‘Doubly exploited’: Migration, activism and the generative geographies of labour agency

Abstract

Scholarship on the connections between migration and labour agency has considered the strategies, practices and grammars adopted by migrant and migrantised workers in their efforts to improve their working and living conditions, particularly in the context of precarious and insecure work. Using empirical material from the Indian Workers Association Great Britain (IWAGB), this paper explores the labour agency produced by an organisation of migrantised workers and the practices the organisation enacted to improve conditions within the sphere of production. The paper focuses on how the IWAGB’s labour organising was shaped by understandings of the intersections between race and class and in particular the principle of ‘double exploitation’, situating these understandings within the experiences, memories and legacies of migration and mobility. Using the 1967/68 Coneygre Foundry dispute as an example, the paper concludes that the discourses and practices enacted by the IWAGB in this dispute are expressions of the migratory geographies and political subjectivities of members of the group, with mobile experiences, memories and connections crucial for understanding the formation of migrantised worker labour agency and resistance.