The world of senior care provision and care work is changing rapidly. Across Europe, brokering agencies for live-in care workers have become powerful players in reshaping welfare systems, transnational care chains and working conditions. This volume draws together the latest research on live-in home care for seniors in Europe, exploring processes of commodification and marketisation, the transnationalisation of care work, the private household as a workplace, and workers’ contestation of the live-in care arrangement. Together, they depict far-reaching challenges in care provision and care work.
‘A must-read for anyone wishing to understand the changes in the political economy of care in the 21st century. A compelling exploration of the emergence of care brokerage and agency intermediation in Europe with a variety of examples from different countries and care settings.’
– Professor Sabrina Marchetti, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
‘Essential reading. Rich empirical and conceptual work provides an exhaustive account of the commodification, marketisation, transnationalisation and exploitation in the care industry, all in the context of global and local inequalities. This is a group of amazing critical analysts who dare to confront some of the key contradictions of our current painful social transformation in European terrains.’
– Professor Attila Melegh, Corvinus University Budapest
‘An encyclopaedic account of the commodification and marketisation of transnationally-brokered senior home care provision across Europe. It pays close attention to the economic and social inequalities, as well as state policies, that underlie this new migration industry, and the collective efforts to contest and improve conditions of work and care. Home Care for Sale documents the geography of care chains within a divided Europe – a geography that both complements and disrupts conventional understandings of international care chains between the Global North and South. A must-read for those interested in senior home care, social reproduction, migration, border studies and the workings and repercussions of neoliberal state policies.’
– Professor Géraldine Pratt, University of British Columbia
Inhoudsopgave
Introduction — Senior home care for sale: agency-brokered transnational live-in care in Europe – Brigitte Aulenbacher, Helma Lutz, Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck, Karin Schwiter
Part I: Care markets, care provision, working conditions, and the role of brokering agencies
Divided Europe? The role of home care agencies from Poland, and how the ideal of decent work gets lost along transnational value chains – Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck
Business preferences in long-term care: the case of live-in home care in Ireland – Julien Mercille
The effectiveness of informal care-work brokering in Italy – Martina Cvajner
Diversification of the senior home care market in Hungary: informality and the operational modes of intermediaries – Dóra Gábriel and Noémi Katona
The ‘good agency’? On the interplay of formalization and informality in the contested marketization of live-in care in Austria – Brigitte Aulenbacher and Veronika Prieler
Part II: Transnationality, mobilities, border regimes and global care chains
Multiple interacting migration patterns in senior care on Europe’s semi-periphery – Majda Hrženjak and Maja Breznik
Distorted Emancipation and the Transnational Political Economy of Social Reproduction – Zuzana Uhde
‘Care Bonds’ in Times of COVID-19 – Petra Ezzeddine
Transnational migration and brokering agencies in the home care sector in Spain – Raquel Martínez-Buján, Paloma Moré
Part III: Worlds apart: the household as a workplace
‘As I always say, you really need to tame them!’ The working conditions of migrant senior care workers employed by brokering agencies in Belgium – Chiara Giordano
Brokering agencies as managers of conflicts and emotions in live-in senior care – Lucia Amorosi
Shaping working hours in the shadow of the law? Experiences of live-in migrant care workers, brokering agencies and family care managers in the Netherlands – María Bruquetas-Callejo
Shaping the social and work-related well-being of migrant live-in carers: the ambiguous role of labour market intermediaries in England – Shereen Hussein, Agnes Turnpenny and Caroline Emberson
At home with the employer? — Contradictory notions of the care client’s home as a workplace and living space – Helma Lutz and Aranka Benazha
Part IV: Contested labour rights, fair-care initiatives and labour organizing
Ethical comments on the working-time regime of live-in care – Bernhard Emunds
Fair care? On the prospects of (and limits to) implementing ‘fairness’ in live-in care – Karin Schwiter and Anahi Villalba Kaddour
Invisible, yet one of the family? Unravelling the precarious employment conditions of migrant Filipina live-in domestic workers and caregivers in Greece – Theodoros Fouskas
Breaking out of the ‘prisoner of love’ dilemma: infrastructures of solidarity for live-in care workers in Switzerland – Sarah Schilliger
Part V: Afterword
Brokering care migration – a new element in the transnational care worker supply chain – Ito Peng
Over de auteur
Karin Schwiter is Assistant Professor of Labour Geography at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. In 2016, her research group received the Swiss Award for Research on Education for their mixed-methods study on occupational gender segregation. In 2021, she co-edited the Handbook Feminist Geographies (with Budrich publishers, in German). Her research interests include feminist approaches to work and labour with a focus on care, migration and digitalization. Recent publications include: 2020, ‘Geographies of care work: The commodification of care, digital care futures and alternative caring visions’ in Geography Compass (with J. Steiner); 2021, ‘Who shapes migration in open labour markets? Analysing migration infrastructures and brokers of circularly migrating home care workers in Switzerland’ in Mobilities (with H. S. Chau); 2022, ‘Care crises and care fixes under Covid-19: the example of transnational live-in care work’ in Social & Cultural Geography (with S. Schilliger and J. Steiner).
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