The Southern European migrant-based care model

ABSTRACT

The development of personal social services and female employment is intertwined, not only in the domain of childcare. With the ageing of the population, the changing forms of care and the developments in the eldercare labour market become crucial issues. The new risk of dependency represents a challenge, but also an opportunity. This paper provides an overview of the relationship between the development of long-term care policies and services in distinct European countries and female employment in the care sector. Whereas Northern European countries have developed policies in the field at an earlier stage and continental countries intervened with new policies in the last 10–15 years, in Southern Europe policies remain weak and fragmented. The paper concentrates on the case of Southern European countries, where the weakness of social policies and low development of services did not prevent the rise of a new care labour market. Next to still low employment rates among women, long-term care tends to be provided mainly by migrant care workers often in the underground economy regardless of their legal status. The last development is a key issue for Southern European countries, as discussed in the paper, not only for the current consequences on migrant workers, older people and their families, but also because it is likely to structure any possible future development in long-term care policies.

Key words:

• long-term care
• immigration
• female employment
• Mediterranean Welfare regime

Notes

¹ This article was drafted within the SOLFCARE project (‘Solidaridad familiar, cambio actitudinal y reforma del Estado de bienestar en España: el familismo en transición’), under the ‘Plan Nacional de I + D+i, Spain’ (programme code CSO2011-27494), and the research project ‘Social policies for the elderly and children: preference formation and welfare reform’, funded by Fundación CSIC-Caixa.

² This commission was in charge of providing a general diagnosis of social expenditure, and of the coverage of social protection in a broad sense (including pensions, the health system and social benefits and services).

³ Immediately after the end of the transition period in June 2012, the new conservative government announced that the legal reform had failed, and decided to come back to the old system in 2013.

⁴ Up to 2003, in Italy it was only possible to distinguish between foreign-born and native-born people.

⁵ Since the Italian Labour Force Survey is known to capture less immigrant workers it is very likely that the figures about the employment growth in the domestic sector in Italy are underestimated.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Barbara Da Roit

Barbara Da Roit, Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam, Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Her research focuses on changing care systems from a comparative perspective and looks at the mutual influence of social policies and care practices, with a specific interest for the changing nature of care work and for the relationships between paid employment and the provision of informal care. Her book ‘Strategies of Care. Changing Elderly Care in Italy and the Netherlands’ was published in 2010 by Amsterdam U. Press. She has published in international peer-reviewed journals (SP&A, Current Sociology, the Milbank Quarterly, Quality and Quantity, Social Politics, Ageing and Society, SESP, JESP). E-mail: [email protected]

Amparo González Ferrer

Amparo González Ferrer, Research Fellow at the Spanish National Research Council and member of the Research Group on Demographic Dynamics. She has extensively worked on international migration to Europe, with special attention to family-linked migration and labour market participation of immigrant women. She is currently coordinating a new project on the Life-course Expectations of Children of Immigrants in Spain (CHANCES), as well as participating in a new research on return migration from the EU to origin areas. E-mail: [email protected]

Francisco Javier Moreno-Fuentes

Francisco Javier Moreno-Fuentes, Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Goods and Policies (IPP-CSIC). His main areas of interest are centred in the comparative analysis of public policies within the European region, with a special focus in the study of welfare regimes and their transformation, as well as in immigration and urban policies. He published several books, chapters in edited volumes, as well as articles in Spanish (REIS, Política y Sociedad) and international journals (Politics & Society, IMR, IJURR, JHPPL, Global Networks). E-mail: [email protected]