The New Maids: Transnational Women and the Care Economy
... Outsourcing domestic work is an established global phenomenon attracting much scholarly attention. Questions have been asked about the gendered consequences when women outsource domestic work to other women (Lutz, 2011), as also reflected by the subtitle of Arlie Russell Hochschild's book from 2012, 'What happens when we pay others to live our lives for us'. Over the last decade, similar questions have been asked in Sweden as the uptake of domestic services has increased (Statistics Sweden, 2022) because of the so-called RUT reform. ...
... The choice to focus on women living in families using domestic services is twofold. First, as Lutz (2011) points out, household work throughout the Western world is women's work. Changes to the organisation of domestic work are therefore likely to affect women more than men. ...
... We argue that in the Swedish context, this is possible specifically because gender equality has been equated with women's rights to paid labour which is of special importance to the reform. Focusing on paid labour, however, risks omitting intersectional differences, including gendered, classed and racialised aspects of outsourcing domestic work (Lutz, 2011) in 21st-century Sweden. What further implications this has for everyday family life as well as men's perspectives on and men's part in the doing of everyday family practices needs to be further investigated. ...
Outsourcing domestic work is an established global phenomenon increasingly common in Sweden, especially since introducing the RUT reform offering tax deductions for domestic services. Little is known about Swedish families using domestic services. This article investigates the narratives of 12 Swedish women living in families using domestic services and what this means for their everyday family life. The results show that outsourcing in part is regarded as a solution to a gender equality problem as it relieves women from unpaid household work. However, the women’s narratives also reveal that even when domestic work is outsourced, the women continue to have the main responsibility for everyday family life. The article thus contributes insights into how gender equality in everyday family practices is negotiated when domestic work is outsourced.
... Low value, low social protection, involuntary part-time and lack of career perspectives all characterise jobs in this domain (Avril, 2014;Devetter et al., 2015;Kalleberg, 2011). These elements reflect in a labour force typically composed by the most vulnerable layers of the labour market, namely migrant women (Lutz, 2011;Anderson & Shutes, 2014;Kofman & Raghuram, 2015). Overall, the feminisation of the domestic sector, the gendered division of labour, and the vulnerability of migrant workers all intersect to create a situation in which migrant women are disproportionately affected by precarious work, when employed in the domestic sector (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010;Kofman & Raghuram, 2015). ...
... The demand for domestic helpers, especially in households where women hold a full-time paid occupation, can be met by migrant women, who are more easily employed under non-standard contracts, such as temporary or part-time contracts. Thus, the overrepresentation of migrant women in this sector can be linked to gendered and racialised assumptions about women's work and the social devaluation of care work (Anderson, 2000;Lutz, 2011;Marchetti, 2022). On the other hand, because gender equality may have a transformative impact on gender and racial stereotypes, it can contribute to shaping working conditions in the labour market, thus affecting the lives and professional trajectories of workers. ...
... A vast literature has emphasised that domestic workwhich in its broad definition includes both housework and (non-medical non-qualified) care work (ILO, 2013)enjoys a bad reputation and is traditionally attributed low value (Anderson, 2000;Cox, 2006;Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2002;Hochschild, 2012;Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001;Lutz, 2008Lutz, , 2011Parreñas, 2001;Rollins, 1985). Care and domestic workers are typically suffering from the 'care wage penalty' and from an overall devaluation of their work, which goes far beyond the economic argument (Ferragina & Parolin, 2022;Lightman, 2021). ...
Non‐standard employment (NSE) is well‐documented in the domestic sector in all European countries. The precariousness and poor working conditions of this sector reflect in a labour force composed by the most vulnerable layers of the labour market, namely, migrant women. This article analyses how and to what extent a macro‐level factor, that is, the gender regime (resulting from the interplay of gender equality and gendered social norms) interacts with micro‐level individual and occupational characteristics to shape the prevalence of NSE in the domestic sector in Europe. We use the 2019 EU‐LFS data and run a set of logistic regression analyses. Our results show that NSE is a defining feature of domestic sector, and that migrant women are at a higher risk of being in this type of employment, especially in destination countries where gender equality is relatively lower and expectations concerning care and family responsibilities are more traditional.
... Researchers have identified an unequal gendered division of labour as crucial in the emergence of a demand for paid housework and childcare in Western Europe and in the United States (Hochschild, 2003;Lutz, 2011). The general argument is that when women entered the labour market, this shift was not accompanied by a change in the division of domestic labour: men did not start to do their share of domestic work, and housework and childcare were still considered feminine tasks. ...
... Empirically, I am working with material from Slovakia, which, being situated in Central Eastern Europe (CEE), 2 provides a good case study for illustrating the need to move beyond 'master narratives' based on Western European or US material. Even as a European and industrialised country, Slovakia differs from the typical model based on data from Western Europe and the United States (Hochschild, 2000;Lutz, 2011;Macdonald, 2011), as well as from the typical model based on global, regional, or local care chains (Hochschild, 2003;Parreñas, 2001;Williams, 2012). While the material I present disrupts the North-South dichotomy, my aim is not to argue for the recognition of CEE as the 'second world'. ...
... 2). According to this script, men in the Global North attach their identity to career and not to care, leaving the main share of childrearing to women (Hochschild, 2000;Lutz, 2011). However, despite seeing childcare and housework as their responsibility, professional middle-and upper-class women are 'caught in a male-career pattern' (Hochschild, 2000: 140): they work in jobs structured for men who are free from family responsibilities. ...
Research on the demand for paid domestic workers tends to be based on data from the United States and Western Europe, and to explain that demand in the countries of the Global South is a result of the migration of paid domestic workers to the Global North. This article argues that we need to decolonise our explanations of the demands for paid domestic workers, and to expand them by taking into consideration the unequal division of domestic labour between men and women, and investigating the possibility of other dynamics of demand than those driven by global care chains. Decolonising the demand for paid domestic work also requires a methodological shift. We need to acknowledge that care is not necessarily situated within a nuclear family or a dyadic relationship between a man and a woman. Empirically, I draw on interviews with employers of paid domestic workers in Slovakia. In Slovakia, while negotiations around outsourcing household cleaning are embedded in relationships within the nuclear family, decisions around outsourcing childcare are embedded in relationships beyond the nuclear family, namely, those between mothers and grandmothers. While nannies and babysitters do the work previously done by the mother, in reality they serve as replacements for the grandmothers.
... Today, the "care economy" depends on both rural to urban migration and transnational migrant women's labor. The general trend in global migratory care chains is that poor women in the Global South move to wealthier nations in the same region (e.g., within the Latin American region), or to countries in the Global North (Lutz, 2011, Yeoh and Huang, 1998, Salazar Parreñas, 2001. Esguerra Muelle, Ojeda, and Fleischer (2021), for example, center the case of Colombia to highlight how the dynamics of war, forced displacement, and globalized capital configure (trans)national care networks that "impel precariously placed people -and particularly women and other feminized subjects -to survive through their articulation with informal economies" (p. ...
... 298-299). Domestic labor as nannies and maids remains one of the main points of women's entry into the international labor force (along with highly gendered modes of factory work) within a globalizing "care economy" (Lutz, 2011). To date, domestic work remains a highly feminized occupation within the informal sector: 76% of domestic workers worldwide are women, and 81% remain in informal employment (ILO, 2021). ...
This paper brings together the social science literature on mobility justice and the feminist literature on mobilities of care to advance both fields. A growing body of research shows that mobilities in general and reproductive care work specifically are unevenly distributed, becoming configured through intersectional relations of gender, class, race, colonialism, sexual violence, and geopolitics. Despite this common ground and potential for cross-fertilization, there has been little effort to bring mobility justice and mobilities of care into dialogue. We highlight some key feminist contributions toward the theory and praxis of more just and care-full mobilities and argue for a multi-scalar relational epistemology grounded in critical Latin American, Caribbean, and Indigenous scholarship and activism. We begin by reviewing feminist contributions that allow us to conceptualize mobilities of care as a mobility justice issue. We contend that mobility injustice is not simply a problem of transportation access, but is deeply dependent on capturing women's unpaid (or underpaid) reproductive work, which is often invisible and devalued. We then analyze two instances of care work through the lens of gendering mobility justice across scales. First, we highlight research on care work in relation to (trans)national migratory flows along race, class, and geopolitical lines. Then, we review studies of Latin American domestic workers' mobilities within their everyday lives and work contexts. We conclude by showing how our combined approach opens up a wider field of feminist mobility justice as engaged praxis that addresses entangled micro-, meso-, and macro-scale concerns, ranging from social justice and gender equity, to urban planning and low-carbon energy transitions, and to planetary environmental ethics and climate justice.
... The International Labor Organization (ILO) reports that one in twenty-five workers is a domestic worker, and in 2015 it was estimated that their number came to, roughly, 67.1 million domestic workers worldwide (ILO, 2020). Against the enduring feminization of this labor (Lutz, 2011), most of domestic work is carried out by women: certainly, women are the overwhelming constitutive element of the "global care chain" that functions to monetize and extract their "emotional surplus value" (Hochschild, 2000). ...
... Notes 1. All Angolan newspaper quotes and excerpts from focus group interviews are our translations from Portuguese. 2. For similar case study accounts, see Pérez (2021) and Lutz (2011) in Peru and Europe, respectively. 3. Without a doubt, the multifaceted endeavors of male gardeners, security guards, and building caretakers also contribute to sustaining the materialities and immaterialities of Kilamba. ...
Kilamba, the first of the new centralities in Angola, is increasingly visible in recent urban scholarship about Luanda, further establishing it as the symbol of both this “new” post-war city and the “New Angola.” Within local discourses of progress, its emergence from within “petro-urbanism,” and its size and modern aesthetics are emphasized, while little attention has been directed towards understanding the actual contributions of its workers, particularly the women who spend a significant part of their day cleaning Kilamba’s apartments. In this paper, we combine a social reproduction framework with infrastructure studies to trace the labor of Kilamba’s female domestic workers, in order to demonstrate how their everyday practices uphold the status and materiality of this centrality, even as their work is invisibilized. In doing so, we understand their commentaries about this space, often refracted through descriptions of their homes, as critiques of the infrastructural priorities of the “New Angola.”
... At the same time, remittances tend to privilege individuals with diaspora connections. Moreover, transnational transactions can induce new inequalities between households who do or do not have family abroad, or in terms of a gendered inequality in the remittance-sending countries, where the emancipation of women results in global care chains with women from peripheral countries taking over the vacant positions for care work in the household (Faist 2014;Hochschild 2000;Lutz 2011). Ultimately, it does not matter anymore who you are or what you do, but only whether you have family abroad. ...
Remittances (i.e., the money, objects, ideas, and social capital migrants send to their families, kin, and communities in their places of origin) are a crucial part of the global economy and migration dynamics. On a micro level, they recognize, maintain, affirm, and disrupt social relationships across the world, mapping out a transnational space in which people work, live, and communicate with multiple belongings. In 2022, migrants sent 836 billion US dollars via official channels worldwide, causing social change in both the places of origin and destination. As such, remittances improve living conditions, facilitate access to education and health, enable the building of infrastructure, and boost the economy in the countries of origin. However, the power to improve individual and communal living conditions or even increase the gross domestic product mainly results from global inequality, and remittances mirror these asymmetrical relationships. Thus, they increase dependencies between sending and receiving countries, disrupt family relations, and create new inequalities along postcolonial routes.
As a key driver of the global economy, remittances have received a significant amount of attention from global institutions, policymakers, and researchers of various disciplines, maintaining a focus on the nexus of migration and development. However, studies in social science and humanities have also shown that transnational money transfers are often accompanied or reciprocated by social (ideas, know-how, norms), political (narratives, voting patterns), or material (gifts, objects) remittances.
From an anthropological perspective, remittances are social practices. By earning, sending, receiving, and spending remittances, actors establish, sustain, erode, or even control relations between families, kin, and communities in the places of destination and origin. The focus on individuals and their practices reveals connections as well as frictions in remittance relations, challenging the remittance mantra (i.e., the assumption that the multiple transfers from the Global North bring nothing but wealth and knowledge to the Global South). However, it should not be overlooked that through remittances, global inequalities are projected onto personal relationships, generating cross-border forms of participation and belonging as well as exclusion and discrimination.
... gendered division of labour; see, e.g. Lutz, 2011), this was not confirmed in the interviewees' accounts. However, we acknowledge that more research is needed to explore these issues. ...
Drawing on recent original qualitative research, this paper focuses on the under-researched area of highly skilled migration in the relatively new migratory context of Ukrainian migrants to Poland. Commonly, migrants from Ukraine have been found to work in basic low-paid jobs and in an informal, non-regulated capacity; thus, often falling prey to precarious and insecure employment. However, this article focuses on career pathways of highly educated migrants from Ukraine in Poland and explores how they take advantage of their education and qualifications. The analysis is focused on individual-level factors. The paper discusses the findings of 29 individual in-depth interviews. Among the respondents, 15 were working in occupations requiring higher education, and 14 worked below their education. This article contributes to the literature on the use of qualifications of migrant workers from Ukraine in Poland. We found that knowledge of the Polish language, and individual attitudes influence migrants’ use of education/qualifications. The relationship between family composition and the labour market situation of people with higher education is not clearly established in this research. We hope these findings will support the integration efforts of the newly arrived forced migrants from Ukraine in Poland and beyond.
... Para las mujeres poco cualificadas o de baja cualificación, una de las primeras puertas que encuentran accesible al entrar en la economía asalariada es a través de la oferta y prestación de actividades de cuidado [Folbre, 2006]. Los investigadores y teóricos que trabajan en esta dirección han definido el trabajo de cuidados como una actividad o servicio presencial que mejora los resultados y las capacidades del receptor [England et al., 2002;Folbre, 2006;Lutz, 2011]. Algunas de las actividades básicas de atención incluyen el cuidado de niños, trabajos ocasionales, ayudantes domésticas, preparadores de almuerzos/refrigerios, enfermeras, maestras y terapeutas, etcétera. ...
El mundo contemporáneo ha avanzado, aunque parcialmente, en lo que se refiere al empoderamiento de la mujer, a la par que se ha estancado en la convergencia de los niveles de derechos entre hombres y mujeres. El problema se ha agravado especialmente en las zonas en desarrollo del mundo. Al ser de naturaleza tradicional y patriarcal, la actividad de las mujeres se ha visto limitada a las tareas del hogar que entran en el ámbito de la economía del cuidado. Últimamente, las mujeres han estado haciendo todo lo posible para participar en la economía salarial con el fin de obtener un ingreso independiente. El presente estudio es un intento de analizar el potencial de la economía informal del cuidado como el canal más accesible para que las mujeres sin educación y sin cualificación encuentren un empleo remunerado. El estudio confirma la limitada capacidad de las economías en desarrollo para absorber la educación y las competencias, y crear puestos de trabajo de manera simultánea. El estudio valida aún más el papel positivo y significativo de la economía informal del cuidado en la oferta de empleo a las mujeres, mejorando sus perspectivas y resultados en el curso de la vida. El estudio concluye con algunas recomendaciones de política para permitir que la economía informal del cuidado exista como un camino hacia el mercado laboral formal para las mujeres en el mundo en desarrollo.
... Despite the implementation of governmental policies aimed at promoting work-life balance, the achievement of this balance, especially for women, remains elusive due to persistent underlying gender inequalities in the workplace and society at large. Consequently, many wealthy families have resorted to outsourcing their childcare, eldercare, and domestic responsibilities to migrant workers (Parreñas, 2001;Lutz, 2011;Anderson, 2000). This outsourcing practice enables families from wealthy countries to effectively manage the demands of their professional careers and familial obligations by delegating certain caregiving tasks to others (Camargo, 2015). ...
... They present the live-in care setting as a prolongation of care recipients' self-determined, household-based homemaking, thereby neglecting the fact that the household at the same time simultaneously and temporarily constitutes a workplace and living space for the migrant carer (Boccagni, 2017). The household turns out to be afrequentlyproblematic mix of personal routines in the private space, the 'order of things' (Kaufmann, 1999) and establishing rules pertaining to (the handling/use of) objects, daily routines and emotions (see Lutz, 2011). It is therefore important to illuminate the often highly divergent views of agencies and caregivers concerning daily tasks and ideas/rules on household and life management. ...
Aulenbacher, Brigitte/Lutz, Helma/Palenga-Möllenbeck, Ewa/Schwiter, Karin, 2024, Introduction, Senior Home Care for Sale: Agency-brokered Transnational Live-in Care in Europe, in: Home Care for Sale, The Transnational Brokering of Senior Care in Europe, Sage: Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington
... In addition to the distribution of care responsibilities -who pays, who cares, who decides -a regulatory framework that governs these care responsibilities, a care regime has an underlying "care culture" (and sub-cultures) that define what type of care is most appropriate and desirable, including who should provide care. The care regime is intimately intertwined with gender relations (12,13). ...
This triangle of care is the result of an ethnographic research conducted with hard pandemic restrictions in Barcelona during 2020. Even if it is based in a bibliography on gender and migration, care and aging, the article is basically empirical. For the interpretation of the debates and discussion groups carried out, we identify here: the elderly person (as we have seen in the interviews in the previous article, 15 and Herrera 2023,“The care debate during the first covid lockout in Barcelona); the caregivers - from family members to hired workers, especially immigrant women- and thirdly, as the third aspect of the triangle, and which remains in this article more blurred, from municipal and health public services. The pandemic highlights the existing systemic inequalities, particularly affecting the elderly, but also migrants and ethnic minorities, people who work in the care sector, and health personnel.
... Marchetti, no entanto, descreve o nexo entre migração e trabalho doméstico exigindo uma abordagem mais multifacetada. As condições desses trabalhadores migrantes, em sua maioria mulheres, são moldadas pela interseção de três regimes políticos diferentes, conforme descrito por Helma Lutz (2011). No que diz respeito ao regime de migração, as políticas estatais influenciam fortemente o emprego de migrantes para o trabalho de cuidados e domésticos remunerados. ...
... A gondozói migrációnak kiterjedt nemzetközi szakirodalma van (lásd például Hochshild 2000, Parreñas 2001, Lutz 2011, és bár a téma közép-kelet-európai vonatkozásaival is többen foglalkoztak már (lásd például Bahna-Sekulová 2019), a magyarországi viszonyok tekintetében elmondható, hogy bőven vannak még feltáratlan területek. Ezt az eddigi hiányt túlzás lenne lemaradásnak nevezni, hiszen maga a vizsgált jelenség is csak a globalizálódó világ terméke, így a nemzetközi iro- és Németh Krisztina (2016) tanulmányait a választott fókusz és módszertan szempontjából A boldogulás útvesztői előzményeként is értelmezhetjük, valamint fontos megemlíteni Turai Tünde (2018) könyvét is, amelyben a szerző a globális kapitalizmus összetett hierarchiái és a gondozók mint cselekvők közötti viszonyokat vizsgálja. ...
... Structural changes in the global market and the emergence of new transnational circuits of capital and labour have facilitated the entry of large numbers of women into skilled and unskilled paid work (Sassen, 2000). Many South Asian nations are witnessing a spurt in women's transnational labour migration as a result of gendered transformations in the global labour market, setting off processes of feminisation of labour, especially in the global health and care sectors (Lutz, 2011). Such gendered changes have undoubtedly affected the individual lives of South Asian migrant women and their interactions with their families (Gallo, 2005;Kodoth, 2014;Nair, 2011;Percot, 2006). ...
This article explores an understudied aspect of women’s transnational labour migration, namely how left-behind men negotiate the changes in their status in the domestic and public spheres when their daughters or wives migrate for work and become primary earners in the family. A case study of Syrian Christians in a village in Central Kerala with a long history of women’s transnational labour migration demonstrates how left-behind men refashion their masculine identities by reasserting their role as family protectors when they lose their traditional role as family providers. The article illustrates how left-behind men employ diverse social and discursive practices in domestic and community spheres to reconstruct their gendered sense of self and resist the social stigma of failed masculinity. It also demonstrates how the Church, which continues to be a dominant institution influencing the personal and political lives of Syrian Christians, has become an arena for left-behind men to reassert their patriarchal status at home and in the community.
... Dôsledkom je ďalšie posilňovanie transnacionálnych nerovností, ktoré štrukturálne príčiny migrácie naďalej prehlbujú. Migrantky v prijímajúcich spoločnostiach zastávajú hierarchicky asymetrické pozície, ich status im neumožňuje rovnocennú participáciu v prijímajúcej spoločnosti (Anderson, 2001;Lutz, 2011), ich práca často nespĺňa štandardy dôstojných pracovných podmienok (Anderson, Shutes, 2014). V súvislosti so stredoeurópskym trhom starostlivosti Uhde a Ezzedine (2020) upozorňujú, že predpokladá a paradoxne aj popiera transnacionálne životy opatrovateľov a opatrovateliek. ...
... Si bien son diversas las investigaciones que se han desarrollado para conocer cuáles son las motivaciones que han impulsado a las mujeres a salir de Marruecos, siguen existiendo grandes interrogantes sobre cuál es el proceso de integración que viven las protagonistas en la sociedad de acogida, en este caso Andalucía, y cómo la educación influye en todo este proceso. Además, hay que considerar que una de las principales características de los procesos migratorios es el dinamismo que presentan (Lutz, 2011). ...
Las sociedades del siglo XXI afrontan el desafío de reconciliar los límites físicos de la biosfera con los procesos de desarrollo, desiguales e insostenibles, que genera un modelo civilizatorio hegemónico que parece ya agotado. Aceptar este reto obliga a repensar las respuestas educativas a las crisis socioambientales, asumiendo la necesidad de educar para otros modos de ser y desarrollarnos, individual y colectivamente. Una tarea en la que, con fortuna dispar, la Educación Ambiental viene comprometiendo sus prácticas desde los años sesenta del pasado siglo. En esta coyuntura, la Pedagogía Social y la Educación Social no pueden eludir sus responsabilidades en la formación de una ciudadanía social y ecológicamente consciente, crítica y proactiva. Con esta convicción, la Sociedad Iberoamericana de Pedagogía Social convocó los días 28-29 de octubre y 4-5 de noviembre de 2021, en la Ciudad de Lugo (Galicia-España), la celebración del Congreso Internacional de la SIPS 2021 y del XXXIII Seminario lnteruniversitario de Pedagogía Social, con el lema Educación Ambiental y Cultura de la Sostenibilidad: construyendo la transición ecológica.
El objetivo de esta convocatoria era reflexionar y dialogar en torno a cuestiones como las siguientes: ¿Qué papel puede y debe jugar la Pedagogía/Educación Social en la transición ecológica? ¿Qué significados cabe atribuirle a una cultura de la sostenibilidad desde el punto de vista pedagógico-social? ¿Qué lugar ocupa la Educación Ambiental en el campo de la Pedagogía/Educación Social y viceversa? ¿Qué enfoques y que metodologías pedagógico-sociales se pueden movilizar en y para la transición socio-ecológica? ¿Cómo contribuir desde la Pedagogía/Educación Social a conformar una eco-ciudadanía?
Estas Actas compilan las ponencias y las comunicaciones allí presentadas y debatidas. La diversidad teórica, metodológica y práctica que recogen refleja el compromiso de la comunidad de la Pedagogía-Educación Social en la transición socio-ecológica, así como las múltiples líneas de reflexión y acción que abre la convergencia transdisciplinar característica del campo de la Educación Ambiental.
Resilience, adaptation, survival, endurance, change, transformation, imbalance – these are all responses to crisis situations and social and economic stresses that are increasingly becoming the focus of academic and public interest. The Carpathian Basin is constantly exposed to strong external influences, to which the local communities, households, and individuals must respond in order to regain their balance, or to transition to a new mode of functioning. In the last three to four decades labor migration became one of the most prominent responses to economic and social pressures and a coping strategy. The convertibility of inequalities and resources between different regions is an opportunity for stabilizing the state of insecurity at home. For the last few years, it has been a common preconception in resilience theories that only strong entities are capable of resilience. Recent research shows that resilience and vulnerability are not mutually exclusive; I offer case studies which illustrate this point. I draw on 15 years of fieldwork with Central and Eastern European migrant women working as care workers in Western countries and Israel. These cases show that the experience of vulnerability and the skills and knowledge gained from it contribute to increasing flexibility, adaptability, and learning capacity, and thus practically lay the foundation for resilient behavior. My research also explores the controversial issue in resilience theories of how responsibility is constituted; i.e., whether the idea of resilience is related to the shifting of responsibility from the social classes in power to the vulnerable groups more prone to disequilibrium. In examining foreign women integrated into the low-level segment of the occupational structure, eldercare, I find that if their physical or mental condition deteriorates, and they are on their own, their vulnerability increases, and the disequilibrium resulting from systemic problems can no longer be corrected through individual resourcefulness alone.
The poor working conditions of care workers within Germany’s eldercare sector have resulted in a series of reforms. Employing a conceptual framework that combines feminist perspectives on the devaluation of care work, Fraser’s concept of recognition and redistribution, and Honneth’s concept of distribution struggles, this article assesses whether these reforms have increased the social status of this undervalued sector. The findings indicate that these reforms have both positively and negatively impacted the social status of eldercare work – a phenomenon that this article links to the contradictory influence of the state, trade unions and provider associations during distribution struggles.
Der Beitrag präsentiert erste theoretisch-konzeptionelle Grundlagen für eine intersektionale Sozialstaatsforschung und illustriert deren erkenntnistheoretischen Mehrwert am Beispiel der Arbeitsmarktteilhabe von Migrantinnen in Deutschland. Ich argumentiere, dass die bisherige (auch feministische) Sozialstaatstheorie der nationalstaatlichen Rahmung von Sozialstaaten zu wenig Aufmerksamkeit schenkt und Migrationsverhältnisse daher anders als Geschlechterverhältnisse nicht als systematisches Verhältnis von Sozialstaaten begreift. Anknüpfend an bestehende internationale Forschung schlägt der Beitrag eine intersektionale Sozialstaatsanalyse vor, benennt damit einhergehende Prämissen und illustriert diese exemplarisch entlang der Arbeitsmarktteilhabe von Migrantinnen zu zwei verschiedenen historischen Zeitpunkten in Deutschland: ‚Gastarbeiterinnen‘ in der deutschen Wirtschaft und geflüchtete muslimisch-markierte Frauen im SGB II-Bezug. Die Analysen machen deutlich, dass mit einer intersektionalen Sozialstaatsforschung Widersprüche zwischen und innerhalb sozialpolitischer Politiken und Diskursen ebenso sichtbar werden wie deren Wechselwirkungen mit den subjektiven Praktiken der Frauen.
In this chapter, we analyze the working conditions of domestic helpers (ayi) and coin the term "working-single" to refer to their affective experiences in laboring in the private urban households, where they are being isolated, and, arguably, alienated. Whether married or not, the ayi usually lives a single life in the city. Focusing on the ways in which ayis build trust with their employers, we present an ethnographic study of ayis in Shanghai, based on nineteen interviews. We begin by outlining the reasons why rural-to-urban migrant women have chosen to work as ayis. Then, we follow Arlie R. Hochschild's theorization of "emotion work" and emotional labor to explore the tactics that Shanghai domestic helpers use to gain their employers' trust. Three main tactics are identified: honesty, professionalism, and care. These tactics enable ayis to attain moments of agency and create a sense of reciprocal intensity that shapes the production of emotional labor as well as the employer-employee relationship. We argue that the ayi-urban employer relationship is dynamic and intense. In this sense, the process of trust-building should be reconsidered as a power game in the context of rural migrant women's job security and work safety.
With the introduction of Long-Term Care Insurance (LTCI) in 1995, Germany established a universal, family-oriented long-term care system. Within this system, a mixture of informal family caregiving and different types of paid care work has emerged, including professional home-care services that are provided within the LTCI framework, as well as domestic services and live-in care arrangements that are organized within private households. This chapter analyzes from an intersectional perspective the increasing involvement of migrant care workers in these home-care settings based on distinct policy regulations. Empirical findings reveal the development of different forms of disparities based on the intersection of migration status and skill levels within and between the female-dominated home-care settings.
Since 2004, the number of Polish nationals in Ireland has increased significantly and over the years Polish migrants have become the largest European migrant minority. For many of those who arrived as young and independent individuals, Ireland became a place for family establishment and settlement. Others brought their partners and children to start a new chapter in family life. Yet very little research has looked at these processes from a life course perspective, particularly in relation to women and mothers who constitute a vital link in the formation and maintenance of familyhood. Based on 61 qualitative interviews with working mothers in Ireland, this chapter considers how mothers negotiate their lives in the contested domains of motherhood and employment as crucial, yet often conflicting spheres. It explores the idea of good motherhood in light of important life events. The practices and perceptions of motherhood changed not only through the experience of migration but more significantly over the time spent in Ireland and through their return to work and interactions with other members of Irish society.
Feminist scholars have focused on paid domestic labour as a site of gendered inequalities structured by race, gender, class, and citizenship. However, men are largely absent from feminist intersectional understandings of everyday interactions within paid domestic labour. This paper draws on an interview study of South African domestic workers focusing on their talk about interactions with male employers. The analysis demonstrates that talk about routines of the physical and symbolic absence of men can become normalised within domestic labour discourse. This is a narrative that is only brought to light once men's (lack of) presence is made a topic. The conspicuous absence of analyses of this kind within paid domestic labour studies points to unfinished and troubling feminist projects.
The volume of [Im]migration has grown domestically and internationally in the last few decades (Castles in J Ethn Migr Stud 36:1565–1586, 2010). It will be a complex phenomenon (Piper in, Int Migr Rev 40:133–164, 2006), although political variables influence every aspect of the migration process and raise numerous political issues locally and internationally (Aydiner in The implications of gender on international migration. Beyond the Horizon, 2020). The relationship between development conditions and migration flows is much more complex and nuanced than is usually acknowledged in policy discourse, especially at the national level (Ullah in Introduction to migration studies. Springer, Netherlands, pp. 295–308, 2021). Numerous studies have shown that financial and economic development (measured by increased GDP per capita) will likely increase migration to a certain threshold. This is referred to as a “migration hill.”
The debates at the nexus of migration and gender often focus on the supposedly diverging ideals Muslims and Christians have about gender. Migrant femininities and masculinities are framed in contrast to liberal, Western values and they undermine the efforts for more gender equality in Western societies. Only a few studies have addressed non-Muslim migrants' construction of, and their perceptions of, the femininities and masculinities of others. To fill this gap, we present the findings of a qualitative social research project where 43 young people aged 16 to 29 shared with us their perceptions regarding gender ideals. In our analysis, we utilize theories developed within women's studies and critical men and masculinities scholarship and adopt an intersectional lens to investigate how young first- and second-generation migrants in Berlin with roots in different world regions imagine their own and others' ideals of masculinity and femininity. Like non-migrant youth, our research participants want their life partnerships to be based on gender equality. Contrary to this, their ideals of femininity and masculinity embrace traditional gender roles, and they mirror the racialized relations in German society. We do not argue that the migrant youth's gender ideals are significantly shaped by their ethnic or religious belonging, and thus they do differ from those of non-migrant youth. However, racial othering is relevant for these migrants' images of their life partners and should be taken under consideration while designing specific policies aimed at increasing levels of gender equality in multi-diverse societies.
This article analyses the relationship between law and class formation through the case of migrant care and domestic work, and puts sociological class theory into conversation with critical migration research. It contributes to class theory by analysing how law helps produce class relations in the Finnish context. The Finnish state channels migrants into cleaning and domestic work through policy measures, and migration law ties them to the reproductive sector, making law a central social relation that defines migrants’ relation to production. The analysis draws on interviews with migrant care and domestic workers (N = 30) holding temporary work permits and examines their structural and affective descriptions of a position restricted by law. The article argues that the way migrant domestic work is formalised in the legislation produces a class relation for migrants, in which they lack full ownership over their labour power. The findings demonstrate how migrant domestic workers express gratitude for their employment despite experiencing it as devalued, indicating labour as repayment of the ‘gift’ of the residence permit.
Embedded within the sociocultural context of romantic relationships are features such as race, culture, neighborhoods, the legal system, and governmental policy. Due to the inherent difficulties with studying large structures and systems, little work has been done at the macro level in relationship science. This volume spotlights the complex interplay between romantic relationships and these structural systems, including varied insights from experts in the field. In turn, more diverse and generalizable research programs on the social ecology of relationships can be developed, helping to facilitate advances in theory. Scholars and students of relationship science in psychology, sociology, communication, and family studies will benefit from these discussions. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
This article examines the link between outsourcing social reproduction and the valuation of time by approaching the employers of domestic workers as workers who themselves labour to produce surplus value. It contributes to current research on outsourcing social reproduction, which emphasizes the (re)privatization of public services, by situating outsourcing within the sphere of production. The analysis is based on in-depth qualitative research on employers of migrant care and domestic workers in Finland (N = 31). Developing an integrated link between migrant workers’ labour-power and employers’ labour-power, we demonstrate that the employers work a second shift of paid employment in the evening, enabled by the outsourcing of reproductive labour. We argue that outsourcing social reproduction often takes the form of purchasing inexpensive time, enabled by hiring migrant domestic workers, which those who outsource convert into productive labour-time, thereby subsidizing their own labour to increment economic value for capital. We analyse the ways in which outsourcing reproduction is organized to enhance the amount of productive social labour-time in a context where capital places increasing demands on labour.
Sociological research on cross‐border class‐making often centres on contemporary dynamics of social inequality in the context of migration and mobility. Relying on the cultural–sociological and processual understanding of 'class', the article integrates three bodies of literature to study complexities of global and transnational class‐making to overcome the 'presentist' bias. Building on the accounts of the Annales School, and specifically on Fernand Braudel's famous distinction between courte durée, moyenne durée and longue durée of historic time periods, the article brings together three different bodies of research: (i) transnational and intersectional approaches; (ii) conceptual history of class theory and (iii) theories of racial and multi‐scalar capitalist dynamics to develop a flexible and relational, but historic‐sensitive toolkit for the analysis of global and transnational class‐making. One of the greatest advantages of this multi‐temporal outlook is that it allows to avoid over‐generalizing accounts on the logics of class‐making and to unpick potentially heterogeneous dynamics of class (re)production.
Volume II presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between 'skilled' and 'unskilled' workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.
Partindo do postulado teórico de que a primeira condição para a emergência dos problemas e dos conflitos sociais seja de que eles sejam definidos enquanto tais pelos atores sociais (condição subjetiva e cognitiva), este trabalho traz alguns apontamentos sobre as lógicas de aceitação dos problemas cotidianos e de evitamento dos conflitos vividos no trabalho, no contexto da migração irregular brasileira na Bélgica. Baseando-se na análise qualitativa de entrevistas realizadas com brasileiros e brasileiras vivendo irregularmente neste país, durante os anos de 2012 e 2015, busca-se compreender diversas situações que, embora se manifestando de forma problemática de alguma maneira, em razão das ofensas morais que elas exprimem, acabam sendo aceitas e toleradas e os conflitos evitados. Articulando a hipótese de um recrudescimento da indiferença social, da banalização das injustiças e do sofrimento, formulada como uma provocação intelectual, aborda- se o contexto particular da migração irregular, enfatizando as formas pelas quais as relações paternalistas/maternalistas na esfera do trabalho, induzidas pela situação de precariedade econômica e de estadia irregular, influem na percepção da própria situação vivida pelos atores sociais e nas lógicas de aceitação dos problemas e de evitamento dos conflitos.
Faced with the most up to date washing machine, the undocumented Rosa, newly arrived from Guatemala to Los Angeles, does what many resourceful Mayan women would: She handwashes clothes and lays them on the lawn to dry. ¹ Played for comic relief in the 1983 movie El Norte , this confrontation of the domestic worker with the machine represents how, presumably in the face of dirty wars in Latin America and rising labor force participation of mothers with small children in the United States, well-to-do households had it both ways: They purchased the latest appliances and relied upon the labor of immigrant women. Recent migrants appeared more tractable than the African Americans who historically had worked in other women's homes. New models superseded old Maytags, but domestic workers never became obsolete, despite the predictions of sociologists and the panicked laments of would-be employers.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.