Beyond “Women’s Work”: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Management of Paid Care Work in Nonprofit Domiciliary Services in Italy

Abstract

Based on qualitative data, this article focuses on management practices in social cooperatives operating as nonprofit providers of domiciliary care services in Italy. Their livelihood is eroded by the presence of migrant live-in caregivers, who are privately employed, inexpensive, and often irregular. This competition is not only economic but also symbolic, as it jeopardizes the managers’ attempts to define care work as a skilled job and reproduces notions of care as naturally feminine “women’s work.” The article analyses the strategies adopted by the managers to negotiate this competition and shows how these strategies challenge dominant gendered constructions of care work.

Keywords:

• Migrant care workers
• paid care work
• nonprofit sector
• social cooperatives
• management
• gender
• Italy
• “women’s work”

Acknowledgments

Previous drafts of this article benefited from feedback by Rosie Cox, Francesca Alice Vianello, Paolo Boccagni, Sylvie Contrepois, and Annalisa Lendaro. I would like to thank these colleagues and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

Notes

1 In 2018, 516 euros were paid monthly to people in conditions of full dependency.

2 “Emotional labour” refers to the processes of management of feelings that is performed by workers based on organizationally defined rules; it is typical of feminized service-sector jobs wherein it reproduces the customers’ status and well-being (Hochschild, 2012).