Care Chains in Eastern and Central Europe: Male and Female Domestic Work at the Intersections of Gender, Class, and Ethnicity

Abstract

The migration of domestic workers has become a significant part of the movement from and inside of eastern European countries. Using the example of Poland as both a sending and a receiving country, two overlapping cases of care circulation and European care chains (from Ukraine to Poland and from Poland to Germany) will be analyzed. I will argue that migrant domestic work dynamics result from and recreate social inequalities based on gender, class, and ethnicity/citizenship, which will be analyzed on the level of policies and actors, the latter using the example of Polish handymen working in German households.

KEYWORDS:

• Care chains
• circular migration
• domestic work
• handymen
• social policy
• gender

Notes

The term “transnational migration” (as opposed to “one-way emigration”) is used here in a broad sense. In this sense, terms such as “mobility,” “commuting,” “circular,” “pendular,” “seasonal” or “temporal migration,” and “guest-worker system” point to different aspects of transnational migration.

However it must be stressed that also in western Europe the tendency of refamilializing (“new Familialism” or “neo-familialist politics”) can be observed (e.g., in France and Finland). Here providing options for both institutional child care services and generous parental leave regulations are framed as offering “more choice” and “rights to care” (Szelewa/Polakowski, 2008, p. 117)

“Live-in” means that the domestic worker is living in the household of the employer, which in practice implies 24/7 availability; live-in is common among elderly carers and au pairs.

Even as domestic care of elderly people is becoming legal, the circulation of care workers remains an integral part of the organization of this work. In some ways it is what makes it attractive in the first place, to employers as well as to workers and agencies. For example, the Austrian government has made the transnationalization of its elderly care sector an official objective in recent years (Kretschmann, 2010, p. 188), while the German market for agencies is booming and even nonprofit organizations (e.g., Caritas) are increasingly employing circular migrants (Wawrik & Germeten-Ortman, 2012).

On the dichotomy between “redistribution” and “recognition,” see Fraser (1996) and Fraser and Honneth (2003).

We found such constellations in both case studies, but did not study them systematically.