‘Paradigmatic workers’: sociologies of gender, class and ethnicity in the labour experiences of Albanian and ethnic Greek Albanian women cleaners at two Greek public hospitals

This study is a sociological investigation exploring the working experiences of 24 women cleaners in two public hospitals in Athens, Greece. The participants are Albanian and ethnic Greek Albanian women. Focusing on the intersectionalities of gender, ethnicity, and class, this study illustrates how different social categories constitute multiple points of vulnerability. The study emphasises also the processes in which the participants become embodied subjects, embedded in wider labour and social structures of inequality. Highlighting how different social categories play out in globalised processes it reveals the nexus between labour migration and global capitalism. Having engaged in ethnographic research in two hospital sites that included interviews and observations with women migrant workers, the research investigates how participants manage through coping mechanisms and strategies to face, negotiate, and challenge the demanding working environment of the public hospital, by creating spaces of resistance. The hospital becomes a paradoxical space wherein the two groups of cleaners express individualistic attitudes but also express the wish to collaborate with each other. Women cleaners assumed respectability and expressed dignity in the hospital, reframing the negative meaning of cleaning and structuring occupational strategies to counter notions of dirtiness. Building on experiences of precarity, and exploring the role of gender and ethnicity in the process of precarisation, cleaning was discussed as an embodied occupation in which both groups of women cleaners ascribed meanings to their bodies based on gender, ethnicity, and class.