This article identifies the points of divergence and convergence between the discourses of technological displacement and low-skilled immigrant labour and argues for the understanding of a new model of neoliberal governance. New technologies, new managerial and organisational strategies, and new models of exploitation emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis in the UK. What are the main features of this crisis? The article points to two different yet interconnected processes. First, due to demands for higher productivity and economic growth the advent of automation, robotics and AI is presented as an irreversible process capable of producing a new corporate environment in which low labour costs and efficiency co-exist with massive job losses, waning of workers’ collective defences and re-training programmes. Second, for all the increasing popularity of protectionist politics and of demands for tight immigration controls the need for low paid and low-skilled immigrant labour across several sectors of the UK economy remains unchanged. Demands for economic growth render the presence of low-skilled immigrants necessary as long as they are subjected to the minimum political, economic and social provisions such as wages, political participation and mobility. As a result, low-skilled immigrants must exist within a political and economic environment in which they are perceived as useful and at times essential accessories for sustaining economic growth and public services. The concepts of precarisation and precarity provide a useful insight into the underlying logic that connects and differentiates those two discourses. In particular, precarisation becomes at once the dominant mode of governing the population and the most effective means for capital accumulation. In contradistinction to old understandings of government that demanded political compliance in exchange for the promise of social protection, the neoliberal process of precarisation increases instability and provides the minimum of insurance. Precarisation is not limited to employment but more generally to the formulation of homo œconomicus as a collective neoliberal subject living in fear and uncertainty. Precarity, on the other hand, designates a sense of hierarchy amongst insecure workforce and the compensations they receive. The article concludes by arguing that the dividing lines between national and foreigner, domestic and immigrant, become integral notions of neoliberal governance for differentiating between precarious groups and maintaining order in contemporary capitalism.

This contribution analyses the meanings and the possible roles of the right to work for a mature labour law that takes such a right seriously. In a historical perspective, the right to work has been denied or supported, according to the ruling ideology and the role of the State in society according to it. Now this right has been recognised as a human right, the most fundamental of social rights, but its justiciability is still at stake. Indeed, in recent times of neoliberal reforms in Europe, the right to work has been facing deep and diversified violations. And the challenges will be even more due to the current jobless economic recovery and transformation of capitalism through digitalisation and automation.

My research aims to investigate the multi-layered concept of work in John Locke’s philosophy, with regard to subjective freedom, political agency, and citizenship rights, so as to draw a framework of interpretation which may fo-ster a new reading of contemporary quandaries. Considering previous discus-sions on work and servitude by prominent authors of Early Modern England (More, Thomas Smith, Hobbes, Milton, Harrington, Tyrrell, Sidney), this study first focuses on the two-fold meaning of the concept of work in Locke’s eco-nomic and political reflections. On one hand, it relates to the capacity to mould nature with arts and knowledge (in Arendt’s words, the production of homo faber); on the other hand, it encompasses the unfree and strenuous human ac-tivity apt to meet natural needs with no poietical aim (the reproduction of ani-mal laborans). Second, by investigating Locke’s stance on citizenship, this paper shows how only the ‘productive’ kind of work (performed by landlords and artisans) grants property, independence, and full membership to the English society, whereas the other condemns subjects (i.e., waged labourers, servants, and women) to dependence on salary, subjection, and social inferiority. Finally, in the wake of this interpretation, this study aims to cast new light on the cur-rent configuration of work in Western capitalistic societies. Although nowa-days work is consistent with market freedom and citizenship from a judicial point of view, material repercussions on personal autonomy cannot be unde-restimated. According to job type and social status (i.e., the possession of in-dividual resources), a worker may be dependent on their salary – and thus on their employer – to outlive. The result is an increase in subjection to unfree and unpaid work as well as in the number of working hours. From this stand-point, it is hard to assert that every worker is as free and equal as another. Even in post-Fordist society and in 4.0 form work, dependence still seems to affect political agency. Key words: Locke, Early Modern England, Labour, Citizenship, Conceptual History

Within the deep work transformations that have taken place in recent decades, the European labour market has been affected by a process of structural precarisation which has created unprecedented forms of precarious work. Among such, unpaid work is an expression of extreme precarity due to the complete separation between work and wage. For several causes, migrant workers are one of the categories most affected by work casualisation and live a condition of double precarity (work and legal), mainly produced by migration policies. At the same time, immigration is involuntary a test bench for new forms of flexible work.This article examines the link between work casualisation and migration through the analysis of a specific form of unpaid work, i.e. the voluntary work by asylum seekers in Italy - institutionalised as a public policy in 2014. Considered as a mechanism of “public atonement” for the guilt of migration through activities of public interest, the article highlights how it constitutes an extreme form of precarisation of a vulnerable category. In merging elements questioning the unconditionality of the right of asylum and acquaintance with permanent precarity, it creates an unprecedented “grey area” of labour exploitation and cultural inferiorisation.

The realm of work has been at the centre of neoliberal transformation of societies. Turning labour into human capital gave rise to imprinting – exploitation beyond the wage-form or beyond what Marx called the subsumption of labour under capital. Employability is key to this phenomenon. While it does not guarantee employment, life itself becomes a promise of employability. This promise perpetuates even without being actualised. This is achieved via ‘transferrable skills’, which serve as an ‘instrumentation’ of employability. Framing subjectivities within and beyond work, these skills provide a mechanism for both governing people and justifying exploitation. The empirical material of this paper analyses EXPO 2015 in Milan, a context where unpaid work as an exploitative practice beyond the wage-form was particularly evident.