Gendered Labour

Abstract

As we saw in Chap. 10.1007/978-3-030-91971-9_1, the gendered transfer of labour globally and within Europe has been the focus of attention and the core of the discourse concerning the feminization of migration. Whilst gendered labour migrations are not new, their composition, extent, and how we analyse them, theoretically and methodologically, have evolved. As data show, migrants and especially females, are heavily concentrated within certain sectors producing not just a migrant division of labour (Wills et al., 2010) but a gendered migrant division of labour. Some sectors such as household services (domestic work and care) or social reproductive labour are not only predominantly female but, especially in Southern Europe, overwhelmingly filled by migrant women. Although this type of work has attracted much attention in studies of female labour migration, other sectors, both lesser skilled and more skilled, have also relied heavily on female migrant labour but have been much less studied. Mirjana Morokvasic (2011) questioned the basis of our preoccupation about migrant women as subaltern and victims, exclusively filling low skilled sectors. Thus domestic and care workers have become the emblematic figures of globalised migrations in stark contrast to the easily mobile male IT worker (Kofman, 2013). This is not to deny that domestic and care work globally employ more migrant women than any other sector, and that demand has not grown in response to the inadequacies of public provision across different welfare regimes, leading to the search for cheap solutions to fulfil reproductive needs by using migrant workers, including men. However it does raise issues around our lack of attention to other low skilled sectors such as hospitality and contract and commercial cleaning in hospitals, offices and public spaces, which also employ large numbers of migrants. Skilled labour, especially in welfare sectors, such as education, health and social work is also sourced globally to make good shortfalls in professional reproductive labour (Kofman & Raghuram, 2015). Thus at all skill levels migrant women are employed disproportionately in diverse sectors of social reproduction in sustaining the wellbeing of the household and of society more generally.