Victims of Care Drain and Transnational Partnering?

ABSTRACT

The paper studies Slovak female elder care workers in Austria. It evaluates the relevance of the care drain metaphor using a representative survey of the carers. It asks two sets of questions: (1) How widespread is the care drain phenomenon? Does migration of elder care workers create care shortages in Slovakia? (2) How do care workers evaluate their employment setting? Is it influenced by experiencing care drain and/or transnational partnering? The higher average age of the care workers means that only a minority has small children in Slovakia. The potential for care drain is therefore limited. Moreover, very few have elderly family members in need of care. On the other hand, most live with partners in Slovakia, so transnational partnering problems could be expected. The average job evaluation of the care workers is highly positive and comparably more enthusiastic than job assessment of women employed in Slovakia. Care workers with small children or partners in Slovakia do not provide a less positive evaluation of the job or its impact on relationships within their families. However, higher earnings and relatively good health of the patient influence the evaluation positively. This focus on earnings and work conditions indicates that care work is probably more similar to other forms of labour migration than anticipated by the current approaches to female migration flows. Indices suggest that these findings could be valid beyond the studied case. A cautious application of the care drain metaphor in intra-EU migration where living standards between countries are not as divergent as between post industrial societies of the West and the Third world is advised.

Key words:

• care workers
• care drain
• transnational partnering
• Austria
• Slovakia

Acknowledgements

The research was supported by APVV grant no. 0309-11 and by the Housing and Home-care for the Elderly and Local Partnerships Strategies in Central European Cities (HELPS) project financed by the European Regional Development Fund within the Central Europe programme. The author would like to thank Martina Sekulová for her valuable comments and help with the cAreworkers 2011 survey questionnaire. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the 11th ESA conference in Turin, Italy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ If we adjust for Italy's higher population (factor 7.5) and share of people aged 65 years and more (20.8% and 18.9% in 2013), the 40,000 legal care workers in Austria equal 330,000 care workers in Italy.

² For a more detailed discussion about measuring migration with LFS see Bahna (2013).

³ The data file with documentation and questionnaire from the survey is available in the Slovak Archive of Social Data (http://sasd.sav.sk).

⁴ The (statistically insignificant) higher average age of care workers in our survey can be explained by the hypothesis that Slovak care workers that draw a pension classify themselves as pensioners and not as care workers in the LFS. This is supported by the fact that respondents who stated their status prior to care work as 'retired' are over-represented among carers with an 'informal' employment status.

⁵ Further descriptive results from the survey can be found in Bahna (2014).

⁶ Later, in our multivariate model, we will test if this difference holds when controlling for their lower age.

⁷ Forty-two percent of the care workers were unemployed in Slovakia before they became care workers in Austria. The average income of the carers in our survey was around 770 euros while the average wages in the eight Slovak NUTS 3 regions ranged from 680 to 1157 euros in 2011.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Miloslav Bahna

Miloslav Bahna is a researcher at the Institute for Sociology, Slovak Academy of Sciences. He wrote a monograph about post EU enlargement migration from Slovakia and contributed to The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration. He published in International Migration Review, European Societies, Journal of Contemporary European Studies and other journals.