine lived experiences of navigating the state production of informalization. This is connected to the increasingly blurred lines between migration regimes and labour market politics in Sweden. With temporary residence permits having become the new norm for asylum policies in Sweden, time and labour market productivity are central to the distribution of vulnerability and life chances, as labour market participation functions as the only means of qualifying for permanent residence. Theoretically engaging with ‘temporal dispossession’ and racial capitalism, I highlight how dispossession operates in and through the border regime, specifically through temporal governance, and how the latter is weaponized to dispossess people of their life chances. Empirically, I focus on how the interlocutors inhabit, negotiate, and defy the precarization of asylum through their labour market participation. Their work, however, is marked by super-exploitation, as they are pushed to the margins of the labour market, often in informalized, underpaid, or unpaid positions with the promise of future employment and stability. The analysis focuses on the strategies of defiance enacted by the interlocutors and their different ways of interrogating contemporary capitalist formation through their experiences of devaluation at the intersection of asylum and labour.

Keywords

temporal dispossession racial capitalism informalization asylum flexibilization labour

Introduction

When I work, I leave home at eight in the morning. It takes two hours to get to work, and then we work 10:30-22:00, that’s 11.5 hours a day. On Saturdays and Sundays, I work between 10:30-01:00 in the morning. I make really good pizza, I’ve learned a lot, and it’s going well, but I’m tired. I’m tired of the system that prevents me from getting a work permit [ . . . ].

(Aalem, September 2019)

Sitting across from each other in his room at a reception camp in southern Sweden, Aalem told me how tired he was after working long days in a pizzeria for the past months, especially due to the stress of working there informally. Because he had not been able to submit the required identity documents¹ to the Migration Agency with his asylum application in 2015, the agency had deemed him unwilling to ‘establish his identity’. As such, the agency did not exempt him from the work permit requirement, thus prohibiting him from working during his asylum process. Aalem shook his head, stating that he was tired of the system that prevented him from carrying out legal work and made it impossible for him to survive on the monthly allowance of 180 Euros² given to those in the asylum process. Consequently, he had turned to the informal labour market. While his work at the pizzeria gave him some ability to afford food and medicine, it appropriated most of his waking hours. Whenever we talked, Aalem would recount how he was losing his autonomy regarding time – in the asylum process, his time was in the hands of the state, and at his workplace, his time was in the hands of his employer, both rendering his life increasingly precarious.

Following the ‘long summer of migration’ in Europe and increased criminalization of migration, the Swedish Government introduced an interim legislation in 2016, restricting access to asylum and making temporary (instead of permanent) residence permits the principal rule (Abdelhady et al., 2020; Elsrud, 2020). The law aimed to deter people from seeking asylum in Sweden by reducing asylum rights to European Union (EU) minimum levels, reintroducing administrative border controls and increasing deportation efforts (Kazemi, 2021; Lindberg, 2022). As a result of making the law permanent in 2021, labour market participation is now the only way to secure permanent residence for those seeking asylum.³ These developments should be understood as a ‘step towards institutionalising temporality and thereby deportability’, as the policy shift carries the inherent risk of deportation if residence permits are not reissued upon renewal (Sager and Öberg, 2017: 6).

Aalem’s experiences illustrate how state processes and asylum regulations push people into precarity and ‘super-exploitation’ (Tsing, 2009) through structural exclusion from the formal labour market and through the highly conditional systems of welfare provision. I thus seek to understand how the above-mentioned institutionalization of temporality can be understood as state production of ‘temporal dispossession’ (Ramsay, 2020) through the informalization of work. In doing so, I draw on the racial capitalism literature to understand how capitalism ‘continues to operate by dispersing us into racialized segments, with hierarchical value attributed to racialized categories’ (Bhattacharyya, 2023: 122), and the role of time in these processes. I explore this through ethnographic engagement with individuals who were seeking asylum in Sweden between 2015 and 2017 and their negotiations in the labour market. Drawing on temporal dispossession as a concept, I examine how border regimes work to sustain racial capitalism and how labour market exploitation is exacerbated by the legal liminality the interlocutors inhabit.

Although dispossession has been theorized as an ‘authoritative and often paternalistic apparatus of controlling and appropriating the spatiality, mobility, affectivity, potentiality, and relationality of (neo)colonized subjects’ (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013: 11 my italics), the research on dispossession has often failed to recognize the importance of time and temporality. Here, I seek to bridge this gap. Whereas migration studies have been critiqued for perpetuating methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002), that is, for treating the nation-state as the sole unit of analysis, temporal dispossession foregrounds time as central to the distribution of rights to make visible how control of time is an experience shared across multiple positions – by citizens and non-citizens alike (Mulinari and Sager, 2022: 5). While this directs our attention to the continuum of temporal control, migrants could be thought of as ‘the sharpest end of the temporal restrictions that surround access to many rights for citizens as well as foreigners’ (Anderson, 2019: 11; see also Mulinari and Nordling, 2022: 261; Mulinari and Sager, 2022). Consequently, engaging with the interlocutors’ experiences through the theoretical lens of temporal dispossession is a means of centring time within the workings of racial capitalism. Examining the role of time in harbouring diverse forms of labour, here I examine how time functions in the shaping of informalization, processes of differentiation and their consequences for the distribution of life chances, to borrow the terminology of Dean Spade (2015). The institutionalization of temporality is thus understood to underpin an informal economy and labour market, as the threat of deportability has expanded the capital and power of employers, allowing them to create more precarious working conditions, default on wages, demand probationary periods without payment for work done, break job promises and so on (Öberg, 2016: 188–189).

Drawing on these insights allows us to understand the systemic nature of informalization, where migrants serve as an important vehicle for expanding flexible labour markets and the ever-available reserve army of labour (Munck et al., 2012; Slavnic, 2015). While all workers are exploited under capitalism and exposed to precarious work conditions (cf. Standing, 2016), researchers have pointed to the specific precarity that follows workers who find themselves in legal liminality, as their precarious legal position exposes them to the risk of deportation (De Genova, 2019; Öberg, 2016; Sager and Öberg, 2017). As I will argue, the threat of deportation renders workers ‘a distinctly disposable commodity’, which in turn creates and upholds a ‘flexible and docile labour force’ (Khosravi, 2018: 39). Connecting this to the workings of racial capitalism is thus a way of drawing attention to the continuities of racialized exploitation (Issar, 2021a).

The remainder of the article is organized as follows: The next section introduces previous research on flexibilization, informalization and precarization of time under neoliberal capitalism. The theoretical framework of temporal dispossession, method and methodology, and the empirical analysis follow this. The latter is organized according to the following three major themes: ‘Dispossession through time and state bureaucracy’, ‘Hope as a dispossessive double-bind’ and ‘Dispossession through flexibilization’. In the conclusion, the findings are discussed.

Flexibilization, Informalization, and Precarization of Time Under Neoliberal Racial Capitalism

In the wake of flexible neoliberal capitalism, informalization has become an ever-pervasive condition of labour market organization (Slavnic, 2010, 2016). Here, I approach informalization as a process that occurs both in formal and in informal labour settings (Sassen, 2009), working through deregulation, privatization, and the resulting flexibility in economic restructuring and dismantling of worker rights (Mendonça et al., 2023: 60). Locating these processes within a racial capitalism framework allows us to understand how the differentiation and racialized division of populations serves capitalist development. Central to this is ‘the economic segregation that arises from exclusion from the formal waged economy, relegation to the periphery of the formal economy and, perhaps most importantly, the scraping of value from the realm of social reproduction but not through wage relations’ (Bhattacharyya, 2023: 4). Importantly, this denial of objective employment structures has been connected to the increased precarization of work (Standing, 2016) that is seeping into all aspects of social life (Lowe, 2015). While often treated as an exception in labour market organization in the West and often attributed to the increase in migration, these processes must be understood as integral to contemporary global capitalism. The precarity of labour and super-exploitation of workers have been prevailing features for women and racialized populations in the Global North (Hardt and Negri, 2011; Tsing, 2009) and affect the vast majority of workers in the Global South, where non-guaranteed and informal labour arrangements have long been the prevailing norm (Munck, 2013). Thus, while research has often treated the informal labour market as an anomaly, primarily operated by marginalized and disadvantaged social groups, it is important to note that this has always been an integral and structural part of the formal economy (Slavnic, 2010) in the Global North as well as in the Global South.

Central to my argument here is the approach to informalization that distinguishes between ‘informalization from above’ and ‘informalization from below’ (Slavnic, 2010, 2015: 310). While the former refers to economic strategies enforced by powerful social and financial actors such as state institutions and big businesses, the latter refers to the informal strategies developed by less powerful actors resisting informalization from above and trying to survive. Because these less powerful actors are developing strategies that operate beyond the boundaries of formal regulatory frameworks, they are also inadvertently contributing to the perpetuation of irregularity, leading to growing informalization (Slavnic, 2010). Migration scholars have pointed out how bordering practices play a crucial role in stratifying labour through the imposition of irregular statuses (Anderson, 2010). Echoing scholars within the Black Radical tradition, capital remakes itself through this very fashioning of differential economic statuses and values (Bhattacharyya, 2023; Robinson, 2000).

Drawing from the insights of Prem Kumar Rajaram (2018), capitalism operates with what he calls a ‘frontstage’ and a ‘backstage’, referring to how the facade of contractual and consensual agreements with the owner of capital obscures the exploitation of labourers, where the conditions of work are based on exploiting workers as surplus labour. These hierarchizations not only depend on specific conceptions of labour but also reflect certain racialized and gendered hierarchies that designate certain bodies as more valuable and productive than others (see Ong, 1999; Rajaram, 2018: 630). The surplus, Rajaram contends, is not ‘simply excluded, but included through their exclusion as cheaply exploitable and dispensable labour’ (Rajaram, 2018: 628). Building on Bourdieu’s (1998) critical interrogation of welfare state deregulation (see also Wacquant, 2009; Wacquant et al., 2014), Shammas (2019: 137) points to the neoliberal shift of taking resources ‘from the social, assistive and caring left hand of the state’ and reallocating them to the ‘the disciplinary, punitive and militaristic right hand’. This ties into how racial border regimes, mass incarceration and imperialist violence are deeply integrated into the neoliberal political economy. In this connection, race serves as a mechanism for categorizing and controlling ‘the material boundaries between different forms of labour under neoliberalism: citizen and migrant, waged and “unexploitable”, bearers of entitlements and bare life’ (Kundnani, 2021: 53; see also Altenried et al., 2018; Issar, 2021a, 2021b).

From the perspective of capital, the lifespan of a precarious worker is fragmented into successive, exploitable units of the present, where precarity represents a form of exploitation that operates exclusively in the present, but that, in doing so, also exploits the future (Tsianos and Papadopoulos, 2006). In the words of Hardt and Negri (2011), ‘precarity [. . . ] imposes a new regime of time’ (p. 146), erasing the division between work and non-work time and depriving workers of their control over their time. This changing nature of work and asylum needs to be understood in relation to the restructuring of the welfare state in the Swedish context, where austerity, deregulation and market solutions have been at the forefront of the labour market. This has not only led to growing gaps and increased inequality at the societal level, but also rendered welfare and rights increasingly conditional (Altermark et al., 2022). Similarly, the turn to neoliberal racial capitalism has arguably enhanced the landscape of informalization with its increased demand for labour market flexibility, which encompasses wage flexibility (speeding up adjustments to change in demand), employment flexibility (swift changes in employment levels), job flexibility (being able to change job structures and move workers around within the company structure with minimal opposition and cost) as well as skill flexibility (meant to quickly adapt workers’ skills), all contributing to systematically making employees more insecure (Standing, 2016: 9–10).

Theorizing Temporal Dispossession: A De-Nationalized Perspective

To comprehend the emergence of informalization in state production from a de-nationalist perspective, I argue that we need to turn to ‘temporal dispossession’ (Ramsay, 2020) and its role in capital accumulation. Building on Harvey’s (2004) ‘accumulation by dispossession’, I understand the forces of capitalist accumulation and dispossession as manifesting in diverse ways. While such forces are acute in conflicts and wars, giving rise to violent expulsions that forcibly displace populations, they can also be chronic in nature, as evident in the neoliberal restructuring of societies that entails the erosion of social rights (Harvey, 2004; Ramsay, 2020). This dynamic is particularly conspicuous in the political economy of migration, where borders play a pivotal role in organizing labour globally as well as nationally. Adding a temporal dimension to this, Ramsay (2020) introduces the notion of temporal dispossession to encompass the lived experiences of displacement and precarity as a pervasive condition of our time. I build on this by highlighting the racial configurations of temporal dispossession, situating it within the larger framework of racial capitalism. Understanding temporal dispossession as grounded in racial capitalism allows us to understand how the dispositions and allocations of time are differentiated by race (Mills, 2014: 28), directing our attention to the distribution of life chances and their temporal dimensions. As described by Hanchard (1999),

the inequalities of temporality that result from power relations between racially dominant and subordinate groups [ . . . ] produc[ing] unequal temporal access to institutions, goods, services, resources, power, and knowledge which members of both groups recognize. When coupled with the distinct temporal modalities that relations of dominance and subordination produce, racial time has operated as a structural effect upon the politics of racial difference. (p. 253)

Pointing to the racialization of dispossession, be it acute or chronic, and building on the insights provided by Ramsay (2020), I examine how dispossession operates in and through the border regime and, more specifically, through time. While racial capitalism is understood as a set of relations and techniques that build on processes of differentiation – the sorting and devaluation of certain bodies along the axis of race, rendering them disposable through the unequal distribution of human value (Bhattacharyya, 2023; Byrd et al., 2018; Melamed, 2015; Melamed and Reddy, 2019; Robinson, 2000) – temporal dispossession indicates how this is configured temporally. Understood as a predatory relation, temporal dispossession points to how temporal techniques of differentiation are mobilized to create ‘differential zones of labour, (and) naturalise a system built on the hyperextraction of surplus value from racialised bodies’ (Danewid, 2021: 147). As such, I argue that we need to understand processes of informalization as part of the larger workings of racial capitalism, in relation to how capitalism operates to exclude certain populations from the formal labour market, rendering them super-exploitable (Tsing, 2009) and at the disposal of the needs of capital.

Method and Methodology

In this article, I draw on my larger thesis project, which is based on ethnographic engagement with individuals who sought asylum in Sweden between 2015 and 2017. The present article is a reworked version of chapter 7 in my thesis (Philipson Isaac, 2024). I here focus specifically on the interlocutors’ navigations with the labour market. Of the 14 persons with whom I had the closest contact, six had received a temporary residence permit (13 or 36 months), and eight were still at some stage in the asylum process (most waiting for their appeal to the migration court or the higher court of migration). In its totality, the material has shown how asylum regulations feed into the expanding precarization of work, including the informal economy. While the interlocutors navigate diverse spheres of the labour market, I here pay particular attention to five interlocutors whose navigations illustrate the blurred lines between the formal and informal labour market. While these are distinct, they also represent the larger dissertation project and the informalization that the material as a whole shows. I followed them closely from 2018 to 2022, and the empirical material consists of field notes and formal and informal interviews, all coded and analyzed using thematic content analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006). The research followed ethical recommendations concerning confidentiality,⁴ consent and integrity and was approved by the Regional Ethics Board in Gothenburg (reg. no. 812-18).

Dispossession Through Time and State Bureaucracy

Gaining permission to work in Sweden after seeking asylum is based on having received an exemption from the work permit requirement, as mentioned earlier. Yet, the demand posed by the Migration Agency to submit relevant identity documents or ‘help establish your identity’ and the difficulties in establishing the latter have led to a situation where very few in the asylum process qualify for permission to work (Calleman and Herzfeld Olsson, 2015: 32). This in and of itself creates a vicious cycle, in which those seeking asylum in Sweden are urged to support themselves financially during the asylum process (The Swedish Migration Agency, 2021a), at the same time as they can neither get a permit to work nor survive on the daily allowance provided by the state. It is important to note that the allowance levels have not increased since 1994, with several non-governmental organizations (NGOs) pointing to the impossibility of supporting oneself on the current levels. Asylum applicants’ reliance on either the allowance or informalized labour is further mobilized against them. While living on the allowance, they are portrayed in the political discourse as a population that is exhausting the resources of the welfare state (Ålund et al., 2017) and thus failing to live up to the work ethic or ‘arbetslinjen’, which is what the work ideology is called in Sweden (see also Bengtsson and Jacobsson, 2018). However, working informally is portrayed as undermining the welfare state and ‘Swedish values’ by expanding the so-called ‘shadow society’ (Department of Justice, 2023a).

These approaches essentially withhold fundamental rights and services, such as employment, healthcare, education and welfare from individuals the state deems undesirable. Compared to more direct and coercive regulatory methods, minimum welfare policies are more cost-effective for states, both financially and legally. They allow governments to subject ‘those physically and politically marginalized . . . to very real bodily violence . . . while fulfilling their legal obligations to those making an application for asylum’ (Mayblin et al., 2020: 111). This minimum-rights approach should here be understood as the ‘state-sanctioned or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death’ (Gilmore, 2007: 28).

Among the interlocutors who worked in the informal labour market, including Aalem, the denial of work permits was experienced as the state and its asylum regulations having left them no choice but to pursue an informal existence. This relates both to the lack of financial support from the Migration Agency and to their exclusion from the formal labour market, both depriving them of the necessary means of economic survival (see Davies et al., 2017). Furthermore, Aalem described these restrictions as the state creating a vulnerability that others could profit from, stating that he had been turned into a ‘legal slave’ – ready to be exploited in a system that kept robbing him of his aspirations, productivity and liveability. Without permission to work in the formal labour market, the asylum process had come to revolve around waiting, putting life on hold and a sense of being prevented from moving forward and from doing something valuable with one’s time. Hence, Aalem saw working informally as an act of disobedience (Lorey, 2015), realized by taking ownership of his own time and resisting the inequalities of temporality and unequal temporal access to a liveable life forced on him by the Migration Agency (see Hanchard, 1999; Mills, 2014).

Aalem’s resistance can be interpreted using the concept of stolen time, introduced by Khosravi (2018), which refers to the surplus value generated from the time capitalists fail to compensate labourers for – the time they essentially ‘steal’. This notion is especially evident in deportations, where additional value is derived from the time forcibly taken from migrants. The idea of theft is significant, as it underscores how deportation contributes to the concentration of wealth among a few ‘by dispossessing the migrants of their saved, spent and invested time’ (Khosravi, 2018: 41). However, this theft of time must be contextualized within the framework of the super-exploitation (Tsing, 2009) enforced through various forms of temporal dispossession, which ultimately empower employers and increase control over labourers (cf. Tsianos and Papadopoulos, 2006).

Aalem’s attempt to ‘steal back’ time from the state by engaging in informal work does not challenge this economy of dispossession; instead, it renders him even more vulnerable within the informal labour market, in that he lacks all formal protections. Nevertheless, it is crucial to recognize that informal work allowed Aalem to challenge the temporal constraints imposed on him while awaiting the processing of his asylum application and ensure his economic survival. Negotiating the informal labour market should thus be understood as both exploitative and emancipatory. Sager (2011: 141) argues that a regular job and relatively stable income can foster feelings of security, stability and belonging, thereby mitigating the precarity experienced in other aspects of life while living irregularly. For Aalem, this translated into securing housing for family members who were living irregularly in Pakistan and awaiting family reunification. It also provided a sense of immediate security, enabling him to afford essential items like medicine and food not covered by the daily allowance provided by the Migration Agency.

Since it is illegal to work informally in Sweden, Aalem’s employment meant that his asylum application was in jeopardy, leaving him vulnerable to the risk of being detected. One case officer at the Migration Agency’s service centre reiterated this, emphasizing that if detected by the agency or the police, working informally meant breaking the law, which would subsequently affect the assessment of a person’s asylum application (phone call with the case officer, 2020). This was made even stricter in 2022, when the Swedish Government decided on harsher legislation in relation to ‘moral conduct’ (god vandel) and increased possibilities to revoke residence permits (Department of Justice, 2023c Dir. 2023:158; see also Prop. 2021/22:284).

As can be seen, the system and its bureaucracy push people to work in the informal labour market while also ‘illegalizing’ their presence there, thus making them deportable based on their own faults. The workings of the system are in this way rendered invisible through the ‘responsibilization’ (cf. Jacobsson and Hansen Löfstrand, 2022) of people’s deportability rather than by shedding light on a flawed system that has created such a Catch-22 situation to begin with.

Hope As a Dispossessive Double-Bind

Like Aalem, Alexandra was denied permission to work during his asylum process and consequently prohibited from finding a job in the formal labour market. Thus, waiting for his asylum application to be processed meant being confined to the asylum camp, as he could not afford public transportation to move outside the facilities. However, challenging this isolation, Alexandra found that although he could not work in the formal labour market and hesitated to engage in informal labour, the Swedish legislation did allow him to participate in an unpaid internship. He had met a pizzeria owner who was happy to take him on as unpaid labour through a formalized agreement.

For Alexandra, the pizzeria was also seen as an opportunity to extend his limited mobility, as it was in a neighbouring town, and the owner had promised to arrange daily transportation for him. Hence, while this extended his mobility outside the camp, it was a mobility conditioned by the owner. Following a few weeks of internship, Alexandra’s initial sense of freedom had been replaced by a feeling of confinement. Instead of feeling isolated at the camp, his daily rountine was dictated by the timeframes set by the pizzeria owner, leaving him isolated at the pizzeria instead. This was perhaps most notably observed in how the initial 8-hour workdays gradually extended to 10- to 12-hour shifts of unpaid labour, depending on the owner’s transportation arrangements.

Alexandra often found himself questioned by those around him regarding his commitment to the pizzeria owner. To them, it seemed illogical since he was not receiving financial compensation, nor did he owe any moral obligation to the owner. However, Alexandra insisted on staying. The internship was not only an escape from the confinement of the camp, but also made him hopeful about the future. Through his appeal process in the Migration Court, Alexandra hoped to secure asylum in Sweden, where his engagement in the labour market was seen as a strategic action to gain experience and potential future employment opportunities in Sweden. His willingness to engage in unpaid labour must thus be understood as one of his strategies for securing his future time in Sweden, not just a matter of reciprocity in the present. Future employment was also seen as a means of securing his ability to reunite with his family through family reunification, where the partner in Sweden must be able to support both the spouse and the children upon arrival. Future time was thus not an individual temporal horizon but a collective one that encompassed his family. Alexandra’s rationale for enduring present unpaid labour in exchange for future prospects echoes research pointing to the ‘political economy of promise’ (Bascetta, 2016: 35) and ‘hope labour’ (Alacovska, 2018; Kuehn and Corrigan, 2013), where unpaid labour is projected as enhancing future employability (Maury, 2020). For Alexandra, the unpaid internship had thus become a promise for a more stable future, a hope that was inevitably part of his continuous super-exploitation in the labour market. However, it would be false to depict this subjectification as solely dependent on hope; rather, capitalist subjectification, particularly through the border regime, operates as much through hope as it does through fear (Bhattacharyya, 2023). In Alexandra’s case, it was the fear of deportation, the dispossessed futures of his children and the sense of confinement to the camp that had shaped his participation in unpaid labour.

As argued by Fraser (2016: 169), capitalism operates through the expropriation of value – ‘sucking value’ from unfree, dependent and unwaged labour. Unlike exploitation – which Marx (1977) defines as the hours the capitalist takes possession of, a certain amount of value without paying the worker the equivalent, thereby creating the illusion that the unpaid portion of the wage is also remunerated – what Alexandra faced was rather how unpaid work is projected as a precursor to, and thus an extension of, waged work. His situation thus resonates with how promises of future paid work ‘facilitate the creation of a pool of free or semi-free labour for capital to utilise, and constitute a source of exploitable labour’ (Maury, 2020: 817).

For Alexandra, the internship helped him pass the time more quickly and reduced his daily expenses by covering lunch and dinner costs. He saw the internship as a way to replicate the structure and routines of employment, as discussed by Kwon and Lane (2016). Even though the internship was unpaid, having these expenses covered provided a degree of economic flexibility. Yet, although engaging in the internship allowed him to participate in activities beyond the confines of the camp, it was not immune to the pressures of neoliberalism, which prioritizes maximizing productivity and efficiency (Davies and Bansel, 2005). For many, the desire to keep moving forward and to explore new opportunities symbolized a rejection of stereotypes portraying minorities and migrants as lazy or dependent on welfare (Alatas, 2010; Kamali and Jönsson, 2018). Instead, they sought to assert themselves as willing contributors to the workforce.

Labour market exploitation through promises of a better future was not only present among the interlocutors who were denied permission to work during the asylum process, but also omnipresent among the interlocutors who had a work permit. One common denominator among these interlocutors was that they had received their first rejection by the Migration Agency and were waiting for their appeal to the Migration Court. Their participation in the labour market served as a strategy to mitigate the risks associated with their court appeals. If denied asylum, an alternative way of safeguarding them from deportation was the possibility to change tracks, more commonly known as ‘track change’, allowing them to seek a work permit after their asylum application had been rejected (Aliens Act Ch.5, 15 a §, see also Calleman, 2015; Sandström, 2020: 61). However, to be allowed to switch tracks, the applicant must fulfil various requirements, which are often at odds with the institutional frameworks of the asylum process. This was part of the 2008 work migration reform, where the possibility to change tracks required that a person had been employed for 6 months (later 4 months) before their asylum application was rejected, that their employment extended 1 year ahead, with conditions in line with collective agreements, for example, a minimum salary of SEK 13,000, and that they applied for the work permit within 2 weeks after their rejection decision had been formalized (see Calleman, 2017: 47). As of 1 November 2023, the minimum salary requirements increased to SEK 27,360, with the government investigating the possibility of eliminating the ‘track change’ option to further reduce migration. Such changes are framed as aiming to ‘reduce [asylum] fraud and exploitation related to labour migration’, as articulated by Maria Malmer Stenergard, the Swedish Minister of Migration (Department of Justice, 2023a). Instead of going after employers who exploit workers or interrogating the restrictive asylum legislation that produces both informalization and irregularization, the political discourse frames workers in the informal labour market as part of a ‘new dangerous class’, to borrow the terminology of Standing and its corresponding racist connotations. This is done by equating labour migration with a so-called ‘shadow society’ (Government Offices of Sweden, 2023), furthering the criminalization of racialized workers in the Swedish labour market. These measures must be understood within the larger context of anti-immigrant sentiments in Sweden, where the right-wing government, with support from the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats, is increasingly criminalizing racialized populations, as seen in its intention to expand deportability to those with residence permits and citizens with dual citizenship if they ‘fail’ to live up to so-called ‘Swedish values’ (Department of Justice, 2023b).

Dispossession Through Flexibilization

Monir was one of the interlocutors who had found employment through the flexible platform economy after months of attempting to find work in the more traditional labour market. A Syrian man in his early 30s, Monir had received a temporary residence permit of 36 months when he sought asylum in Sweden in 2015. When he told me about his new job, he jokingly said, ‘This will be good for your research; I work as a delivery man for Foodora!’⁵ knowing that I wrote about labour market exploitation. At the beginning of his employment, Monir had worked every day of the week to compensate for the low profitability by expanding his workdays. He would divide his workday into a morning and evening shift to adapt to the more intensive and productive working hours when there was a greater demand for food deliveries. Like many others employed on zero-hours contracts, he was made responsible for the parts of his work deemed ‘unproductive’, such as the unpaid gaps between orders (Moore and Newsome, 2018; Newlands, 2022). His work was thus part of the growing gig-economy, where digital platforms have replaced formal employers and instead serve as platform economies, where the worker is hired for each gig rather than on contracts that give them stability (Gebrial, 2022). These platform companies have gained influence in the labour market as part of the more significant trend of de-regularizing within neoliberal racial capitalism (Altenried, 2021; Gebrial, 2022; Jessop et al., 1987). As Gebrial (2022) argues, migration and race are central to structuring platform economies – not only concerning how racialized minorities are overrepresented in platform economies, but also concerning how racialization has played a crucial role in the development and expansion of platform economies, where ‘platforms absorb surplus populations unable to access formal, standard employment’ (p. 2).

In the platform economy, workers are no longer considered traditional employees but rather independent contractors. Consequently, they bear the burden of providing their own equipment, paying taxes, covering operating costs, and securing insurance, rather than these things being the employer’s responsibility (Vallas, 2019: 49). As Olivia Maury (2020: 819) points out, platform work is often framed as a form of entrepreneurship, even though it typically entails insecure working conditions and irregular pay. This narrative further shifts the precariousness of platform capitalism, from being viewed as a structural issue to being viewed an issue for the individual.⁶

The precariousness regarding work and pay was also evident in Monir’s payment sheets, where he was only symbolically reimbursed for transportation expenses. Here, he was only paid for the estimated distance between the restaurant and the customer, with Foodora algorithms frequently discounting traffic delays. Classifying temps in the gig-economy as independent contractors further enables employers to evade the responsibilities associated with regular employment, including job security, social security payments, overtime earnings and insurance coverage. Monir thus found himself in a predicament where he not only had to maintain his car and smartphone – his means of production – but also relied on them for his livelihood. This dependence became apparent when Monir’s car was involved in a highway accident rendering it unusable. Not only did he lose his means of production, but he also lost his source of income until he could secure a replacement vehicle, as he was solely responsible for providing transportation. Given his precarious employment, with contracts renewed every three months, Monir and his wife, Maya, faced several obstacles in obtaining a bank loan or securing a rental agreement for a new car, further exacerbating their precarious circumstances. It is thus important to note that temporary employment not only affects the present but also employees’ ability to secure their futures.

Whenever Monir talked about his working conditions at Foodora, he consistently emphasized that he took on the work with the hope that it would improve his prospects for obtaining permanent residency when he had to renew his residence permit in October 2022. Monir was employed on monthly and occasionally 3-month contracts during his first 2 years. However, he remained with Foodora with the anticipation of transitioning to a more permanent contract by the end of those 2 years, seeing it as a means of enhancing his chances of securing stable employment. This resonates with a general tendency within precarious employment, where insecure employment is to be understood as producing flexibility and mobility in the labour market, even though it immobilizes people in precarious employment (Mulinari, 2007). When Monir was finally offered a permanent contract in November 2021, it was only for 10 hours a week. He also realized that his employment had shifted from Foodora to one of its subsidiary companies, Hungry Delivery, turning each gig into its own contract and thus rendering his employment fruitless for any attempts to make his stay in Sweden permanent.

In contrast to Monir, Maya and Roya secured employment through temp agencies for teaching positions, placing them within the rapidly growing group of workers commonly referred to as temps, who are typically employed on an hourly basis. Such employment is characterized by its temporary nature, contingent on the employer’s immediate needs and the absence of a stable schedule. This temporary demand ‘can arise suddenly or be more recurring, and it can be shorter or longer in duration, which influences the structure of the employment’ (Alfonsson, 2020: 11, my translation). While scholars have argued that temps now constitute the most precarious segment of temporary employment in the labour market (cf. Kalleberg, 2000), it is crucial to acknowledge that although temps may represent the most precarious form of employment in the formalized labour market, they are situated at the beginning of a continuum of precarization between formalized and informalized labour markets (Slavnic, 2010, 2015). Therefore, despite the essential and qualitative differences between temps, gig-workers and those in more informal positions, they all share common traits of temporal precarity and precarious positions in the labour market (Tsianos and Papadopoulos, 2006).

This is well illustrated by Maya’s and Roya’s mornings, which often started with the alarm clock going off at 5.30 a.m., commencing their routine for the working week. They would get up, shower, get dressed and eat breakfast. At 6 a.m., they would begin monitoring their phone, as available job shifts were announced through text messages or apps. Since job offers are sent to several employees through text message, it is the first person who responds who is given the work shift. There were occasions where Roya and Maya would not even have a chance to read the text message before receiving another one informing them that the shift had already been filled. This was the routine for them as temps affected by the increasing flexibilization of the labour market. After waking up in the morning, Roya and Maya did not know whether they would be offered work, the duration of the shifts they would be offered, the commuting distances between different workplaces and the potential repercussions of declining a job offer for future propositions. The distinction between work and non-work time was increasingly blurred, leaving them with little to no control over their time (see Hardt and Negri, 2011; Tsianos and Papadopoulos, 2006). In a phone conversation, Maya described the unpredictability of working at temporary employment agencies:

MAYA:

It’s unfair, you sign a contract for full-time work, but if there’s no work, then they’ll say: ‘take this day as a vacation day’, but it will be without pay. Even if in the contract they say they will provide you with work.

SARAH:

You would have a contract, but you still had to be available every morning?

MAYA:

Yes, every day in the morning from 6 o’clock and maybe they send me something, maybe not. But the schools were always in need [of staff]. It’s not the lack of job, but the pressure you live with during this period. This is just the system; this is how it is. Even when I went to school and met other temps, we complained about the same issues, and other teachers would also express that they were sorry for us. [ . . . ] The contract, they had to renew it every other month.

SARAH:

So, you would have a contract but still have to be by the phone every day. Would it affect your salary?

MAYA:

Yes, of course, it would. One month I would have 10,000, and one month [SEK] 14,000. There is another thing, even if I had a workday [they would call and say] ‘ok Maya, would you like to work in this school from 7-10 a.m.?’, but the rest of the day I would not work. Or the opposite, ‘Would you like to work between 12 and 4 p.m.?’. The formal work in Swedish institutions is from 8 o’clock, sometimes I would be waiting from 7, 8 to 9 o’clock, which should also be considered worktime. It was so stressful.

As depicted by Maya, work could not be reduced to paid working hours, as time-limited employment also meant a constant wait and hyper-vigilance to being offered more work and to securing additional work by being the first to respond to a text. Their workdays were thus shaped by a digital system that functioned through a ‘just-in-time’ logic, meaning that employment was no longer into jobs, but rather to perform one-off tasks. Such work further requires constant labour market flexibility, from wage flexibility to job flexibility, all feeding into the landscape of informalization and erosion of labour protection (Standing, 2016). As such, employment is broken down into gigs and tasks, removing responsibility for renumeration of ‘unproductive labour’ from the employer, as time spent on travel and waiting between shifts is considered the employee’s own personal time. Mulinari (2007) has shown how the blurring of boundaries between working hours and private life reflects the employers’ expanding control over the workforce’s time, reaching far beyond the confines of the workplace and regular working hours. She further sheds light on how such temporality of flexibility functions to discipline workers (Mulinari, 2007: 210). This exertion of temporal control is evident in the increased emphasis on workers’ ‘availability to work’, leaving potential employees in a perpetual state of anticipation: waiting for a text message offering them a shift, waiting to accumulate enough work to cover their monthly rent and waiting to have worked for a sufficient duration to be considered for permanent positions. It also involves the ongoing differentiation of time: between paid/unpaid work, and temporal arrangements dictated by the employer’s needs, thereby reinforcing an already unequal distribution of time and rights in the lives of those involved. While this dynamic affects all workers within capitalism, individuals navigating legal liminality, like the interlocutors, experience this precariousness not only in the present but also as a looming threat to their future security (Ramsay, 2020). Their ability to secure permanent residency in Sweden becomes intertwined with their productivity, irrespective of their asylum claims or protected status within the asylum system. As such, the border regimes become a vehicle for super-exploitation, rendering their life chances dependent on their participation in formal as well as informal labour.

Conclusion

The framework of temporal dispossession encourages us to understand how migration policies underpin processes of informalization in both the formal and informal economy, as well as their relation to racial capitalism. Where previous research has pointed out the dual nature of informalization – from above and from below (Slavnic, 2010, 2015), I argue that we need to pay further attention to informalization from below as a response to the fact that it is partly produced by the state. This can be seen in how the interlocutors, responding to bureaucratic hurdles and contradictions embedded in the system, have been forced to deal with the intricate dynamics of economies of exploitation in the form of exclusion, precarity and deportability. In doing so, in this article, my aim has been to contribute to the research by elucidating how dispossession operates in and through the border regime and, more specifically, through time. For instance, there is a paradox in that the interlocutors need acceptable identity documents if they are to work during the asylum process, but it is very difficult to obtain such documents, especially for politically and religiously persecuted minorities. At the same time, the minimum-rights approach surrounding the asylum system effectively withholds fundamental rights and basic needs from those the state deems undesirable. This dissonance often makes gainful employment unattainable, thus funnelling racialized communities into the realm of the informalized job market and super-exploitation. This is further exacerbated by labour market participation as the only means of securing permanent residence in Sweden – in a political climate that is becoming increasingly hostile towards migration and racialized communities.

The fact that labour market participation is the only means of escaping the threat of deportability further fuels what researchers have termed ‘the political economy of promise’, where engaging in unpaid or underpaid work is justified by the promise of future stability. However, and importantly, temporal dispossession allows us to understand how hope works as a dispossessive double-bind, through both the promise of a continued and the threat of a discontinued future. While those still in the asylum process navigate the complex bureaucracy that allows them to work during the asylum procedure, the interlocutors with temporary residence permits highlight the continuities of informalization in the formal labour market. Taking the example of the expanding platform economy and its just-in-time logic, the interlocutors’ experiences bear witness to how those living under legal liminality serve as an ever-available labour pool, rendering them disposable and replaceable in the larger political economy of racial capitalism.

It is also important to highlight that the situations of the interlocutors – be they Aalem and Alexandra navigating the asylum process without work permits or Monir, Maya and Roya with work permits and temporary residence permits – are not appreciably different from each other. This is in accordance with research suggesting that, even after acquiring permanent residence status and a work permit, the prospects for these individuals remain largely unchanged (cf. Bursell and Bygren, 2023; Neergaard, 2015; Schenner and Neergaard, 2019). They are likely to find themselves relegated to labour-intensive and low-income sectors of the job market, frequently assuming roles as owners of small-scale enterprises within the service industry. To sustain their own livelihoods, they may resort to informal employment practices, thereby subjecting others to the super-exploitation they once navigated themselves – sustaining the economy that dispossesses them in the first place.

Finally, unpacking state production of informalization is also a means of demonstrating how state practices of temporal dispossession and political subjectivation are crucial to capital’s self-expansion (Fraser, 2022). This does not mean that the state is the sole enforcer of these hierarchies, nor does it mean that they operate independent of capitalism’s imperialist division of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’. Rather, as Fraser (2022) argues, the figure of the migrant and the refugee underscores the global political economy through which states and border industries acquire legitimacy, and within which legal and political statuses become ‘racially coded’. While there is a growing body of scholarship on informalization and how it is tied up with neoliberal racial capitalism, there is a need to further explore the inherent role of the state and temporal dispossession in these processes. Similarly, instead of treating the super-exploitation of migrants and racialized minorities as something to be solved through a stronger commitment to human rights and broader forms of citizenship inclusion, we need to shift our attention to exploitation as facilitated by the state, and part of a global political economy – de-exceptionalizing exploitation and super-exploitation as anomalies in capitalist economies. Hence, while a broadening of social citizenship can be understood as a counterforce against certain forms of exploitation, this does not in itself challenge capitalism’s global quest for capital accumulation.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author extends her sincere gratitude to the interlocutors for so generously sharing their experiences, critical reflections and time with her. She also wants to thank Mattias Bengtsson and Maja Sager for crucial and insightful comments on this paper. Finally, thanks to the editors, Zoran Slavnic and Klara Öberg, for providing the opportunity to submit a reworked version of her chapter for review, and for their generous feedback. She also extends gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their important comments, which have improved the arguments in this paper.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Sarah Philipson Isaac

Notes

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Unpacking State Production of Temporal Dispossession: The Intersections of Labour,Asylum and Informalization in Sweden

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Flexibilization, Informalization, and Precarization of Time Under Neoliberal Racial Capitalism

Theorizing Temporal Dispossession: A De-Nationalized Perspective

Method and Methodology

Dispossession Through Time and State Bureaucracy

Hope As a Dispossessive Double-Bind

Dispossession Through Flexibilization

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References