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Migration for Domestic Care Work
Time and Venue
February 11, 9:15-15:45 at CSS, Øster Farimagsgade 5, DK-1353 Copenhagen. Room 18.1.08
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(Background description for the seminar and abstracts of the presenations follows after the program)
Program
9:15-10:30 Helma Lutz key note
9:15-10:00 Helma Lutz - Care Work Migration in Europe
10:00-10:30 Discussion
10:30 - 10:45 Coffee break
10:45 -12:45 Care work migration in Europe
10:45-11:05 Myra Lewinter - Concepts and Contexts
11:05-11:25 Karina Märchen Dalgas - Love and Money; Changing Family Ties among Ukrainian Domestic Workers in Italy
11:30 - 11:45 Discussion
11:45 - 12:45 Lunch
12:45 -14:40 Care work migration in Scandinavia
12:45-13:05 Lise Widding Isaksen - Nordic Perspectives on Care Work
13:05-13:25 Helle Stenum - Au pair care in Nordic Welfare. The excluded insider and chains of suspended positions. The management of temporary Filipino au pair migration in Denmark
13:25-13:40 Discussion
13:40-14:00 Coffee break
14:00-14:20 Trine Mygind Korsby - Au pair and trafficked? Recruitment, stay in Denmark, and dreams about the future
14:20-14:40 Cecilie Øyen - Au pairing as gendered migration of unskilled labour: State policy and au pairs' experiences in Norway
14:40-14:55 Discussion
15:00-15:45 General discussion
Introduced by Ninna Nyberg Sørensen
Background
Europe is experiencing a huge demand for care workers, as the number of children, aged, sick and disabled needing care has grown due to the changing demographic profile of the European population and women's entrance into the labor market. Women in the post-colonial and post-socialist world have been encouraged to fill this need and today migration for care work offers one of the main ways in which they can access the labor market in the Western World. Much of this care work is located in the private sphere and therefore poorly protected by labor laws. Furthermore, it is often subject to immigration laws that place severe restrictions on these migrant care workers' employment opportunities. For this reason the social and economic condition of migrants who perform domestic care work depends, to a great extent, on the nature of the inter-personal relations that they develop with their employer and those they care for. At the same time, the care workers' general situation is influenced by their continued close ties with family left behind in the country of origin, often including children of their own, that they are expected to support.
This seminar will focus on the complex web of local, national and transnational relations in which migrants performing domestic care work are entangled. How do migrant care workers experience this field of varying and often contradictory relations? And how do they navigate the barriers against - and opportunities for - social and economic mobility that it entails?
The seminar will begin with a keynote lecture by Helma Lutz, professor of sociology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, who in 2008 published an edited volume, Migration and Domestic Work. Her presentation will be followed by a number of shorter papers, with particular focus on migration for domestic care work in Scandinavia under the au pair scheme.
Abstracts - Migration for Domestic Care Work
Helma Lutz: Who cares? Migration- and care regimes in Europe
This lecture will focus on migrant women's contribution to the fulfilment of care responsibilities of various kinds in different European countries. While some European countries have established recruitment policies for migrant care workers, others have used a laissez faire policy and treat the massive employment of migrant carers in private households rather as 'open secret'. After a general introduction on the relation between waged work and care work the intersection of migration- gender and care regimes will be considered an special attention will be given to the situation in Germany.
Helma Lutz is a sociologist and educationalist. She is professor of Women's and Gender Studies in the Social Sciences, Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research interests are gender, migration, ethnicity, nationalism, racism and citizenship. She has a long record of research about the intersection of gender and ethnicity in European societies and has widely published on these issues. She edited a special issue for the European Journal of Women's Studies (3) 2007: Domestic Work. Her latest book in English is: Helma Lutz 2008 (ed.) Migration and Domestic Work. A European Perspective on a Global Theme. Aldershot: Ashgate. Her German monograph : vom Weltmarkt in den Privathaushalt. Die neuen Dienstmädchen im Zeitalter der Globalisierung. (Opladen: Barbara Budrich Verlag) 2007, 2008 will be published in English with ZED press under the title: The new maids of Europe. 2010.
Myra Lewinter: Concepts and contexts
In this seminar we are looking the migration of people to different countries to look after children or take care of frail older people. My presentation will attempt to provide some general background for the case studies presented in the seminar. The first part of the presentation will be an attempt to develop a theoretical framework for these phenomena. I will employ the distinction that the Norwegian sociologist Kari Wærness made between care work and service. Then I will argue that looking after children (and household activities) can be understood through her concept of service, while taking care of frail elderly people is care. I will elaborate these as different conceptions but bring them together through the idea of "cheap" female labour and explore the consequences of this. The second part of the presentation will examine the importance of national contexts in providing contours for the employment of migrant labour to do these types of work. It will focus on care for frail elderly people and involve case studies of Germany (Austria), France and Italy. Finally I will comment on the possibilities for utilization of migrant labour in care of frail elderly in Denmark.
Myra Lewinter, External Lecturer PhD, MPH, Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. Major area of work: aging. Has published first textbook in Denmark on sociology of aging. Has carried out two major studies of informal care for frail elderly people in Denmark and is currently writing a book about these.
Karina Märcher Dalgas: Love and Money; Changing Family Ties among Ukrainian Domestic Workers in Italy
A growing number of Ukrainian women come to Italy in order to work as domestic workers. By sending remittances to family members in Ukraine, these women have chosen to secure their children financially, at the cost of a physical distance which challanges relations with these children. The Ukrainian domestic workers spend their everyday lives caring for children and elderly in the Italian families whom they work for. This family participation can enable the development of close social ties involving opportunities as well as obstacles for the migrant.
Based on my fieldwork in Bologna, this presentation is concerned with forms of relatedness between Ukrainian domestic workers, their family members and their employing families. Showing these relations as both instrumental and emotional I adress how employer-employee relations are created in the tension between a work and family relation.
Karina Märcher Dalgas is a candidate from the Institute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. She graduated in 2008 with the MA thesis "Betalt omsorg. Et antropologisk studie blandt ukrainske husarbejdere i Bologna"
Lise Widding Isaksen: Nordic Perspectives on Care Work
In this context I will analyze domestic workers in Nordic societies as care workers in the zone between formal and informal systems of care. Migrant care workers have got a vital importance in the transformations of the welfare states and play an important role in the new mix of domestic care, public welfare state services like child care, social welfare and tax deduction for expenses to household services. Domestic workers are as such not a new phenomenon in Nordic societies. But it is a recent phenomenon that the Nordic societies have become receiving countries for au pairs mainly arriving in Scandinavia to take on care related work in private homes. Up to the 1980thies Nordic countries still was a sender countries of au pairs to France, England and USA. With the new millennium came new forms of globally recruited domestic care workers to Nordic families and societies. It seems like the social organization of care work in private homes have found a form where public care has been a hegemonic role model. The question is: Is this a "Nordic" particularity?
Lise Widding Isaksen. Professor Lise Widding Isaksen works at the Department of Sociology at University of Bergen, Norway. She has a Ph.D. in sociology from 1996.
She was the leader of the research project "Gender and Globalization: Care Across Borders" in collaboration with Arlie R. Hochschild , University of Berkeley (USA) and S. Uma Devi, University of Trivandrum (India) from 2002 - 2006. For the time being she works with a Nordic project on "Global care in Nordic Societies".
Helle Stenum: Au pair care in Nordic Welfare. The excluded insider and chains of suspended positions. The management of temporary Filipino au pair migration in Denmark
The contemporary au pair arrangements in Denmark and Norway, which mostly include Filipino migrants, contain a range of ambiguities and contradictions in the transnational and national space of organizing and positioning au pair migrants, and these ambiguities, contradictions and discomforts are part of the social construct and organisation - some are visible and others are less visible. Au pair migration is managed and regulated migration, but migration management is not only about nation states claiming their sovereign right to exclude/include non-nationals at the border. Migration management, especially concerning migration from economically poor to economically rich countries, is also working in transnationalized chains. Legalising and illegalising different types of migration and migrant statuses are important tools in governing the non-national population and separating the wanted from the unwanted migrants, and in producing and reproducing gendered chains of migration management.
Based on material such as legal documents, administrative guidelines, media representations and interviews with au pairs living in Denmark, host families and government/civil society representatives in Denmark in 2007-2008, this paper analyzes Philippines-Danish au pair migration in the light of the legality and illegality produced by the nation states involved as migration management regulations; lived by Filipino domestic workers in Denmark (socially constructed as au pairs); and reflected in social interpretations of social power relations.
Helle Stenum, Ph.d. fellow, Ålborg University, is about to complete a dissertation on migration management focussed on temporary and illegalized migration in Europe/Denmark. MA in social science and computer science. 15 years of experience as a professional in the field of integration, ethnic equality, anti-discrimination etc. in various NGOs and GOs. At the moment also independent consultant and external lecturer at Roskilde University, Department of Culture and Identity.
Trine Mygind Korsby: Au pair and trafficked? Recruitment, stay in Denmark, and dreams about the future
This paper focuses on au pairs in Denmark and the risk of human trafficking. It is based on a research project which set out to determine whether a group of au pairs in Denmark had experiences of trafficking in their lives and stories. The project is based on qualitative interviews with 27 au pairs from the Philippines, Kenya, Nepal, Belarus, Ukraine, and Serbia. The paper is case-based and it focuses on the informants' motivations for becoming au pairs, their journey to Denmark, their experiences working as au pairs, and their thoughts and dreams about the future. The paper gives an insight into the recruitment experiences of the au pairs, since the recruitment process could be a starting point for possible exploitation and trafficking. Based on the narratives of the informants, their au pair stay in Denmark is regarded as part of an ongoing migration process and a life strategy for creating better possibilities for themselves and their families in the future.
Trine Mygind Korsby has conducted fieldwork among young victims of trafficking in Italy and based on her findings she wrote her master's thesis in anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She has also worked with anti-trafficking measures as an intern at the Danish delegation to the OSCE. Trine is currently working as a consultant at the Danish Centre against Human Trafficking where she is carrying out research on human trafficking into prostitution and labour exploitation. She gives guest lectures on human trafficking e.g. at the Danish Institute for Study Abroad and at The University of Copenhagen.
Cecilie Øien: Au pairing as gendered migration of unskilled labour: State policy and au pairs' experiences in Norway
In a recent evaluation of the Norwegian au pair scheme, commissioned by the Directorate of Immigration, I argued that au pairing should be redefined as work and not cultural exchange. The reason for this, was the observation that the vocabulary of the information au pairs and host families receive from the authorities is ambiguous. While third country residents have to apply for a work permit to enter Norway through the au pair scheme, the contract they sign with the host family defines the compensation they receive for their work "pocket money/ pay". Furthermore, many au pairs and host families alike regard au pairing as work and therefore use the scheme according to this perception.
While I did not suggest that the scheme should be terminated, the policy recommendations I gave were all based in the importance of acknowledging care work as work in legislation and compulsory documents. In the paper I analyse ideas about the migration of unskilled and skilled labour within the Norwegian context and also how the au pair scheme, because of representing a highly gendered form of migration, adds complexity to this discussion.
Cecilie Øien has a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology with visual media, University of Manchester. She now works as senior researcher at the Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies, Oslo, Norway