ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the legal gaps that construct irregular status for workers with precarious legal immigration status, in precarious employment arrangements. These gaps illustrate work that goes beyond formal legal categories in UK employment law and immigration. However, the work performed by migrants (non-UK and non-EU citizens) is not outside of the law and economy. Migrant workers deemed irregular are persons in particularly vulnerable employment situations working within the nation-state. The ambiguous relationship between irregular migrant workers and UK employment law demonstrates firstly, that existing categories of employment law construct vulnerability for certain migrants at work. Secondly, the groundless legal subjectivity that irregular migrants experience is not unique to their condition but archetypal to all persons subject to the law. Thus, labour law, which holds as an aim the protection and fair treatment of persons at work, would conceptually benefit from embracing the groundlessness of the legal subject to respond to experiences beyond predetermined frames of legal recognition.
