Migrant care workers’ trajectories in a familistic welfare regime: labour market incorporation and the Greek economic crisis reality-check

ABSTRACT

It is well documented that post-1990s migrant labour supported Southern European families over a period of social and economic change which challenged their capacity to mobilise and accrue welfare resources. Drawing on empirical research in Greece, this paper explores the trajectory of a particular group of migrant care workers who moved on from the insecurity of the informal labour market of domestic work to work as exclusive bank nurses in hospitals. It reveals how during the crisis these care workers seek refuge back to the informal labour market where their journey started, and discusses what this trajectory reversal implies on a theoretical level. Are we witnessing change in the prevalent pattern of migrant incorporation or rather its continuation under a familiar, and perhaps more precarious, ground?

KEYWORDS:

• Care
• bank and agency nursing
• migration
• familistic welfare regime
• crisis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In 2010 the Greek government introduced the ‘ergosimo’, a bank cheque with which the employer pays the domestic worker. This cheque stipulates the wages and relevant social security deductions involved in the payment of occasionally employed workers in the domestic and other sectors.

2 That said, there have been cases where exclusive nurses had come to Greece without agency mediation, had been working in the country and tried to look for work through employment agencies at a point in their lives that they were out or short of work.

3 The number of uninsured workers has increased substantially according to controls made by Greek Labour Inspectorate in 2010–2012.

4 Phenomena of exclusive nurses persuading patients to hire them at home as live-in quasi nurses/domestic workers after their hospitalisation have been reported before the crisis (see Lazaridis 2007, 238). Some of the bank nurses I interviewed, were familiar with such cases but stressed that these were either agency exclusive nurses who wanted to escape from the clutches of the agency, or un(der)employed domestic workers/carers who were trying to secure a more regular income.