Negotiating the Social Family: Migrant Live-in Elder Care-workers in Taiwan

Abstract

In response to difficulties faced by families in caring for the aged, the government of Taiwan launched a foreign live-in caregiver programme in 1992. This paper draws upon literature on family, domestic work and motives for caregiving to examine how the long-term co-residence of migrant live-in elder care-workers reconfigures Taiwanese families. Our analysis, based on in-depth interviews conducted in the summer of 2009 with 20 Vietnamese migrant live-in care-workers, uses the concept of ‘social family’ to document the close emotional and quasi-familial relationships between foreign care-workers and members of Taiwanese families. Narratives shed light on the dynamics of these relationships and show the limitations of the concept. The inherent asymmetrical employer-employee power relationship remains, while workers constantly negotiate contradictory feelings and positions in the intimate sphere of the employers’ private homes. This paper emphasizes the mutual dependency that migrants experience as both workers and members of a new family. Rather than being seen as cheap, disposable labour, migrants become indispensable to the families. It is this dependency and intimacy that make them part of the family, but also continues to make them vulnerable to abuse.

Discounted labour? Disaggregating care work in comparative perspective

“…Compared to Korea and Taiwan (China), there is greater reliance on public or non-profit provision. In 2000, Japan instituted the world's largest programme of universal, mandatory long-term care insurance, with expenditures nearly doubling between 2000 and 2007 (Campbell and Ikegami, 2000;Lin and Bélanger, 2012). In 2010, the Government vowed to reduce the number of children on childcare waiting lists, with costs geared to income on a sliding scale (An and Peng, 2015).…”

Fictive Kin, Families We Choose, and Voluntary Kin: What Does the Discourse Tell Us?

“…A fourth category, caregiving kin , emerges in the context of a workplace but is different because it involves not relations between people in similar circumstances (as would be the case for convenience, institutional, and organizational kin) but the inequality of position represented by paid care. Because it can take place in a range of locations—total institutions, voluntary organizations, and individual homes—it has its own heading under “situational kin.” Many of the recent studies about this type of kinship (Dodson & Zincavage, ; Karner, ; Lin & Belanger, ; Piercy, ; Rodriguez, ; White‐Means, ) explicitly examined the relationships between the elderly and paid caregivers. The elderly vary in terms of race/ethnicity and gender.…”

“…The elderly vary in terms of race/ethnicity and gender. Caregivers, however, are predominantly from minority and female populations (Duffy, ); in some countries, caregivers are from a foreign or immigrant population (Lan, ; Lin & Belanger, ). Studies looking at child‐care (and other household) workers also examined how employers often refer to them as “one of the family” (B. Anderson, ; MacDonald, ; Nelson, ; Romero, ; Wrigley, ).…”

Labor Migration and Trafficking among Vietnamese Migrants in Asia

“…Women who got along with their employers were less likely to experience various forms of abuse, labor insecurity, and early return, or become undocumented (running away from their employer). Once a positive working relationship was established, many felt part of the families for whom they were working (see Lin and Bélanger 2012). 15 In some cases, the workers were even protected by their employers to overstay their contracts and continue to work beyond the authorized period.…”