Migration and Domestic Work

A European Perspective on a Global Theme

Helma Lutz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754647904
• eBook ISBN: 9781317096429
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Domestic work has become highly relevant on a local and global scale. Until a decade ago, domestic workers were rare in European households; today they can be found working for middle-class families and single people, for double or single parents as well as for the elderly. Performing the three C's - cleaning, caring and cooking - domestic workers offer their woman power on a global market which Europe has become part of. This global market is now considered the largest labour market for women world wide and it has triggered the feminization of migration. This volume brings together contributions by European and US based researchers to look at the connection between migration and domestic work on an empirical and theoretical level. The contributors elaborate on the phenomenon of 'domestic work' in late modern societies by discussing different methodological and theoretical approaches in an interdisciplinary setting. The volume also looks at the gendered aspects of domestic work; it asks why the re-introduction of domestic workers in European households has become so popular and will argue that this phenomenon is challenging gender theories. This is a timely book and will be of interest to academics and students in the fields of migration, gender and European studies.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Migrant Domestic Workers in Europe

Helma Lutz

1. Outsourcing Domestic Work

‘In mummy country’1 was the title of a column that appeared in the German weekly Die Zeit in 2006. Subtitled: ‘The German housewife is seen as the pillar of the nation. But it costs a fortune for well-educated women to stay at home’, this column focused on the mismatch between German women’s desire to pursue a professional career outside the home and the organization of everyday life, which requires the presence of a ‘mummy’ in the home, ready and available for the family and household-related issues. Indeed, by pointing to the absence of state support – most crèches, kindergartens and schools offer only half-day facilities, forcing women into part-time work or (occasionally) into the housewife role – the author struck a raw nerve concerning the organization of social life in German society.

However, this analysis ignored the fact that many professional middle-class women, in Germany as much as in many other European countries, are not waiting for the state or their partners to help them combine gainful employment and care work. Instead, they prefer a different solution. They pay another person to clean their houses, take care of their children and nurse the elderly and the disabled. In other words, they pay somebody to do the unpaid work formerly performed by them.

For a whole range of reasons which will be addressed in this book, the majority of those to whom this work is delegated are female and migrants.

Migrant domestic workers, coming to the European West and South from Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia, leave their own homes and migrate to wealthy regions of the world where salaries exceed those of their country of origin.

Migration theorists often suggest that this is just another market relationship, created by the so called ‘supply and demand’ balance, which has been used as explanation for migration movements for a very long time. However, there are reasons to argue that domestic work is not just another labour market, but that it is marked by the following aspects: the intimate character of the social sphere where the work is performed; the social construction of this work as a female gendered area; the special relationship between employer and employee which is highly emotional, personalized and characterized by mutual dependency; and the logic of care work which is clearly different from that of other employment areas.

Together these factors contribute to the assertion that domestic work cannot just be analyzed using the terminology of migration theories following the rationale of a global push-pull model in which demand in one part of the world leads to supply from less developed areas with surplus labour.

Instead, I argue that there is more to say about this sector. Migrant domestic work in Europe distinguishes itself from other transnational services because this work:

a) cannot be outsourced, like call centres, to those countries where the workforce is cheap. Instead, it is performed in the private sphere in the client’s country.

b) needs flexible and experienced (educated) migrants, able to integrate themselves into the households of their employers, following their preferences, their household choreography and their personal habits.

c) is insufficiently theorized if one reduces it to the issue of replacement or substitution. In care work emotional barriers play a specific role because, for example, mothers do not wish to be entirely ‘replaced’ by a childminder, and housewives do not leave household tasks to another woman without making sure that their status and responsibility are not in question.

On the theoretical level, three different ‘regimes’ are at the heart of the phenomenon of ‘migrant domestic work’ in Europe. Firstly, gender regimes in which household and care work organization can be seen as the expression of a specifically gendered cultural script. Secondly, care regimes as part of the welfare regime, concerning a (multitude) of state regulations according to which the responsibilities for the wellbeing of national citizens is distributed between the state, the family and the market. Thirdly, migration regimes, which for various reasons either promote or discourage the employment of migrant domestic workers. The term ‘regime’ (Esping-Andersen 1990) as it is used here refers to the organization and the corresponding cultural codes of social policy and social practice in which the relationship between social actors (state, (labour) market and family) is articulated and negotiated (see also Williams and Gavanas in this volume).

Before these regimes and their intersection are introduced, I will focus on the landscapes of migrant domestic work in Europe, which have changed rapidly over recent years – a phenomenon coinciding with both the breakdown of the political system in Eastern Europe and the forceful introduction of neo-liberal market-driven policies, not only in Europe but also in many other parts of the world.

2. The ‘New’ Landscapes of Migrant Domestic Work in Europe

Social scientists are reminded by historians that what is currently characterized as ‘new’ may not be new at all, if seen from a broader historical perspective. As I have argued elsewhere (Koser and Lutz 1998: 4), ‘new’ and ‘old’ are arbitrary labels. As Raffaella Sarti (in this volume) shows, domestic work is a centuries-long phenomenon in which female migrants have participated in great numbers since the feminization of this sector around the middle of the nineteenth century.

However, in contrast to earlier periods of servant migration, there are certain distinguishing characteristics of current women migrants. In spite of poor data on the European situation, as well as regional differences, the overall trends seem to be the following:

a) Growing demand for labour power in the domestic work sector has contributed to the feminization of migration more than any other area of work (Zlotnik 2003; Sassen 2003; Anthias and Lazaridis 2000; Kofman et al. 2000). This is especially true for those countries in Europe which were former out-migration states like Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey and Poland, who have either transformed into countries of in-migration or combined outward and inward movement.

b) Migration has followed a pattern from East to West that is from Eastern Europe to Western, Southern and Northern Europe and from South to North, from Latin America, Asia and Africa to the EU countries.

c) Regarding education and age, migrant women are currently more educated than their predecessors; a section of them are from a middle-class background, and some have even reached higher education. They are migrating at an age when they have already finished their educational training sometimes after years of professional experience. They move alone, often leaving behind a partner or a family with (young) children. These factors contribute to the characterization of this phenomenon as the ‘care drain’ (Hochschild 2000), which intersects partly with the loss of knowledge and cultural capital, known as the ‘brain drain’.

d) The migration motivations of migrant women have been described by Mirjana Morokvasic (1994) as somewhat ambivalent: they leave home because they want their homes to be sustained and not because they wish to start and establish a new home somewhere else. Saskia Sassen (2003) has called this massive outflow of women ‘counter geographies of globalization’ in which migration can be seen as resistance to hardships of the transition period (see Coyle 2007 for the Polish example).

Not only is the ethnic and national diversity of the countries of origin of migrant workers noteworthy (see also Ozyegin and Hondagneu-Sotelo in this volume), but so is the speed of change in the new geographic relations between states. One of the better documented and therefore more telling cases is the development of the sector in Italy. As Scrinzi, Sarti and Parreñas note (in this volume), in Italy domestic work is the key area of occupation for migrant women. The main nationalities of domestic workers in Italy today are Ukrainian, Romanian, Filipino, Polish, Ecuadorian and Peruvian (Chaloff 2005: 4). Prior to the last regularization of immigration status in Italy in 2002, the Ukraine did not even appear on the list of sending countries; yet during 2003 and 2004 more than 100,000 Ukrainians made use of the opportunity of ‘earned legalization’ and were regularized and made visible in immigration statistics, which is why one now speaks about ‘the ‘Ukrainisation’ of the field’ (ibid.: 5). It is obvious that this development astonished many experts. Morokvasic’s assertion that: ‘The mobility rarely takes Ukrainians, Belorussians or Russians as far as Western Europe’ (Morokvasic 2003: 109), was a widely held opinion which proved wrong. Now Ukrainian women are not only found in Italian households, but also in Austrian (Haidinger in this volume), German, Spanish and other Western and Southern European ones.

What can be learned from this is that the movement of migrant domestic work in Europe is only predictable to a certain extent. So, for example, a high level of education seems to be a prerequisite for the ‘new domestics’, as in most of the destination countries they are required to speak or learn the language of the employers. It is also the case that perceived cultural proximity – with religious and ‘cultural’ affiliation as the main factors – seems to be a prerequisite for acceptance into this work area. However, many developments have taken researchers by surprise; thus, the analysis of emerging patterns is clearly a question of time and patience and one should not jump to hasty conclusions.

At this moment in time, it is noticeable that the shifting European geographies of domestic work are characterized by ongoing changes in the sending and receiving areas along the East to West and South to North axis of movement, many of which are covered in this book. There are, however, some gaps in this volume. Of the Nordic countries only Sweden is covered (Williams and Gavanas). Ireland, France and the Benelux states, for different reasons, are missing. Also, Eastern European countries, many of them sending areas, like the Baltic States, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria are missing, and in addition Turkey is not covered. The inclusion of the Israeli case (Mundlak and Shamir) can be legitimized by taking a closer look at the structure of the Israeli welfare state, which combines regulations present in strong and weak welfare state regimes in Europe: the state is responsible for providing care facilities for all age groups but has, at the same time, traditionally put care responsibilities on women’s shoulders. As in Italy, Greece and Spain, the commodification of care work in Israel has increased tremendously and the migrant profiles of workers are similar to those in European states.

Further attempts to describe emerging patterns in the European landscape of domestic work focus on the analysis of the nexus of care, gender and migration regimes.

3. The Intersection of Care, Gender and Migration Regimes

The term regime derives from the famous study by Esping-Andersen (1990) in which he explained how social policies and their effects differ between European countries. While his model of three regimes (the liberal welfare regime, the social democratic welfare regime and the conservative welfare regime) has been criticised widely for the absence of gender (Lewis 1992; Sainsbury 1994; Williams 1995; see also the overview by Duncan 2000), the key concept of his analysis – namely the relationship between the state, the market and the family – has been widely embraced. While his main question can be summed up as: ‘… how far different welfare states erode the commodity status of labour in a capitalist system (how are people independent from selling their labour) and as a consequence how far welfare states intervene in the class system’ (Duncan 2000: 4), gender studies scholars have emphasized the explanatory limitation of this model, reducing labour to gainful employment, thereby excluding care work, which in many cases is unpaid labour. Care as a central element of welfare state regulation is part and parcel of the organization of gender arrangements (Pfau-Effinger 2000), or regimes (Anttonen and Sipilä 1996; Daly 2002; Gerhard et al. 2003). This raises questions such as: Is care work equally or unequally distributed between the genders? Are care work and gainful employment equally assessed financially and culturally? What is the relationship between them? And which institutional support systems (which are in themselves also gendered) are provided by the state?

European care regimes can be symbolized by a sliding scale, with the traditional care regime linked to a conservative gender regime at one end and equality in both regimes at the other. Birgit Pfau-Effinger (2000) and Simon Duncan (2000) see West Germany as a prototype of a ‘home-caring’ society, the Mediterranean states – with the involvement of members of the extended family – as traditional, while the Nordic states are characterized as the most equalized and modern. Another possible distinction is that of Jane Lewis (1992) who differentiates between ‘strong’, ‘modified’ or ‘weak’ breadwinner states.

Within the European Union, the emancipation of women and their inclusion in the labour force has been a priority for more than 20 years. Next to gender-mainstreaming policies, the ‘reconciliation of personal, family and work life’ is currently high on the agenda (for the analysis of the Spanish case see Peterson 2007).

This policy focuses on the dismantling of hurdles that keep women from combining employment and care work. While one can evaluate the fact that care work is no longer purely seen as a ‘natural’ job for women, the question is how states have become actors in this transformation process. While some European states have a record of providing services for children, the elderly and the disabled through subsidies for care work (parental leave, crèches, elderly care and nursing homes), neoliberal welfare state restructuring now seems to lead to a market driven service and a serious decline of state-provided social care services. For example, Misra and Merz (2005) notice that: ‘Over the last decade, the trend has been for states to move towards subsidizing care that families provide or negotiate or withdrawing entirely from care provision’ (ibid.: 10). They give the example of the French crèche system which has been weakened by new policies that encourage families to hire nannies and carers, using state subsidies. A comparable example stems from the Netherlands where the marketization of the home and of child care was introduced more than a decade ago and has led to a high dependency on the income capacity and/or social networks of those who receive care (Knijn 2001). According to Knijn (ibid.) the Dutch state has been a pioneer in the individualization of care obligations and arrangements and the leaking of economic market logic into this sphere; individual regulation supported by the ideology of choice and ‘managing the self and the household’ seem to be the bridgeheads of this process.

Notwithstanding the fact that the majority of the literature dealing with the juncture between care and gender regimes is very sophisticated, many authors are blind to the third regime that plays a significant role here, the migration regime.

Migration regimes determine rules for non-nationals’ entrance into and exit out of a country. They are based on the notion of the cultural desirability of in-migration and they decide whether migrants are granted employment, social, political and civil rights, and whether or not they have access to settlement and naturalization. Migration policy in the European Union has always been dominated by the so-called needs of the labour market. However, gender norms were always deeply inscribed in the definition of these needs. A good example is the West German ‘guest worker’ system (1955-1973), which was started not because of a general labour shortage, but because of the state’s preference for the ‘housewife marriage’ which could only be continued by recruiting (male!) workers from abroad, rather than encouraging German women to enter the workplace. Likewise the actual migration regimes, which prefer a policy of ‘managed migration’ (Kofman et al. 2005) giving priority to skilled workers, are deeply gendered. In order to enable female nationals to ‘reconcile’ care work and a working life, some European states have decided to install quotas for the recruitment of domestic workers (Spain, Italy, Greece) or have opened their borders to them (Britain and Ireland). Others, such as Germany (see Lutz and Cyrus in this volume), the Nordic States and the Netherlands, have hardly acknowledged the need for migrant domestic workers, let alone included this need in their managed migration policies. This, however, does not mean that migrant domestic workers are absent from these countries; they are present and endure the difficult conditions of life in a twilight zone.

Interestingly, several articles in this volume show that in many countries the work of migrant domestics does not fall under labour law, presenting another indication that care work is deeply gendered and not considered proper ‘work’. Together the articles illustrate that a new gender order – once the dream of the feminist movement – is not in sight. Rather middle-class women have entered what Jaqueline Andall (2000) has called the ‘post feminist paradigm’, reconciling family and work by outsourcing (parts of) their care work to migrant women. The presence of migrants willing to do this work does in fact help them to balance work and life; to a certain extent it even helps them to ‘undo gender’ in the realm of their daily gender performance.

Nevertheless, the articles in this volume also show that migrant women are not ‘cultural dopes’, acting on the demand of employers and migration regimes. They have their own agendas and their subjectivity needs to be emphasised. NGOs (Respect 2000, 2001) and very seldom trade unions have dealt with the problems of migrant domestic workers; even the European Parliament (2000), albeit with little practical effect, has discussed a ‘Report on regulating domestic help in the informal sector’ (see Cyrus in this volume). Until today, however, the majority of migrant domestic workers seem to perform their work in unacceptable working conditions. It is clear that the European discussion on migrant domestic work needs to be opened up and carried out in various institutions and on various levels.

4. The Book

The first part of the book deals with the question of whether domestic work in a commodified form can be characterized as ‘business as usual’. Fiona Williams’s and Anna Gavanas’s contribution deals with the intersection of childcare and migration regim...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Series Editor’s Preface
• 1 Introduction: Migrant Domestic Workers in Europe
• Part One: Domestic Work – Business as Usual?
• Part Two: Transnational Migration Spaces: Policies, Families and Household Management
• Part Three: States and Markets: Migration Regimes and Strategies
• Index