A ‘career shift’? Bounded agency in migrant employment pathways in the aged care and early childhood education and care sectors in Australia

ABSTRACT

Unlike many countries in Europe and North America, Australia does not directly recruit migrants to work in frontline aged care and early childhood education and care (ECEC). However, employment data shows that a large proportion of people working in these two care sectors are migrants. Little is known about how migrants make their way into the ECEC and aged care sectors in Australia. Drawing on qualitative interviews with migrants working in three cities, this paper explores the pathways of migrants into care work in Australia. It uses the concept of bounded agency to illustrate how migrants articulate agency within constrained employment opportunities. It finds that participants experience a heavily constrained sense of agency upon arrival in Australia due to lack of skills recognition and English language proficiency. Our data shows that, over time, participants mobilise existing resources – and acquire new ones – to develop new frames for action that culminate in what they describe as a ‘career shift’ into employment in formal care settings. Our data sheds new light on the way in which migrant care workers, through this process, are able to negotiate a sense of agency and pursue employment preferences, within a context of constraint.

KEYWORDS:

• Care worker
• migrant
• aged care
• early childhood education and care
• Australia

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the rest of the project team Deborah Brennan, Sara Charlesworth, and Jenny Malone for their comments and suggestions on drafts and their wider contribution to the project. We would also like to acknowledge Isabel Shutes and Chris F Wright for the time they took to provide extremely useful feedback on an earlier draft. We would like to acknowledge the research partners who supported us to recruit the participants for the study, and especially the participants themselves for their time and generosity in sharing their experiences with us.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 By ‘frontline’ care work we refer to personal care provided directly to a person or people, excluding that provided by health professionals.

2 These are based on the authors’ analysis of the most recent figures from the Australian Census & Migrants Integrated Dataset (ACMID) 2011, where ‘frontline’ care jobs are defined as level four on the formal Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations (ANZSCO) framework.

3 At Federation in 1901 Australia had a population of 3.8 million people, 23 percent of whom were migrants (Treasury 2018, 15). By 2016, 28 per cent of Australia’s population was born overseas (ABS 2017).

4 There are currently nearly 1.6 million temporary migrants in Australia (Treasury 2018, 19) most of whom have working rights attached to their visa even when the primary reason of the visa is not work.

5 For example, the Seasonal Worker Program (SWP) and the Pacific Labour Scheme (PLS) are only available to workers from specific Pacific countries. The SWP is for employment in horticulture and agriculture. The PLS is focused on non-seasonal jobs in sectors deemed to have a labour shortage, such as care.

6 A Certificate III qualification is a vocational qualification, signifying training in a specific skill area equivalent to level 3 of the Australian Qualifications Framework.

7 The au pairs in the sample (n = 14) were excluded because their pathways and demographic profiles were highly distinct from the rest of the sample and an analysis of their pathways, aspirations and experiences is being undertaken separately. The research team drafted and submitted this paper before receiving a late spike in recruitment, so the final ten interviews were not captured in this paper but are being analysed and include in further papers.

8 There are two visa categories: the Working Holiday Maker visa, and the Work and Holiday Maker visa.

9 This reflects Australia’s focus on skilled migrants and aligns with the ACMID data on migrant education levels referred to in footnote 1.

10 The participants in this study identified English language proficiency as a dominant constraint shaping their employment pathways upon entering Australia. No participants articulated incongruence between their perception of their English language proficiency and the perceptions of employers and others. However, participants’ perceptions should be understood in the context of the important body of literature identifying the ‘racialized employment criteria’ adopted by employers when recruiting migrants (Cranford 2014), or the racialized norms shaping employers’ recruitment practices in the care and other sectors. According to this literature, English language proficiency is itself a socially and culturally situated concept that may have been operating as a constraint in more complex ways than were described to us by participants in this study.

11 Family day care is a formal small group child care service provided by a qualified educator in their own home. Government regulations stipulate a maximum of four children under school age and three children of school age.

Additional information

Funding

This paper emerges from research funded by the Australian Research Council DP160100175, Markets, Migration and the Work of Care in Australia and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership grant number 895-2012-1021, Gender, Migration and the Work of Care.