Reta Barfuss and Karin Schwiter spoke with employees in Switzerland’s commercial cleaning sector who work part-time or on-call, and yet feel under constant pressure. In their article, the two show that this phenomenon, so-called time-related underemployment, can’t be explained simply by the neoliberalisation of work. Instead, they propose a different lens, that of racial capitalism. Seen this way, underemployment also appears as a result of othering, processes that mark certain groups as different and thereby easier to exploit.
Barfuss, R., & Schwiter, K. (2026). Underemployed but overworked: reframing the paradox of underemployment through the lens of racial capitalism. Geoforum, 175, 104759. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2026.104759
The publication was made within the Public Data Lab.