Organising “Multiplied Labour” under Racial Capitalism: Filipino Nurses On Strike in German Hospitals

Abstract Shifting class compositions and the fragmentations of localised workforces are key developments for labour struggle. This paper argues that two major, interlinked processes are central to these fragmentations: the multiplication of labour through border capitalism and the devaluation of racialised labour under racial capitalism. Through ethnographic fieldwork, this article excavates the experiences of recently migrated Filipino nurses within a union‐led strike campaign in a large German hospital, and how their condition of precarity, produced by these structural processes, shapes their collective agency and response within a specific labour struggle. The paper discusses the precarity of the nurses’ residency, recognition, and reproduction, as well as their self‐organisation to strike. It also reveals the ambivalences in the modes of their representation by the union campaign in order to further the debate on how to approach the idea of a unified political subject in labour struggles: by incorporating racialised migrant workers’ border struggles.