This article explores the growing interest in care within geography. Focusing on care as waged work, we trace current transformations through commodification and digitalisation. We discuss how the private household is turning into a precarious and feminised workplace for a growing number of workers, and we show how this development is promoted by the rise of labour agencies that facilitate the transnational recruitment of care workers. The literature on global care chains illustrates how the recruitment of migrant workers fills care deficits in destination countries while opening up care gaps in sending countries. We review this literature from economic geography and beyond and reflect on the continuing feminisation and devaluation of care labour. Based on these critical insights, we examine how processes of digitalisation contribute to reshaping care work. We discuss the ambivalent effects of digital technologies on care and argue that there is an urgent need to intensify our engagement with the processes and effects of digital transformations. In our conclusions, we call for strengthening the budding debate on alternative visions of caring within geography and point to avenues for future engagement.
Zusammenfassung In Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz ist in der letzten Dekade ein transnationaler Markt entstanden, auf dem eine wachsende Zahl von Unternehmen mittel-und osteuropäische Carearbeiter_innen für die Rund-um-die-Uhr-Betreuung betagter Menschen rekrutiert. Das aktuelle Modell der sogenannten 24 h-Betreuung ist allerdings umstritten. Agenturen sehen sich mit dem Vorwurf unlauterer und ausbeuterischer Geschäftspraktiken konfrontiert, die gesetzliche (Nicht-)Regulierung ist Gegenstand medialer und politischer Debatten. Basierend auf Regimeund Webseitenanalysen untersucht dieser Beitrag in ländervergleichender und-übergreifender Perspektive, wie Vermittlungsagenturen auf ihren Webseiten das eigene Angebot legitimatorisch absichern. Dazu analysieren wir die Legalitätsnarrative und setzen sie mit den länderspezifischen Regulativen in Beziehung. Wir zeigen auf, wie die Bezugnahme auf Legalität prekäre Arbeitsbedingungen und ungleiche Machtverhältnisse entnennt und Prekarität als Problem einzelner unseriöser Agenturen (de-)thematisiert.
The fragility of transnational live-in care arrangements The live-in care model in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland is based on mostly female workers from Central and Eastern European countries providing care for an elderly person (or couple) in that person's own home (Bachinger, 2009; Greuter & Schilliger, 2010; Lutz, 2005). Typically, two (or more) carers alternate in rotas of two to twelve weeks and commute between their workplace and their homes in, e.g., Poland, Romania, or Slovakia. They spend their rotas living in the homes of the elderly they provide care for and are usually on call (almost) around the clock (Österle, 2014; Palenga-Möllenbeck, 2013; Schilliger, 2014). While live-in care workers are self-employed in Austria, they are employed either directly by the household or by temporary employment agencies in Switzerland. In Germany, EU-regulated posting of workers is the most common form of employment. In all three countries, many live-in care workers are brokered by agencies which are often in charge of the collection of payments, transportation, and similar services (Chau, 2020; Österle & Bauer, 2016; Rossow & Leiber, 2017). Although to different extents and not uncontested, livein care has become an increasingly established model for elderly care in these three German-speaking countries (Steiner et al. 2019). The existing literature documenting the working and living conditions of live-in carers reveals the precarity involved: conditions are generally characterised by long working hours and low wages, oncall duty (almost) around the clock, and a high degree of dependence on the employer (
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.