At home with the boss: Migrant live‐in caregivers, social reproduction and constrained agency in the UK, Canada, Austria and Switzerland

Abstract

In many countries of the global North, families increasingly rely on live‐in caregivers to look after their children and elderly. Although much care work remains unpaid and informal, several states have set up a variety of migration and labour regimes to guarantee a steady supply of workers to provide paid live‐in care in the home. This paper contributes to a broadening of the focus of labour geography beyond “productive” labour by factoring in the theoretical perspective of social reproduction into the debates on constrained agency. Our aim is to identify the mechanisms that make these regimes function for employers and employees, and their consequences for the social reproduction of the workers. To do so we compare live‐in care schemes in the UK, Canada, Austria and Switzerland and examine the ways in which live‐in care is differentially institutionalised. Our policy analysis in these four countries shows that the constrained agency of the workers does not solely stem from their status as migrants, but is produced by the nexus of specific migration, care and gendered labour regimes. Furthermore, we argue that we need to extend our perspective beyond the immediate work context to see how live‐in care regimes not only infringe, but also enable, the social reproduction of the workers – a fact that has often been neglected by existing research.

Healthcare workers ‘on the move’: making visible the employment-related geographic mobility of healthcare workers

“…Our research centred on the journey of healthcare workers to and from fixed sites, within the context of a specific geographical region in Canada, but it is important to note that the movement of healthcare workers ranges across scales from the global to the body. There is an extensive literature on the international migration of healthcare/ homecare workers, and migration patterns have been linked to variations in working conditions based on different dimensions of marginality such as race, class, citizenship and language (England & Dyck, 2012;Schwiter, Strauss, & England, 2018). Speaking about migrant homecare workers, England and Dyck (2012) provide an analysis of the different international routes taken to work in Canada, the varied socio-economic backgrounds of the workers, and the body work which workers engage in such as bathing clients.…”

Geographies of care work: The commodification of care, digital care futures and alternative caring visions

“…Within geography, a number of studies have investigated how these global care relations are shaped by power relations that capitalise on class, ethnicity, and gender. They show, for instance, how the employment of female Filipino migrants in Canadian households (England & Dyck, 2012; Lee & Pratt, 2012) or Eastern European women in households in Germany (Palenga‐Möllenbeck, 2013; Strüver, 2011), Austria (Aulenbacher, Leiblfinger, & Prieler, 2020) and Switzerland (Chau, 2020; Pelzelmayer, 2018; Schwiter, Berndt, & Truong, 2018) is based on transnational inequalities and legitimised by gendered and ethnicised assumptions about their specific abilities to care. With a focus on Singapore, Huang, Yeoh, and Toyota (2012) point to the links between migrant women in domestic work and the transnational recruitment of healthcare workers in institutional settings.…”

Labour geography II: Being, knowledge and agency

“…So when Castree (2007: 856) wrote that ‘it is no exaggeration to say that most labour geographers operate with some version (often-times mixture) of Marxian, feminist, anti-racist or institutionalist approaches to work and employment wherein power and social relations get central attention’, it is also no exaggeration to write that this admixture tends to include feminist and anti-racist approaches as minor ingredients. Scholars writing about workers from feminist, anti- or post-colonial standpoints often do not identify as labour geographers (Pratt and Philippine Women Centre of BC, 2012; Silvey, 2004; Werner, 2012, 2016), and feminist geographers continue to need to make the case for attention to social reproduction (Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, 2016; Hopkins, 2017; Kelly, 2009; Schwiter et al, 2018; Strauss, 2012, 2015). Such biases amplify the favouring of sites of paid work for analyses of agency and struggles over spatial fixes.…”