Resistance Is Useless! (And So Are Resilience and Reworking) : Migrants in the Finnish Labour Market

Abstract

In Finland, integration is discussed in terms of labour market success. Finding work tends to occur in the ‘secondary’ labour market as migrants have difficulty accessing the more secure jobs of the ‘primary’ labour market. This chapter draws on 11 qualitative biographical narratives of migrants and refugees, looking for turning points and epiphanies about their job-seeking experiences. We classify these as agentic acts of resilience, reworking, and resistance, borrowing from Cindi Katz’s framework. Interviewees exhibited resilience in revising downward their expectations of what sort of job they would accept and how their career would develop. ‘Reworking’ was also often attempted, usually at a later stage and with limited success, through reskilling, or repackaging of existing skills to appear more desirable to employers. Resistance was rare and limited to exit from the Finnish labour market, rather than voice within it. We found that despite significant investment in their own human capital, macro structures such as segmented labour markets and unequal power relations limited the scope for their individual acts of resilience and reworking. Thus, while agency is useful for understanding migrant actions, overemphasising it obscures the role of labour market structures and employer recruitment practices – important bottlenecks to migrants moving from the secondary to primary labour market.