Between digital platforms and agriculture : Changing labour strategies of Bangladeshis in neoliberal Portugal

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, Bangladeshis in Portugal developed some thriving commercial activities related with tourism and the service economy. Restaurants, groceries, souvenir shops, convenience stores, import-export businesses among others, are some of the examples one can find in Lisbon, Porto, Braga, and Faro. In the past decade, though, the labour market dynamics of my interlocutors, especially recently arrived, followed new trends mainly connected to digital platforms (e.g. Uber, Glovo, Uber Eats, among others) and agricultural production (e.g. fruit picking). Based on ethnographic fieldwork, life stories and semidirected interviews with migrants and activists in Lisbon and Odemira (Alentejo), this paper explores these new labour dynamics. Furthermore, I want to show how these dynamics are related with the transformations in the Portuguese economy, centered on neoliberal forms of flexibilization, precarity and exploitation, and, how this transnational labour is increasingly racialized and seen as out of place.