Slovak Care Workers in Austria: How Important Is the Context of the Sending Country?

Abstract

This study complements the existing analyses of migration of care workers by focusing on the economic situation in the sending country. It shows that the rising popularity of care work in Austria in recent years was fuelled primarily by the crisis induced unemployment rise in Slovakia, rather than by the Austrian legalization policies. Compared to the pre-crisis situation, post-crisis care workers in Austria are more often previously unemployed and without a nursing qualification. Similarly, the earnings of the carers are strongly connected with their previous employment situation in Slovakia. We conclude that the size of the migrant workforce as well as its composition is better explained by the conditions in the sending country than by welfare policies in the destination. If care migration follows the logic of labour migration—as our results suggest—the gradual closing of the income gap between Western and Central European countries will lead to a shift in the source countries of care workers.

Keywords::

• care work
• care policies
• female migration
• Austria
• Slovakia

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Vedecká grantová agentúra (VEGA) [grant number 2/0115/11] and by European Regional Development Fund (Central Europe programme) [grant number 3sCE416P4, project Housing and Home-care for the Elderly and Local Partnerships Strategies in Central European Cities (HELPS)]. The author would like to thank Martina Sekulová for her valuable comments and help with the cAreworkers 2011 survey questionnaire.

Notes

¹ It might be assumed that part of the reason for this is the fact that since 2004 the attention has been pointed towards the more recent and spectacular post EU-enlargement migration flows from Slovakia to the UK and Ireland.

² In May 2011 Austria (together with Germany) as the last of the EU 15 lifted the remaining employment restrictions for the 2004 new member states nationals creating free labour market access for Slovak citizens in Austria.

³ If we combine official Austrian data on care workers' social security payments with information on the legal status of the carers from our survey we can asses that at the end of 2011 there were altogether 27,500 Slovak care workers in Austria.

⁴ Our cAreworkers 2011 survey includes one carer providing live-in care in Austria since 1991.

⁵ Inclusion of Slovakia in the Schengen area on 21 December 2007 was perhaps less important in this regard as it coincided with the regularization process of care workers in Austria after 2006.

⁶ The Wikipedia entry on 24-hour-care (Austria) even calls the typical care setting when a pair of care workers provides care for one elderly or disabled person, each of them working in fortnight cycles as the böhmische Schwestern (bohemian nurses) (accessed on 22 February 2013).

⁷ Based on information from email communication with Thomas Richter (author of the presentation Richter 2011) we know that in November 2011 the share of Slovak care workers in Austria was 69%.

⁸ The data file with documentation and questionnaire from the survey is available in the Slovak Archive of Social Data (http://sasd.sav.sk).

⁹ The compared characteristics included age, region of residence, highest achieved education and marital status. The comparison is part of the cAreworkers 2011 survey documentation in the Slovak Archive of Social Data.

¹⁰ Similarly, we observe a fast change in family situation of the carers between 2005 and 2010. While according to the LFS data in 2005 over 70% of carers were living in Slovakia in households with their parents, five years later it was only a quarter.

¹¹ Figure 2 also shows that the overwhelming majority of Slovak care workers in Austria are women. The share of male care workers only seldom reaches 10%. This finding is the reason why the cAreworkers 2011 survey only focuses on female carers.

¹² The share of Slovak care workers at the beginning of May 2012 was 65%. As already noted, figures on the share of Slovak care workers were obtained from Thomas Richter from Sozialversicherungsanstalt der gewerblichen Wirtschaft.

¹³ According to the 2011 census, the Bratislava and Trnava regions represent 21% of the population of Slovakia.

¹⁴ This is based on recoded answers to an open ended question about the immediate reason for starting care work in Austria in the cAreworkers 2011 survey.

¹⁵ The income variable in the cAreworkers 2011 survey used as the dependent variable in the OLS regression has four categories. We therefore checked the reliability of our models also via a multinomial logistic regression with the same variables. As results from the multinomial logistic regression are in full accord with results obtained in the OLS regression, we decided to present only the latter.

¹⁶ We use ISEI as introduced by Ganzeboom, De Graaf, and Treiman (1992). For the conversion of ISCO-88 codes into ISEI a script prepared by Harry Ganzeboom was used. The script is available at: http://home.fsw.vu.nl/hbg.ganzeboom/isco88

¹⁷ It should be noted that the findings of Elrick and Lewandowska (2008) show that the migrant networks among Polish care workers in Germany function differently than expected.

¹⁸ Slovakia is a country with large regional unemployment differences. In November 2011, the unemployment at district level ranged from 34.3% in Rimavská Sobota in south-eastern Slovakia to 3.5% in the first district of the capital city.