Home Care for Sale

The Transnational Brokering of Senior Care in Europe

Brigitte Aulenbacher, Helma Lutz, Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck, Karin Schwiter

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781529680140
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781529680409
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

The world of senior care provision and care work is changing rapidly. Across Europe, brokering agencies for live-in care workers have become powerful players in reshaping welfare systems, transnational care chains and working conditions. This volume draws together the latest research on live-in home care for seniors in Europe, exploring processes of commodification and marketisation, the transnationalisation of care work, the private household as a workplace, and workers' contestation of the live-in care arrangement. Together, they depict far-reaching challenges in care provision and care work.


"A must-read for anyone wishing to understand the changes in the political economy of care in the 21st century. A compelling exploration of the emergence of care brokerage and agency intermediation in Europe with a variety of examples from different countries and care settings."
- Professor Sabrina Marchetti, Ca' Foscari University of Venice

"Essential reading. Rich empirical and conceptual work provides an exhaustive account of the commodification, marketisation, transnationalisation and exploitation in the care industry, all in the context of global and local inequalities. This is a group of amazing critical analysts who dare to confront some of the key contradictions of our current painful social transformation in European terrains."
- Professor Attila Melegh, Corvinus University Budapest

"An encyclopaedic account of the commodification and marketisation of transnationally-brokered senior home care provision across Europe. It pays close attention to the economic and social inequalities, as well as state policies, that underlie this new migration industry, and the collective efforts to contest and improve conditions of work and care. Home Care for Sale documents the geography of care chains within a divided Europe - a geography that both complements and disrupts conventional understandings of international care chains between the Global North and South. A must-read for those interested in senior home care, social reproduction, migration, border studies and the workings and repercussions of neoliberal state policies."
- Professor Géraldine Pratt, University of British Columbia

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• 1 Introduction Senior Home Care for Sale: Agency-Brokered Transnational Live-in Care in Europe1
• Part I Care Markets, Care Provision, Working Conditions and the Role of Brokering Agencies
• 2 Divided Europe? The Role of Home Care Agencies From Poland, and How the Ideal of Decent Work Gets Lost Along Transnational Value Chains
• 3 Business Preferences in Long-Term Care: The Case of Live-in Home Care in Ireland
• 4 The Effectiveness of Informal Care Work Brokering in Italy
• 5 Diversification of the Senior Home Care Market in Hungary: Informality and the Operational Modes of Intermediaries
• 6 The ‘Good Agency’? On the Interplay of Formalisation and Informality in the Contested Marketisation of Live-in Care in Austria
• Part II Transnationality, Mobilities, Border Regimes and Global Care Chains
• 7 Multiple Interacting Migration Patterns in Senior Care in Europe's Semi-Periphery
• 8 Distorted Emancipation and the Transnational Political Economy of Social Reproduction
• 9 ‘Care Bonds’ in Times of COVID-19
• 10 Transnational Migration and Brokering Agencies in the Home Care Sector in Spain
• Part III Worlds Apart: The Household as a Workplace
• 11 ‘As I Always Say, You Really Need to Tame Them!’ The Working Conditions of Migrant Senior Care Workers Employed by Brokering Agencies in Belgium
• 12 Brokering Agencies as Managers of Conflicts and Emotions in Live-in Senior Care
• 13 Shaping Working Hours in the Shadow of the Law? Experiences of Live-in Migrant Care Workers, Brokering Agencies and Family Care Managers in the Netherlands
• 14 Shaping the Social and Work-Related Well-Being of Migrant Live-in Carers: The Ambiguous Role of Labour Market Intermediaries in England
• 15 At Home With the Employer? – Contradictory Notions of the Care Client's Home as a Workplace and Living Space
• Part IV Contested Labour Rights, Fair-Care Initiatives and Labour Organising
• 16 Ethical Comments on the Working-Time Regime of Live-in Care1
• 17 Fair Care? On the Prospects of (and Limits to) Implementing ‘Fairness’ in Live-in Care
• 18 Invisible, Yet One of the Family? Unravelling the Precarious Employment Conditions of Migrant Filipina Live-in Domestic Workers and Caregivers in Greece
• 19 Breaking Out of the ‘Prisoner of Love’ Dilemma: Infrastructures of Solidarity for Live-in Care Workers in Switzerland
• Part V Afterword
• 20 Brokering Care Migration – A New Element in the Transnational Care Worker Supply Chain
• Index