Vulnerability workers: vulnerability and precarity in Morocco's migration welfare sector

This article examines how concepts such as vulnerability and precarity play out in the migration welfare sector in Morocco, both as motivational concepts that mobilise action and as critical lenses through which to examine the sector itself. The article takes as its starting point the insight that people engaged in migrant assistance work in Morocco operate in a sensitive political context and are vulnerable to ambiguous and often fraught relationships with (state) authorities. The contributions of this article are twofold. First, it reveals the role of vulnerability itself in the moral career trajectories of a new emergent category – mostly female – who we term ‘vulnerability workers’. Second, it argues that vulnerability workers are themselves vulnerable to a plethora of personal, interpersonal, and structural challenges in their roles. These include gendered emotional labour, high workloads, poor work/life balance, lack of resources, lack of stability in the target population, contradictions between official objectives and ongoing practices, and precarious working conditions. It concludes that working conditions in the migrant welfare sector warrant attention, not least because the precarity of vulnerability workers has the potential to exacerbate the vulnerabilities of migrants themselves.