Agency by exit: Swedish nurses and the “Not below 24,000” movement

•Contributes to conceptualisation of labour agency.•Introduces the concept of agency by exit.•Provides new insight into mobility as a source of structural power.•Operationalises structures that constrain and enable labour agency.•Explains how individual agency can enable and empower collective agency.

Hirschman's (1970) concepts of exit, voice and loyalty can be reworked to add further nuances to the understanding of labour agency. Agency by exit is of interest in demonstrating how agency is conditioned by structures and context that constrain and enable successful action. It may start as individual acts of coping and then enable and empower more collective actions of reworking and resistance. Agency by exit thereby expands our understanding of what strategies of coping, reworking and resistance entail. We base our arguments on a case study of the “Not below 24,000” movement among nurse students and newly graduated nurses for acceptable entry wages in Sweden. The movement has succeeded in raising the entry wage for a number of newly graduated nurses by turning individual and collective agency by exit into structural power. While the movement has managed to shake power relations, it has not fully changed the rules of the game.