Migration and Care Labour

Theory, Policy and Politics

B. Anderson, I. Shutes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349457441, 9781137319692
• eBook ISBN: 9781137319708
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Social Sciences

The provision of care has been widely referred to as facing a 'crisis'. International migrants are increasingly relied upon to provide care – as domestic workers, nannies, care assistants and nurses. This international volume examines the global construction of migrant care labour and how it manifests itself in different contexts.

Part I
Theorizing Migrant Care Labour

1

Making Connections Across the Transnational Political Economy of Care

Fiona Williams

Introduction

In her book on Virginia Woolf, Mrs Woolf and the Servants, Alison Light documents beautifully the end of the earlier bourgeois period of the servant. Virginia Woolf, a feminist icon, wrote both brutally and with affection about Nellie, the woman who dutifully administered unto her for sixteen years. The question of Nellie was never far from her mind: she anguished continuously about this asymmetrical relationship of emotional, physical and economic dependency. She wrote in 1929: ‘I am sordidly debating with myself the question of Nelly.¹ It is an absurdity the time Leonard and I have wasted in talking about servants. And it can never be done with because the fault lies with the system’ (Light, 2008: 176). The ‘system’ Woolf refers to here was the British class system. Today we might read these comments as politically pertinent but personally impertinent and evasive. After all, as Light suggests, in her quest for a ‘room of one’s own’, Virginia did not ask who would clean it for one.

How do we understand today’s ‘system’ with respect to the social relations of care labour? There are many factors in this particular story; they include the global increase in women’s waged labour without a significant balancing of their domestic/caring responsibilities, either on the part of male family members or state/workplace support; a so-called ‘care deficit’ or ‘care crisis’ across many parts of the world²; an ageing society; new international divisions of labour; the gendered and racialized divisions of care labour; the neo-liberal consequences of poverty and structural adjustment programmes in poorer countries; restructuring of welfare states; changing migration systems within shifting national and international boundaries; and more.

But how do we stack the factors up? And how do we connect them in ways that do justice to theoretical adequacy – the recognition of both macroeconomic global forces and micro care relations, along with the policies and social and political networks that lace them together? This chapter aims to relate these macro dynamics to the meso-level of national and supranational state social policies and how these contribute to the transnational social and political economy of care. In doing this I draw a continuum of care working that extends from home-based domestic and care work to institution-based social and health care. Further, in drawing attention to the role of the state, I ask what strategies states might develop at national, supranational and international levels to counter the inequalities that ensue. In other words, what are the analytical and normative bases for global social justice in care work migration?

To do this the chapter develops in four parts, each identifying conceptual connections that offer insights into the relationship between migration and care. The first part reviews relevant analytical frameworks that place the crisis of care within a global context. Next I draw on regime analysis to look at how the restructuring of state social policies has been part and parcel of this crisis and the increase in care and health work migration. In the third part I present the main dimensions of the transnational social and political economy of care. Finally, I suggest how the latter analyses might inform an understanding of global social justice with respect to care and migration.

A crisis in social reproduction

The first analysis is not grounded in research on migration and care; it presents the crisis of social reproduction as a constituent part of the current crisis of global capital but I start with it because it grants salience to the study of care migration in relation to both wider contemporary changes and feminist scholarship.

In a critical reinterpretation of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (Polanyi, 1944/57), Nancy Fraser argues that most analyses of the current capitalist crisis are gender blind and asserts the obverse, that feminism lacks a framework to link social changes affecting gender relations to this crisis (Fraser, 2011). Further, given the multidimensional nature of current global crises, she suggests that we need an integrated approach to understand how these dimensions relate to each other. So Fraser turns to Polanyi’s tripartite analysis of the history of capitalist crisis over the 19th century and first half of the 20th century. In brief, Polanyi’s argument is that capitalism’s self-destructive impulse lies in its turning land, labour and money into ‘fictitious commodities’. The marketization of each of these domains led to despoiling the land, demoralizing the labourer and destroying the value of money through speculation. In Fraser’s view, it is the integrated nature of this analysis that is important along with the recognition of political agency – through the conflict between capital and labour – as the key to effect social and economic change. However, the analysis is blind to both gender and struggles for emancipation. She therefore rewrites, for contemporary analysis, the three crisis-prone constituents of land, labour and money as the interlinked systemic crises of ecology, social reproduction and finance, respectively. And she inserts struggles over domination into the action framework, notably feminist and anti-imperialist mobilization.

Thus, integral to changes in labour today is ‘reproductive labour as fictitious commodity’ (or, as she also calls this, ‘the wages of care’). The retrenchment of public services and the marketization of care have contributed to the commodification of women’s previously unwaged labour, and the effect of employing migrant labour to do this work merely displaces those hidden reproductive processes that support the productive edifice. Key areas of mobilization today, she argues, have been around work/life balance and cuts in public services, such that the crisis in social reproduction represents ‘a smouldering flashpoint’, of the capitalist crisis (Fraser, 2011).

Fraser’s intention is to centre stage the crisis in social reproduction as one of the three elements, along with the crises of ecology and finance, contributing to the contemporary crisis of global capitalism. Each of these three threatens future security. Sustainability is threatened by the crisis of ecology; the affective and care processes upon which not only productive labour but also human solidarity depends are jeopardized by the crisis of social reproduction; and the capacity of money to store value for the future is undermined by the global financial crisis. Furthermore each is linked to the other. For example, the global financial crisis has led to major retrenchments in many countries on social expenditure which threatens further the capacity of communities to care. In addition, Fraser argues that it is important to add in a moral dimension: asserting a crisis of social reproduction should not imply an idealization of what went before but should draw insights from the moral critiques provided by feminist and anti-imperialist struggles for emancipation to argue for social, economic and political transformation.

What is very useful about this framework is that it makes social reproduction central to the analysis – and here I take this to be both the care and domestic work traditionally carried out by women in the home and the semi-formal and formal health and social care investments made by states. In other words, those feminized processes of care and support are not, in this theory, subordinated to the urgent issues of the environment or finance, but stand, analytically, alongside them and part and parcel of them. At the same time, as an overarching theory, it does not spell out the dynamics and tensions in the relationship between systems and actors, or the different levels at which this crisis of social reproduction manifests itself, or how this may overlay historical antecedents. I now turn to analyses of the gendered and racialized nature of domestic work and of an international division of reproductive labour, which have contributed to an understanding of those dynamics (Anderson, 2000; Heyzer et al., 1994; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001; Parreñas, 2001).

Parreñas’ seminal study Servants of Globalization (Parreñas, 2001), a study of Filipina migrant domestic workers’ experiences in Rome and Los Angeles and their own and their families’ experiences in the Philippines, conceptualizes the system in which these workers are caught up as ‘the international division of reproductive labour’. The concept makes a number of important connections. First is the historical relationship of reproductive labour to ‘race’, gender and class by building on Glenn’s (1992) work on ‘the racial division of reproductive labour’. This identifies the continuing role in care work and domestic service that black and minority ethnic women have played in the USA. Second, the analysis makes links to the specific yet central incorporation of women from poorer regions into globalized production processes by drawing on Sassen’s (1984) gendered analysis of the new international division of labour and of the development of global cities. These cities form the focus for specialized firms employing highly professionalized male and female workers whose catering, cleaning and care needs are serviced at low cost by migrant workers – in other words, by an international reproductive labour force. Third, the study connects to the discursive nature of nationhood and its contribution to the subordination of migrant groups, with reference to Sassen’s understanding of the way in which globalization both opens up national economies while effecting a political closure of nationalist (anti-immigration) sentiment. What Parreñas adds further to this is an analysis of the partial citizenship status that these systems construct for migrant women in this work.

A fourth connection is in a multi-levelled analysis that ties agency to structure: Parreñas (2001, 2005) connects the micro level of migrant women’s experiences with these macro-level processes described earlier, as well as to the meso level – through the transnational institutions and networks which migrant workers create to connect across the diasporic space that they and their families inhabit.

The concept of the ‘transfer of caretaking’ enables a fifth connection across space. It describes the three-tiered process involved when a migrant mother leaves her dependants in the care of another (usually another woman) to care for the dependants and household of a working woman in a richer country (later coined ‘the global care chain’ by Hochschild, 2000). What this does is link the source and destination countries of migrant women through a commonality of experience – the pressure on women to balance earning and caring responsibilities without support from male partners and/or adequate support from the state – but within a deeply structural geo-political inequality of condition. In the study of Children of Global Migration (2005), Parreñas applies the multi-levelled analysis in greater detail to experiences within the source country of the Philippines through the concept of the ‘global economy of care’ to which I return in the discussions to follow.

These analyses make important connections with regard to the macro and transnational dynamics in which care and care work migration are situated, and the micro-level experiences of care and migration. I now focus on the contribution of research from Europe that has analysed the influence of meso-level state policies in terms of the intersections of care, migration and employment regimes.

The state and intersecting regimes

Research into the increases in migrant women working in home-based domestic and care work in Europe posed new issues for the analysis of institutional factors at the meso level (Lutz, 2008; Williams and Gavanas, 2008). Behind these was a new convergence across social policies, appearing at the beginning of this century in the European Union (EU), in national European governments and international organizations such as the OECD and World Bank. Termed ‘social investment’ policies, these have focused on investing in the human capital of all adults as part of a strategy to enhance the potential for labour market self-sufficiency, economic competition and social inclusion – signifying a move from an old breadwinner model of family life to a new two-earner model encouraging women’s employment (Williams, 2009).

Across Europe, and also elsewhere – Korea and Japan, for example – care policies have seemed to represent a greater recognition for public responsibility in meeting working women’s care responsibilities and people’s care needs. At the same time, whether these are liberal or social democratic states, what has become common is the growing commodification of care and the influence of markets to meet care needs (Lister et al., 2007; Ungerson and Yeandle, 2007; Williams and Brennan, 2012). There have been three central dynamics here. First is the shift from providing public care services to giving individuals cash payments to help them buy in care.Forms of cash provision or tax credit have been introduced in the UK, Spain, Finland and France to assist with childcare or domestic work. In addition, allowances and ‘direct payments’ in, for example, the UK, Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Austria have enabled older or disabled people or their family carers to buy in support and assistance.

Second, there has been increasing reliance of states on the not-for-profit (voluntary) sector and especially the private-for-profit sector to deliver care services. Associated with this has been the development of home-based, often low-paid, commodified care or domestic work. So although some support for care may emanate from the state, it is often the case that people will find their care services and providers in the private market. This establishes service users as consumers seeking good value for money in a market place of care commodities.

Third, where care services are contracted out to the private-for-profit sector, there are lower levels of pay along with greater difficulties with labour shortages – compared with care work in the public sector (Cangiano et al., 2009). Combined with the historical devaluation of care labour (where much care work is defined as ‘unskilled’), this means that employers recruit those with least bargaining power. This may include local working class women (such as Nellie, mentioned in the introduction) and internal migrants from rural areas; however, increasingly, international migrant women workers fill this gap. A combination of migration rules and lack of social protection make migrant workers particularly attractive to employers (see Shutes and Chiatti, 2012 and below), along with the fact that they are often overqualified – in all countries of the EU, migrants in general are more than twice as likely to be overqualified for the work they do as their native born counterparts (Eurostat, 2011; see also Anderson et al., 2006, and Busch, 2012, for preferences by parents for migrant nannies).

These developments have contributed to increases across Europe in the employment of migrant care workers. For example, in Spain in 2009, 62.5 per cent of those employed in domestic/care work in households were migrant workers – a fourfold increase in ten years (Leon, 2010). These are migrant women from Latin America, North Africa, the Philippines and Romania, Bulgaria and the Ukraine. In Italy in 2006, 72.6 per cent of home-based care workers were migrants from similar countries – a threefold increase in four years (van Hooren, 2008).³ These figures refer to registered foreign-born workers, but there are many who are not registered or who are unauthorized, undocumented or waiting to receive their papers (van Hooren, 2008). In addition, both Japan and Korea, countries with a traditionally ethno-nationalist sentiment that opposed the immigration of people from other countries, and especially other ethnic groups, have initiated the recruitment of co-ethnic foreigners (that is, people of Japanese/Korean descent) as care workers for older people. In Korea these increased three and a half times between 2007 and 2010, from 93,000 to 334,000 (Michel and Peng, 2012). It is not altogether clear what impact the recession will have on these increases. As the chapter by Ibañez and León (this volume) indicates, in the case of Spain there continues to be a demand for migrant workers in the home-based domestic and care work sector, despite a decline in migrant workers in other labour market sectors.

However, this demand for migrant care labour has not been even across Europe. I have elsewhere described the situation as one of ‘converging variations’ which has been shaped by the differences in the changing roles of the state, market and family in the provision of care, combined with the particular ways migrant labour has been employed within specific areas and sectors of care work (Williams, 2012). It is most marked in the Southern European welfare states where migrants replace a former reliance on family carers (Bettio et al., 2006). It is in understanding these differences within converging trends that the elaboration of welfare regime analysis has provided particular insights (Shutes and Chiatti, 2012; Kilkey, Lutz and Palenga-Mőllenbeck, 2010; Williams and Gavanas, 2008 and 2010; Williams, 2012).

Using empirical research carried out on home-based childcare work in Madrid, London and Stockholm (Williams and G...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Theorizing Migrant Care Labour
• Part II The Institutional Contexts of Migrant Care Labour
• Part III Governance and Political Mobilization across Care, Work and Migration
• Conclusion
• Index