‘They laughed at me, but I left that job’: occupational agency of Latvian migrant workers in the United Kingdom

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on migrants’ occupational agency in the UK labour market. In particular, the article explores the experience of Latvian migrant workers who together with other Baltic and Central European migrants have filled the low-skilled and low-paid employment sectors in the UK. The article follows a realist approach that provides different conceptual layers to better explain occupational agency. Drawing on survey data and semi-structured interviews, the article demonstrates how Latvians have exercised their occupational agency over the past decade, building relations with co-workers and UK employers. It is argued that Latvians’ position taking in the workplace and occupational mobility are directed by various forms of capital that are embedded in a transnational social field. The emergent structural properties of employment field guide migrants’ trajectories towards the accumulation of particular capital. Eventually, as this article also argues, such structural conditioning impinges on migrants’ personality traits and motivations that either foster or constrain transformative agency in the UK employment field.