Paced-, Piece-rated and Unpaid work: Migrants Navigating Institutional Continuity and Change in the Finnish and Norwegian Cleaning Sectors
Since capitalist wage work is undergoing variegated informalisation processes on a global scale.,
scholars have pointed out how it is the west that is catching up with the rest, rather than the reverse
(Breman & van der Linden 2014). A salient example is the cleaning industry in the global North,
which has been restructured through outsourcing and subcontracting work, and is increasingly
dependent on a migrant workforce (Abbasian and Hellgren 2012). Existing studies have
demonstrated how corporate strategies such as tendering and outsourcing intensify labor processes
while degrading workers’ wages and work conditions. Less emphasis has been put on the role of
unpaid work as part of these broader politico- economic restructurings. Drawing on interview data
with migrant workers in the cleaning industry in Finland (N=30) and Norway (N=12), this article
discusses how outsourcing, tendering, and subcontracting exert downward pressure on labour costs,
leading to work intensification, often resulting in surplus value being extracted through unpaid work
hours. We demonstrate how migrant cleaners’ time-based employment contracts are, in practice,
converted into piece-rated labor, where cleaners are paid per task but expected to complete more
than what is compensated. Hence they perform unpaid labour as an extension of their paid
employment. We argue that surplus value in the Finish and Norwegian cleaning industries is
expropriated (Fraser 2016) by subtracting the value necessary for the reproduction of labour
power—what Nartozky (2022) describes as discounted necessary labor—as such devaluing the
labor necessary for sustaining life itself.
scholars have pointed out how it is the west that is catching up with the rest, rather than the reverse
(Breman & van der Linden 2014). A salient example is the cleaning industry in the global North,
which has been restructured through outsourcing and subcontracting work, and is increasingly
dependent on a migrant workforce (Abbasian and Hellgren 2012). Existing studies have
demonstrated how corporate strategies such as tendering and outsourcing intensify labor processes
while degrading workers’ wages and work conditions. Less emphasis has been put on the role of
unpaid work as part of these broader politico- economic restructurings. Drawing on interview data
with migrant workers in the cleaning industry in Finland (N=30) and Norway (N=12), this article
discusses how outsourcing, tendering, and subcontracting exert downward pressure on labour costs,
leading to work intensification, often resulting in surplus value being extracted through unpaid work
hours. We demonstrate how migrant cleaners’ time-based employment contracts are, in practice,
converted into piece-rated labor, where cleaners are paid per task but expected to complete more
than what is compensated. Hence they perform unpaid labour as an extension of their paid
employment. We argue that surplus value in the Finish and Norwegian cleaning industries is
expropriated (Fraser 2016) by subtracting the value necessary for the reproduction of labour
power—what Nartozky (2022) describes as discounted necessary labor—as such devaluing the
labor necessary for sustaining life itself.
Publisert i Symposium on Precarities and Temporalities in Migratory Contexts, 2025
Les artikkelen her