ABSTRACT
Inspired by materialist intersectional analyses, this article explores how the dominant discourses about the figure of ‘foreign-born unemployed women’. This figuration is seen as fixed in time and place and shapes a labour force that is trained to be flexible, patient and disposable though various forms of temporal regulation. The article identifies three different forms of temporal control racialized unemployed woman are subject too, waiting, the stealing of time though the devaluation of previous education and life experiences and finally, the strategic unaccountability of the organisation. These different forms of temporal and spatial control combined, I argue, shape a labour force that is flexible, with long experience of uncertainty and the unpredictably, and a labour force that is directed toward the margins of the labour market, to the periphery. The chapter is based on interviews with 30 unemployed women between the ages of 25 and 54 who had all experienced migration from the Global South.
