Contextualizing Migrants in Care Work

© Copyrighted Material

ww w.a sh ga te. co m

Chapter 1

Contextualizing Migrants in Care Work ww w.a sh ga te. co m

Karen Christensen


When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw. Nelson Mandela

Introduction






When a man or woman is denied the right to live the life s/he wants in her/his home country, s/he may choose to leave the normal course of life there. This book is about people, who at some point actively choose, for various reasons, to leave their home country, for a brief or long time, because they want to live a life they believe in or desire. At the heart of this book lie the life stories of 51 migrant workers with experiences of care work in either Norway or the United Kingdom; this care work includes various kinds of employment, among them, paid care work for disabled young and older people. Their stories have shaped and developed the book, and these stories have two important macro contextual explanations: one concerns global migration; the other the demographic challenges of an ageing population. According to the United Nations more people than ever are living ‘abroad’, or not in their country of birth; in 2013, 232 million people worldwide lived abroad, a sharp increase from the number of 175 million in 2000 and 154 million in 1990 (UN News Centre – New York, 2013). This means that today 3.2 per cent of the world’s population are migrants, people not living in their home country. According to the same source, 48 per cent of all migrants are women, and while the United States remains the most popular place to go to, two thirds of all migrants are going to Europe or Asia, with Europe attracting slightly more: 72 million people in 2013 compared with 71 million in Asia. Although migration is today one of the central characteristics of our time, it is no new phenomenon in the world. Thousands of years ago nomad life was the main form of survival. First this took place through hunting and gathering, using the natural resources in different places, and later through offering services like trade and craft to the residents of other places. Nomads often moved in groups based on families and kinship. While the original human motivations for nomad life, survival and to get a better life have remained, migration in modern times is shaped and encouraged also by phenomena like wars, violent conflicts, political or racial persecution, uneven development of living conditions as well as migration policies regulating access to different nations, and possibilities of © Copyrighted Material

Migrant Care Workers © Copyrighted Material

2









obtaining citizenship in other countries. Included in this may also be people’s desire to maintain a lifestyle not possible in one’s homeland. Within this general picture of people, places and movements, some major changes contribute to the historical understanding of the lives of the migrant care workers in this book: one is the move from once-in-a-lifetime emigration such as, for example, the huge Norwegian emigration to America in the nineteenth century, consisting of around 800,000 people out of a population of only 2 million people (NOS, 1921). Norway remained the second most common source of US migrants after Ireland for many years (NOS, 1921). Most emigrants never returned to their home country, for many reasons, the long and dangerous sea journey being one of them. It is estimated that 50 million people left Europe in the years between 1820 and 1930 to look for a better life in North America. Modern infrastructure and technology have changed this whole picture. Almost all parts of the world are now easy to reach by plane, and decreasing flight prices have made this an option for more than the rich. If there are barriers at this macro level, these are rather related to migration policy regulation. The migratory stories in this book are part of this historical migration change away from emigration as a once-in-a-lifetime experience to more varied patterns of migration. The other challenge reflects the demographic change toward ageing populations in the developed world, which can be regarded as a success story, but one with important implications for the social care sector that is responsible for long-term care and support services for older and disabled people. Across most European countries, according to The Greying of Europe report (EU, 2012), one third of the population will consist of people older than 65 in 2060. While very few will need social care until the last years of their life, it is expected in many European countries that the demand for the social care workforce will increase extensively and even be higher than is possible to meet from the country’s own labour force. This is already the case in both Norway and the UK (Texmon and Stølen, 2009; Skills for Care (SfC), 2012), the two countries of particular interest in this book. Although the services that are the focus in this book are services which currently are much more used by disabled than older people, this still is an important part of the context: that this work is part of a growing sector which is at times under high pressure. And also, many social care workers – throughout their working life – are employed to provide care for disabled and older people, rather than one age group alone. On a macro level this is one central reason for the attraction of migrant workers to this sector as it offers jobs that are easily available, and easy to leave. There may not even be a strong competition for such work from the ‘home grown’ population as these are generally jobs that do not require formal qualifications – typically associated with low-paid, low-status female jobs – which are often not attractive to UK workers (cf. e.g. Hussein, Stevens and Manthorpe, 2011; Moriarty, 2010; Cangiano, Shutes, Spencer and Leeson, 2009). There are, currently, plans to introduce a Care Certificate in the English social care sector from March 2015 (Skills for Care (SfC), 2014). But as this book will make a contribution to show, for migrant care workers it is unlikely that this will add to or change the situation © Copyrighted Material

Contextualizing Migrants in Care Work © Copyrighted Material

3



significantly for them, as this skill requirement is overall framed by the contextual organization of the sector and its historical roots as well as migration policies (see below). While the care work situation on an everyday level can be challenging, as we will show throughout the book, this is another central social factor accounting for the attraction of migrants to this sector, and the migrant workers’ stories in this book are part of as well as contributors to this broader picture.

The Aim and Rationale of the Book – Leaving a ‘Victim’ Perspective







The aim of the book is to give insight into the creative individual development of transnational (involving more than one country) ways of life and life projects created by migrants’ interpretation and handling of historical national and transnational structural conditions. This includes the negotiation and potential conflict between individual wishes regarding life career, work and partner/ family matters on one side and on the other side migration policy, labour market characteristics (in particular regarding care work in people’s homes), cultural and gender related norms and patterns in the host country as well as in the home country. We aim to contribute to the understanding and explanation of migrants’ ways into and experiences with care work and to set these within their life projects including migration and care work. The book counters a tendency to one-sidedness in the literature on migration and care developed over the last 10–15 years by authors such as Anderson (2000), Parreñas (2001), Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2003), Yeates (2009), Williams (2010; 2012), Isaksen (2010; 2012), Cox (2011) and Lutz (2002; 2008; 2011). Although there are emerging critiques by some authors, for example, Williams, and Yeates, that we discuss below, there are nevertheless several common issues which the literature has not yet seriously extended since it ‘started’ (cf. e.g. Rollins, 1985) with Anderson’s (2000) work on domestic workers undertaking ‘dirty work’ in middle-class households. In particular in the Nordic countries, among higher middle-class families, this is also about using migrants to maintain gender equality in these households, as gender equality is high on the agenda in these countries (cf. e.g. the case of Norway in this matter (Bikova, 2010; Fjell, 2010)). The key aspects of these issues in this literature cover three common grounds. One is a focus on the worldwide change from male migrants to an increasing number of female migrants. This is sometimes called the ‘feminization’ of migration, which means that the literature has had a strong focus on ‘global women’. A second focus is on the type of work replaced by the migrants in the host country. The work they replace is described typically as caused by ‘outsourcing of reproductive labour’, which means that ‘migrants are employed to provide that labour as domestic workers’ (cf. Yeates, 2009, p. 21). Therefore, in particular, domestic workers (including au pairs) have been included in this literature, with recent empirically based analysis of domestic workers by Lutz (2011). She additionally brings into this debate a historical view on servants and domestic service and its shift from © Copyrighted Material


4









men to women. However, there is also some focus on specific labour market-based recruitment of foreign workers with a concentration on (female) nurses within the health care sector (see e.g. Yeates, 2009; or Isaksen, 2012). So whether this is about wealthy households in the north who need women from the south to do household work for families with two breadwinners, or (skilled) labour market areas needing foreign labour, this is all about women’s work (either traditional domestic work including childcare, or skilled typical female work) being replaced by migrant women who are in a weaker position, economically and socially. In particular, this includes those who have children and husbands in their home country. The third aspect concerns the theoretical focus framing these issues. Here a particular centre of interest has been on ‘global care chains’, a concept first developed by the American sociologist Arlie Hochschild (2000) which points to this whole movement as a global issue about how the richer parts of the world rely on those from poorer countries, with important consequences for migrant workers as well as the families left behind. In other words, the main perspective on migrants in this literature has often been what we would call a ‘victim’ perspective inspired by feminist and poverty approaches. Although this book looks to new perspectives beyond the issues raised by these ‘exploitation’ theorists, there is no doubt that they have made important contributions to the field of migration and care, and we will, where relevant in the book’s discussions, include some of their work. Fiona Williams, a British social policy academic, has, as mentioned, criticized some of the one-sidedness in this literature. For example, she has drawn attention to the fact that there is more diverse migration in this area taking place than is often remarked upon, that migration is not only global but also takes place across and within regions of the global North and South, and that some of the migrant women do not have any children and others do not leave children behind but may, for example, bring their mothers to take care of their children while working in the host country (Williams, 2012, p. 388). And Nicola Yeates, a British academic working in the fields of sociology and social policy, criticizes the literature that has ‘in practice focused on migrant female domestic workers’ (Yeates, 2009, p. 20), presenting them as ‘the servants of globalization’ (Parreñas, 2001). Such critiques show that there is a growing need for serious attempts to try get beyond the onesided focus on global women, women’s work replaced by other women’s work, the leaving-children-behind perspective conceptualized by the ‘care drain’, and, in general, the exploitation perspective. It is our aim with this book to contribute to the rebalancing of this one-sidedness. We systematically avoid a focus on migrants as victims of global processes and meso-level processes regarding needs, including equality maintenance in middle-class households, although this does not mean we will avoid a focus on the challenging context of social care. It is indeed important to understand what kind of challenges migrants actually face, but this does not imply they are steered by them. Therefore, our perspective is to understand migrants as individuals who actively construct their lives within the options and conditions they are given at any time. In other words: we intend to bring into the discussion an awareness of what might be called ‘a new type of © Copyrighted Material


5









migrant’ who is not mainly the victim of the North–South problem and who is not necessarily leaving family behind, but is an individual making care work a part of their own life project, not a family project. We also intend to bring in a new and stronger welfare perspective. Firstly this is because we will focus on care work, that is either fully paid (Norwegian case) or to a large extent paid for by public money (UK case). In the UK there is often some self-funding (see below) due to the strict eligibility criteria for publicly funded social care in the UK. The care work that is focused on here is primarily publicly funded care work in terms of having its point of departure in the welfare state allocating social care services to disabled and older people with social care needs, in the international literature often called ‘long-term care services’, and in the UK ‘adult social care services’. But additionally then, and as indicated above, in the UK case this is increasingly mixed with self-funding, thereby interweaving private and public money for paying the care workers. Another more general mix is the intersection of (primarily) public money and the care work that takes place in people’s homes rather than buildings based care (e.g. care homes or day centres) – crossing more public and private boundaries. Secondly, our perspective has a strong welfare dimension because we bring a disability perspective into this discussion: our focus is not on traditional homebased care services but on those based on the idea of independence. Many disabled people and their organizations have been keen to support one of the current key ideas of European welfare states: the idea of independence through the welfare arrangement of cash-for-care (explored more below) whereby eligible disabled people – and so far to a lesser extent older people with social care needs – are given cash to buy their own care, that is, to employ directly or indirectly their own care workers (Ungerson and Yeandle, 2007; Andersen, Askheim, Begg and Guldvik, 2006). This care work is supposed not to be traditional care work, the content of which is decided by local authorities. It is instead directed by the users who choose what needs to be done and how, provided this is in accordance with meeting their assessed needs, and who often take over the employer role (more on this below). As this is not routine housework or care work stereotypically only attracting women, the new forms of support may also attract men, and in particular migrant men. One reason for it attracting migrants is because the work demands a high degree of flexibility in regard to working hours, working times and length of employment which many host population workers want to avoid; it may fit migrants who have already left the normal course of life in their home country. One might say, simply, that two searches for independence – the one by disabled people and the one by migrant workers looking for new life chances and using care work on the way – are meeting in a global world. In summary, we will extend the mainstream themes in the existing dominating literature on migration and care with the help of what might be conceptualized as ‘the global cross of independence’ crossing welfare state users’ (in particular disabled peoples’) search for independence and migrant care workers’ active attempts to realize their (independent) life projects. We focus on gender by © Copyrighted Material


6




including both women and men and we focus on everyday life supporting work rather than traditional (female) care work. Our discussion is empirically grounded, here taking the perspective of migrant care workers. The book’s three main concepts are migration, care and gender. The tools for the book’s rationale consist of four perspectives: a critical, a comparative, a life course and an intersectional perspective. In the following sections we will first briefly define the book’s main concepts in the way they are relevant here. We will then go through the perspectives we apply. Following this we will compare Norway and the UK as two different welfare regimes, their different migration policy histories and finally differences, but also some similarities, regarding characteristics of their social care sectors, with a focus particularly on ‘personalization policies’ as these have been the impetus for the cash-for-care models.

The Book’s Main Concepts


Migration





Migration is a concept basically about a change involving a home country (in migration policy language also called the sending country) and another country (sometimes called the receiving country or a host country). Taking a sociological perspective, two approaches are of particular interest here. One approaches migration as a process involving some kind of people’s movement between different countries, and these movements are interacting with individual aspects such as gender, ethnicity and class (although the last one originally is a macrosociological term). However, besides this approach, representing a social change with its own dynamics, another approach concerns the continuous relationship to society, including both the home country and the receiving country. This means that migration will potentially always, in various ways, change the societies involved (Van Hear, 2010). This way, migratory processes contribute to as well as being part of wider (in the widest sense global) social changes too. Both approaches are relevant to the discussion here, although our analytical focus is particularly on the migratory dynamics. The concept ‘migration’ is defined as including immigration to countries as well as emigration from countries. The inclusion of both these two processes and allowing them to take place in various ways is the reason why this concept increasingly is being used in the literature about people’s movements between countries and also why this is the main concept in this book. There is no internationally agreed term to define a ‘migrant’. According to the Migration Observatory, an independent research organization based at the University of Oxford: ‘Migrants might be defined by foreign birth, by foreign citizenship, or by their movement into a new country to stay temporarily (sometimes for as little as a year) or to settle for the long-term’ (Anderson and Binder, 2013). In accordance with a definition applied in Norway by the national statistics authority (Statistics © Copyrighted Material


7









Norway, 2013e) an ‘immigrant’ is a person who was born abroad with two foreignborn parents and four foreign-born grandparents; the same then being true for a ‘migrant’ but here taking into account that the process of change may involve more than one-time-emigration from the home country in question. All our study’s participants in Norway fulfil the requirement of being ‘immigrants’ in this sense. Although we only asked them about whether they were born abroad, we know from their life stories that also their parents as well as their grandparents were foreign-born. The same is true for our UK participants, except for one or two cases in which the participant had a grandparent born in the UK and therefore, due to Commonwealth rules (see later), was allowed access to the UK for a certain time period. A further requirement for participating in our project was that they had clear memories of living in two countries, thereby giving the possibility of making transnational experiences and reflections part of their stories. These requirements excluded people migrating to Norway and the UK as young children. The Norwegian definition is stricter than the one used in the UK by the Office for National Statistics to analyse migration flows into and out of Britain, also used by the United Nations. According to these bodies an immigrant is ‘A person who moves to a country other than that of his or her usual residence for a period of at least a year … so that the country of destination effectively becomes his or her new country of usual residence’ (Office for National Statistics, UK, 2013a). This way the United Nations’ definition is slightly broader as it is not a requirement that parents and grandparents of an immigrant are foreign-born, making numbers based on this definition higher. Using the Norwegian definition there were 593,000 immigrants in Norway in 2013, but 664,000 when using the UN definition (Brunborg, 2013) out of a population of 5 million people, equivalent to 12 per cent. In the UK context, anyone born outside the UK is called ‘foreign-born’, but ‘foreign-nationals’ if they do not have a British citizenship. According to the Labour Force Survey, a quarterly survey of households in the UK, which provides annual data on the number and characteristics of migrants, in 2012, 7.7 million people were foreign-born and 4.9 million were foreign-citizens. The UK population was 11.4 per cent foreign-born and 7.2 per cent were non-British citizens at this time (Rienzo and Vargas-Silva, 2013). Figures for England and Wales from the 2011 Census show slightly higher figures, 7.5 million (13 per cent) of usual residents being born outside the United Kingdom and 4.8 million (9 per cent) having non-UK passports (Office for National Statistics, UK, 2012). Although the Norwegian/UK figures seem to be very similar, we still regard the UK as a much more diverse country than Norway, for example due to the fact that there are areas such as London boroughs that already 5–10 years ago had almost half the population foreign-born (Vertovec, 2007). According to the 2011 Census, 36.7 per cent of the usual residents of London were born outside the UK (Office for National Statistics, UK, 2012). While all our participants were foreign-born, not all were foreign-nationals, as some of our participants from both Norway and the UK had gained a Norwegian or © Copyrighted Material


8






British citizenship, or planned to do so. However, we will still call them migrants, as this does not change the fact that they had a foreign background. In the literature into migration, one of the discussions concerns the interpretation of migration as one-time-emigration with settlement in the host country as described, for example, by Castles (1984). Based on an empirical study about Filipino entertainers working in Japan, Parrenñas has challenged this theoretical understanding and suggested the contrasting concept ‘circular migration’ in order to include short-time settlers as represented by her case study about entertainers (Parrenñas, 2010). In our study this concept plays a key role, but in a broader and further understanding, that the decision about settlement is not only a decision about settlement and settlement time but is part of individual life project decisions among the ‘new migrants’. In another aspect of this discussion Parrenñas again challenges an established understanding; here of the concept ‘transnational migrants’ (2010, pp. 303–4) meaning that the ties to the home country balance those to the host country; that is, they are equally strong, indicating also that they, in the end, will move in favour of the host country. Parrenñas challenges this by stressing that ‘circular migrants’ maintain strong ties to their home country; they may not be balancing home and host country ties. While Parrenñas’s point about these ties is important we also find that this is an even more complex and simultaneously changing phenomenon empirically, including the possibility of mixing transnational ties with circular migration as we will show later. Care




Care is a concept that has changed dramatically due to major historical changes, among them those related to the development of welfare states, central parts of families’ responsibilities being replaced by the public, in a wider sense the state. Although the content and strength vary by different dimensions related to care, the profound theoretical idea of this phenomenon remains the same: it involves basically two people where one is physically and/or emotionally helping another party. As stressed by several scholars (e.g. Tronto, 1993; Wærness, 1982) it is a relational phenomenon and power in this relationship differs in various ways depending on the way it is framed and organized. If applied to the welfare state’s social care sector, and in particular care for older people, a definition widely used in the Nordic countries is to understand care as the work done for those who are – due to common social norms – vulnerable people depending on help from others (Wærness, 1982). However, while this definition fits the ideas developed in the mid-early times of the welfare state up until around the 1990s, the idea of the citizen has since taken a new direction, as expressed in concepts such as the ‘new citizenship’ (Daly, 1997) ‘active citizenship’ (Hvinden and Johansson, 2007), and user empowerment (Askheim and Starrin, 2007). A governance shift has taken place from the public as the main party responsible to a reduction in © Copyrighted Material


9





this by transferring more responsibility to the market (see below) but also to the individual citizen (Stoker, 1998). While those allocated care services earlier were seen as dependent people receiving care, the new citizen is expected rather to take over more of the responsibility her/himself and act as independently as possible (Christensen, 2009). The cash-for-care arrangement mentioned earlier represents this new direction. It was encouraged in particular by disabled people, many of them younger and with mainly physical disabilities, and thereby significantly different from the group of older people in terms of resources and attitudes towards help when growing up with a welfare state. This new direction and change have challenged the traditional concept of care and to some extent replaced it with the help of another idea: the idea of independent people taking control – or searching and encouraged to take control – of their own life, including the care work they are dependent upon, therefore not representing ‘care’ but (personal) ‘assistance’, at least as an intention. A change from ‘care’ to ‘assistance’ has significant implications for the power relationship: it challenges the old and traditional place of the welfare user as a subordinated role and through new ways of organizing these relationships – as is the case with cash-for-care system – increases the power, but simultaneously also the (self) responsibility of the citizen as a welfare user. Gender





Gender, we would argue, is central to our discussion for two main reasons. One is that the shaping and making of lives are gendered in the sense that the different roles of women and men in society will impact on the decisions and choices they make. Secondly, care work is strongly and for historical reasons associated with women’s work (e.g. Christensen and Syltevik, 2013). However, the increasing participation of women in the labour market during particularly the 1970s also changed this stereotyped picture making some scholars argue that women’s and men’s lives are not as different as earlier because the role of employee has become a stronger part of many women’s life and thereby, as some call it, masculinized (Christensen and Syltevik, 2013) women’s lives. Based on the fact that care work no longer only represents traditional care work in terms of home-based care (home help) or institutional care for older people in nursing or residential homes and other facilities, but takes also the form of ‘assistance’, concerning help in everyday life tasks, this is probably one reason why this work also attracts more men, including migrant men (e.g. Hussein, 2011b). Supporting a person in everyday life activities is different from carrying out traditional ‘care’ work. Besides the major impact of the economic crises in many European countries on the labour market, which increases the competition for jobs, for example, between migrants, we suggest that a picture of women’s (subordinated) work as being associated with the three ‘C’s (cleaning, cooking and caring (Anderson, 2000)) should be challenged today, in particular because of three social changes. On a worldwide basis migration is now – because of the increasing numbers of feminine migrants – a rather mixed © Copyrighted Material


10




gendered event, not just ‘feminized’. Care work paid and organized by the welfare state has moved currently in a direction that may change the traditional power relationship between care workers and those users wanting assistance rather than care. And finally, the impact of such societal factors as the economic crises, which basically push some people from areas with few employment options to areas with more options and then – when the options expected are not there – create competition between both men and women for low-paid jobs. Together we suggest that these factors when intersecting are challenging ‘the three ‘C’s’. We suggest that this challenge also includes the concept ‘dirty work’ (Anderson, 2000), which may be useful as long as this concerns domestic work tasks, but becomes highly problematic when it concerns personal and supportive work for disabled and older people in their everyday life. In other words, some of the established gendered concepts in the field of gender and care may need some supplementation.


The Book’s Perspectives A Critical Perspective





Our main perspective is a sociological critical perspective for two reasons. One is that it gives the option of understanding the impact of structural conditions on the actual work done by migrants working for older and disabled people. While globalization processes like migration include increasing mobility of the world’s workforce, with a significant part moving to Europe, these flows of labour impact on national and local labour markets, and when meeting recruitment problems among people in the host countries, can function as what Marx called a reserve labour force as well as creating working environments that may develop alienation (see e.g. Joas and Knöbl, 2009). Seen from a labour market needs perspective the ‘interest’ in migrants is only due to the need for them being employees willing to carry out work – on this level stereotyped as women’s work: low-status work – under conditions less acceptable to employees from the host country population (explored more below), with ‘no interest’ in who they (the foreigners) are and what experiences they have. Another option, that the critical perspective gives, is the (critical) understanding of how a concrete social policy relevant here – personalization policy (Christensen and Pilling, 2014) – lying behind the cash-for-care arrangements is potentially privatizing and individualizing care work relationships between the older or disabled person and the care worker. But we suggest this should not imply that one only sees the care worker as an employee exploited by an employer using the cash-for-care scheme. In other words, there are (negative) consequences as well as new options for the (care) workers when the work is being pushed in the direction of more informal conditions and less public control, but with easier access and providing experiences that might contribute to the decision of the next step in life. © Copyrighted Material