Precarious Masculinities: Migrant Working Men’s Masculinities as Self-Exploitation in a Mediterranean Restaurant in Glasgow

Abstract

Drawing on a covert ethnography of a Mediterranean restaurant in Glasgow, this article analyses how practices characteristic of hegemonic masculinity are incorporated by male migrant workers in the process of crafting labour identities. Building on Connell’s framework of hegemonic masculinity, the researchers found that performances of masculinity operated in a way that, while allowing subjects to feel some degree of power, also ultimately reinforced the individualising pressures promoted by the labour process. It is therefore argued that hegemonic masculinity is critical in providing an avenue through which experiences of exploitation are naturalised by precarious labour workforces.

Introduction

Migrant workers in the UK are located at the forefront of the precarious condition. The structural conditions that define precarity, and which migrant workers labour under, have been extensively documented (Anderson and Ruhs, 2010; Sporton, 2013; Standing, 2011). Following Brexit, this has assumed a renewed importance (Rogers, 2017; Rzepnikowska, 2019). This article focuses on how these conditions determine and influence workers’ subjectivities, drawing upon Theodoropoulos’s (2021; 2025) doctoral research into precarious migrant labour in Scotland. It is argued that masculinity is a crucial lens through which precarious workers perceive themselves as workers, as migrants and as migrant workers; more precisely, we argue that workers draw upon characteristics of hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 2020; Slutskaya et al., 2016) such as strength and resilience to craft identities that allow them to internalise and rationalise the demands put upon them by their precarious, hyper-exploitative labour contexts. In this study, hegemonic masculinity was deployed in ways that, while allowing subjects to feel some degree of power, ultimately reinforced the individualisation promoted by the labour process.

In the ensuing analysis, a dialogue is established among disparate strands of the sociology of labour, migration, and masculinities. These investigations follow Theodoropoulos’s (2025) conclusion that precarious work fosters a ‘socialisation of precarity’ whereby the pressures of the labour process combine with the overarching sense of insecurity and lack of organised resistance through trade unions to foster an isolated, detached, short-term individualism on the part of workers. A critical part of this process involves the elevation of experiences of exploitation into core aspects of one’s identity, interpreted through the prisms of resilience and personal strength rather than structural disempowerment. The research questions addressed are: what is the role of hegemonic masculinity in fortifying, and reproducing, the underlying dictums of the labour process (expressed through the schema of the individualised, powerful, flexible, inexhaustible, omnipotent male worker)? Moreover, we sought to understand the extent to which such masculinities are operationalised by workers to create identities of dignity and self-worth in the face of intensely exploitative conditions. We argue that, even as hegemonic masculinity allows workers to assume a sense of control and power in precarious labour conditions, it is simultaneously a trap, as these notions function to legitimise and naturalise exploitation as a solitary struggle that one must endure as a measure of self-worth. We hope that this ethnographic viewpoint from one workplace contributes to the wider process of theorising the relationship between masculinity, labour, precarity and subjectivity.

The next two sections engage with the academic literature on precarity, migrant work and masculinities which ground the subsequent analysis. We then discuss the data, drawn from a one-month covert ethnographic process where Theodoropoulos spent more than 145 hours employed as a kitchen porter (KP) in a Mediterranean restaurant in Glasgow. The findings are then discussed along three thematic axes. Firstly, we position the analysis within the context of the intensely exploitative and precarious conditions of the restaurant and show how migrant workers were both symbolically and structurally disempowered during their daily labour. The analysis turns to how such conditions contribute to the emergence of a specific form of socialisation whereby exploitation is naturalised; workers consequently negotiate their labour experience by foregrounding their individual capacities to survive in a competitive and insecure environment. Finally, Connell’s (2020) framework is drawn upon to explore how hegemonic masculinity is operative in crafting labour subjectivities. Crucially, we argue that, while these subjective processes allow the workers in our study to perceive themselves as empowered in the face of adverse and exploitative labour conditions, they resultantly reproduce the axiomatic qualities of neoliberal subjectivities, thereby enforcing the disempowering foundations of the labour context.

Precarity and migration in Scotland

Precarity is a contentious concept, and it is therefore important to delineate its use. Following Paret and Gleeson (2016: 280), we argue that it is analytically useful in so far as it allows one to speak about synchronous social processes, centred around core socioeconomic realities of instability, insecurity and transience that connect ‘the micro and the macro’. Specifically, precarity is employed here to encapsulate an array of positions and experiences that saturate western societies, allowing reference to both the realities of casualised labour and social welfare regimes as well as to their effects upon the formation of subjectivities (Bauman, 2000; Casas-Cortés, 2014; Jørgensen, 2016). We maintain a critical distance in relation to Standing’s (2011) thesis of the ‘precariat’ as a novel, global class-in-the-making. Indeed, precarity only emerges as an unfamiliar reality if viewed through the prism of the western Keynesian welfare state (Munck, 2018; Neilson and Rossiter, 2008). As such, precarity is used here as a convenient frame of reference (Alberti et al., 2018), as a shorthand way of describing some of the key experiential and subjective effects of contemporary working conditions, rather than as an overarching theoretical framework.

Characteristic features of precarious occupations include the absence of unions, intense rhythms of production, contractual insecurity and an almost total lack of control over hours and conditions on the part of workers (Bloodworth, 2019; Moore and Robinson, 2016; Sporton, 2013; Standing, 2011). The insecurity, transience, overexertion and expectation to perform as a ‘good worker’ may produce dispositions where a worker not only competes with others, but also with themselves (Gomberg-Muñoz, 2010; Lazzarato, 2015; Lever and Milbourne, 2017). These dispositions are closely associated with hegemonic manifestations of masculinity; indeed, various theorists have argued that precarity, and the skills required to survive it, can become internalised and reworked into a source of pride and a component of one’s identity (Berrardi, 2017; Lever and Milbourne, 2017).

Both the international capitalist economy and the British economy depend on migrant labour, with migrant workers frequently staffing the most precarious and insecure occupations of the labour hierarchy (Anderson and Ruhs, 2010; Jørgensen, 2016). This is also reflected in Scotland. As of 2019, non-UK nationals comprised 8.3% of Scotland’s workers and are heavily concentrated in industries that are characterised by precarious, intense and highly exploitative employment relations. Migrant workers made up 12.5% of the workforce in distribution, hotels and restaurants, and 8.2% of the health and care sectors (Scottish Government, 2019). These jobs tend to be precarious, characterised by a lack of trade union presence, the use of temporary contracts and high degrees of pressure (Lever and Milbourne, 2017; Sporton, 2013). In this context, racism, xenophobia and social exclusion are inseparable aspects of many migrants’ lives in the UK (Davidson et al., 2018; Rzepnikowska, 2019).

Subjective elements associated with the condition of being an immigrant intersect with structural characteristics of British society to fortify the relationship between migration and precarity (Anderson and Ruhs, 2010; Theodoropoulos, 2021; 2025). For example, new arrivals might prefer accessing quick jobs that have minimal contractual commitments, less strict selection criteria and allow a degree of mobility until they can establish themselves in the host community (Bauder, 2006; Meardi et al., 2012; Parutis, 2014). Indeed, Alberti (2014) argues that this element of non-commitment can be used by migrant workers agentically, as it allows them to leave occupations that they view as excessively exploitative. The operation of a ‘dual frame of reference’ – whereby conditions in the UK, albeit precarious, are viewed favourably in comparison to the employment conditions in their home countries – has also been cited as a contributing factor in migrants’ acceptance of precarious occupations (Berntsen, 2016; Piore, 1979; Recchi and Triandafyllidou, 2010). Of course, these subjective elements neatly align with the demands of employers in seasonal, flexible and high-turnover sectors (Anderson and Ruhs, 2010).

The concept of ‘differential inclusion’ (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013) here is critical: migrants are not ‘excluded’ from participation in the socioeconomic structure; rather, the nature of their incorporation is directed by a combination of economic, juridical and social processes, within which migrants themselves are significant actors. What is of interest here are the subjective elements of this triptych: how do structural conditions experienced in the context of precarious labour influence migrants’ subjectivities, and, in turn, how do these actors interpret, negotiate and potentially reproduce or challenge their lived experience in work? Masculinity is a key aspect of male workers’ identity formation, and it is a lens through which these subjectivities are crafted.

Precarity, masculinity and migration

Masculinity as an object of scholarly inquiry is classically formulated in the sociology of Connell (2020), who conceptualises masculinities as distinct and related to the patriarchal gender order: neither simple or static, they are historically and spatially determined. Hegemonic masculinity is one form of masculinity that men can perform that reasserts their dominance in society; however, multiple forms of hegemonic masculinity exist across differing contexts (Connell, 2020). Historically, it has ‘embodied the currently most honoured way of being a man, require[ing] all other men to position themselves in relation to it, and it ideologically legitimated the global subordination of women to men’ (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005: 832). Hegemonic masculinity allows the creation of a symbolic hierarchy of subject positions, subordinating women and men that do not conform to it (e.g. gay and bisexual men); it also confers benefits of patriarchy upon other men without performing a strong version of it.

The concept has found purchase in labour market analyses (Connell, 1991; Jackson, 1991; Walker, 2016). Hearn (2023: 110) has highlighted that the neoliberal ideal worker, while supposedly a gender-neutral subject, is often highly gendered. This article follows Hearn’s (2015: Chapter 5) extension of Connell’s work, emphasising the materiality of the body as a site upon which violences and emotions coalesce. This involves the violence of exploitative labour as well as the socio-spatial aspects (Hearn, 2023) of men’s bodies organised by neoliberal labour regimes, and the ‘intensities of experience, action and effect’ (Hearn, 2015: 102) that are produced therein. Men’s bodies are material-discursive, carrying transnational discourses of manliness and emotions that contextualise and construct the embodied experiences of work (Hearn, 2015: 103).

These theories are poignant for analysing the subjectivities of precarious working men. Migrant men often must negotiate the various gender orders of the multiple contexts that they move through; they are tasked with constructing forms of identification and practices that draw on the gender orders of both countries of origin and host countries (Howson, 2013: 141). Such labour contexts can take on gender orders of their own, while reflecting and reproducing a shared notion of hegemonic masculinity. In this article, the gender order that is presented in our findings is a coalescence of proximate men’s bodies, structured by the intensity of work that they perform, the practice of which is highly gendered.

Connell (2020) and Slutskaya et al. (2016) point to the significance of a conception of masculinity that relies on physical work. Slutskaya et al. (2016) find that men’s adherence to hegemonic masculinities offers a form of resistance to their subordinate class position in jobs that are designated as ‘dirty’ work (refuse collection; street cleaning). Paradoxically, migrants were simultaneously viewed as hard workers but also as outsiders because of the perception of increased competition that their presence inspired, especially in relation to local unemployed men. The absence of women’s voices in the workplace and the normalisation of a particular form of masculinity echo our study: gender was rarely raised as an issue overtly (Slutskaya et al., 2016: 174), as the environment was homosocial. Slutskaya et al. (2016) note that while forms of masculinity that emphasise physical endurance are usually a hallmark of subordinate masculinities, in their study it was operative in reclaiming perceptions of power and dignity that were lost in performing this work. Yet, in reifying physically demanding work, the workers ‘simultaneously reproduce the relations of power in which they are subordinate’ (Slutskaya et al., 2016: 175).

Masculinity can serve as a force that regulates labour and maintains its hierarchical divisions: Kukreja (2021b) highlights how migrant labourers’ own performances pit masculinities against one another and thus reinforce disempowerment through promoting an uncritical and performance-oriented approach to their exploitation. The reworking practices in the fruit-picking contests shown in Kukreja’s (2021b) study of South Asian agricultural workers in Greece further individualise workers without requiring overt disciplinary regimes. Moreover, Kukreja (2021b) highlights that the underlying conditions structuring these forms of precarity are reinforced by a particular masculine work ethic, which if not adhered to, has dire consequences within the social order that is established and enacted routinely through fruit picking contests. Pitting worker against worker, the bosses construct precarious and exploitative working conditions as meritocratic: if you win the contest, you are the best worker and most deserving of your pay. Managers often have limited oversight in these processes: the competition between workers functions as a disciplinary regime all on its own, drawing on the workers’ own competitive participation.

Kukreja (2021a) found that masculinity also functions as a compensatory mechanism whereby workers assume a sense of pride and dignity vis-a-vis their co-workers, thus impeding class-based forms of solidarity. In multiple exploitative workplace contexts (seafaring, construction, low-wage work), migrant men emphasise a ‘dutiful’ self-disciplined masculinity of competence and endurance as a means of transforming themselves into the image of successful, desirable men (Ikeya, 2014: 248). These can be seen as examples of protest masculinities (Connell, 2020: 109): forms of recuperative masculinity forged in the face of extreme powerlessness. Masculinity can therefore perform a dual function: it can serve as a fallback subjectivity in the face of adverse working conditions (Kukreja, 2021a) and also as a means of self-exploitation and competition (Kukreja, 2021b). This self-exploitation is a common ‘technique of the self’ used by migrant workers as a reaction to their precarity (Basok and Bélanger, 2016: 150). One way in which Spanish-speaking migrant agricultural workers in Canada responded to disciplinary power was through masculine performances of self-discipline: working as hard as possible, outpacing others, exhibiting a lack of empathy towards co-workers, giving more than one can and being the ‘toughest and fastest’ (Basok and Bélanger, 2016: 152).

Much of this rich ethnographic literature on masculinity in precarious labour contexts has focused on migrant workers in agriculture; in contrast, the hospitality sector in the UK has received less attention, despite the high degrees of precarity it is associated with (Roca and Martín-Díaz, 2017). Similarly, many studies that examine migrant worker subjectivities in the UK do not do so through the lens of masculinity. Paramountly, rarely are ethnographic forays into precarious workplaces undertaken by scholars in the UK; even rarer is the scholar participating in the labour process (a notable exception is Alberti, 2014). We follow Hearn (2015, 2023) in acknowledging that men’s labour contexts possess unique, materially situated, socio-spatial characteristics that are worthy of research; in our study, the combination of proximity, homosocial composition and labour process intensity in the kitchen of a Mediterranean restaurant in Glasgow were of particular interest in relation to masculinity and precarity.

Methodology

This article draws on Theodoropoulos’s (2021; 2025) doctoral research on the subjective and structural barriers to migrant workers’ unionisation in precarious occupations in the UK. This was an overtly politicised project to develop theoretical tools that could assist social movements organising alongside migrant workers. An important aspect of this investigation involved exploring the formation of migrant subjectivities: that is, migrant workers’ conceptualisations of themselves as workers, as migrants and as migrant workers. The PhD employed both formal semi-structured interviews and covert ethnographic immersions as a worker into six precarious labour contexts, in sectors characterised by precarity and a lack of unions. The portion of the research that involved working as a KP in a Mediterranean restaurant in Glasgow produced rich data relating to masculinity and workers’ subjectivities; this article only draws on the covert participant observation process in this restaurant. This observation was conducted between July and August 2019. Theodoropoulos was employed on a zero-hours contract – like everyone else in the restaurant besides the two head chefs – which generally involved a 5-day working week with shifts ranging from four to 14.5 hours a day. More than 145 hours were spent in the restaurant.

Out of the six workplaces accessed, this restaurant was chosen for an analysis on masculinity because it was overwhelmingly homosocial, composed mostly of Albanian male workers. Moreover, the kitchen’s layout meant that workers were in close proximity to each other, leading to a sustained climate of interaction and familiarity that is rare in other precarious sectors like logistics or manufacturing. While hegemonic notions of masculinity were operative in crafting workers’ labour identities in every location Theodoropoulos accessed, this restaurant is presented as a compact case study of these processes.

Covert observation is an ethically sensitive methodological choice, mainly due to the use of deception in the research process (Erikson, 1967; Herrera, 1999). In response, a range of scholars have defended covert methodologies, arguing that they are important for accessing hard-to-reach environments (Briggs, 2008; Calvey, 2013; Mitchell Miller and Tewksbury, 2010). Overt ethnographies of kitchen settings – such as Demetry (2013) or Fine (1996) – focused on less precarious and less hyper-exploitative contexts, and therefore access was conceivably easier to negotiate. Theodoropoulos was not interested in the kitchen experience in general; he was interested in exploring how the precarious – and frequently illegal – employment conditions impact workers’ identities, and he therefore targeted precisely these hard-to-reach establishments. In the context of the Mediterranean restaurant, it seemed highly unlikely that employers would grant access to a researcher whose aims included documenting the labour injustices and infringements of their business. Conventional research access to these sites would also have been problematic simply due to the spatial dimensions of the kitchen, whereby the presence of any superfluous body represented a serious nuisance. This was not a context where a researcher could casually take a seat and discreetly keep notes on what they saw.

Theodoropoulos was already highly familiarised with similar labour environments due to his previous extensive experience as a male European migrant worker in Britain. His history afforded him access and familiarity that would perhaps be unavailable to most British researchers. This approach therefore follows a tradition of ‘embedded ethnography’ (Calvey, 2008) where the researcher is already an active participant in the social realities that are being researched. It also mirrors explorations conducted by movements like the Angry Workers (2020), who explored precarious warehouses in London. While his positionality as a researcher entailed a degree of distance from the rest of the workers, it must be noted that these were the jobs that Theodoropoulos had been doing for years; indeed, he would return to working as a picker and packer in an Amazon warehouse once his PhD funding expired. In this sense, we argue that the distance between the researcher and the researched is significantly reduced, since the researcher was researching his own social group for the purposes of contributing to social movements that he was already involved with.

Further reasons for adopting a covert approach involved the desire to avoid ‘reactivity’ (Alberti, 2014) from managers and workers. The aim was to gather what Calvey (2008: 913) terms ‘naturally occurring data’: this involves a plethora of spontaneous aspects of daily social life that emerge when people develop a degree of familiarity with each other. These may include jokes (which can be highly offensive, sexist, or racist), exasperated statements, aggressive behaviours, extreme emotions, as well as manifestations of solidarity and care. These aspects of daily behaviour – necessarily unfiltered or otherwise unuttered – add valuable nuances which would not have become apparent through more formal processes such as interviews. Indeed, it was precisely because of these manifestations of daily behaviour – and the proximity of the kitchen that encouraged them – that we chose to focus on the Mediterranean restaurant as a case study of masculinity and precarity. We therefore argue that the chosen methodology entails a series of advantages that legitimate the covert nature of the research, in line with the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) (2023: section 8, para 4) guidance that this approach is ‘only justified if important issues are being addressed and if matters of social significance which cannot be uncovered in other ways are likely to be discovered’.

Following Holmes’ (2013) ethnography of Mexican strawberry pickers in the United States, we argue that the experience of performing the tasks that one is analysing adds further nuance to the investigation (Emerson et al., 2011). As has been extensively documented within labour studies, precarious occupations frequently involve a significant degree of physical and mental overexertion on the part of the workers (Alberti, 2014; Holmes, 2013; Kukreja, 2021b; Slutskaya et al., 2016). Partaking in this labour afforded the researcher both the opportunity to relate to, and assess, the stress and pain that are inseparable aspects of the job; it also positioned him as an equal member of the wider community of workers in the kitchen, which allowed him to also be on the receiving end of other workers’ stress-induced behaviours and observe the ways in which identities of overexertion are relationally crafted through the cumulative interactions that saturate labour contexts among workers. As will be examined below, this positionality made possible the emergence of rare insights which would not have been observed through other methods.

Data collection consisted of detailed notetaking as soon as possible after a shift (Emerson et al., 2011: 49). The notes covered as many details of the daily life of the kitchen as possible, such as the architecture, the smells, the relationships between workers and between workers and management, and the labour process. Attempts were made to engage in informal interviews with colleagues at times when the demands of the job were less intense; these were recorded in script form as comprehensively as memory allowed. All names were pseudonymised to ensure anonymity and limit the harms that might result from covert research (Van Niekerk, 2014). At the end of the observation period, the fieldnotes were manually coded to correspond to the broad topics of labour conditions, precarity, subjectivities, workplace relationships and solidarities, and resistances.

For the purposes of this article, the fieldnotes that corresponded to the Mediterranean restaurant were isolated from the main dataset, and a further process of manual coding ensued where both researchers focused on data relating to workers’ masculinities. Using Connell’s (2020) framework of hegemonic masculinity, we separated the fieldnotes that were thought to be particularly relevant to the research objective from the main dataset. Lawton-Westerland then engaged in a further process of manual coding whereby the fieldnotes were further refined. Both authors then engaged in an iterative deductive process of secondary thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006). This involved taking notes of the dataset, coding for initial themes that emerged, relating these themes to the relevant literature, a rigorous process of meetings and discussions between the researchers and a final codification of the selected themes. This research received ethical approval from the College of Social Sciences, University of Glasgow (application number 400170237).

Setting the scene: The kitchen

This section provides a glimpse into the daily realities of the kitchen, communicating the smells, sounds, jokes and pain that collectively structured the everyday, subtly but directly impacting workers’ subjectivities.

The working conditions broadly resembled those described in a range of sources on migrant work in the UK’s hospitality industry (Alberti, 2014; Lucas and Mansfield, 2010). The workplace – part of a chain of similar, middle-budget restaurants that operated throughout the city – was non-unionised, heavily reliant on migrant labour, and the contractual precarity and understaffing that characterised the labour process created forceful pressures to overexert oneself in terms of performance and productivity. Similar to other studies of precarity, one’s acquisition of future hours directly depended on how well one was able to fulfil the ‘good worker’ stereotype of physically demanding work, overexertion and flexibility (Alberti, 2014; MacKenzie and Forde, 2009; Sporton, 2013). While chefs in other studies (Demetry, 2013; Fine, 1996) have been described as having significant influence over the labour process, in this restaurant, efficiency and speed, rather than quality, were the chief requirements, echoing the agricultural contexts described by Basok and Bélanger (2016). The chefs did have authority over the kitchen, but only within the confines of the wider requirements imposed on them by the owner.

The workplace was almost exclusively composed of Albanian men, with two Polish women only appearing during extremely busy weekends. Many of the men had grown up outside of Albania in countries like Greece or North Macedonia, and all had secure EU citizenship. In a regular workday, therefore, one heard a colourful mixture of Albanian, Greek (the language that Theodoropoulos mainly used to communicate with fellow workers), Slavic languages and fragmented English; sometimes, these were all included within the same sentence. The only Scottish worker was one of the two head chefs, and he regularly foregrounded his native identity in relation to his subordinates. Critically, the restaurant employed a very explicit form of workforce segregation, which socio-spatially objectified the symbolic subordination of the kitchen staff (Hearn, 2023):

I was informed through a message by Drago, the Albanian head chef, that I would be working at 15:00 until 23:00 on Sunday. I arrived at the restaurant, greeted a fellow Greek waiter at the door, but was immediately approached by the main manager and aggressively told to head down to the kitchen, as kitchen staff are not allowed to be seen inside the main restaurant floor. There was a discreet compartment right next to the main entrance that led downstairs, and I was firmly instructed to never actually enter the restaurant unless it was an emergency. (Fieldnotes, 7 July 2019)

This underground kitchen was almost always busy, with between three and 10 workers straining to meet the tight temporal demands of the job. The setting was saturated by the clatter of pots and pans, accompanied by orders that were screamed by George, the Scottish head chef. Theodoropoulos’s position as a KP was considered the lowest in the kitchen’s hierarchy, and other workers repeatedly noted that this was usually the first position that new workers accessed. One’s capacity to survive the arduousness demanded by the post alongside the symbolic aspect of doing the ‘dirtiest’ work of the labour process (Slutskaya et al., 2016) was instrumental both in securing more hours and in rising up the occupational hierarchy. Nevertheless, an improvement in one’s rank from KP to kitchen assistant or sous-chef (the only other positions available below the chefs) did not correlate with better remuneration; other than the two head chefs, every other member of the kitchen staff was paid minimum wage (at the time, £8.21 per hour). Contractual precarity, combined with a necessity to keep up with the constant circulation of orders, dishes, preparatory equipment and other occurrences in a clearly understaffed environment created a sustained atmosphere of stress and anxiety:

It is a very busy day, and I didn’t get the chance to sit down at all throughout the 14-hour shift. As the rhythms of work are incredibly intense, my apron has inevitably become saturated with leftovers, fats and juices from all types of food, leading to a very characteristic smell that resembles a mixture of vomit and the interiors of a dirty dishwasher. The floor below me is full of puddles; I have ripped up and laid some cardboard boxes on it so that nobody trips.

I have sustained a few more cuts and burns. The burns are particularly problematic because they are on my fingers, which always are in use and in contact with warm water, chemicals and leftovers. Every action that I must perform hurts, and I have to just keep on working, ignoring the pain. As I look at my arms and hands, I can’t help thinking about the fact that these conditions are directly attributable to the rhythm of the work, combined with contractual precarity and the business’s unwillingness to pay more staff. Everyone is complaining about the day’s intensity, yet there are no attempts to get the managers to relax their expectations. While various colleagues have told me that the KP post is a two-person job, they only bring in an extra person on specific Fridays and Saturdays. (Fieldnotes, 17 July 2019)

While the above segment is specific to the perspective of a KP, the intensity, physical pain and stress described were shared throughout the workforce. Everyone had to regularly work more than 10-hour shifts without a break; everyone was routinely complaining of injuries, pains, or strains; and everyone understood these as inseparable aspects of the labour process (for a fuller exploration of the precise conditions in the restaurant, see Theodoropoulos, 2025). The KP position, acting as a rite of passage, performed a critical socialising function in conditioning workers’ expectations and behaviours; as was mentioned above, most workers had started through this post, and it was here where their competence and endurance were assessed. Crucially, one could only escape that position through overexertion (Basok and Bélanger, 2016) and physically demanding ‘dirty’ work (Slutskaya et al., 2016), which were also expected in the next echelons of the labour hierarchy. One’s ability to withstand these conditions and excel within them frequently became a source of pride and an important component of identity. This was an environment so thoroughly saturated by precarity and the consequent demands for workers’ overexertion that, rather than being epiphenomenal concerns, they formed fundamental pillars of the labour process and of workers’ understandings of their position within it.

However, despite the adverse labour conditions, the cramped, homosocial environment also gave rise to a particular sociality. In contrast to other types of precarious employment where workers are isolated and atomised, here the close interrelation of every aspect of the labour process meant that workers were in constant communication with each other, leading to a certain familiarity. Whether through jokes or overt aggression, this familiarity also became grounds for enforcing notions of masculinity, productivity and self-worth. Another critical aspect of sociability was that the significant number of hours spent in the kitchen meant that workers’ everyday perceptions of themselves seemed to become intimately associated with the restaurant; Theodoropoulos rarely observed anyone talking about their personal lives, and all discussions, whether serious or amusing, circulated around the kitchen. However, these relationships were not taking place in a neutral environment; as the excerpt below illustrates, all interactions were both subtly and overtly structured by the overarching precarity and differential positions of authority and ethnicity in the hierarchy of the restaurant:

I overhear George, the Scottish head chef, speaking to an Albanian worker about his previous day’s experience of working alongside John [another Albanian worker]. He exclaims: ‘I couldn’t communicate at all, he no understand anything! Always “speak slow”, “speak slow”, fuck off!’ This is an expression of exasperation at having to work with migrants, as well as a tactic of division between the migrant workforce and an extreme exercise of authority. The Albanian fellow worker just kept silent and stared straight ahead as if he was focusing on the dish rather than on the conversation. What could he say? If he agreed, he would sell his friend short. If he resisted, he would be jeopardising his job security and his favour with this extremely powerful individual. (Fieldnotes, 11 July 2019)

As the above excerpt demonstrates, the experience of the Albanians in the kitchen is saturated by the multiple forms of bordering that permeate the social body and fortify the disempowerment of migrants in the UK (Anderson and Ruhs, 2010; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). Having come to the UK through extensive familial networks spanning Europe, they depended on Drago to keep their jobs. Indeed, Drago usually organised their arrival, and often even picked them up from the airport. Most of them had very little command of English and were uncomfortable navigating Glasgow’s precarious employment landscape; their main focus was amassing enough money to return to their countries. This was demonstrated by John, who explicitly told Theodoropoulos that he aimed to make around £100,000 by working as much as possible and then leaving Scotland to set up a business in Athens (Fieldnotes, 7 July 2019). In this sense, workers’ subjective outlooks supported Piore’s (1979) classic thesis on migrant labour, as they largely viewed their migration temporarily and instrumentally with a view towards returning home. The structural and subjective factors that tied them to this job, and to this kitchen, were fully demonstrated the day that Theodoropoulos handed in his notice to leave the workplace:

Wanting to leave in order to explore other workplaces, I texted my notice to Drago, telling him that I found another job that pays better. As I was entering the kitchen through the back door, I bumped into John changing. He had just been told to leave for one hour because it was very quiet. This was done so the restaurant saved £8.21, something that we both found ridiculous. He exclaimed that ‘these fuckers don’t care, but in December they will be begging us to do 14 and 16 hours’. I told him that I gave in my notice because I found a better job; immediately, he asked me: ‘If you could find a better job, then why were you in this place? It is horrible. The other guy, he had booked holidays, they had agreed to them, and in the last minute they didn’t let him have them and he lost his tickets. They do things like that. They don’t care.’ I ask if Drago can do something to improve the situation. He replies: ‘What can Drago do? He is only the chef.’ He goes on to tell me that the only reason he stays in this job is because he wants to improve his English and also work up the hierarchy to become a chef himself. (Fieldnotes, 22 July 2019)

Naturalisation of overwork and the socialisation of precarity

The combination of precarious contractual relations, insecurity and overexertion, alongside conditions of interdependence and familiarity, encouraged a particular form of socialisation whereby arduous labour was naturalised, precarity was accepted as a given rather than as a potentially changeable condition, and both emerged as central aspects of workers’ identities. In this context, any critical appraisal of working conditions – such as John’s comment above that ‘these fuckers don’t care’ – indicated an acknowledgement of the requirement to survive alone, in an environment absent of care and solidarity:

I remember that I haven’t seen Jonathan since my trial shift. I ask Marcin what happened to him, and he replies that ‘he was fired, he worked too slow’. I am taken aback at this cynical proclamation, so I ask Marcin whether he thought it was deserved: ‘I don’t know, but he was very slow and they fired him’. Drago comes up next to me, and I ask him what happened. He replies: ‘He wasn’t good at his job. He was here for four weeks and we kept on having to show him how to do everything. We showed him how to close the machine three times, and he still left it open two times and went home.’ I said that it’s a shame because he was a good guy. ‘Yes, but being a good guy is not enough in a kitchen like this. You have to be up for the job. Plus, then you showed up, so we had another reason to get rid of him.’ I respond that I never wanted to take anybody’s job, and he responds by saying, ‘Yeah, well, life is unfair. That’s just the way it is.’ (Fieldnotes, 24 July 2019)

In the context of the kitchen, this socialisation manifested in a resigned but simultaneously active acceptance of precarity. This was not only expressed by Drago, who took the final decision to fire Jonathan, but was also mirrored in Marcin’s tactic of emotional distancing from the event. Marcin ‘does not know’ whether Jonathan deserved to be fired; he refuses to deliberate on abstractions such as fairness. The only aspect of the event that he allows himself to comment on is the concrete reality – he was slow and therefore got fired. In the face of the unforgiving rigidity of labour conditions, the onus is on the individual worker to be constantly flexible, malleable and productive. The issue is survival, not fairness.

However, this emotional distance does not necessarily mean being comfortable with a given situation; it merely signifies that these conditions of intensified insecurity had been deeply naturalised by the workforce. Survival in the workplace was perceived as an individual struggle associated with competence, a view that was enforced by the physically demanding character of the job itself. This echoes Basok and Bélanger’s (2016) descriptions of the competitive, unempathetic and individualising work of migrants in the agricultural sector. Competence is a prerequisite to keeping most jobs; however, in this context, competence was measured by one’s ability to consistently perform above and beyond what would be considered acceptable – for example, the acknowledgement that the KP position was ‘a job for two or three people’ was frequently expressed.

This imperative to overperform was further exacerbated by the latent conditions of competition that existed; as Drago’s cynical quote above makes clear, every worker is disposable once someone faster and more productive comes along. This kitchen thereby presents a potent example of how workers reproduce the axiomatic demands of neoliberalism through their overexertion (Lazzarato, 2015; Sporton, 2013). However, it must be remembered that this process does not happen spontaneously: it is underpinned by the constant, overhanging threat of dismissal, as well as by the wider precarity experienced by migrants in Scotland and these specific migrants’ – real or perceived – inability to find other comparable jobs (recall John’s quote in the previous section). Finally, it is underpinned by the complete inexistence of unions from the labour context (Anderson and Ruhs, 2010); in the absence of collective modes of resistance, one’s capacity to overwork becomes the only guarantee of labour security.

This acceptance and reproduction of fundamentally oppressive social and economic conditions on the part of the workforce amounted to a very specific form of socialisation (Theodoropoulos, 2021; 2025), confirming wider sociological assertions as to the subjective impact of precarious conditions (Bauman, 2000; Berrardi, 2017). Here, this was expressed primarily through overwork and a latent but omnipresent sense of performative competition in tandem with an agentic internalisation of the existing labour conditions. This complex was most clearly expressed by Drago, who implicitly juxtaposed Jonathan’s firing to his own 12-year tenure in the establishment and his rise up the occupational ladder: ‘and you know how many sick days I have taken? Zero. Zero in 12 years. You can see that hard work pays off in the end’ (Fieldnotes, 24 July 2019). Beyond simply competence, workplaces such as the Mediterranean restaurant rely on consistency and reliability – if workers do not meet the very tight temporal demands of the job by either not being present or not being efficient, the entire labour process unravels. Fulfilling these demands therefore becomes a fundamental prerequisite for accessing security; in Drago’s case, it may even be the basis of what could be considered ‘success’, or ‘hard work paying off’. In this case, similarly to Slutskaya et al. (2016), workers fully internalised the demands imposed upon them by the labour process, and even enthusiastically partook in their reproduction. Masculinity is a crucial lens through which this conversion of necessity into identity takes place.

Masculinity in the kitchen

Migrant men in precarious working conditions must rationalise their exploitation and insecurity. As was shown above, one component of this process is the ‘good worker’ paradigm, the willing performance of flexibility, docility and high productivity that agencies and other employers exploit to discriminate between workers when selecting them for tasks (Theodoropoulos, 2021; 2025). Another involves the incorporation of narratives of hegemonic masculinity, which are concurrently drawn upon by workers to reinforce, internalise and normalise the conditions that they find themselves in. Following Hearn (2023), we argue that masculinity can be inextricable from workers’ internalisation and reproduction of the neoliberal ‘good worker’ ideal: the strength and endurance associated with their masculinity are assets in the construction of their identities as workers. As Afrim’s quote below shows, this enabled them to negotiate intensely exploitative conditions in a way that is perceived to be dignified:

Afrim came up to me and asked me how I was. I told him that I am beginning to struggle and that, in busy periods, it is a job for at least two people. He told me: ‘This is a job for three people, but you have to have the ass for the job! The ass! The ass!’ (Fieldnotes, 10 July 2023)

Instead of hegemonic masculinity subordinating other masculinities, here masculinity was reified through its resilience while subordinated: one had to be tough enough to take the subordination. This echoes Slutskaya et al. (2016), who claim that while masculine endurance is usually a hallmark of subordinate masculinities, migrant working men’s masculinities function to reclaim a sense of power and dignity which is lost in their labour. In this way, masculinity functioned to turn exploitation into a positive trait: one can work harder than anyone else and can endure horrendous working conditions. This also illustrates how competition from other workers regulates this labour. Afrim had the same worker status as the researcher, echoing Kukreja’s (2021b) findings about how labourers’ own performances pit masculinities against one another, reinforcing their disempowerment by cultivating an uncritical and performance-oriented approach to their work. The labour experience is individualised by making masculine resilience a core feature of it: ‘You have to have the ass for the job’, again reaffirming that the ideal neoliberal worker is one of masculine endurance (Hearn, 2023), belying a material-discursive invocation of the body (Hearn, 2015: 103).

Beyond functioning to fortify one’s sense of self, masculinities also operated through exclusion and tension. Homophobia and threats of aggression were key components of these migrant workers’ masculinities. Homophobic provocation repeatedly occurred within the workplace context:

During the course of the day, [Afrim] repeatedly touched my ass as a joke or provocation. Initially I was taking it as a joke, teasing him that his behaviour did not fit with his macho image. He responded to me that ‘an ass is an ass, doesn’t matter if you are a man or a woman. If you give it you are straight, if you take it you are gay.’ Thankfully, the people around us ridiculed him for saying this. Later, he touched me again; I turned around and very seriously told him that, if this were repeated, I would stop taking it as a joke. This was the point where his actions began feeling like a mixture between sexual harassment and violent provocation. He responded that I have ‘a nice ass’ and that he ‘wants to fuck it’, an overt expression of sexual aggression. I remained calm and told him that I would not tolerate him touching me again. George was laughing at this exchange and said: ‘I really want to see that, it’s about time someone punched you. And if he does, I’m not going to do anything, you have been warned.’ The atmosphere became very tense and Afrim kept on issuing similar provocations, but he didn’t touch me again and kept his distance. (Fieldnotes, 21 July 2019)

Afrim’s insistent sexual provocations and harassment mirrored the relentless and proximately intimate (Hearn, 2023) nature of the work and the conditions, which were both hypermasculine and homosocial. Afrim’s response conceptualised bottoming as a homosexual, feminine act and active penetration as a reassertion of the hierarchical gender order of the kitchen (Connell, 2020). It could be argued that Afrim desires to subordinate someone other than himself, and that it is through such subordination that he can locate himself within the dominant masculine hierarchy. These heightened emotions were ones which revealed the material-discursive imaginary of the worker’s bodies (Hearn, 2015) within the translocal gender order (Connell, 2020; Howson, 2013).

Relatedly, homophobia was often expressed as a marker of social dislocation (Howson, 2013; Slutskaya et al., 2016). For example, when discussing a recent Pride parade during a cigarette break, John said:

The faggots were dancing around here a few days ago. They were just dancing in the streets. And you can’t even cuss at them, you can’t even hit them, because you will be thrown in jail. They have rights here, everything, you can’t act badly or be ‘aggressive’. (Fieldnotes, 7 July 2019)

Here the supposed freedoms of LGBTQ people are contrasted with John’s feelings of marginalisation and disempowerment: he later highlighted that in the UK, ‘everything scares them’ (Fieldnotes, 7 July 2019). This illustrates that John felt constrained and alienated, caught between competing transnational gender orders (Howson, 2013). The comparison made here is socio-spatial, as John contrasted the hegemonic masculine gender order of ‘inside’ the kitchen – which was saturated with performances of masculinity that he felt comfortable with – with the disrupted order of the ‘outside’, an order that alienated him and reinforced his feeling of social dislocation as a migrant man. The feelings of mutuality expressed in the kitchen through common performances of masculine endurance were thus more than behavioural elements that allow workers to meet the demands of the job; they could be conceptualised as resources that allow them to assert a sense of power in a wider context of social dislocation, which their subordinated labour condition was but an acute expression thereof. In the same breath that extant notions of masculinity produced an isolated, individualised worker, they were also productive of a very limited form of solidarity and sociality, bounded to the context of the kitchen, which connected workers to each other and imbued the labour process with self-reproducing meanings that were sources of strength as well as disempowerment (Basok & Bélanger, 2016; Kukreja, 2021a,2021b).

Alongside homophobia, sexism was another important component of this process. Masculinity was regularly constructed as a superior position to femininity, the latter seen to be at odds with the productivity demanded of the workplace. For example, in discussing workers in another restaurant of the same chain, Drago complained that a chef was not a good worker ‘because she is a woman. Some women can be strong, but she is weak’ (Fieldnotes, 24 July 2019). This worker – who Theodoropoulos never met – was regularly contrasted by Drago as well as the rest of the workers to one of the Polish women who occasionally came to help out with the KP duties during particularly busy shifts: her intense levels of productivity and resilience were contrasted to her womanhood; she was perceived to be a good worker despite being a woman, and this made her performance all the more exotic, while symbolically shoring up the men’s identities as hard workers (Kukreja, 2021a).

The idea of strength being necessary for this kind of work was fundamental to Drago’s view of his own labour. Women were equated with weakness, aligning Drago with hegemonic masculinity at the peak of the gender order (Connell, 2020), positioning him as a strong and competent worker, something that Kukreja (2021a) describes as a fallback subjectivity in the face of harsh working conditions. This can also be thought of as an expression of protest masculinity ‘embody[ing] a claim to power typical of regional hegemonic masculinities [. . .] but which lacks the economic resources and institutional authority that underpins regional and global patterns’ (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005: 845). Drago, while attempting to claim a form of hegemonic masculinity, did not do so from a position of power himself; albeit a head chef, he remains enmeshed in a social position where, in the last analysis, he must follow his boss’s orders (recall John’s statement above: ‘What can Drago do? He is only the chef’).

The masculine gender order within the kitchen was consistently reinforced through competitive, playful displays of masculinity:

After the others finish work at 23.00, Ben and Afrim have arranged to go lap dancing. They invite Rip, who refuses. Afrim shoots back ‘you are scared to go because you have a small dick’. (Fieldnotes, 17 July 2019)

This excerpt illustrates, once again, simultaneous processes of collective identity formation, exclusion and bonding. The downtime from work is spent engaging with a commodified form of heterosexuality that subordinates women as sexual objects, while maintaining the dominant hierarchy of men (Connell, 2020). Beyond allowing workers to recuperate a sense of dignity and pride, hegemonic masculinity also facilitated the formation of a limited collective social identity between workers. This passage illustrates how the masculine identities that dominate the workplace were reproduced outside of the labour context through consumption. At the same time, this reproduction of normative masculinity necessarily created outgroups: Rip’s reluctance to engage in these hegemonic masculine activities is ridiculed and his masculinity is questioned by the other men. The working material-discursive body (Hearn, 2015) is again repositioned within the local, hierarchical gender order which reaffirms hegemonic masculinity as an intrinsic part of workers’ subjectivities (Connell, 2020).

Conclusion

Migrant workers in this study drew on dominant understandings of hegemonic masculinity in order to recuperate power and a sense of dignity in the context of the exploitative conditions that they faced (Slutskaya et al., 2016). Paradoxically, these attempts resulted in further enforcing the individualist ‘good worker’ mentality upon which the precarious structure relies for its productivity and reproduction (Kukreja, 2021a). The onus was on the workers to individually endure the hard work, rather than uniting to change the working conditions. Masculine endurance was also a way to rationalise their disempowerment and to cognitively subordinate Others (women and gay men), through their deployment of homophobia and sexism, in an attempt to use the socio-spatial order of the workplace to orient themselves in relation to the wider gender regime of the UK (Hearn, 2023; Howson, 2013). In this context, masculinity functioned to present precarity not as an exploitative order that must be challenged, but more as a challenge to be taken up, elevating the physical and mental suffering associated with the job into a type of virtuous struggle that became a fundamental aspect of workers’ identities.

Returning to our research questions: hegemonic masculinity is argued to provide a crucial lens through which workers developed identities of resilience in the hyper-precarious and physically taxing environment of the Mediterranean restaurant’s kitchen. The Albanian migrant men that figure in this study were structurally and symbolically disempowered both as migrants and as workers (Anderson and Ruhs, 2010; Bauder, 2006); in a context where one’s capacity to individually overexert oneself was the only guarantee of labour security, their capacity to performatively assert themselves as ‘good workers’ was crucial (Bauder, 2006; Sporton, 2013). In short, our study demonstrates how masculinity operates to enforce workers’ identifications with precarity, allowing for the intensely exploitative labour that was done to take on a dignified character through narratives of masculine resilience (Basok and Bélanger, 2016).

We follow Slutskaya et al. (2016) in arguing that these displays cannot be divorced from the precarious conditions that they are enmeshed within. Invocations of hegemonic masculinity were ultimately a jostling for position within the local, socially constructed gender order of the kitchen. In this limited context, the ‘good worker’ is inextricable from the ideal conception of manliness, and thus an ideal, but highly gendered, neoliberal subject (Hearn, 2023). Ultimately, however, these instances of attempting to recuperate power further fortified the individualist foundations of the labour process; the participants ‘simultaneously reproduce[d] the relations of power in which they [were] subordinate’ (Slutskaya et al., 2016: 175). More precisely, the collectively agreed and constantly reinforced scripts of both masculinity and individualist survivalism created an environment where workers discursively and actively enforced their structural disempowerment.

Intimately grounded in the material realities of exploitation, our findings indicate that class and ethnicity-based affinities are not enough to create empowering bonds of solidarity; rather, in the desert of precarity, these precise class and ethnic similarities can contribute to a heightened reproduction of individualist identities. This imperative to ground one’s self-worth on individualist survival in precarious workplaces can lead to a proud identification precisely with the conditions one is surviving. In a global context of proliferating inequality and precarity, we believe that understanding these processes and their emergence through material conditions of exploitation is crucial to conceptualising neoliberal subjectivities more generally.