The making of gendered ‘migrant workers’ in youth activation: The case of young Russian-speakers in Finland

Abstract

The article focuses on young Russian-speaking migrants’ day-to-day institutional encounters with labour market activation policies in Finland. The analysis contributes to the discussion on labour activation through analysing the workings of gender, migration and racialisation in welfare encounters through ethnographically grounded research. The argument of the article is two-fold. First, it argues that migrant and racialised minority populations are sustained in a ‘migrant worker’ subject position not only through exclusion from rights and legal status, but also through the targeted inclusion of the ‘undeserving’ poor with formal rights into worker-citizenship through workfare. Second, the article shows racialisation of ‘migrant workers’ as a gendered process with essentialised gendered logics of what skills migrant men and women supposedly possess ‘naturally’. Activation thus maintains and exacerbates the segregation of migrant and racialised youth into gendered and racialised labour markets. The analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork in youth career counselling in a metropolitan area of Finland in 2015–2016.