Automation and Migrant Workers: Redefining Hierarchies of Skill?

National and transnational labour markets are experiencing profound transformations linked to new opportunities for value accumulation resulting from implementing digital solutions. From automation of production processes to the algorithmisation of employment relations, the digitalisation of work quickly changes the relations between skill and the value assigned to it and redefines the notions of both skilled workers, and precarious labour. It also pushes workers to seek options for reskilling and retraining, as well as to adapt their strategies for resistance and collective action. How are the working lives of migrant workers impacted by these changes? How are technological transformations in production processes restructuring the ethnical hierarchies of skill and working conditions on the shopfloor? Does the robotisation of repetitive, low-added value tasks lead to the re-training and upskilling of migrant workers who typically occupy these positions? How is the spectrum of high to low skill redefined in this context? And finally, how do these technological transformations interact with migrant workers’ capacity for resisting both sovereign and capital forces of discipline and control?

Drawing on theories of the labour process and autonomy of migration, this paper seeks to answer these questions by proposing an investigation of the labour market experiences of migrant workers through the concepts of indeterminacy of labour, mobility strategies and subjectivity. This study is based on interviews with migrant workers in the Czech Republic and ethnographic work in a factory that hires them and is transformed by digitalisation processes. The paper seeks to epistemologically shift the focus in studies on migrants’ labour market integration from the binary between the citizen and the migrant to the experiences of migrant workers as laboratories that expose the mechanisms of the digital transformation of labour relations.