Gender, migration and care deficits: what role for the sustainable development goals?

ABSTRACT

This article explores migration to higher income countries in light of collective commitments to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and argues that domestic social protection and labour market policy will need to be modified to meet these commitments. We look primarily at women in care work, using a broad definition of care that includes home help, domestic work and health care. We argue that the failure to recognise and value unpaid care work has created a sustained labour demand for women migrant care workers in many of these labour-importing countries. Increasingly, immigrant women are being imported into host economies to care, often in informal settings, and frequently engaged by private households, without full access to social protection and labour rights. The consistent application of SDG goals 5 and 8 and their linking to existing labour rights norms and conventions could simultaneously address care deficits in home and host countries and protect the rights of care workers in labour-importing countries and ensure that migrant workers are able to claim these rights.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• migration
• care deficits

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Hess and Henrici (2013) estimate that 74 per cent of the population of home health workers in the United States are foreign born.