Employers, Agencies and Immigration

Paying for Care

Anna Triandafyllidou, Sabrina Marchetti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781472433213
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317144243
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Social Sciences

Exploring the performance by immigrants of domestic and care work in European households, this book places the employer centre-stage, examining the role of the employer and his or her agents in securing the balance between work, family and welfare needs, as well as investigating both who the employers are and the nature of their relationships with migrant workers. With attention to the dynamics of inequality, as class, ethnicity and gender become intertwined in a location that is at once home and workplace, this volume is organised into sections that deal with the subjectivities of employers and their relationships with their employees in the home; the re-organisation of welfare and care arrangements at state level; and the wider area of migrant domestic and care work, with the transformation of the au pair scheme. Bringing together the latest empirical work from across Europe, Employers, Agencies and Immigration will appeal to social scientists with interests in migration, ethnic and class relations, immigrant labour and domestic work and the sociology of the family.

Chapter 1
The Employers’ Perspective on Paid Domestic and Care Work

Anna Triandafyllidou and Sabrina Marchetti

Employers of paid domestic workers and home-carers are not employers like any others. They are not entrepreneurs or company owners. Very often, they have not hired anyone else in the past, nor have they received any training in business management. For most of them, employment dynamics are totally new, seen from the position of employers since normally they are or have been also workers, and they are themselves hired by someone else. In some instances, they are not directly paying the people working in their households, but this is done through an agency of which they become ‘customers’. A further complication is that in some cases they might not pay these workers out of their own income, as happens often in elderly care where the salary of the worker is generally covered by the pension and the savings of the care-receiver, but still there are those who hire the care-givers and manage their work.

The perspective of these kinds of employers, who they are, their expectations and their values, are the object of this book. We look at all kinds of typologies: employers of nannies and housekeepers, relatives of dependent elders who need a care-giver, host-parents of international au pairs and finally clients of agencies that provide home-cleaning and care services. The majority of them currently employ migrant workers, but we are also interested in those who choose instead to hire their co-nationals for these jobs. In so doing, we adopt a variety of approaches, from policy oriented to narrative analysis, and we highlight the difference between employers in various European contexts since the realities of these jobs might be different.

The aim of this book is thus to illustrate who are these employers, and what is the specificity of their perspectives on migrant domestic and care work in contemporary Europe. This brings an important contribution to the debate that has developed during the last 20 years in international academia. Several scholars have investigated the phenomenon taking place in the increasing number of households that employ migrants in order to perform tasks related to the care of the house, of children, elders and other dependent persons. This debate intertwines broad research fields such as those on welfare, ageing and family, on gender, race/ethnicity and inequality and finally on globalisation and migration regimes.

So far, this scholarship has emphasised the importance of the international division of reproductive labour and of the ‘global care chains’. For instance, scholars such as Rhacel Salazar Parreñas (2001, 2008), Bridget Anderson (2000), Pei Chia Lan (2006) and Nicole Constable (1997) who show how gender and ethnicity affect the formation of domestic work as a labour opportunity for Filipinas on a global scale. Along the same lines, Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild (2002) have argued that this system has brought migrant women to be seen as those who embody ‘traditional’ gendered skills. Maurizio Ambrosini in his most recent book (2013) has analysed the ‘invisible welfare’ that migrant domestic workers provide for families and which covers for the gaps created out of the ageing of society and a decline in welfare services. Scholars such as Eleonore Kofman (2012), Fiona Williams (2012), Nicola Yeates (2009), Raffaella Sarti (2007) and Helma Lutz (2011), together with Sigrid Metz-Gockel, Mirjana Morokvasic-Muller and A. Senganata Munst (2008), have shown how the interconnection between gender and migration regimes shapes the experience of workers in this specific labour sector, in Europe and beyond, especially in the case of undocumented workers (Triandafyllidou 2013). These studies also show the importance of the fact that more often than not both the employer and the employee are women. This creates important dynamics of inequality where class, ethnicity and gender become intertwined, while it may also trigger feelings of mutual understanding and solidarity in terms of ‘common’ gender roles that have to be performed in the family context.

However, we believe that within this debate, the ‘demand side’ of paid domestic and care work still requires further elaboration. In fact, we are interested in bringing new analysis to a debate that takes employers as the object of analysis per se and which has been already developed by authors such as Helma Lutz (2011), Pierrete Hondagneu-Sotelo (2001), Claudia Alemani (2004), Bridget Anderson (2007), Lena Näre (2012) and Catrin Lundström (2012) in particular. Researching the standpoint of employers is very important in order to highlight the hierarchy between women employers and employees, as rooted in class and race/ethnicity inequalities of contemporary societies (see Cock 1989; Palmer 1989; Ray and Qayum 2009; Rollins 1985; Marchetti 2006). Importantly, employers talk about their competition with employees, especially for the case of employers of nannies and elderly carers, but also for those who worry about the possible seduction of their husbands from the side of the domestics (Lan 2006; Constable 1997). Finally, the perspective of employers is very important when talking about the transformation of welfare, families’ needs and organisations (Vega Solìs 2009).

It is by building on this debate that this book wants to offer the first edited volume, with intra-European comparisons, entirely devoted only to the figure of employers, with the aim to contribute not only to the specific debate on migrant domestic and care work, but also to understanding the response of middle-class European households to the changing intertwine between family life, the restructuring of welfare provision and the regulations pertaining to migrant work.

In the rest of this introduction, we elaborate on the debates that illustrate the context in which the experience of employers takes place. We focus on three main issues: the marketisation of care; the interconnection between family life and homes becoming workplaces; and finally the relationship between policies on welfare and on migration in Europe. In conclusion, we will briefly outline the structure of the book and the contribution brought by the authors of the chapters.

The Care We Pay For

Before entering into the discussion on who are the employers, it important to define what is the kind of work that they are buying from their employees. In other words, what is this ‘care’ that employers are willing to, although in different ways, pay for?

The employment of free or enslaved servants for care and cleaning chores goes back in history for a very long time (see Rollins 1985). Initially, however, masters did not actually ‘pay’ for the work of their servants but rather they provided them food and shelter. The monetarisation of care and domestic work is an increasing reality, as witnessed in the United States in the Seventeenth century (Hoerder 2014). This was the time in which slaves indeed started to be sold and therefore their workforce started to be something that employers needed to quantify. In other words, this is the time in which employers needed to assess the value of the care that they were buying, and thus also probably be more clear-minded about what they were actually buying.

The context in which employers live today is of course very different. In Europe, the monetarisation of domestic and care work has been in place since the nineteenth century (see Sarti 2007). Also, importantly, in countries like Italy, there has been a debate on remuneration for housewives, which takes into account their crucial role in the wellbeing of their families, something that had important repercussions on the valorisation of reproductive work in general (Repetto 2004).

Along these transformations, several attempts have been made to spell out what are the tasks that employers might expect their workers to perform. The recent ILO Convention n. 189 on the rights of domestic workers is only the last of these attempts in which a ‘definition’ of paid domestic work is provided by simply saying that domestic work ‘means work performed in or for a household or households’ (ILO 2011). Galotti (2009, p. 11) notes that it encompasses two broad areas of family care (whether for elderly or children) and household maintenance at large. The precise configuration of what domestic work means indeed varies from country to country.

In this volume, the emphasis is very much on the employer’s attempt to buy something which goes beyond the performance of material chores, and which rather refers to their expectations and desires for the wellbeing of their households. This includes the cleaning and tidying of their living spaces, washing and ironing clothes, cooking meals, taking care of pets and plants as well as tending to children and assisting elderly family members. All these tasks equally affect the person that performs them as well as those who benefit from their accomplishment (Gutierrez-Rodriguez 2010). In other words, the buying of all this kind of work carries along an important emotional dimension, which leads us to group them all together as ‘care’. Thus, as in the title of this book, we talk about ‘paying for care’ with reference to important stories that have to do with the monetarisation of all tasks that employers require from the people they employ, being this washing the dishes or playing with their children, for the wellbeing of their homes and their household members.

The relationship between domestic and care work and intimate life is of the utmost importance. Arlie Hochschild (2012) sees in the buying of care service a palpable example of what generally happens along the expansion of the service economy. She talks about the ‘outsourcing of the self’ to refer to a fundamental psychological dimension in employers’ choices and expectations (see Chapter 6 by Marchetti, this volume). Also Eileen Boris and Rhacel Parreñas (2010) devote particular attention to employment in the domestic and care work fields, in their volume on ‘intimate labours’. Viviane Zelizer (2010) talks about an ‘economy of care’ to refer to the specific market created by the delegation on others of tasks otherwise understood as intimate. Since this is a market based on the selling of ‘relational services’ (Cranford and Miller 2013), the figure of those who buy these services is more often seen as the one of ‘customers’, rather than, as we emphasise in this volume, of ‘employers’.

Homes as Workplaces

In the debate on migrant domestic work, the importance of homes as workplaces has been widely discussed. Brenda Yeoh and Shirlena Huang (1999) see homes where migrant domestic workers are employed as ‘contact zones’, while Janet Momsen (1999) talks about ‘culture-contact situations’. These scholars demonstrate how, in domestic and caring practices, employers are constantly negotiating with their employees and other members of their families’ shared notions about gender which find their spatial context in their homes.

The home is a very special place of employment where the boundaries between the private and public are continuously renegotiated (Davidoff 2003). Homes are very much shaped by national culture and identities. Alison Blunt and Robin Dowlings (2006) talk about homes where discourses and practices related to the nation are reproduced. In what they call ‘lived and metaphorical experiences of home’, people create a sense of identity which then calls for an analysis of the power relations which make of homes an ‘intensely political’ site.

It is in this ‘politicised’ domestic space that the relationship between migrant domestic workers and their employers evolves. Employers are seeking in the workers someone who is able to take up domestic and caring practices, such practices are regulated by hidden principles and organised along axes of power. The ‘home’ is the site where those practices take place and identities are shaped, contested and reshaped over time.

In the perspective of this relationship, the house is considered not simply as a ‘space’, but rather as a ‘place’, that is a specific location where subjects’ experience takes shape. The difference between ‘space’ and ‘place’ is emphasised by Doreen Massey who defines a ‘place’ as the result of particular interactions and of the meeting of certain social relations, which occur in that specific location (Massey 1994). For this reason, when looking at the interactions between employers and employees in the domestic sphere, one should see a ‘place’ rather than a ‘space’ being a specific location where different forces interact. The domestic ‘place’ where these encounters take place, practically and metaphorically, reflects the structure of the ‘social space’, where different subjects occupy and take up different positions. In this view, the organisation of these houses as workplaces is crossed by boundaries separating the upper-class in opposition to the working-class, and the European citizens versus the migrant (often undocumented) worker.

The debate on ‘homes’ as workplaces is very intertwined with the one on the role of women inside their households and the transformation in their commitment towards cleaning tasks. Already in 1994, in their classic book Servicing the Middle Class, Nicky Gregson and Michelle Lowe acknowledge that:

In certain middle-class households cleaning is no longer being seen as a suitable use of middle-class women’s time-space. … Social transformations … have restructured women’s relations to the home in ways that have altered their traditional ties to domesticity (Gregson and Lowe 1994, p. 24).

We are talking here about the rejection of those commitments towards reproductive work which have to do with the maintenance of the homes themselves. Middle-class women are ready to dismiss the low-level abjected tasks (Kristeva 1980; Douglas 1979) in order achieve the ideal of respectable women (Mosse 1985).

Bridget Anderson suggests the image of Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde to represent two women united by interdependent representations. The domestic workers represent physicality and dirtiness because of the tasks they accomplish, while the employers confirm their superiority regarding femininity and managerial skills (Anderson 2000). The European middle-class employers, in Anderson’s view, take the role of organising domestic work: they carefully choose the best employee; they assign her the tasks to fulfil and give her instructions about the education of the children. Therefore, the employers succeed in being domestic without being dirty (Ibid.).

This new model of femininity is closely related to the emergence, in contemporary Europe, of a very interesting female figure. She has been called the new traditionalist model that, as Leslie says, corresponds to the woman that ‘was searching for something to believe in and look what she found: her husband, her children, herself’ (Leslie 1993, p. 308). In fact, employers place a lot of effort in taking care of their house and in their family, which likely aims at the reproduction of a traditional household.

Thus while the entrance of women in the paid work sector outside the home is ever increasing, the tensions and gaps that this leaves by the ‘care gap’ that it creates do not disappear. While they are filled by migrant domestic workers, the transition to a commodified care is not as smooth as it may seem from a simple economic transaction perspective (the employer buys a service, the worker provides for the service, the need is addressed). This book emphasises the emotional and value tensions that this commodification of care creates for employers, particularly women, as well as on the new job arrangements that emerge out of the need to regulate the domestic work sector and help match offer with demand.

The issue is even more complicated in the case of elderly carers which individual families have to employ in order to compensate for the lack of public welfare provisions, as we will further discuss in the next section.

Welfare and Migration

The debate that has developed around care services and welfare has increasingly looked at four actors: the market, the state, the non-profit sector and the family (Kofman and Raghuram 2009). The employers whose experience we analyse in this volume belong to the first one of these four categories, covering the demand side of the private market of care services. However, they are also part of the last one of these four institutions, the family, since they are usually the relatives of those who are receiving the care services, especially in the case of care for elders, disabled and children. This book thus sheds light on the difficult positioning of employers as simultaneously market and family actors in the context of the changing welfare arrangements in contemporary Europe. The focus on these two dimensions, the market and the family, is very timely in relation to the evolution of national welfare towards privatisation and re-familiarisation, elements which are unsettling the borders between the different European welfare regimes as Esping-Andersen (1990, 1996) describes.

Care is probably the welfare sector which has been most privatised in Europe, in comparison to health, education, pension systems and so forth (Daly 2012; Ferrera 2005; Graziano, Jaquot and Palier 2011). The ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 The Employers’ Perspective on Paid Domestic and Care Work
• Part I Everyday Negotiations through the Employers’ EYES
• Part II Employers and the Changing Policies on Domestic and Care Work
• Part III From Host Parents to Employers: Recent Developments in Au Pair Schemes
• Index