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This article addresses young people’s school-to-work transitions.The analysis draws on data from a Swedish ongoing qualitativelongitudinal project spanning over 10 years. In this article, wefocus on eight young people who grew up and still live in a smallrural inland town in North Sweden where the regional labormarket is going through a process of rapid reindustrializationafter decades of industrial decline and welfare stateretrenchment. The aim of the study is to explore the young rural‘stayers’ transitions in a region characterized by strong economicgrowth, yet with long-standing challenges in terms of socialreproduction, focusing on what kind of work they end up withand their speed of establishment on the labor market. At thetime of the latest interview all but one of the 8 participants inthis study had employment in local or regional industries,however, how fast they had managed to establish themselves onthe labor market varied between them. Further, their staying onlocally depended largely on regional mobility. We discuss theirtransitions in relation to the ongoing re-industrialization processin North Sweden but also what implications young stayers’school-to-work transitions might have in relation to the widersocial reproduction in the region.

This article analyses how employer federations, trade unions and the Swedish state symbolically construct seasonal migrant workers to work in the green industries, specifically in agriculture, forestry and wild-berry picking. Work tasks and skills become ethnicised where certain groups are constructed as ‘fit’ for certain work tasks. Through symbolic constructing, boundaries are drawn in relation to Swedish workers in general but also hierarchically within the group of seasonal migrant workers and in relation to specific groups in Sweden, typically un-employed youth and newly settled refugees. This paper is based on interviews with unions and employer organisations as well as secondary text-sources and legal texts. The analysis shows that while employers construct seasonal migrant workers as vital for agriculture, forestry and wild-berry picking, arguing that their line of business could not be sustained without them, the union side portrays this as an ‘artificial demand’. Within a system that to a large degree is based on employers’ demand for inexpensive and flexible labour, symbolic boundaries of seasonal migrant workers are not only performed by the employers’ side, but are also co-constructed with and sanctioned by the state; while partly contested by the unions.

The article addresses school-to-work transitions among young women in a strongly male dominated professional sphere – the transport industry. Drawing on interviews with two girls over the time span 2015–2022 and visits to their upper secondary school 2016–2019, the study focuses on how power structures related to gender play out in the positioning that takes place in school and workplaces: How the girls were positioned socially and in relation to professional qualification, and how they positioned themselves in these respects. The findings indicate significant changes in discourse and practice when the girls transitioned from students to employees, changes which in the article are discussed in the framework of ‘inequality regimes’ and through the lens of the ‘glass funnel’ metaphor. Linking the funnel metaphor to the framework of inequality regimes broadens the picture to consider how young people are exposed to generally increasing inequalities in labour markets where institutions and organisations are affected by neoliberal economic policies, weakened collective protection of workers and wider wage gaps. With individualisation and insecurity, young people like the two girls in focus in this article, are increasingly left to fend for themselves in a harsh labour market.

In this chapter we discuss how demands for social justice and struggles around social reproduction have evolved in the Nordic “periphery”, placing the struggles within a context of critical socio-spatial theorizing and earlier geographical research on uneven development within Nordic welfare states. We give examples from Sweden of how resistance in the northern periphery increasingly mobilizes around spatial justice and social reproduction rather than mainly around employment. Demands about the right to spatial justice challenge the rewarding of a specific place – usually the urban – of modernity, meaning-making and hub for democracy and resistance. And thus oppose the naturalization of uneven rual-urban geographies. Nordic critical geographers have researched inequalities within Nordic welfare states, including center-periphery divides and conflicts, and examined how these have increased with welfare state retrenchment. Feminist geographers highlight the centrality of battles around social reproduction – the right to environmental security, work, food, housing, healthcare, education, a meaningful and dignified life in both urban and rural places. We identify a tradition of empirically based geographical research on material conditions and changing socio-spatial forms of production and consumption, which suggests a socio-spatial theory useful in an era of crisis and increased privatization of nature and social reproduction.

The forest berry industry in northern Sweden operates within a competitive global market for nutritious wild berries and is dependent on seasonal migrant workers. This chapter analyses actual wage levels of these workers after a series of new regulations surrounding migration and labour standards. Labour standards improved in Sweden in 2010 with the implementation of collective agreements and work contracts for non-European Economic Area berry pickers, the only country employing such standards within this type of industry. We discuss how, despite these improvements, Thai migrant berry pickers continue to be exploited in a process that we theorise as subordinated inclusion. The chapter is based on unique survey material with berry pickers and in-depth interviews with migrant workers during the berry season in Sweden and off-season in Thailand. We focus on actual wages, while also placing our analysis in the context of the industry’s peripherality and changing geographies of production and consumption. One third of the workers in the survey reported earnings below the income they are entitled to according to the work contracts. Despite deploying varying forms of resistance and the recent regulation of labour standards for migrant labour, we conclude that the fulfilment of their formal rights is still lacking.The forest berry industry in northern Sweden operates within a competitive global market for nutritious wild berries and is dependent on seasonal migrant workers. This chapter analyses actual wage levels of these workers after a series of new regulations surrounding migration and labour standards. It focuses on unique survey material with berry pickers and in-depth interviews with migrant workers during the berry season in Sweden and off-season in Thailand. The changes in the globalising labour markets and the varying forms of conditions and access to rights granted to different groups of migrant workers in relation to national systems provide examples of severe employment inequalities worldwide. Work in rural economic sectors such as agriculture, forestry, or industries of non-timber forest products links increasingly to global value chains and their institutional, ideological, and economic dynamics. The analysis of the survey shows that the earnings for Thai berry pickers many times were considerably lower than the collective agreement had stipulated.

The Swedish wild-berry industry has become increasingly dependent on migrant workers. As the world market's demand for health and food ingredients increased, Swedish forest berries are exported to China to become nutraceutical products, while most berries consumed in Sweden now are imported cultivated berries. These changing geographies of production and consumption have resulted in a system of supply chains, that reproduce and manage difference between groups of workers and thus, make it difficult to safeguard labor rights. Moreover, this new“global standard” has great impacts on the cultural and political meanings of food. The aim of this paper is to study new emerging practices within the industry and to shed light on the production of representations of certain types of workers and work, and how this relate to supply chain capitalism. From the starting point of narratives collected within the different nodes of the supply chain, the paper focuses on the production, distribution and consumption of berry products as means to address how meanings of work and berries are negotiated. A specific focus is put on the narrated events during and after a strike where migrant workers tried to fight for better wages and living conditions. The workers not only lost the battle, but they were also expelled from Sweden without being paid. The work of the pickers and their agency is disconnected from discourses of labor and from Swedish laws and regulations, and the injustice is further justified and obscured through the lens of memories and nostalgia among Swedish consumers of berries.

Increased commercial interest in wild berries in Northern Sweden's resource periphery has connected places and people to a global berry supply chain that produces goods for world markets. As a part of a wider global food chain, every link in this chain is deeply insecure and partly marked by secrecy and mystification. Contemporary representations of the Norrlandic landscape tend to obscure and hide economic conflicts and power relations connected to resource exploitation and corporate concentration, neglecting workers and local communities. This paper examines how globalization, neoliberal policies and the development of supply chain capitalism drive changes in labour markets and migration policies, which in turn shape/and are shaped by both material and immaterial aspects of the Norrlandic landscape. While many studies of global food chains have focused on abstract patterns of chain governance, business economics and logistics, we analyse the wild berry industry by centring on migrant workers and the production of a distinct spatiality through interconnectedness and historical conjuncture, with a starting point in a particular place in the interior of Norrland. We thereby contribute to a different narrative of the Norrlandic landscape, making visible power and labour relations.