Migrant Care Workers

Searching for New Horizons

Karen Christensen, Ingrid Guldvik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367669263
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317096696
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this beautifully-argued book, Karen Cristensen and Ingrid Guldvik provide a comparatively-based insight to the historical context for public care work and show how migration policies, general welfare and long-term care policies (including the cash-for-care schemes) as well as cultural differences in values in the UK and Norway set the context for how migrant care workers can realise their individual life projects. Through viewing migrants as individuals who actively construct their lives within the options and conditions they are given at any time, they bring to the discussion an awareness of what might be called 'a new type of migrant' one who is neither a victim of the divide between the global north and the global south, nor someone leaving family behind, but individuals using care work as a part of their own life project of potential self-improvement.

Chapter 1 Contextualizing Migrants in Care Work

Karen Christensen

DOI: 10.4324/9781315595214-1

When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.

Nelson Mandela

Introduction

When a man or woman is denied the right to live the life s/he wants in her/his home country, s/he may choose to leave the normal course of life there. This book is about people, who at some point actively choose, for various reasons, to leave their home country, for a brief or long time, because they want to live a life they believe in or desire.

At the heart of this book lie the life stories of 51 migrant workers with experiences of care work in either Norway or the United Kingdom; this care work includes various kinds of employment, among them, paid care work for disabled young and older people. Their stories have shaped and developed the book, and these stories have two important macro contextual explanations: one concerns global migration; the other the demographic challenges of an ageing population. According to the United Nations more people than ever are living ‘abroad’, or not in their country of birth; in 2013, 232 million people worldwide lived abroad, a sharp increase from the number of 175 million in 2000 and 154 million in 1990 (UN News Centre – New York, 2013). This means that today 3.2 per cent of the world’s population are migrants, people not living in their home country. According to the same source, 48 per cent of all migrants are women, and while the United States remains the most popular place to go to, two thirds of all migrants are going to Europe or Asia, with Europe attracting slightly more: 72 million people in 2013 compared with 71 million in Asia.

Although migration is today one of the central characteristics of our time, it is no new phenomenon in the world. Thousands of years ago nomad life was the main form of survival. First this took place through hunting and gathering, using the natural resources in different places, and later through offering services like trade and craft to the residents of other places. Nomads often moved in groups based on families and kinship. While the original human motivations for nomad life, survival and to get a better life have remained, migration in modern times is shaped and encouraged also by phenomena like wars, violent conflicts, political or racial persecution, uneven development of living conditions as well as migration policies regulating access to different nations, and possibilities of obtaining citizenship in other countries. Included in this may also be people’s desire to maintain a lifestyle not possible in one’s homeland. Within this general picture of people, places and movements, some major changes contribute to the historical understanding of the lives of the migrant care workers in this book: one is the move from once-in-a-lifetime emigration such as, for example, the huge Norwegian emigration to America in the nineteenth century, consisting of around 800,000 people out of a population of only 2 million people (NOS, 1921). Norway remained the second most common source of US migrants after Ireland for many years (NOS, 1921). Most emigrants never returned to their home country, for many reasons, the long and dangerous sea journey being one of them. It is estimated that 50 million people left Europe in the years between 1820 and 1930 to look for a better life in North America. Modern infrastructure and technology have changed this whole picture. Almost all parts of the world are now easy to reach by plane, and decreasing flight prices have made this an option for more than the rich. If there are barriers at this macro level, these are rather related to migration policy regulation. The migratory stories in this book are part of this historical migration change away from emigration as a once-in-a-lifetime experience to more varied patterns of migration.

The other challenge reflects the demographic change toward ageing populations in the developed world, which can be regarded as a success story, but one with important implications for the social care sector that is responsible for long-term care and support services for older and disabled people. Across most European countries, according to The Greying of Europe report (EU, 2012), one third of the population will consist of people older than 65 in 2060. While very few will need social care until the last years of their life, it is expected in many European countries that the demand for the social care workforce will increase extensively and even be higher than is possible to meet from the country’s own labour force. This is already the case in both Norway and the UK (Texmon and Stølen, 2009; Skills for Care (SfC), 2012), the two countries of particular interest in this book. Although the services that are the focus in this book are services which currently are much more used by disabled than older people, this still is an important part of the context: that this work is part of a growing sector which is at times under high pressure. And also, many social care workers – throughout their working life – are employed to provide care for disabled and older people, rather than one age group alone. On a macro level this is one central reason for the attraction of migrant workers to this sector as it offers jobs that are easily available, and easy to leave. There may not even be a strong competition for such work from the ‘home grown’ population as these are generally jobs that do not require formal qualifications – typically associated with low-paid, low-status female jobs – which are often not attractive to UK workers (cf. e.g. Hussein, Stevens and Manthorpe, 2011; Moriarty, 2010; Cangiano, Shutes, Spencer and Leeson, 2009). There are, currently, plans to introduce a Care Certificate in the English social care sector from March 2015 (Skills for Care (SfC), 2014). But as this book will make a contribution to show, for migrant care workers it is unlikely that this will add to or change the situation significantly for them, as this skill requirement is overall framed by the contextual organization of the sector and its historical roots as well as migration policies (see below). While the care work situation on an everyday level can be challenging, as we will show throughout the book, this is another central social factor accounting for the attraction of migrants to this sector, and the migrant workers’ stories in this book are part of as well as contributors to this broader picture.

The Aim and Rationale of the Book – Leaving a ‘Victim’ Perspective

The aim of the book is to give insight into the creative individual development of transnational (involving more than one country) ways of life and life projects created by migrants’ interpretation and handling of historical national and transnational structural conditions. This includes the negotiation and potential conflict between individual wishes regarding life career, work and partner/ family matters on one side and on the other side migration policy, labour market characteristics (in particular regarding care work in people’s homes), cultural and gender related norms and patterns in the host country as well as in the home country. We aim to contribute to the understanding and explanation of migrants’ ways into and experiences with care work and to set these within their life projects including migration and care work.

The book counters a tendency to one-sidedness in the literature on migration and care developed over the last 10–15 years by authors such as Anderson (2000), Parreñas (2001), Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2003), Yeates (2009), Williams (2010; 2012), Isaksen (2010; 2012), Cox (2011) and Lutz (2002; 2008; 2011). Although there are emerging critiques by some authors, for example, Williams, and Yeates, that we discuss below, there are nevertheless several common issues which the literature has not yet seriously extended since it ‘started’ (cf. e.g. Rollins, 1985) with Anderson’s (2000) work on domestic workers undertaking ‘dirty work’ in middle-class households. In particular in the Nordic countries, among higher middle-class families, this is also about using migrants to maintain gender equality in these households, as gender equality is high on the agenda in these countries (cf. e.g. the case of Norway in this matter (Bikova, 2010; Fjell, 2010)). The key aspects of these issues in this literature cover three common grounds. One is a focus on the worldwide change from male migrants to an increasing number of female migrants. This is sometimes called the ‘feminization’ of migration, which means that the literature has had a strong focus on ‘global women’. A second focus is on the type of work replaced by the migrants in the host country. The work they replace is described typically as caused by ‘outsourcing of reproductive labour’, which means that ‘migrants are employed to provide that labour as domestic workers’ (cf. Yeates, 2009, p. 21). Therefore, in particular, domestic workers (including au pairs) have been included in this literature, with recent empirically based analysis of domestic workers by Lutz (2011). She additionally brings into this debate a historical view on servants and domestic service and its shift from men to women. However, there is also some focus on specific labour market-based recruitment of foreign workers with a concentration on (female) nurses within the health care sector (see e.g. Yeates, 2009; or Isaksen, 2012). So whether this is about wealthy households in the north who need women from the south to do household work for families with two breadwinners, or (skilled) labour market areas needing foreign labour, this is all about women’s work (either traditional domestic work including childcare, or skilled typical female work) being replaced by migrant women who are in a weaker position, economically and socially. In particular, this includes those who have children and husbands in their home country. The third aspect concerns the theoretical focus framing these issues. Here a particular centre of interest has been on ‘global care chains’, a concept first developed by the American sociologist Arlie Hochschild (2000) which points to this whole movement as a global issue about how the richer parts of the world rely on those from poorer countries, with important consequences for migrant workers as well as the families left behind. In other words, the main perspective on migrants in this literature has often been what we would call a ‘victim’ perspective inspired by feminist and poverty approaches. Although this book looks to new perspectives beyond the issues raised by these ‘exploitation’ theorists, there is no doubt that they have made important contributions to the field of migration and care, and we will, where relevant in the book’s discussions, include some of their work.

Fiona Williams, a British social policy academic, has, as mentioned, criticized some of the one-sidedness in this literature. For example, she has drawn attention to the fact that there is more diverse migration in this area taking place than is often remarked upon, that migration is not only global but also takes place across and within regions of the global North and South, and that some of the migrant women do not have any children and others do not leave children behind but may, for example, bring their mothers to take care of their children while working in the host country (Williams, 2012, p. 388). And Nicola Yeates, a British academic working in the fields of sociology and social policy, criticizes the literature that has ‘in practice focused on migrant female domestic workers’ (Yeates, 2009, p. 20), presenting them as ‘the servants of globalization’ (Parreñas, 2001). Such critiques show that there is a growing need for serious attempts to try get beyond the one-sided focus on global women, women’s work replaced by other women’s work, the leaving-children-behind perspective conceptualized by the ‘care drain’, and, in general, the exploitation perspective. It is our aim with this book to contribute to the rebalancing of this one-sidedness. We systematically avoid a focus on migrants as victims of global processes and meso-level processes regarding needs, including equality maintenance in middle-class households, although this does not mean we will avoid a focus on the challenging context of social care. It is indeed important to understand what kind of challenges migrants actually face, but this does not imply they are steered by them. Therefore, our perspective is to understand migrants as individuals who actively construct their lives within the options and conditions they are given at any time. In other words: we intend to bring into the discussion an awareness of what might be called ‘a new type of migrant’ who is not mainly the victim of the North–South problem and who is not necessarily leaving family behind, but is an individual making care work a part of their own life project, not a family project.

We also intend to bring in a new and stronger welfare perspective. Firstly this is because we will focus on care work, that is either fully paid (Norwegian case) or to a large extent paid for by public money (UK case). In the UK there is often some self-funding (see below) due to the strict eligibility criteria for publicly funded social care in the UK. The care work that is focused on here is primarily publicly funded care work in terms of having its point of departure in the welfare state allocating social care services to disabled and older people with social care needs, in the international literature often called ‘long-term care services’, and in the UK ‘adult social care services’. But additionally then, and as indicated above, in the UK case this is increasingly mixed with self-funding, thereby interweaving private and public money for paying the care workers. Another more general mix is the intersection of (primarily) public money and the care work that takes place in people’s homes rather than buildings based care (e.g. care homes or day centres) – crossing more public and private boundaries.

Secondly, our perspective has a strong welfare dimension because we bring a disability perspective into this discussion: our focus is not on traditional home-based care services but on those based on the idea of independence. Many disabled people and their organizations have been keen to support one of the current key ideas of European welfare states: the idea of independence through the welfare arrangement of cash-for-care (explored more below) whereby eligible disabled people – and so far to a lesser extent older people with social care needs – are given cash to buy their own care, that is, to employ directly or indirectly their own care workers (Ungerson and Yeandle, 2007; Andersen, Askheim, Begg and Guldvik, 2006). This care work is supposed not to be traditional care work, the content of which is decided by local authorities. It is instead directed by the users who choose what needs to be done and how, provided this is in accordance with meeting their assessed needs, and who often take over the employer role (more on this below). As this is not routine housework or care work stereotypically only attracting women, the new forms of support may also attract men, and in particular migrant men. One reason for it attracting migrants is because the work demands a high degree of flexibility in regard to working hours, working times and length of employment which many host population workers want to avoid; it may fit migrants who have already left the normal course of life in their home country. One might say, simply, that two searches for independence – the one by disabled people and the one by migrant workers looking for new life chances and using care work on the way – are meeting in a global world.

In summary, we will extend the mainstream themes in the existing dominating literature on migration and care with the help of what might be conceptualized as ‘the global cross of independence’ crossing wel...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Contextualizing Migrants in Care Work
• 2 The Study’s Empirical Ground: Access, Collection, Analyses and Ethics
• 3 The Life Trajectories of Migrant Care Workers
• 4 Social Mobility – Downwards to Care Work
• 5 Gendered Pathways and Care Worker Profiles
• 6 Negotiating Cultural Differences
• 7 Facing Challenging Intimate Relationships
• 8 The Global Cross of Independence
• Appendix
• References
• Index