France is a country with rights. So give me my rights. A little bit of rights, because in a way Iâm doing something for France. (âŠ) Who will do it? Itâs not François Hollande [former French President elected in 2012] who will do it, itâs not his wife, itâs the miserable care assistants. What I do, itâs not little, itâs really something. (Fouzia, 43, Algeria, Paris)
Fouzia had been living in France for 12 years when I met her. She came to France from Algeria and had been working for a couple of years as a care assistant in domiciliary care at the time of the interview. We met in a Parisian hospital: Fouzia did not have much free time for herself, and the only moment she could dedicate to an interview was when the older woman she took care of was being looked after by other healthcare professionals in the hospital. We talked for about two hours in the busy hallway of the hospital where a small cafeteria served visitors, hospital workers and, more rarely, patients. Fouzia seemed to enjoy talking about her job and conveyed overall a sense of satisfaction and pride. She appeared to be highly engaged, with each story she told she reflected on what constitutes good care and shared with me the challenges she was facing to achieve the standards she had set herself. The pride she took in her daily work was, however, disregarded by her friends, family and society at large. Fouziaâs trajectory differs in one significant aspect from most of those portrayed in this book. A former ministry employee in Algeria and a former bank employee in France, Fouzia decided to change her profession after the death of her mother in Algeria, guided by her sense of guilt over not having been able to take care of her. Being in this profession out of choice, Fouzia met with incomprehension from her family, friends and sometimes even the relatives of the older persons she took care of. She felt the importance of her work was not recognised, neither by those close to her nor by the state through its policies. Fouzia lamented her low earnings and the absence of supplementary health insurance, which meant that many medical treatments were only partially covered by social security. She deplored the lack of access to further training, which was contrary to the life-long learning opportunities enshrined in French labour law, as well as the absence of paid leave. These are the rights Fouzia referred to in the opening quotation, and their absence constituted for her the symptom of societyâs disdain for her work. Fouzia ironically spoke of the âmiserable care assistantâ to contrast that figure with the actual importance of her work that in spite of being invisible to most people, including her close ones, indisputably mattered: âitâs really something.â
By exposing this paradox with anger, Fouziaâs statement encapsulates the research endeavour of this book. While families increasingly need to rely on paid care to provide for the needs of older relatives, the work of sustaining life is devalued, marginalised and widely disregarded. In the context of ageing populations, increasing participation of women in the labour market, frequent geographical mobility within families, growing marketisation of care provision and, most importantly, global inequalities, migration and paid care work tend to be increasingly connected in western European societies. This growing reliance is furthermore inscribed in broader gender inequalities and racialisation processes.
Projections of the old-dependency ratio hint at the size of the challenge that providing older-age care represents for the future of European societies. The old-dependency ratio (i.e. population of 65 years and over to population of 15â64 years) is estimated to increase by 48% in the UK, 50% in France and 125% in Spain by 2050, reaching 45%, 46% and 48%, respectively, according to 2015 Eurostat figures. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the number of foreign-born people working in residential care grew by 44.5% between 2008 and 2012 in European countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD 2013). Older-age care represents one of the few sectors experiencing labour shortages; urban centres are especially affected by these shortages and the reliance on migrant and minority ethnic labour is likely to grow. Against this background, working conditions in the sector remain characterised by low pay, long hours, job instability, health implications and lack of career advancement opportunities. The significant role of migrant and minority ethnic workers in the older-age care sector, symptomatic of the multiple inequalities faced by these workers, is related to the workings of various fields of policy, from the restructuring of European welfare states to migration and employment policies (Williams 2011c). Since the care industry is meant to expand, and the role of migrant workers within it is expected to grow, researching migrant and minority ethnic care workersâ experiences contributes to deeper understandings of this central challenge for European societies.
1.1 From Feminised and Racialised Domestic and Care Work to Private Residential Care: Ruptures and Continuities
The role of migrant workers in the care industry has been mostly explored in the literature on migrant domestic workers. While residential older-age care remains under-studied in comparison with the domiciliary setting within migration and care studies, theoretical paradigms developed within this literature significantly contributed to this book. Major works in the field include Andersonâs Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour (Anderson 2000) and Servants of Globalization by Rhacel Parreñas (2001). In the former, Bridget Anderson uncovered the ways in which migrant women performing domestic work find themselves positioned within multiple tensions. The commodification of domestic work and the role of migrant women within these processes reveal how class and âraceâ play out within gendered hierarchies. In the latter, Parreñas problematised the global role of migrant domestic workers, notably through the concept of âinternational division of reproductive labourâ in her study of Filipina domestic workers in Los Angeles and Rome. The literature has been further developed through monographs, like Black Girls: Migrant Domestic Workers and Colonial Legacies by Sabrina Marchetti (2014), and case studies, such as those brought together in the collective volumes Migration and Domestic Work: A European Perspective on a Global Theme, edited by Helma Lutz (2008) and When Care Work Goes Global: Locating the Social Relations of Domestic Work, edited by Mary Romero, Valerie Preston and Wenona Giles (2014). To wit, an important body of literature provides country- and city-specific knowledge about migrant and minority ethnic care workers in the care sector. In the UK, a pioneering report published by COMPAS researchers in 2009 sketched out the contribution of migrant care workers to the care sector (Cangiano et al. 2009). In addition, a series of publications on this theme by Shereen Hussein, Martin Stevens and Jill Manthorpe analysed the relative position of ethnic minority and migrant care workers in the sector (Hussein et al. 2011; Stevens et al. 2012). Sondra Cubanâs (2013) volume offered an ethnographic insight into domiciliary and residential care and a detailed analysis of processes of deskilling. Haren Christensen and Ingrid Guldvik (2014), in their comparative study of migrant care workers in Norway and in the UK, focused on care work with disabled persons and shed light in particular on deskilling through migration policies and power relationships in the work setting. Studies on the role of migrant workers within care in France have so far focused on domiciliary care (Lada 2011). Several specific difficulties emerge when studying the role of migrant and minority ethnic workers in the care sector in the French context. The categorisation of âsocial careâ familiar to the British context, or that of âcuidadosâ in Spain, has no direct equivalent in France (Martin 2008). Care is most often apprehended in academic work through the proxy category of âservices Ă la personneâ, which encompasses all services performed as paid economic activity in private households. While it mostly concerns care and domestic work, this statistical category also includes activities such as gardening. This makes it difficult to group together all care-related activities and renders the care sector as such statistically invisible (Jany-Catrice 2013). Finally, two major sector-specific publications offer rich context data on the work of migrant care assistants in Spain (IMSERSO 2005) and in the autonomous region of Madrid more specifically (RodrĂguez RodrĂguez 2012).
This book draws in particular on the theoretical framework of a transnational political economy of care (Williams 2011a, b) that highlights the intersection of various regimes as defined by Fiona Williams: âa countryâs care regime intersects with its migration regime and its employment regime which provides the institutional context that shapes the experiences of both migrant women employed in domestic/care w...