Crossborder Care

Lessons from Central Europe

Miloslav Bahna, Martina Sekulová

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319970271
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319970288
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Social Sciences

This book analyses the circular migration of care workers in Central Europe using the example of Slovak carers in 24-hour care provision for the elderly in Austria. Challenging analyses that focus primarily on care drain and care regimes, Bahna and Sekulová supplement quantitative methodology with qualitative fieldwork to demonstrate the importance of the sending country's economic context. The authors discuss the dynamics of economic differences between Austria and its post-communist neighbors as preconditions of the crossborder care provision, bridging analyses of policy and legal frameworks with approaches from labor migration study. Even as they scrutinize the relevance of care drain-based analyses, Bahna and Sekulová bring to the fore the interplay of economic differences, social policies, gender and migration regimes with geographic proximity to study long-term impacts of care work, including an analysis of employment after care work.

© The Author(s) 2019

Miloslav Bahna and Martina SekulováCrossborder Carehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97028-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Miloslav Bahna¹ and Martina Sekulová²

(1)

Institute for Sociology, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia

(2)

Independent Researcher, Bratislava, Slovakia

Miloslav Bahna (Corresponding author)

Martina Sekulová

I have not employed anyone illegally—neither has my wife. My sister-in-law took the initiative after her mother’s complicated surgery. She approached a charity which was recommended by the hospital—they provided the care worker. We paid 1600 to 1700 Euro a month….

Wolfgang Schüssel, the head of the Government of Austria, 23 August 2006

End Abstract

In contrast to the situation when the Austrian Prime Minister had to explain the employment of a care worker from Slovakia during the campaign for the 2006 national election (Kindermann, 2006), the topic of this book is already a well-established area in academic literature. The phenomenon of the elderly in affluent and aging Western countries being cared for by migrant care workers has been studied and written about extensively, particularly in the last decade. Despite this circumstance, our book is able to offer many insights into new or under-researched areas of this field. To understand why certain aspects of migrant care workers have been neglected, we shall briefly outline the history of the development of academic thought on the subject. While conceptually closely related to research on domestic work—being the last of the three “Cs”: the cooking, cleaning, and carrying triad (Anderson, 2000)—there are two research traditions, in particular, which had the biggest influence on the ways in which the arrangement of care provision by a migrant has been portrayed and analyzed in academic literature so far.

The first tradition, the “care chains framework,” is related to early research on “transnational motherhood” in the 1990s, which later inspired the popular care drain metaphor. Authors such as Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila (1997) and Parreñas (2001) focused on young women from Latin America, or from the Philippines, who traveled to the US to earn money, which they used to provide for their kids and families in their home countries. While providing care in the Global North, these women often left their kids behind in the care of other women, creating what has been later coined the “global care chain” by Hochschild (2000). When migrant care providers left their home countries, care drain, another influential concept termed by Hochschild (2004), was born. Given the third-world source countries and the US as a destination, parallels to colonialist exploitation of the countries of the “Global South” are drawn, comparing love—accompanying the care provision—to raw materials once imported from these countries (Hochschild, 2004).

Whereas the authors and objects of studies in the first tradition can be located in North America, the second research tradition influential in research on migrant care workers has European roots. In the vein of the seminal welfare state analysis by Esping-Andersen (1990), new typologies focusing particularly on welfare policies in the area of care provisions were born. A Europe-wide typology of “care regimes” classifying the various approaches of European countries to care provision to children and the elderly was introduced by Bettio and Plantenga (2004). Two years later, Bettio and her colleagues made the link between a care regime (or care model) and the reliance on migrants in the care provision for the young or the elderly (Bettio, Simonazzi, & Villa, 2006). To account for the highly gendered nature of care provision, Lutz (2008) suggested an amendment of care and migration regimes investigation with an analysis of the “gender regime.”

The conceptual apparatus of both perspectives almost inevitably drives their attention to particular aspects of care provision by migrants. With its focus on care provided by female migrants, the first perspective tends to explore the emergence of care gaps and how they are tackled via global care chains. Related issues of transnational mothering or transnational partnering focus on the maintenance of relationships from a distance (see Madianou & Miller, 2011, 2012). On the other hand, when care regimes are explored, the focus is on how the respective policy mix creates an environment facilitating the employment of migrant carers. A detailed mapping of the policies introduced and their use is characteristic of these approaches. If care drain is the most typical concept in the first approach, cash-for-care benefits—allowing to shop for care, coming from anywhere in the world (also)informally—form the notorious focus point of the second perspective.

In many regards, these two research traditions are not interested in the agency of care workers themselves.¹ We can say that in both cases, they are, rather, an object of welfare policies or global inequalities than an active subject in search of a better life. Care drain is something that just happened to the care workers and forces them to react.² Focusing on welfare policies explains why it is affordable for families to tackle their care needs through migrant care providers. Why this employment is attractive for the migrants is not relevant. The question of why the carers do arrive and who they are seems to be satisfactorily covered in both approaches by the fact that they live in countries that are generally poorer than the countries of their employers. It can be observed that the bulk of research in both traditions is done by academics from the receiving countries using explanation factors present in the destinations of the migrant care workers. We can exemplify this neglect of the source countries in the fact that approaches developed from interviews with workers coming from third-world countries to the US have been directly applied to intra-European migration occurring between two bordering countries in Europe. These features of the current research have left large, unexplored gaps in the topic of migrant care workers in Europe. The care drain perspective has nothing to say about seven out of eight carers from Slovakia not having young children of their own to look after. It also struggles to explain the high level of satisfaction of Slovak care workers. The policy explanation fails to answer the question why 24-hour care work in Austria attracts carers from Slovakia, but not from other post-communist Austrian neighbors with the same wage levels. Also, policy-related approaches do not explain why the employment of migrant care workers occurs also in countries that provide high levels of residential care provision for the elderly. Indeed, it seems from works exploring migrant care workers or those with migrant backgrounds, that the main distinction provided by the care regime is the distinction between countries importing migrant live-in carers and countries employing second-generation migrants in long-term care facilities. This points toward the generally unappealing image of this kind of work (see Pfau-Effinger & Rostgaard, 2011).

Focusing on the policy-driven demand for care work and tackling the care-related problems of the (mostly) female carers, research on the topic has so far created a body of literature that does not engage with approaches typical in studies of labor migration. Questions such as why there are Slovak care workers in Austria but almost no Hungarian ones, what determines whether someone decides to become a care worker, what explains work satisfaction or the income levels in this labor market, and what happens after leaving care work are omitted as uninteresting. Perhaps the best example of the disconnection between research on migration related to care provision and labor migration is the approach to the dual labor market concept. Since the early 1970s, economists have observed particular features of certain sectors of economy often dominated by migrant workers (Bonacich, Light, & Wong, 1977; Piore, 1973). While seemingly well suited for describing the employment of workers in private households, such as that of the elder care providers, until recently, we did not find a single scholarly work recognizing the potential of this concept in the research on migrant care workers.

There is another particularity of the dominant approaches to the topic of our study. It is the almost exclusive reliance on qualitative interview data. This is not only a characteristic of studies focusing on care workers in Europe, the tendency for using small-scale qualitative research is dominant in the global academic production on the subject as well. Although this is an understandable feature, given the mostly informal work arrangements studied, it is clearly a limiting circumstance when exploring the phenomenon.

For the reasons mentioned earlier, we claim that the current academic writing covers only a particular section of the topic “v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Slovak Care Workers in Austria: An Overview
• 3. Care Workers as Economic Migrants
• 4. Does the Family Suffer?
• 5. Crossborder Care in the Long Term: Intersections of Age, Gender, and Circularity
• 6. Leaving Care Work: Career Prospects in a Secondary Labor Market
• 7. Conclusion: Labor Migration After All?
• Back Matter