Satisfied after all? Working trajectories and job satisfaction of foreign-born female domestic and care workers in Italy

ABSTRACT

Foreign-born women frequently find their first job in the domestic sector. This is usually considered a stepping-stone, but it is rather a definitive condition. We analyse the working trajectory of foreign-born women with a first job in domestic work using sequence analysis and studying their association with job satisfaction by means of logistic regression models. The data were collected as part of the Foreigners’ Job Trajectories project conducted by the ISMU Foundation in Italy in 2009. We found that, after all, domestic and care workers can be satisfied with their job if basic decent working conditions are guaranteed. Particular attention is paid to the high rate of job satisfaction for women with a trajectory from live-out to live-in jobs. Possible explications for job satisfaction are extensively discussed focusing on economic drivers, the agency of domestic workers, and the emotive dimension of domestic and care works.

KEYWORDS:

• Job satisfaction
• working trajectories
• foreign-born women
• domestic work
• care work

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Elisa Barbiano di Belgiojoso http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5782-6266

Livia Elisa Ortensi http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1163-8440

Notes

1 Before 1989, the migration to Italy was completely different in terms of size and provenance (Bonizzoni 2013). It should be noticed that this choice does not affect considerably the results because there were very few cases deleted for this reason.

2 The sequence analysis was performed in Stata using a package implemented by Brisnsky-Fay, Kohler, and Luniak (2006).

3 We tested other solutions that produced only slightly different results; therefore, we opted for this solution because it guaranteed the most informative classification. The matrix proposed allows for separating atypical and small groups that otherwise would be associated to main clusters. As stated by Lesnard (2014), in the presence of strong clusters, as in our case, the substitution cost affects the assignation only of atypical or less frequent sequences.

4 Preliminarily, we tested the hypothesis by using a multilevel model with citizenship of origin as a second level variable, but the adaptation of the model did not show significant improvements as the effect of the citizenship of origin is very much incorporated into trajectories. For this reason, the citizenship of origin is not considered as a covariate in the models.

5 This definition is similar to that of ethnic niche adopted by Wang and Pandit (2007). We estimated the incidence of domestic female workers for each nationality according to the 2010 ISMU Dataset (Blangiardo 2011).

6 Some of the smallest trajectories discussed above are split into different clusters according to their timing and substitution costs. Therefore, they are not explicitly mentioned in the cluster label adopted.

7 It should be noted that, while performing the cluster analysis, even selecting models with a different number of clusters, this small cluster continues to be separated from the others, as it is the last cluster to be aggregated with the others when a small number of clusters is requested.