This paper unpacks the contested inter-connections between neoliberal work and welfare regimes, asylum and immigration controls, and the exploitation of migrant workers. The concept of precarity is explored as a way of understanding intensifying and insecure post-Fordist work in late capitalism. Migrants are centrally implicated in highly precarious work experiences at the bottom end of labour markets in Global North countries, including becoming trapped in forced labour. Building on existing research on the working experiences of migrants in the Global North, the main part of the article considers three questions. First, what is precarity and how does the concept relate to working lives? Second, how might we understand the causes of extreme forms of migrant labour exploitation in precarious lifeworlds? Third, how can we adequately theorize these particular experiences using the conceptual tools of forced labour, slavery, unfreedom and precarity? We use the concept of 'hyper-precarity' alongside notions of a 'continuum of unfreedom' as a way of furthering human geographical inquiry into the intersections between various terrains of social action and conceptual debate concerning migrants' precarious working experiences.

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This paper reflects on the concept of insecurity defined as 'the capacity to hurt'. It begins by considering asylum seekers and refugees as hyper-precarious groups that have experienced bodily, material, and psychological 'hurt' in the UK. At the same time, the paper considers how these hyper-precarious groups are perceived to have the capacity to hurt (bodily, materially, psychologically and spatially) the majority population. Having drawn out two understandings of the capacity to hurt -both the ability to be or feel hurt, and the act of doing hurt to others, we argue that a shared recognition of what it means to feel hurt (co-suffering or suffering together) -albeit to very different extremes and with very different consequences -and an understanding of the processes which drive this might be mobilised politically to challenge the doing of hurt to others. In doing so, we argue for a group politics of compassion to respond to increasingly insecure times.

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