“In Case You Can Speak Finnish, There’s No Problem”: Reconstructing problematic identity-positions in migrant care workers’ organisational discourse

With a discourse-analytical approach to interviews conducted in Helsinki, this article examines how foreign-born care workers make sense of their work-related identities and the structural conditions they inhabit. The analysis demonstrates how, in the interviews, “a migrant care worker” was easily recognised as an identity-position problematic-by-default. Nevertheless, the interviewees were also able to utilise multiple different, more particular identity-positions related to their migrant histories (e.g. “a Finnish speaking migrant”, “a migrant with the right attitude”). However, partly due to these particularisations, and unintentionally, potential problems in work-place relations (e.g. discrimination) came recognised as private matters dependent on particular individual characteristics.