From ‘migrant’ to ‘refugee’: what changed? Working lives of Ukrainian women in the Czech Republic

In this article, I analyse labour market experiences of women from Ukraine in the Czech Republic. I build on critiques of political migration categories, particularly in regards to their inability to capture the complex realities faced by people on the move. However, my focus shifts away from the disjuncture between conceptual and policy categories and the broader social, economic, and political drivers of migration. Instead, I propose that the effects of changes in political rationalities and the creation of new legal categories must be examined in light of structural forces that remain largely unaffected by shifts in political and normative frameworks. My interest lies in how political migration constructs intersect with gendered and racialised mechanisms of value extraction. I argue that these mechanisms blur the boundaries within the legal hierarchy of rights, obligations, and opportunities derived from politically defined migration categories. In this context, rights stemming from temporary protection granted to women from Ukraine may fail to offer meaningful protection from precarious employment arrangements, as the structural forces governing labour markets override shifts in migration policy and legal classifications.