Undocumented resistance : On strategies and practice in the margins of a post-welfare society

The post-modern western city is going through two central changes in the organization of paid labour. One is the switch from production of goods to production of services, and the other is the increasing rift between well-paid labour with permanent jobs, and temporarily employed workers with low wages. Both of these processes are rasified and gendered, and strike harder against women, young persons and people of emigrant background. The flexible capitalism creates an informalization of the economy, breaking with earlier regulations of the labour markets, in which workers also need to find informal strategies in their individual and collective struggles. In this paper, I search for these “new” experiences of living and working in late capitalist society, by doing open interviews with three women of Latin-American origin, working without official permission (without documents) in the informal economy of Stockholm. Analyzing their narratives, I look for the agency and resistance that, according to my theoretical perspective, is part of everyday life of all suppressed subjects. I come to the conclusion that irregular systems of recruitment and other forms of interdependency could be useful for other groups of precarious workers. The interviewed women also use strategies such as fantasizing about a reversed world or focusing their thoughts on the future, and deceiving or avoiding the power(full), to cope with their everyday work situations and the contradictory class mobility they experienced in the migration. However, these strategies often reproduce an acceptance of power more than a resistance to it, and show us how the capitalism works as an hegemonic ideology incorporated in us all