Panos Theodoropoulos shares notes for organisers in Scotland based on years of struggle alongside precarious migrants in Glasgow.

Ever since the publication of The Precarious Migrant Worker,¹ I have been invited on numerous occasions to speak and write about the barriers to organising precarious migrant workers in the UK and Scotland. Interest in one’s work, especially when it distils more than a decade’s worth of experiences in social struggles, is flattering and even mildly cathartic. Yet while I appreciate all these invitations, I believe that they are also symptomatic of a few wider issues plaguing the left. These can be summed up as a tendency to theorise more than organise, to explain more than act. And yet, even though we don’t seem to be making any substantial progress, almost every organiser I know is burnt out. In our circles, the word ‘capacity’ has become a mantra that reduces collective struggles to questions of personal involvement, resilience, and sacrifice.

Despite our best efforts, we stand impotent as precarity invades every crevice of social life. How can we be so useless and yet so tired? So individualised, yet so burdened by the weight of our collective responsibility? In this piece, I will explain the bare basics of what I term the ‘socialisation of precarity’ and humbly offer a few suggestions about organising structures that can fight both in solidarity with migrant workers and towards broader goals of social transformation. As history shows, the two are inseparable.²

Glasgow and the Socialisation of Precarity

The bulk of the book consists of research conducted in Glasgow’s warehouses, factories, and kitchens about the barriers to migrant worker unionisation.³ As a long-time precarious migrant worker in the UK, I experienced first-hand the exploitation, mistreatment, and discrimination that are daily features of millions of migrants’ lives. I also experienced the reluctance of my union comrades and even of my fellow precarious workers, to organise. Unable to find satisfactory answers as to why this was in the relevant literature, I took various jobs in Glasgow’s precarious employment landscape and did covert research to better understand its hidden realities. I also interviewed tens of migrant workers.⁴

Most existing literature ignored the material realities of labouring under precarity and reproduced variations of two themes. One concerned the difficulty of organising under precarious conditions, touching upon issues like high worker transience, agency labour, and lack of social bonds. The other concerned the particularities of migration: language barriers, ignorance of British labour rights, fear of deportation and loss of status, and many other factors. While combinations of the above are true, I found little acknowledgment of what precarity does to you. In my book, I argue that the ceaseless grind that forces you to butcher your mental and physical health on the altar of surviving to grind another day does more than just secure relentless profits for an insatiable capitalist system. It creates a specific type of worker, and a specific type of human.

From the yellow shelves of an Amazon warehouse in Kinning Park to the leftover-stained floors of a central Glasgow restaurant, I observed the ceaseless overexertion of my fellow workers, struggling for an elusive security that should have been guaranteed. Whether orders came from a hand-held scanner or an aggressive white Scotsman, the overarching message was simple: you swim or drown. If you collapse, there are others waiting to replace you. I saw workers scramble for overtime during the Christmas season so their families could enjoy the holidays in their absence. I watched kitchen workers celebrate their burns as badges of honour, unable to imagine a hospitality industry liberated from pain.⁵ As a caseworker with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), I saw bosses blatantly steal migrants’ salaries; the workers returned to work, unable to find other options. On the other hand, in a café near St Enoch Square, a Romanian woman defiantly told me that she could switch jobs at the snap of a finger. She viewed herself as a strong, independent woman and, while acknowledging that zero-hours contracts are ‘not natural’, took pride in her ability to keep her head above water.  

I call the thread running through these vignettes ‘the socialisation of precarity’. In the absence of inspiring counter-hegemonic narratives and social movements, precarity is naturalised and seen as inevitable. It is through your capacity to tolerate the intolerable that you might be offered a permanent job or more money, or might jostle up the hierarchy and be offered future jobs over other workers. Workers gradually internalise the conditions that disempower them. Fatigue, scars, bruises, varicose veins, and headaches become not symbols of exploitation, but signs of your capacities to endure, alone. Precarity means eternally straddling the dialectic of pain and pride, nurturing a deep competitive survivalism that ruptures the potential for solidarities to emerge. Capitalism captures our desires for freedom, power, and autonomy and turns them against us, while securing our ongoing and sometimes passionate reproduction of its demands. In such conditions, collective action is almost unconscionable.⁶

Union absence

Capitalism’s reliance on suffering is its weak spot. While it has individualised our struggles and even got us to take pride in our exploitation, it cannot erase our acute awareness of class-based injustice. I encountered it continually. It simmered under the surface, manifesting in sarcasm at customer demands, snide remarks about management and pay, and statements like “you can’t be friends with your boss” – which, to be sure, is more radical than most mainstream unions’ literatures.

In almost every workplace I entered, the absence of unions was deafening. This absence is more important than the ways precarity debilitates organising, more obstructive than language barriers or fears of deportation, more deleterious than workers’ internalisation of exploitation. The absence was mentioned by almost everyone I interviewed. A bittersweet finding of my research is that almost every migrant worker I spoke to was positive about joining a union, had one approached them. One worker used the interview as an opportunity to address the union movement: “You need to be more visible. Right now, you don’t exist”.

In contrast to metropoles like London, Paris, and New York, Glasgow does not have significant, embedded, migrant workers’ movements. The reasons are too numerous to analyse in one article, although I suspect that a myopic focus on Scottish nationalism as an inherently progressive project has contributed to further marginalising migrant workers from movement building.⁷ There is also a tendency to view migration as separate from class: for example, I remember movements kicking up a big fuss about Brexit and the assaults on the rights of (generally relatively privileged) EU workers, without drawing the connection that so many of our non-EU fellow migrants were already living in the most precarious circumstances imaginable in Western economies. I have not conducted research into migrant movements’ relative scarcity in a city as diverse as Glasgow, and can therefore only offer hypotheses. Whatever the causes – which would need an entire research project to uncover – the reality is grim. While movements in Scotland loudly proclaim their solidarity with migrants, most precarious migrant workers have never seen any of them.

Embeddedness, the IWW, and directions for the future

Visibility, embeddedness, contact, and building trust are prerequisites for organising alongside migrant workers. Here we return to the question of burnout. Handing out leaflets, holding public events, and attending demonstrations are not enough. If they were, perhaps a refreshing sense of progress would soothe our burnouts. Instead, contemporary labour regimes deepen our impotence, making traditional shop floor organising almost impossible as worker transience, fear, migration-related disorientation, and the socialisation of precarity erode the potential for solidarity to emerge. This impotence spreads throughout society and paralyses our movements.

Only with physical points of connection in communities can we overcome the multiple barriers to the development of class struggle. Such connection points could emanate from open, community-embedded social centres,⁸ re-orienting our performative, reactive ‘activism’ towards deep, sustained organising that connects the realms of care (social reproduction) and labour (production).⁹ Before organising, workers must meet the basic human needs. This is why they are in the rat race to begin with. Social centres in communities can connect precarious workers to movements and root sustainable solidarities in our common lives.

Various groups in London host breakfast and homework clubs, relieving some burdens of overworked and exhausted workers. In Athens, autonomous, non-charitable, socially embedded movements offer resources that range from language classes to psychological counselling. I am heartened to see that Glasgow Autonomous Space has re-opened, hosting a variety of critical community initiatives.¹⁰ This space must be supported by the big unions, who have far more money and resources than most community-based movements. Projects like these can lead to much more than short-term organising drives. They demonstrate that a different form of socialisation is possible, premised on mutual aid rather than competitive, solitary individualism.

These centres must also be connected to autonomous unions. I am a proud IWW member, not because of its impressive history, but because its structure promises the potential for sustained organising.¹¹ Organising across industries, workplaces, and sectors, the IWW caters to most precarious workers’ realities. This is what has allowed formations like the Pan-African Workers’ Association to emerge, organising migrant workers across the UK.¹² We provide organiser and representation trainings to everyone regardless of whether they hold a formal workplace or union branch position. This allows tools and knowledge to diffuse throughout society. Even in the absence of established workplace unions, our members represent each other against management, organise their colleagues, and support friends, family members, and neighbours. Meanwhile, structures like our General Defence Committees allow us to be present as a union in wider social struggles, from antifascist actions to pickets and marches. The idea is to create a feedback loop where the community is connected to the workplace, and vice versa. Such initiatives allow us to go beyond seeing solidarity as a form of ‘activism’. It is something fundamental to our daily lives as living, breathing workers.¹³

This connection between life and organising might be an answer to our constant burnout. Rather than individualising our capacities to resist – reflecting the pressures placed upon us by our precarious working lives – we can begin collectivising our projects. Rather than investing in reactive undertakings that rely on a few omnipresent ‘organisers’, we can build long-term institutions of struggle that support both our movements and communities. Once these become sustainable, care can be collectivised, as more workers become involved in processes that are seen not as political fronts but as intimate components of their lives. For many of us, that might also mean that we will be able to take a very well-deserved rest.

Panos Theodoropoulos is an editor at Interregnum. He is organised with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and teaches social sciences at King’s College London.

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1. Available to buy from Polity Books: https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-precarious-migrant-worker-the-socialization-of-precarity–9781509564989 ↩︎
2. Theodoropoulos P 21 December 2021 Organizing in the “Inferno of Misery”: Jewish Workers’ Struggles in Britain Between 1900 and 1914. Available at https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/organizing-in-the-inferno-of-misery-jewish-workers-struggles-in-britain-between-1900-and-1914 ↩︎
3. For a more comprehensive summary of the book’s themes, see Theodoropoulos P 2 May 2025 From the Ground Up: The Socialisation of Precarity and the Future of Social Struggles. Available at https://interregnum.ghost.io/from-the-ground-up-the-socialisation-of-precarity-and-the-future-of-social-struggles/ ↩︎
4. This project was significantly aided by a three-year PhD scholarship from the University of Glasgow and by Professor Andrew Smith’s unwavering support.   ↩︎
5. The Workers’ Observatory in Edinburgh found that 90% of surveyed courier drivers suffered from pain. In response to capitalism’s depiction of precarity as flexibility, perhaps movements should offer a counter-narrative of precarity as institutionalised pain. Read more at Villares X April–June 2025 Observations On Gig Worker Organising. Available at https://scottishleftreview.scot/observations-on-gig-worker-organising/   ↩︎
6. The full argument about the socialisation of precarity, and why I claim it is a form of ‘socialisation’, is much longer and cannot be distilled in one article. I invite the reader to purchase the book. If readers are unable to afford it, I urge them to email contact@interregnum.live and we will try to find a solution. ↩︎
7. Indeed, Scottish radicalism has a very ugly, racist underbelly that frequently remains unacknowledged. A brief excerpt of Satnam Virdee’s Race, Class and the Racialised Outsider covering some of this history can be accessed here: https://libcom.org/article/racists-reds-and-revolt-clyde-1919 . However, I fully recommend reading the entire book. ↩︎
8. A very important exploration of various forms this could take has been published by Notes From Below, available here: https://notesfrombelow.org/issue/worker-centres-locations-of-class-power ↩︎
9. The Pirate Care project has released the following syllabus showcasing radical examples of care across the world: https://syllabus.pirate.care/. For a recently released book on the project, see Mars M, Medak T, and Graziano V 2025 Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalisation of Solidarity, Pluto Press, available at:  https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745349800/pirate-care/ ↩︎
10. You can find out more here: https://glasgowautonomous.weebly.com/ ↩︎
11. Find out more here: https://iww.org.uk/ ↩︎
12. View their website here: https://pawa.uk/ ↩︎
13. For a detailed look at the ideas structuring the IWW, see Cyprus IWW 17 November 2024 From Mediation to Direct Action: Solidarity Unions in Cyprus and Beyond, available at: https://interregnum.ghost.io/from-mediation-to-direct-action-solidarity-unions-in-cyprus-and-beyond-2/ ↩︎