Gender, Work and Migration

Agency in Gendered Labour Settings

Megha Amrith, Nina Sahraoui, Megha Amrith, Nina Sahraoui

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367856601
• eBook ISBN: 9781351846219
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Chapter 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315225210

While the feminisation of transnational migrant labour is now a firmly ingrained feature of the contemporary global economy, the specific experiences and understandings of labour in a range of gendered sectors of global and regional labour markets still require comparative and ethnographic attention. This book adopts a particular focus on migrants employed in sectors of the economy that are typically regarded as marginal or precarious – domestic work and care work in private homes and institutional settings, cleaning work in hospitals, call centre labour, informal trade – with the goal of understanding the aspirations and mobilities of migrants and their families across generations in relation to questions of gender and labour. Bringing together rich, fieldwork-based case studies on the experiences of migrants from the Philippines, Bolivia, Ecuador, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Mauritius, Brazil and India, among others, who live and work in countries within Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America, Gender, Work and Migration goes beyond a unique focus on migration to explore the implications of gendered labour patterns for migrants' empowerment and experiences of social mobility and immobility, their transnational involvement, and wider familial and social relationships.

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Part I

Migrant workers in feminised sectors

Meanings of work

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1 Emotional labour in the care industry

Workers’ best asset or biggest threat?

Nina Sahraoui

They teach us that we need to learn to separate emotions and work, I’m against it. For me for example, that’s my emotions that make me work with passion. That’s what makes me love each person.

(Saba, 41, Cameroon, Paris)

Introduction

Saba was working in a for-profit residential care home for elderly persons in Paris as a care assistant when we met and had been living in France for more than thirty years. In this quote, she not only described some of her feelings at work, but also reflected upon the role these emotions played. This chapter builds on interviews conducted with migrant and minority ethnic care workers from outside the European Union (EU) in London, Paris and Madrid. ‘Minority ethnic’ designates here care workers who did not migrate, but who are exposed to processes of racialisation. By including minority ethnic workers, when many studies focus on migrant care and domestic workers (see, for example, Anderson and Shutes 2014; Lutz 2008), this research design seeks to take into account intersections of racialisation processes with gendered labour through and beyond migration status.¹

Hardt and Negri (2000) have identified a significant shift in post-industrial societies: the rise of immaterial labour. Under this category, they have included ‘affective labour of human contact and interaction’, and take the example of the healthcare and entertainment industries (Hardt and Negri 2000: 292). They write from an autonomist perspective that focuses on working-class agency and its potential to emancipate itself. They acknowledge that ‘caring labor is certainly entirely immersed in the corporeal’, but they justify its classification as ‘immaterial’ because ‘its products are intangible, a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement or passion’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 293). The concept of ‘affective labour’, as theorised by Hardt and Negri, presents several shortcomings when accounting for paid care work. Affective labour is, in their book Empire, the third type of immaterial labour, which also includes the incorporation of communication technologies in industrial production and the ‘immaterial labour of analytical and symbolic tasks’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 293). Within this typology, the concept of ‘immaterial labour’ is dominated by an attention to new technologies and networks that transform production processes, without ‘care’ and reproductive work being addressed as such.

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From a more empirical standpoint, Hochschild introduced the concept of ‘emotional labour’ in her 1983 key work The Managed Heart. By ‘emotional labour’, she meant ‘the management of feeling to create publicly observable facial and bodily display; emotional labour is sold for a wage and therefore has exchange value’ (Hochschild 1983/2003: 7). Hochschild (1983/2003: 90) wrote about ‘emotional dissonance’ to capture this separation between display and feeling. The example of Saba, however, points in a different direction. Saba claims that emotions are her best tool for carrying out her job. The airline company that Hochschild studied taught flight attendants what to feel about customers and how to perceive them; workers were, for instance, encouraged to see customers as children who need attention, so that their behaviour seemed less irritating and flight attendants would avoid getting angry or upset (Hochschild 1983/2003: 110). The care provider who employed Saba also stipulated how employees should feel about residents and what feelings should be considered inappropriate. Care workers are supposed to deliver professional care, but not to get attached to residents or come to see them as members of their own family. Whereas the airline company had an interest in that the flight attendants would be working as though the airplane cabins were the workers’ homes (Hochschild 1983/2003: 105), care workers were not supposed to think of residents/service users/clients as their grandparents.

Yet Saba’s quote is illustrative of the widely shared discourse around attachment and feelings present in respondents’ narratives in London, Paris and Madrid. These elements hint at some of the limitations that both concepts of ‘affective labour’ and ‘emotional labour’ present in relation to the analysis of the role of emotions in care labour. This chapter thus seeks to answer the following questions: How can we reconcile, analytically, workers’ discourses of authenticity and love with the emotional labour they perform? How can the concepts of ‘affective labour’ and ‘emotional labour’ be revisited from the standpoint of migrant and minority ethnic care workers? What does this tension reveal as to the place of ‘care’ in our societies?

Within the framework of these broader reflections, this chapter will look at different dimensions of the emotional labour performed by migrant and minority ethnic care workers in an attempt to grasp its complexity and the contradictory dynamics it entails. In the first section, I scrutinise the role of emotions in respondents’ narratives, both as actively mobilised by care workers to carry out their work and as endured because of the affective implications of such emotional labour. I then turn to the analysis of a double contradiction: on the one hand, the marketisation of emotional labour in a commercial setting and its invisibilisation in the institutional practices of care homes; and on the other, the existing conflict between the discourse of professionalisation prevalent in the care sector and carers’ own perceptions of what constitutes proper care.

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Mastering emotional labour or being mastered by emotions?

To some extent, the role of emotions in care appears to be obvious. Precisely because care is relational, it involves the interaction of two or more human beings, which inevitably triggers emotions and which, in a commodified setting, supposes emotional labour. While my topic guide for interviews did not explicitly mention emotions at work, in the analysis of 82 interviews with non-EU migrant and minority ethnic care workers,² I coded a total of 269 extracts from 70 interviews in relation to various aspects of emotional labour. Emotions were mentioned in significant sections of each interview, be it as a tool, as hardship or as reward; they were definitely at the heart of respondents’ daily activities. I argue here that descriptions of emotional labour in care workers’ discourses show, on the one hand, that emotions are actively mobilised by workers to provide care and, on the other hand, that providing care triggers emotions, both positive and negative, which lead workers to engage in continuous ‘emotion work’ to adjust their reactions to institutional expectations and to attempt to protect certain boundaries between their paid employment and their personal lives. Regarding the forms of emotional labour analysed in this section, there were no significant differences as to respondents’ experiences in London, Paris and Madrid.

What emerged unanimously from the narratives is a constant emphasis on communication. If communication serves to build relationships with residents, it is not only about improving residents’ well-being; care workers also have to communicate so that the person receiving care accepts the care that the worker needs to provide. Indeed, refusing care is quite common amongst residents and service users; institutional caring practices might appear as highly intrusive or violent to elderly residents. For instance, care workers need to wake the residents up at a scheduled time and make sure that all residents on the floor are washed or showered before breakfast. Many residents do not want to be washed or showered and refuse the care that care workers are supposed to provide. The interaction in these cases revolves not around the act of bathing or showering itself; instead, the worker needs to focus on bringing the resident around to accepting being bathed or showered. This challenging task is difficult and time-consuming, and at times it exposes the care worker to aggressive reactions by residents when the conversation turns into a confrontation. Immense emotional labour is invested by care workers in such interactions in an attempt to provide care as smoothly as possible. As Fouzia described this challenge:

They have a lot of sloppiness, they refuse life in general. So it’s the case of this person, so I have to make jokes, or facilitate conversation and give him a bit of humour so that he does his personal hygiene. It’s very very hard. The gesture of doing personal care is very simple but to convince a person to do it it’s very hard.

(Fouzia, 43, Algeria, Paris)

Relying on communication tools such as humour does not necessarily mean that care workers are always successful in gaining the resident’s trust or even acceptance. Confrontations are sometimes left unresolved. Nada, employed in a private care home in Paris, gave the following example:

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There is a lady who did not want to be washed and I’m not sure she will agree tomorrow to be washed. I will try again tomorrow but she’s almost 100 years old and she considers that she doesn’t need a shower. What do we do? I force her to take a shower?

(Nada, 31, French, North African parents, Paris)

In trying to make residents feel at ease and trust them for the delicate care they need to provide, care workers continuously engage in emotional labour. This emotional labour is about building relationships with the elderly persons they care for and, in this interaction, they are both agents and receivers. Their actions do not simply have an impact on the feelings and well-being of the persons who are cared for, and care work can hardly be conceptualised as a unilateral relationship. Lanoix (2013: 93) brings to the fore, in this regard, a major critique of Hardt and Negri’s (2000) notion of ‘affective labour’ by highlighting that the latter replicates the idea of productive labour in the sense that ‘it still aims at producing something in a passive object that is laboured upon’. In contrast, feminist theorisations of care work tend to highlight the relational dimension of care work (Tronto 2013). Neglecting one side of the care relationship is more than a mere oversight: by artificially applying the analytical framework of factory production, it negates the fundamental interdependency that characterises human life (as opposed to the figure of the independent and autonomous worker). The care relationship cannot be described as one between an active and a passive agent, and in this regard the concepts of ‘care-giver’ and ‘care-receiver’ are misleading; rather, both persons actively take part in the care relationship.

Another form of emotional labour mentioned by respondents in the three cities – one that sustains Hochschild’s (1983/2003: 7) definition of ‘the management of feeling to create publicly observable facial and bodily display’ – relates to care workers’ descriptions of the mental preparation needed before starting the day and entering into contact with residents. Many respondents made statements similar to that of Elena:

We all have personal problems, and these problems you can’t bring it to the company, especially in a care home where you care for dependent people, persons who are sick, who need affection, cuddling, attention, who need an example, a smile on your face. You have to be in your best mood. Problems, you leave them in the street, you have to come with very good energy to be with them because there’s no reason why they would need to pay for all the problems of those working in this, they’re innocent.

(Elena, 42, Paraguay, Madrid)

Most situations narrated by care workers, however, accounted for forms of emotional labour that do not fit so easily into Hochschild’s definition. Among the aspects of the caring relationship that do not follow from purposeful emotion work by the workers, feelings of reward and fulfilment constitute a positive example of the ‘two-way relationship’ that care work represents, as illustrated by the following quote from Adriana:

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What I like most is the gratitude of the persons, they are grateful. I have worked in different places and I don’t know why generally speaking, the work one does nobody acknowledges it or thanks you. But an elderly person will always appreciate, will be grateful.

(Adriana, 29, Ecuador, Madrid)

From one extreme to the other, feelings of fear and guilt pose a similar challenge to the concept of emotional labour. A story frequently told was one of helplessness over having to care for residents who never recover, who might preserve their health for a while, but who inevitably start deteriorating at some point. Being continuously confronted with diseases from which residents would not recover often triggered sadness and a sense of guilt. Elena was caring for an elderly man for several years as a live-in carer until she decided she would like to obtain a nursing degree to better her professional prospects. When the possibility arose for another carer to take her place, she decided it was a good time to leave. Her account below shows, however, that such decisions can be upsetting:

When I left him, he died after a month . . . I left the house to start studying nursing. I left and a girl came that they had something like five or six years earlier, who got married and left for a different place. So this girl was about to come back, so I said: ‘given that this person is here, I go’. And the man told me that if I left he would die. I don’t know, I was always saying that this . . . no, this can only God decide, that neither him nor me could know when. So it was how he saw things, so I left and he died after a month.

(Elena, 42, Paraguay, Madrid)

Another set of endured emotions is related to the harm that residents can cause to care workers by being aggressive. Very often, residents with certain conditions such as Alzheimer’s are aggressive towards the carers, whose only protection is the emotional labour they perform in an attempt to keep the resident calm while they provide the care the person needs. Examples of violent gestures by residents are almost countless in their narratives. In this regard, the situation of care workers in domiciliary care – and especially in the Spanish context, where many of them work as live-in carers – needs to be distinguished. Feelings of danger were most exacerbated for workers in this situation, such as Gladys:

To be with one person is a lot, you absorb everything from that person and even more when the person . . . because according to the pathology . . . ( . . . ) when you first start it’s very difficult, because many are aggressive. And being at home you run the risk that they attack you.

(Gladys, 37, Ecuador, Madrid)

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These emotions endured by care workers require them to do extra emotion work. In addition to the emotion work one does to ‘leave personal problems outside’ before starting the shift, after a difficult day care workers need to do additional emotion work if they intend not to let these feelings impact on their private life. This point was often made by women with children, who felt they needed to take up the role of mother as soon as they left the workplace. Most respondents in this research were women and their family lives were as gendered as their working lives: when they had children, the role of the partner in childcare was, at times, mentioned as a form of additional support (in combination with the role of other family members or...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Gender, Work and Migration
• Studies in Migration and Diaspora
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Migrant Workers in Feminised Sectors: Meanings of Work
• PART II Migrant Agency, Mobilisations and Resilience in Precarious Contexts
• PART III Transforming Gender Relations
• Conclusion
• Index