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If the issue of work has acquired a high political profile in France over recent decades, the question of the sans papiers, of undocumented migrants and their potential place within the Republic, has become equally highly politicised. However, these two issues are rarely seen as being intrinsically connected, protests in favour of the rights of the sans papiers typically being couched in humanitarian terms, with little reference to questions of political economy. This is equally true of many filmic representations of the sans papiers, which reinforce this notion of sans papiers as victims deserving of humanitarian aid, rather than as active agents. This chapter draws on Emmanuel Terray’s notion of ‘délocalisation sur place’ or ‘on-shore off-shoring’ to argue for a better understanding of the role the sans papiers play within the contemporary French jobs market, epitomising the logics of flexibility, modulation, and precarity that now characterise its functioning. Armed with this interpretative framework, it re-reads a number of films and novels featuring undocumented migrants, uncovering the insights concealed behind their overt humanitarianism, insights into the interrelationships between undocumented migration and the shifts in employment analysed in earlier chapters.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of precarious labor in the video game industry. The emergence of video games as a medium goes back to a moment of “refusal of work” when Pentagon scientists, tasked with beating the USSR during the Cold War, ended up creating ludic experiences on their work computers during times of boredom. Today, contemporary video game production is a serious, lucrative business. Tracing Studio Desire's transition from its early days as an independent studio to a financialized structure after its acquisition by Digital Creatives in the 2000s, this book examines the inequalities that structure the lives of game developers in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. It unpacks Studio Desire's story as it unfolds through four interlinked processes: rationalization upon acquisition, spatialization, financialization, and precarization. Among these, precarization anchors the whole story.

Chapter 4 draws on semi-structured interviews with 18 organizers of Hollaback!, Everyday Sexism, and Who Needs Feminism? The chapter interrogates key experiences and the affective dimensions of starting, running, and managing a feminist campaign. The chapter outlines four key arguments: First, we posit that organizing feminist campaigns involves highly affective, invisible, precarious, and time-consuming labor. Second, we demonstrate how involvement in these campaigns can inspire “feminist awakenings” among organizers. Third, we suggest that while mediated abuse is a common experience, it is not universal; rather it operates on a continuum, and evokes varying responses from its victims, including being motivated to continue their activism. Finally, we map how feminist activism is often exhausting and draining, and individual and collective care strategies are needed to prevent activist burnout.

The stories and experiences of migrant mothers and their Hong Kong–born babies are at the heart of this book. They are set against the backdrop of global capitalism and transnational mobility. The Asian “world city” of Hong Kong provides a meeting ground for young Indonesian and Filipina domestic workers; South Asian and African traders, refugees, and asylum seekers; Western tourists and businessmen and local Chinese residents. Their personal stories provide insight into global problems of mobility, family, and citizenship, and point to the consequences, creative responses, and tragedies of labor and migration policies. This chapter introduces the idea that migrant workers are never only workers, regardless of the policies and laws that restrict them and narrowly define them as such. The chapter introduces the key concepts of bare life, citizenship, precarious labor, and humanitarian reason, and it proposes that laws and policies relating to migrant labor and non-citizenship often produce the very problems of “illegality” that they seek to avoid.

Chapter 8 examines the consequences of industrial restructuring, which began in the early 1990s and continues to the present day. The great majority of state-run and collective enterprises have been privatized, and all firms—including those in which the state has retained a stake—have been turned into shareholding companies. Tens of millions of workers have lost their jobs, and permanent job tenure has been replaced by much more precarious employment relations. As work unit communities have been transformed into profit-oriented enterprises, workers have been reduced to hired labor, losing their status as legitimate stakeholders and eroding the foundations for workplace participation. Shop-floor self-management has been replaced by harsh disciplinary regimes enforced by bonuses, fines, and the threat of dismissal, and staff and workers congresses have been sidelined. Workers, whose influence is now explicitly seen as compromising efforts to maximize profits, have been disenfranchised.