Brokering Circular Labour Migration

A Mobile Ethnography of Migrant Care Workers’ Journey to Switzerland

Huey Shy Chau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429638916
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book examines the commercialisation of domestic and care work through private agencies that organise transnational care arrangements by brokering migrant workers.

The book focuses on the emergence of private for-profit home care agencies following the 2011 extension of the Free Movement of Workers to Eastern European Countries agreement in Switzerland. The agencies recruit migrant women from these countries and place them in private households for elderly care. This book explores how circular labour migration for these care workers is facilitated. In the form of a mobile ethnography, it traces their journey from Eastern European countries to Switzerland – from when care workers find employment and are recruited by agencies to when they arrive at their designated households. From the agencies' analytical standpoint, the book examines the recruitment and placement practices of the home care agencies and their role in facilitating migration.

Brokering Labour Migration offers an understanding of new migration patterns and highlights fundamental changes in migration control with the extension of free movement of workers in Switzerland to lower-wage countries in Eastern Europe. It will be an invaluable resource for academics and scholars of geography, anthropology, sociology, and gender and migration.

1 The black box of live-in care labour migration

When Sara, a woman from eastern Slovakia who was unemployed at the time, saw a job advertisement on the social media platform Facebook, she spontaneously sent in her CV. An agency was looking for live-in carers to work in Switzerland. Shortly thereafter, a recruiter called Sara to offer her a temporary job: A man was recovering from a nervous breakdown and looking for someone to help with domestic chores. Sara would have to assist him in getting up in the morning and with keeping house. Two days later, she received a contract, which she signed and sent back to the agent. Seven days after that, Sara was in the back of an eight-seater car. Together with other care workers, she was on her way from Slovakia to Switzerland, where she would be dropped off at the care recipient’s door.

The women started their journey in the evening and arrived at their workplaces the next morning. For some of them, it was their first time working as live-in care workers, while others were well acquainted with the job. Many of them were on their way to replace their ‘switch partners’, care workers with ending assignments. The women usually work for 2 to 12 weeks at a time before they are replaced by new or recurring care workers. After dropping off the new arrivals, the drivers pick up the departing care workers and drive back to Slovakia. These tours are arranged several times a month by the agency and are carried out in collaboration with a small transportation business in the recruitment country.

Sara’s journey echoes the stories of many women around the globe who travel from poorer to richer regions to provide care work in private households. Care in the Global North is increasingly being delegated to women migrating from poorer to wealthier countries (Raghuram 2016). In Europe, there has been an increase in women from Eastern European countries working as care workers in wealthier EU countries. Initially, care workers worked mainly in informal arrangements and found work through informal networks (Krawietz 2014). Many started their work abroad by commuting to neighbouring countries, such as Germany and Austria. As early as in the 1990s, migrant workers had already established a system of going back and forth between their homes in Poland and their places of work in Germany (Irek 1998, 75; Morokvasic 1994; Schilliger 2014, 20). However, since the introduction of the Agreement on the Free Movement of Persons (AFMP) in Europe in 2002, there has been a rise in commercial agencies recruiting circularly migratin care workers from Eastern European countries. (Lutz 2008, 2011; Triandafyllidou & Marchetti 2013). In Germany and Austria, the surge of live-in care for the elderly was particularly sparked by the introduction of the Posted Workers Directive, which allows agencies based in recruitment countries to provide services on a temporary basis (Bachinger 2009; Krawietz 2014; Österle, Hasl, & Bauer 2013; Rossow & Leiber 2017).

Switzerland differs from its neighbouring countries, as it does not allow the posting of workers. Moreover, it has gradually introduced the AFMP through bilateral agreements with the EU much later than EU member countries. Hence, discussions of live-in care by migrant care workers began almost a decade later than in the other German-speaking countries. The appearance of care agencies and live-in care was first documented in Switzerland in 2009, mainly in relation to informal arrangements (Schilliger 2009). However, the period since the extension of the AFMP to eight new EU member states in Eastern Europe in 2011 has seen a mushrooming of care agencies officially placing migrant care workers (Schilliger 2014; Truong, Schwiter, & Berndt 2012). In the last few years, these home care arrangements have become increasingly popular in Switzerland. More and more private households buy care services on a privatised care market. Private, for-profit care agencies not only broker migrant care workers to private households but also offer all-inclusive home care services. With their appearance, a new pattern of labour migration from households in Eastern Europe to households in Switzerland in the form of circular migration has emerged.

This development prompts many questions. How, and in which contexts, have these agencies developed, and how do they operate? How is this labour migration for live-in care work organised? How are social relationships created and unravelled in this process? In what ways do agencies control and shape labour migration within an open labour market that allows free movement of people between sending and recipient countries? Before we tackle these questions, this introductory chapter first presents the commercialisation of transnational live-in care as a global phenomenon and the existing literature on migrant domestic and care work. Subsequently, I outline the theoretical framework that underpins this research: migration infrastructure and politics of mobility. The third part presents the methods used for data collection and analysis. This introductory chapter finishes with an overview of the structure of this book.

Migration, gender, and care work

In the 1990s, feminist literature in the social sciences saw a rise in studies on an increasingly global phenomenon: migrant women leaving their own homes to work as domestic workers for other families (Momsen 1999; Constable 1997a; Huang & Yeoh 1996; Ehrenreich & Hochschild 2003). Women’s increasing labour market participation in many countries in the Global North, which was not accompanied by an equivalent shift of care responsibilities to men, paved the way for hundreds of thousands of women to work as migrant domestic workers.

Unevenly gendered and global circulation of care

The migration patterns show that domestic work is mostly delegated to migrant women traveling from poorer to wealthier countries, leading to what has been discussed as an international division of social reproduction (Parrenas 2000). In addition to a gendered and global division in paid domestic and care work, scholars have observed a racial division, in which white women tend to occupy professional positions in the health care sector, such as certified nurses, whereas women of colour perform low-wage reproductive labour and are situated at the lower end of a racialised hierarchy (Glenn 1992; Parrenas 2001; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2000).

The many studies on the global rise of migrant domestic work tie into feminist discussions on unpaid domestic work and social reproduction in the 1970s. When Marxist feminist voices, in a context of international campaigns calling for wages for domestic work, started questioning a duality between women’s’ unpaid reproductive work ascribed to a private sphere and men’s wage labour ascribed to a public sphere, they also challenged the implicit underlying gender contract that assigns care work to women (Cox & Federici 1976). Since the 1990s, feminist researchers have questioned how unpaid as well as paid domestic work is valued in society (see Kofman & Raghuram 2015 for an overview). The restructuring of unpaid care into paid care is closely related to the way economic concepts understand domestic and care work. How care is measured and defined in mainstream economic analysis has been questioned by a range of feminist economists (see Donath 2000; Folbre 1995; Knobloch 2009; Madörin 2007, 2010; Madörin & Soiland 2013; Perrons 2005; Waring & Steinem 1988). The literature has contributed to more gender inclusive economic studies by questioning the social construction of mainstream economic analysis that excludes the value of unpaid domestic work. Introducing the term ‘the other economy’, Donath (2000) argues that care work, which is concerned with the production of human beings, follows distinct economic logics that differ from the ones related to the production of commodities in other economic sectors. Similarly, Madörin emphasises that care work is interactive work (personen bezogene Dienstleistung) involving time and hence can only be rationalised to a certain extent (Madörin 2010). Care work differs from other types of work, as it encompasses not just manual but also affective embodied work and emotional labour (McDowell 2009). It is a kind of labour that ‘requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance to produces the proper state of mind in others’ (Hochschild 2003b [1983], 7; see also Steinberg & Figart 1999). It embodies attributes of a service that is usually financially unrewarded when ‘undertaken by a close relation to the person cared-for’ (McDowell 2009, 82). Because of its association with supposedly natural attributes of femininity, care work, according to McDowell (2009), is undervalued when the exchange takes place in the marketplace. Hence, wage payment is usually low considering the exhausting and difficult working conditions of live-in care.

In many countries, the household as a working place is characterised by a low level of labour regulations and relatively low salaries in comparison to other sectors (Chau, Pelzelmayer, & Schwiter 2018, 3–4; Medici 2012, 2015). Consequently, as Chen (2011, 170) points out, live-in domestic and care workers face greater isolation, limited mobility, and long working hours and are more exposed to abuse. Truong (2011) and Schilliger (2014) show that the live-in situations of care workers in Switzerland blur the boundaries between work and private life, which makes it difficult to distinguish the stipulated working hours from free time. Huang and Yeoh (2007, 212) show that abuse of domestic workers in Singapore can take place ‘under the discourse of family’ and is perpetrated by women employers on the basis of class asymmetries, ethnicity, and nationality. Moreover, they stress that uneven power relations in the household as a workplace and the characteristics of domestic work can hinder domestic workers’ desires to leave employment and claim social justice in case of abuse (Huang & Yeoh 2007, 212; Yeoh, Huang, & Devasahayam 2004, 16). In contexts where domestic workers’ only possibilities of accessing employment are through recruitment agencies and debt bondage, they are also more exposed to abuse from employers (Chen 2011, 170). Examples of such abuse include withheld wages and passports. In Europe, many care workers work in informal employment relations without access to social security; as a result, it is difficult for them to claim labour-related and social rights (Anderson 2000; Hess 2005; Karakayali 2010; Metz-Göckel, Münst, & Kałwa 2010).

Several studies underline the agency of domestic workers, showing how care workers employ strategies, negotiate work practices, and are active agents in shaping their own lives (England & Dyck 2012; Gaetano & Yeoh 2010; Pratt 2007; Rother 2017; Strüver 2011; Truong 2011; Yeoh & Huang 2010). Paul (2017) recognises domestic workers’ agency by shedding light on how they mobilise social capital over the years and develop strategies of multi-step migration, working their way up to different destination countries. Furthermore, researchers address forms of political organisation of migrant workers, migrant organisations, human rights advocacy groups, and other non-governmental organisations advocating for improved working conditions and social rights (Ally 2005; Elias 2008; Piper 2005, 2007, 2010; Rehklau 2011; Rother 2009; Schilliger 2015). An important milestone was achieved when the International Labour Organisation (ILO) approved Convention 189, a document that stipulates labour protection around working conditions for domestic workers, after years of union and association organisation all over the world (Boris & Fish 2014; Fish & Boris 2015; Schwenken 2013).

As Williams (2011) emphasises, care is a global issue that requires global policy strategies to address the nature of unequal care distributions. She advocates for an understanding that recognises and redistributes care needs and care responsibilities, instead of seeing people as holders of individual rights, in order to address global justice issues. The unevenly gendered and global circulation of domestic and care work has been most prominently captured by the concept of global care chains (Ehrenreich & Hochschild 2003; Hochschild 2000; Parrenas 2000; Yeates 2004, 2012). It foregrounds that children and elderly family members of migrant care workers themselves are often in need of care, which would require the employment of migrant care workers from even poorer regions. Hochschild (2000, 2003a) described the phenomenon of a global care chain as an emotional imperialism, arguing that love as a resource is extracted from poorer countries to wealthier countries. While in earlier stages of imperialism, natural resources were expropriated from colonial countries, it would be love that is the new gold today. Love or emotional resources are quasi-extracted from poorer countries and accumulated in wealthier countries (Hochschild 2003a, 24, 27).

Focusing on bodily features of care work, Akalin (2015) proposes rereading the concept of global care chains in terms of affect production. According to Akalin (2015), the value of care labour is constituted through the fact that the affective labour produced by care workers is reserved for the employer’s family, whereas the care workers’ own families are denied the same level of care. Affect production, she argues, is immanent to the mobility of care workers. Hence, for Akalin (2015), affect labour foregrounds the fact that care work is relational, whereas in the concept of emotional labour, emotions occur only within the bodies of care workers at the moment of interaction. Similarly, Gutiérrez Rodriguez (2010) draws on concepts of affective labour to conceptualise the value of domestic and care work. Based on empirical data of Latin American migrant domestic workers and their employers in Europe, and by applying a postcolonial analytical lens, Gutiérrez Rodriguez (2010) presents the household as a space with transcultural encounters of unequal power relations and argues that migrant domestic work is more than just ‘a field in which gendered and racialised boundaries are negotiated’, that domestic workers engage with circuits of affective social (re)production (Gutiérrez Rodriguez 2010, 141). The amount of value that is produced with their labour is extracted and flows into the individual reproduction of the household, where the domestic workers are employed. For Akalin (2015), this extraction is only enabled by the fact that domestic workers are away from their own families, which are deprived of receiving the domestic workers’ care. Crucial in Akalin’s analysis is that a migrant domestic worker’s ‘history of affect making, i.e. whether she is married or not, how many children she has at home, how many siblings or relatives she has cared for’, all play a role in the value creation of domestic work. From the point of view of employers, a domestic worker’s association with motherhood embodies the capacity to produce ceaseless affection and the ability to respond aptly to any situations. Consequently, Akalin (2015, 74) argues that the ‘left behind family is not an undesirable aspect or an unintended consequence of her mobility: it is an intrinsic aspect of how her labour gets exploited’.

The global flow of care has been further conceptualised as the care diamond (Raghuram 2012; Razavi 2007) and most recently as care circulation (Baldassar & Merla 2014). While the concept of a care diamond recognises that the provision of care involves multiple institutions, the concept of care circulation observes that care does not flow in only one direction but is rather multi-sited and occurs through asymmetrical reciprocal exchange within transnational families. Together, the literature on global migrant domestic and care work provides important insights into gendered and unequal distribution of care, on specific migration patterns, the often precarious transnational working and living conditions, the adverse impact on transnational families (Pratt 2012), and how care is reorganised in different societies. Many of these studies take individual domestic and care workers and/or the household as an analytical vantage point. The next sections present an overview of literature that takes brokers as a unit of analysis for migrant domestic and care work.

Recruitment agencies in domestic and care work

While many studies have mentioned the role of agencies as a subtopic, relatively few have taken them as a main unit of analysis in migrant care work. Some scholars have focused on the role of agencies in enabling employers to find carers and examined how agencies gain access to care workers. In a study in Los Angeles, Hondagneu-Sotelo showed that the agencies depict themselves as indispensable matchmakers to employers, who seek ‘idiosyncratic traits, such as personal compatibility’ (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1997, 5). Shedding light on a subsystem of local recruiters and informal intermediaries in Indonesia, Lindquist (2010, 2012) showed that agencies can play a key role in creating trust between would-be migrants and employers. Other studies stress the important role agencies play in facilitating complicated bureaucratic procedures to enable migration and in elevating standards for migrants (Goh, Wee & Yeoh 2017; Kern & Müller-Böker 2015). England and Dyck (2012) paid attention to the routes that outpatient home care workers, employed by home care agencies, take into care work in Canada. They observed that home care work ‘was more readily available to them than other jobs because agencies were less concerned about their lack of work experience in Canada, gaps in their paid-work history, and, for the non-English speakers, their limited language skills’. In this sense, agencies were essential in providing employment to the outpatient care workers. As for live-in care work in Canada, a governmental programme enabled the hiring of migrant live-in care workers who, after a certain period of time, are eligible to apply for permanent immigrant status. In this context, Bakan and Stasiulis (1995) looked beyond the role of brokers for care workers’ access to labour markets and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Glossary
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The black box of live-in care labour migration
• 2 Paving the way to live-in care work
• 3 The rise of home care agencies and packaged home care services
• 4 How regulations matter for care agencies and care workers
• 5 Finding a job in live-in care
• 6 Recruiting care workers
• 7 Matching with and travelling to the workplace
• 8 Arriving at the household
• 9 Care of care workers
• 10 The middle space of migration and time for a care revolution
• Bibliography
• Index