Irregular Migrant Domestic Workers in Europe

Who Cares?

Anna Triandafyllidou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317112839
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

With specific attention to irregular migrant workers - that is to say, those without legal permits to stay in the countries in which they work - this volume focuses on domestic work, presenting studies from ten European countries, including Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain. Offering a comparative analysis of irregular migrants engaged in all kinds of domestic work, the authors explore questions relating to employment conditions, health issues and the family lives of migrants. The book examines the living and working conditions of irregular migrant domestic workers, their relations with employers, their access to basic rights such as sick leave, sick pay, and holiday pay, as well as access to health services. Close consideration is also given to the challenges for family life presented by workers' status as irregular migrants, with regard to their lives both in their countries of origin and with their employers. Through analyses of the often blurred distinction between legality and illegality, the notion of a 'career' in domestic work and the policy responses of European nations to the growth of irregular migrant domestic work, this volume offers various conceptual developments in the study of migration and domestic work. As such, it will appeal to sociologists, political scientists, geographers and anthropologists with interests in migration, gender, the family and domestic work.

Chapter 1
Irregular Migration and Domestic Work in Europe: Who Cares?

Anna Triandafyllidou

Irregular Migration and Domestic Work

International migration in the last two decades has been increasingly gendered. Women have become important components of international migration flows both within Europe (from East to West) and from developing countries in Asia and Africa to Europe. Female migration has been encouraged by both push and pull factors. On the push side, the implosion of Communist regimes in central eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics has left women unemployed, without a welfare state to rely on and/or with salaries that were too low even for the mere survival of families. In developing countries, women were and still are faced with poverty and unemployment as well as violence.

At the same time, there has been a strong ‘pull’ effect as western and southern European societies have been characterized by an increasing demand of migrant labour, and particularly in sectors that are highly gendered such as caring and cleaning work in private homes. Such work was traditionally performed by women (in southern Europe) and to a certain extent by welfare services (in northern and western Europe). While welfare services have been suffering major cuts, European societies have been rapidly ageing and the demand for caring and cleaning services has boomed. These factors have contributed to the creation of an important niche in European labour markets for mainly female migrant domestic workers.

Native women have favoured the employment of immigrant domestic workers in the home, as they have freed them from caring and cleaning tasks. Migrant domestic work has at the same time had important implications for welfare systems. In southern European countries for instance where assistance of elderly or ill people at the home is generally not provided or where public nurseries are scarce, migrant women have come to fill important gaps and to actually substitute for services that are not there. The current economic crisis and the overall restructuring of welfare systems both in southern and northern Europe make the need for an affordable domestic care labour force all the more necessary and sought after, especially as life expectancy is prolonged and the European population is increasingly ageing.

Interestingly migrant domestic work poses important gender role and welfare challenges at the countries of origin too. Migrant women become the main breadwinners in their families and parental roles change (if the father is left behind to look after the children). Many times families break up because of long absences and the change in gender role balance within the family. Inter-generational solidarity among women at the countries of origin is also an issue triggered by migrant domestic work: young women leave their children with their own mothers (that is, the grandmothers of the children) so that they can go abroad to find work and send money for the family’s survival or also for the children’s education.

Domestic work is characterized by a number of special features that make it a labour market sector that stands apart from other areas of migrant employment. Domestic work takes place in the home of other people – a place that notoriously escapes any control on the part of labour inspections and that by definition is not a ‘formal’ workplace. It involves tasks that are very personal in nature: caring for elderly people or young children, cleaning somebody’s house, taking care of their private belongings (clothes, furniture, cooking food, for instance). Hence it involves a high level of intimacy – even if it is an unwanted or implicit one – between the employer and the employee.

It is highly gendered: domestic workers are in their overwhelming majority women. And increasingly in Europe domestic work is an immigrant’s job. Indeed native women are no longer willing to occupy this labour market niche but increasing immigration during the last decades have swelled the ranks of immigrant women who move to European Union (EU) countries to take up jobs as cleaners and carers in private homes.

Domestic work is seen as a dead-end job. There is no career properly speaking when one works in the private care or cleaning sector, although as we shall see in the studies presented in this volume immigrant domestic workers do engage into a career path within this sector. They can go from live-in to live-out, from being at the mercy of the employer towards selecting their job, from a feeling of deskilling to a feeling that they become specialized in the sector, they are good at their job and they are needed – their employers depend on them.

The above issues and features of domestic work have increasingly attracted the interest of scholars during the last decade. The relationship between immigration and domestic work, the particularities of domestic work as a specific sector of employment as well as the gendered nature of the work are some of the topics investigated (Anderson 2000, 2007, Cox 1997, 2006, Cyrus 2008, Lutz and Schwalgin 2004, Lutz 2002, 2008, Pannell and Altman 2009, Scrinzi 2003, 2005). Moreover, a number of specialized NGO networks and international organizations have issued their own studies to provide support and assistance to immigrant domestic workers as well as to raise public and policy makers’ awareness on the special vulnerability of immigrant domestic workers (see for instance Respect 2000, Respect Network 2009, Gallotti 2009, ILO 2010, PICUM 2009).

This book subscribes to the wider area of research on immigrant domestic workers but particularly focuses on immigrant domestic workers in an irregular situation. In other words, we study the particular characteristics and the challenges faced by immigrant domestic workers that have no legal stay permits in the countries in which they work and who thus have no proper work contract or welfare benefits.

The book covers eight European countries, notably Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain and looks at all types of domestic work (live-in, live-out with one employer, and live-out with many employers). The countries were selected on the basis of the estimated size of their irregular immigrant domestic worker population. The book aims to cover both genders when and where relevant even though domestic work remains a women’s job in the vast majority of cases.

Contributions to this book focus on three main aspects of irregular immigrant domestic work: employment conditions, health issues and family life. Concerning employment, we investigate the living and working conditions of irregular immigrant domestic workers, the tasks assigned to them, their relations with employers, their access to basic rights such as sick leave, sick pay and holiday pay.

The book covers two issues that are generally neglected or not directly addressed by other studies: health issues and family life. Domestic work is a heavy job both physically and emotionally and entails particular health hazards. Access to health services is at best limited when an immigrant worker is undocumented and the fact that they work in the home makes it even more difficult to access information and/or to refer to NGOs or trade unions that could assist them.

Domestic workers are implicitly seen as having no right to a family life when they work as live-in carers, and even when they work as live-out they may face unfriendly working times (for example, night shifts, starting early and ending very late, asked to work on Sundays), and a lack of flexibility on the part of their employers when they need to be absent for family reasons. On the other hand, the very nature of the work sometimes transforms the employers into a surrogate family environment for the domestic workers, especially when she has left her own family in the country of origin.

This book has three main objectives. It seeks to provide for a country-by-country and comparative overview of the situation of irregular immigrant domestic workers in Europe (unique in its kind). It offers conceptual advancements in the study of immigration and domestic work by discussing three important issues: (1) the notion of a ‘career’ for irregular immigrant domestic workers – a concept that has to date only been discussed for legal immigrant domestic workers; (2) the notion of legality and irregularity highlighting the fuzzy borders between them in immigrant domestic work; and (3) the gender and (transnational) family issues – the right of irregular immigrant domestic workers to have a family life and the difficulty of combining this especially with live-in employment (see also Anderson 2000). We particularly highlight the multiple dimensions of legality/illegality involved for immigrant domestic workers in an irregular situation. The book also touches upon the additional challenges posed by irregular immigration status and the periodical creation of surrogate family ties with employers and their families. This volume aims also at critically assessing the policy responses of different European countries to the growing sector of (irregular) immigrant domestic work and their efforts to regularize immigrant domestic work and/or protect the rights of both irregular and legal immigrant domestic workers.

The aim of this introductory chapter is to place the book in the wider literature on global migration and the ‘global care chain’ (Hochschild 2000), looking at how domestic work fits the needs and dynamics of developed countries’ labour markets in the era of post-industrial capitalism and neoliberal globalization. The gender dimension of domestic work and the global care chain is an important aspect that needs to be taken into account in studying domestic work. Secondly, the chapter puts this discussion into the specific European context and the ways in which migration policies construct illegality in the domestic work sector. Last but not least, the chapter discusses the special features of domestic work as a particular type of employment comparing today’s domestic workers with ‘servants’ and ‘maids’ in the past when domestic work did not involve international but national migration from the countryside to urban centres. The last section outlines the structure of the country specific chapters and the empirical work on which they are based.

Migration and Domestic Work in the Age of Neoliberalism and Globalization

There are a few issues that need to be discussed in this chapter which are not peculiar to our interest in the link between domestic work and irregular migration but rather to domestic work and migration more generally. They are, however, important in placing the book in the appropriate theoretical and social policy context.

There are several social developments that have marked late industrial societies in the post-World War II era and particularly so during the last three decades which are directly relevant for our work. First, the fact that increasing numbers of women in industrialized countries have started working outside the home. They have engaged into paid work instead of what they used to do, which was notably unpaid care work, within the home. Second, that European societies are increasingly ageing, thus generating higher needs for care, for both children and elderly people. The issue is that there are fewer adults to look after the sick and the elderly, while at the same time there is a need for looking after young children and infants as women are increasingly working outside the home. Third, European welfare systems are downsizing. The prevalence of neoliberal models in economic and social policy pushes towards the commodification and also towards the marketization of care work as the most efficient policy in responding to the care needs of households. This section briefly discusses these three phenomena with a view to showing how they relate to the more limited realm of irregular migrant domestic work.

Gender equality has been a priority for national and EU level policies in past decades. Such gender equality is inscribed in what Lewis (2004) has termed the ‘adult-worker society’ model. In this model, a prototype of which can be seen in the Scandinavian countries for instance, all employable adults enter the labour market (and paid work). In this perspective, all adult people are seen to be autonomous and self-providing individuals, what Manske (2005) calls ‘autonomous worker-citizens’, realizing their full capacities and life prospects through work (and of course leisure). This principle is seen as corresponding to ideas about equality between genders but also about social policy regimes and their viability in the context of ageing societies. This model finds support not only in ideas about gender equality and women’s emancipation – as expressed by women’s movements – but also in economic arguments about female human capital. As the level of education of the female population rises, the interruption of their careers when they become mothers involves a waste of their human capital (OECD 2001, cited in Lutz 2011: 6).

Women entering the labour market and paid work has two important implications for the household’s production and consumption patterns (Esping and Andersen 2002: 69). The woman’s earnings increase the overall purchasing power of the household. The woman’s employment outside the home, however, creates at the same time a ‘gap’ in the provision of her unpaid obligations vis-à-vis dependents such as young children or the elderly and sick. The process of transferring the caring and cleaning chores from the domain of the home (where work is invisible and unpaid) to the labour market (where other people are hired to do this work or where these services are purchased by other agents or offered by the state) is what has been called the process of commodification of care.

Whether commodification of care is good or bad and for whom is a complicated research and policy question. For the women who enter the paid work domain, this process may be seen as liberating and empowering. Outsourcing domestic work has other important implications, however. State provisions even in countries with well-developed welfare and education systems do not cover all the possible needs and arrangements that families need, especially in the context of an overall ageing population. Market provisions are often too expensive to be affordable. There may also be issues of cost (care services may be quite expensive) and lack of labour supply (not many people being willing to take up such jobs). As Milkman et al. (1998) argue, latent demand for domestic help becomes actual demand only when such help becomes easily affordable.

Europe is experiencing relatively rapid population ageing as the baby-boom generation grows older in western and southern Europe, while central eastern European countries are experiencing mostly negative demographic growth in the post-1989 period (due both to low fertility rates and high emigration). These developments have dramatically increased the social and economic cost of elderly care. In response to these rising costs most countries reduce entitlements (targeting services for the populations with greatest need) while also seeking to reduce costs (Simonazzi 2009). The reduction of costs takes place through cash transfers, private provision and home care. Thus in most European countries private households share the burden with the state by contributing to the cost of care as this is not entirely covered by either the state or any private insurance funds (Simonazzi 2009: 212).

This double reduction, as previously stated, is driven not only by the increasing cost of care services but also by the prevalence of the neoliberal logic: welfare systems are being downsized strengthening the tendency not only to commodify care but also to delegate it to the market (Lutz and Palenga 2011). Thus instead of expanding the public child-care sector, states prefer to provide child allowances; instead of providing for full-time care for those the sick and the elderly, today’s welfare systems opt for cash transfers to their families. However, these cash transfers whether through dependency or care allowances, retirement pensions or other insurance payments are not sufficient to cover for the care work needed. Care becomes affordable only when migrant women step in as the necessary labour force to satisfy this labour market niche (Lyberaki 2008, Lutz 2011). Thus, women’s engagement in paid work, ageing societies, and welfare systems that are being downsized and reorganized leads to an inextricable link between care work, welfare and migration. Migrants provide for the missing link in the chain. It is only through the provision of a plentiful and affordable migrant labour force that welfare and care regimes in Europe become affordable, cost-efficient and functional.

The whole system is conveniently integrated by the structural adjustment neoliberal policies imposed by richer countries on developing ones (Cox 2006: 18–19). Such policies instead of promoting growth they rather tend to disrupt local production structures, increase poverty and ultimately force women to seek work opportunities abroad. It may be argued that the link between care regimes, welfare systems and migratio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Irregular Migration and Domestic Work in Europe: Who Cares?
• 2 Domestic Work in Belgium: Crossing Boundaries between Informality and Formality
• 3 Migration Careers and Professional Trajectories of Irregular Domestic Workers in France
• 4 Three Different Things: Having, Knowing, and Claiming Rights: Undocumented Immigrant Domestic Workers in Germany
• 5 ‘With All the Cares in the World’: Irregular Migrant Domestic Workers in Greece
• 6 The Home as a Site of Work
• 7 Undocumented Domestic Workers in Italy: Surviving and Regularizing Strategies
• 8 Regulating Migrant Domestic Work in the Netherlands: Opportunities and Pitfalls
• 9 Globally Interdependent Households: Irregular Migrants Employed in Domestic and Care Work in Spain
• 10 Irregular Migrant Domestic Workers in Europe: Major Socioeconomic Challenges
• Index