Migrant workers, focused on Ireland

https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392118765206

Current Sociology Monograph 2018, Vol. 66(4) 547 –561

© The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permissions:

sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0011392118765206

journals.sagepub.com/home/csi

CS

Care: Intersections of scales, inequalities and crises

Fiona Williams School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds, UK

Abstract This article develops an understanding of how and why care is a central issue for personal relationships and for global sustainability and justice. Three approaches inform the synthetic analytical framework: intersectionality; the transnational political economy of care within the context of global crises of care, finance, environment and migration; and the ethics of care. The article applies these to an analysis that can account for the multidirectional dynamics of care from micro to meso to macro scales, as well as to the salient intersections of categories within each of these levels. It argues for a care-ethical approach to global social justice and sustainability that recognizes the centrality of care and interdependence to everyday life.

Keywords Care, environment, ethics of care, global crises of care, global social justice, intersectionality, migrant care work, migration and finance, transnational political economy of care

Introduction

The aim of this article is to provide an analytical framework that makes sense of the matrix of interconnections in which care exists in the contemporary world. Care exists as relational practice, as policy, as an ethic, and as the basis for making claims, as a com- modity, as economy, and as power. In most of these facets, it operates personally, locally, nationally, transnationally and globally. Care may be paid and unpaid and as such it captures a range of interconnected inequalities. Women’s inequalities, at work and in the household, relate to the (unpaid) care and domestic responsibilities they carry. Globally,

Corresponding author: Fiona Williams, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK. Email: [email protected]

765206CSI0010.1177/0011392118765206Current SociologyWilliams research-article2018

Part 2: Transnationalization of Care and Care Policies

548 Current Sociology Monograph 2 66(4)

women do most paid care and domestic work, which is generally low paid and devalued (ILO, 2016a). It often falls to those with least bargaining power: working-class women, minority ethnic and migrant women. Care is not just about those who provide care or support but also about those who are its recipients, and this may involve complex power relations to do with disability, frailty and old or very young age.

Since the turn of the century the gender, race and class dimensions of care have been intensified by the increase in migrant care work. Half of the world’s 232 million interna- tional migrants are women (OECD-UNDESA, 2013: 1), many of whom find work in care and domestic work in private households and institutions in wealthier countries. This movement reflects some of the most significant social, economic, political and demographic changes of the twenty-first century, which, in turn, render care a critical issue for policy. The international demand for and supply of care workers has followed the increase of women’s involvement in the labour market and the greater reliance in both the Global North and South on a woman’s wage. In 2014 the average rate in OECD countries was 63% female labour force participation (OECD, 2015). In developing coun- tries female participation in formal work (often as main breadwinners) has increased in the last 10 years and, by 2008, ranged from 24.7% in the Middle East to 62.9% in sub- Saharan Africa for women over 25 (ILO, 2009: 9). In developed welfare states, this change has been characterized by the move from a normative ‘male breadwinner’ to a new ideal-type ‘adult worker’ society in which ‘hard-working’ men and women are expected to support themselves and their families through employment. In the wealthier world care needs are exacerbated by an ageing society, declining fertility and cutbacks on social expenditure. In the poorer world, the effects of structural adjustment pro- grammes, unemployment, wars, natural disasters and chronic illnesses create major dif- ficulties for women to maintain themselves and their families with little supportive infrastructure. This intensifies the reason for women to migrate. Although migrant care work may partially solve the work–life stresses of dual-earning households and the strains of social expenditure in developed countries, as well as providing migrant women with opportunities, it does so at the cost of reducing the care resources in migrant work- ers’ countries of origin, thus contributing to geopolitical inequalities. As I argue, care as such is a pressing political issue, not just for demographic and social reasons, but also for global sustainability and social justice.

The conceptual context

The term ‘care’ is not uncontested. ‘Social reproduction’ or ‘reproductive labour’ provide alternative framing concepts for the activities of care and domestic work that contribute to human flourishing, repair and sustenance. Some argue that social reproduction is pref- erable to care in that it provides for ‘a wider landscape of activities and sites’ (Kofman, 2012: 144) connected to many different forms of reproductive labour including, for example, education. These two terms have different but consanguine lineages. In the 1970s, early feminist research brought care out of the closet, and provided a critique of how the assumption of women’s responsibility for the care of children and disabled or frail older family members, as well as able-bodied men, reinforced women’s financial dependency and their marginalization from the public sphere. It highlighted care’s

Williams 549

ambiguity for women – a ‘labour of love’ (Finch and Groves, 1983). ‘Care’ became more widely used in feminist analysis in order to reference the emotional, relational and inti- mate dimensions of those practices.

However, transformative as this thinking was, it also tended to be more localized (some would say parochial) in its application and sometimes verged on gender-essentialism by attributing the emotional capacities for care to women alone (e.g. Noddings, 1982). In addition, the privileging of not simply gender but the unpaid/paid carer became the focus of criticism from disability activists for its occlusion of the relations of power between care provider and care recipient (Morris, 1991). Indeed, in the light of the history of disa- bled people as well as of mental health, the very notion of care, especially institutionalized care, carries narratives of segregation, abuse and humiliation (Goffman, 1961).

Social reproduction’s origins in Marxist analysis tied it closely to production and capitalism with women and the state performing the necessary work to ensure a healthy and educated labour force. Marxist-feminists explored the gender and class inequalities that accompany social reproductive practices within the context of patriarchal welfare capitalism (Wilson, 1977). While Marxist analysis gave those practices greater explana- tory power, as part of the gender and class structuring of the political economy, it tended towards economic reductionism, focusing on the functional labour of care, omitting its emotional, agentic and relational aspects.

Neither approach told the whole story. The development of research on the connec- tion between female migration and care work drew race, ethnicity, migrant status and (trans)nationality into the picture (Heyzer et al., 1994). It also developed wider frames for conceptualizing a massive span: from the economic, social, cultural and political dimensions of globalization to the most intimate practices of care carried out in private homes, and the connection to the history of racialized servitude. Thus Parreñas’s analysis of the ‘international division of reproductive labor’ (Parreñas, 2001) builds on Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s (1992) ‘racial division of reproductive labor’ – the historical and con- tinuing role in care work and domestic service played by black and minority ethnic women in the US. Parreñas shows how women from poorer regions have been pulled into a new international division of labour (Sassen, 1984), where corporations in global cities employ highly professionalized male and female workers whose catering, cleaning and care needs are serviced at low cost by migrant workers.

While much of the early research on global care chains linked up diasporic spaces between transnational migration and the experiences in private households, a further gap opened up on the part played in this by nation-states and their social policies, and how these generated the context for micro scale experiences as well as being subject to pro- cesses and structures at the macro scale. Research carried out in Europe began in particu- lar to show how the developments in national care policies and migration policies constituted important institutional factors in linking the micro level of care practices and experiences to the global movement of care workers (e.g. Williams and Gavanas, 2008).

The framework that follows (see Table 1) draws on these insights and attempts to overcome some of the limitations of earlier care analysis by making connections across the micro, meso and macro scales of analysis while also understanding the complexity of intersections within those scales. It is informed by an intersectionality perspective which has its origins in Black feminist thinking of the 1980s. This aimed to capture the ways in

550 Current Sociology Monograph 2 66(4)

which the experiences of women of colour are constituted across and within the axes of race, gender and class subordination and domination (Crenshaw, 1989). Its contempo- rary application emphasizes the fluid and shifting nature of social relations of power and inequality over time and place (Cho et al., 2013). This is particularly useful to understand the multiple social relations involved in paid and unpaid care work at the micro level (of gender, race, ethnicity, class, inter alia), and the way these are overlaid with the social relations of care-giving and care-receiving in which power manifests itself through phys- ical, emotional (and financial) interactions. These relationships are shaped at the meso level by the institutional, cultural, social and political intersections of federal, national, and sometimes regional, care, migration and employment regimes. These refer not only to policies but also to practices, cultures, legacies and mobilizations. At the macro level these processes are understood to be not just part of global capitalism or neoliberalism, but a context in which different forms of patriarchal, post-colonial and imperial capital- isms are in play. These processes shape the ‘the transnational political economy of care’ whose dynamics involve the movements and practices of care labour, care capital, care commitments and political actors, both in terms of global governance and international political mobilizations (Williams, 2011). Table 1 summarizes these vertical relations between scales (which is elsewhere conceptualized as multi-scalar analysis – Michel and Peng, 2017) and the horizontal intersections within the scales. It accentuates connection and movement through scales and within them rather than a top-down hierarchical reduc- tionism from macro to micro, or global to local. In this way it synthesizes ‘care’ with an intersectional method and a political economy perspective.

Before illustrating these intersecting scales and categories, there is a further analytical point about historical specificity. I have noted how the transnational political economy of care is characterized in this century by the global and regional movement of care labour, building on historical precedents in which racialized groups were recruited, either pri- vately or by welfare states, to perform caring and cleaning work. In recent decades, national care, employment and migration policies have been further shaped by the mar- ket domination of neoliberalism and work-centred welfare policies, along with the effects of the global financial crisis from 2008. In the last section of the article, I draw on and add to Fraser’s critical reinterpretation of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (Polanyi, 1944/1957), which offers an intersectional analysis of the global crises of

Table 1. Intersecting scales and categories of analysis.

Micro: the everyday experiences of care and care work (and the claims to emerge from them) – saturated in the social relations of both inequality and care relations of gender, class, race, disability, age, sexuality and migrant status. Meso: the institutional, social, political and cultural factors which shape this relationship – the intersection of national care, migration and employment regimes. Macro: global capitalism with its geopolitical, gendered, imperialist and post-colonial hierarchies and inequalities – the intersecting dynamics of the transnational political economy of the transnational movements and practices of care labour, care capital, care commitments and international political actors.

Adapted from Williams, 2011, 2012.

Williams 551

finance, environment, care and migration, all of which jeopardize security, sustainability and solidarity. I combine the analysis at this point with a care-ethical approach (Robinson, 1999; Tronto, 1993; Williams, 2001). This provides a useful critique of the way care is hidden by economistic understandings of globalization, its policies and its crises, and the basis to consider a care-ethical approach to social justice.

To begin with, the following three sections illustrate the micro, meso and macro scales and their internal and external intersections. For reasons of space I reference empirical studies to illustrate the particular nature of a specific set of intersections rather than elaborating country-by-country or care-by-care examples (but see Hobson et al., 2015; Michel and Peng, 2017; Williams and Brennan, 2012 for such examples).

Micro intersections of close encounters

The practices of care involve complex interpersonal, emotional and physical encounters between care giver and recipient. When this is paid care work, the social relations are made more complex by not only the soial positionings of both parties attached to class, race/ ethnicity, religion, gender, age, sexuality and disability, but also by the employment and migrant status of the care worker. This can be extremely variable. The worker may live in the home of the care recipient or in an institution such as a nursing home; she may work a few hours a week, a few hours a day, or long hours; her work may involve caring and/or cleaning for an older, frail or disabled person, or it may involve being their per- sonal assistant. An employee may be self-employed, or receive cash-in-hand as part of the grey economy, or she may work for a private agency, or for a local authority; she may have limited access to collective organization or representation. As a migrant care worker, she may be working under a special permit, a temporary visa, or she may be undocumented, and these insecurities may be exacerbated where her ethnicity, national- ity, religion or migrant status are racialized.

At the same time, these differences are overlain by the social relations of care and these may construct multiple vulnerable dependencies of frailty in old age on the part of the recipient and of insecure employment and the indignities of racism and sexism or homophobia experienced by the worker, especially where care has little social or eco- nomic value. These complexities attach not only to care work in employers’ homes (such as cleaning, child care or looking after a frail person), but also to institutional care. In a study of migrant and minority ethnic workers in mainly institutional-based care for older people in London, Paris and Madrid, a feeling of a ‘hierarchy’ of vulnerabilities made workers sense their own experiences of racism were ignored (Sahraoui, 2016). That is to say, institutional regulations covering older people’s vulnerability were placed higher than vulnerability to racist abuse towards the worker by recipients or managers. In this way, a worker in Paris said:

Racist remarks, homophobic remarks, it’s an offence punished by French law. But [when] we say it’s an elderly person, it’s not … When you work 10 or 12 hours, you come, you sweat, you take care of the person, you wash him/her, you prepare breakfast, sometimes you even feed the person …, you bend, you sweat, you’re called negro, domestic … (Bacar, Senegal, Paris, quoted by Sahraoui, 2016: 246)

552 Current Sociology Monograph 2 66(4)

In this study, some nursing home owners regarded being able to cope with racism and sexism as part of the emotional skills staff needed to do care work. Here deep tensions in intimate care are constituted by processes at the meso level, specifically, cultural and institutional understandings of differential vulnerability, of care as work, and of migrants as employees.

Meso level institutional intersections

Insofar as interpersonal care relations are shaped by different institutional, political, eco- nomic and cultural processes at the meso level, here too an intersectional understanding of these dynamics is also useful for showing the diverse ways in which the migration– care–work nexus operates in different countries even where those countries are faced with similar pressures. The way in which a country’s migration, care and employment regimes intersect provides us with a picture of how care needs are met in developed welfare states.1 ‘Regime’ does not only refer to policies and regulation but, importantly, to conditions, cultures, practices and legacies, and to major forms of social relations of power and ine- quality inherent in care, migration and employment, and also to the forms of mobilization and contestation that each regime in each country provokes (Williams, 2012).

While there are many convergent trends in higher and middle-income countries around care, migration and employment policies, these build on cultural and path- dependent institutional differences. In relation to convergences, care policies of many developed welfare states have shifted over the past two decades from providing public services (or in some places, such as Southern Europe, few care services) to giving older people, disabled people or parents cash payments or tax credits to access public care in the private market or buy in care or domestic help in their private homes (Williams and Brennan, 2012). The reliance on voluntary but especially private for-profit provision has led to care being treated as a commodity that is bought and sold in the care market. Where local authorities contract out provision such as domiciliary services, nurseries or residential homes to the private sector there has often been a worsening of pay, condi- tions and labour shortages. It thus attracts those with least negotiating power and this is often female migrant or minority ethnic labour. Such workers enter a labour market where they are already disadvantaged by their gender, and by their migrant and racialized status, and are susceptible to the poor conditions that beset the long-standing low-wage economy of care and domestic work, itself worsened by the increased casualization of care work through neoliberal economic policies and post-crisis austerity measures. According to the ILO (2016b), domestic and care work across the world carries all the hallmarks of non-standard employment – temporary, part-time, precarious, low waged, insecure, flexible, without collective organization. There have also been common trends in migration policies which have become increasingly restrictive towards so-called ‘unskilled’ workers, a category that often includes care workers (Anderson, 2010). Furthermore, this has been accompanied in many countries by backtracking on multicul- turalist policies, by populist and political xenophobic and anti-immigration sentiment that increases the existential insecurity of foreign workers.

However, historical legacies, path dependencies, cultural practices and crises shape variable responses in different countries to these trends. In terms of care, Spain and Italy

Williams 553

are both countries with a strong history of familial (female) care provision. The rise in women’s employment and ageing has led to what has been called a move from a family model of care to a ‘migrant-in-the-family’ model of care (Bettio et al., 2006). In Spain and Italy state allowances assist families in employing care workers to look after frail old family members in their homes and 63% and 73% respectively are migrant workers (Leon, 2010; Van Hooren, 2008).

Furthermore, migration policies in these countries have in the past been relatively ‘unmanaged’, veering from domestic worker quotas to amnesties for irregular care worker migrants. When in Italy, amid prevailing anti-immigration mobilization, new immigration policies in 2009 criminalized undocumented workers, an exception was made for badanti – home-based domestic/care workers – allowing them to become regu- larized (di Martino et al., 2013) reflecting both the state’s and families’ reliance on this low-cost care provision. Spain was one of the European countries most hit by the global financial crisis and the demands of the EU/IMF bailout in 2009, after which general unemployment rose to a peak rate of 27%. This has affected migrant care workers in a number of ways. The squeeze on household incomes has led to a decrease in their hours, conditions and pay (Hellgren and Serrano, 2017). In turn there has been a reduction in remittances sent back home: general remittances have halved in Spain since 2006 (World Bank, 2016 cited in Hellgren and Serrano, 2017: 5). For many, return migration is not a viable option. Indeed, in spite of tightening immigration measures on non-EU migrants, and an increase in non-eligibility of migrants to social rights, general immigration since 2009 has levelled off rather than dropped dramatically (Hellgren and Serrano, 2017). In other words, the crises in finance, care needs and migration have intensified the pre- existing poor working conditions of migrant care workers with a major impact on their families back home.

Britain’s care regime by contrast has a tradition of public provision for elder care but not, until recently, for child care. The care economy has seen these areas of provision now dominated by the private sector. Migrant workers are much more likely to be employed by private sector residential and home care services (where 20% are migrant workers; Cangiano et al., 2009). However, since the financial crisis, the tightening of local authority budgets has cut the incomes of private care homes with worsening condi- tions for workers and residents and an increase in bankruptcy and home closure (Carter, 2016). In relation to migration, historically, Britain’s welfare state depended on recruit- ment of workers from its former colonies over the 1950s and 1960s. More recently, Britain’s migration regime has developed a restrictive points-based system which favours skilled workers, and this shapes the care labour market. After the points system was introduced in 2008, nurses and senior care workers were removed from the skilled labour work permits allowed to migrants from outside the EU. These workers still continue to migrate to the UK but end up in care jobs for which they are overqualified and for which they have to constantly renew their work permits. In this way new migration rules con- tribute to care workers’ employment precarity.

With its legacy of state-funded public provision in both elder care and child care, social protection of the labour force, and a more liberal migration regime especially for asylum seekers, Sweden presents a further contrast. This also involves eligibility to social rights for documented and undocumented migrants. Nevertheless, in 2007 the

554 Current Sociology Monograph 2 66(4)

liberal-conservative government implemented tax breaks for households employing a domestic worker in order to encourage domestic workers and their employers out of the grey market, and also in the name of ‘gender equality’, at least for the professional couples who are among those who use these services (Williams, 2012: 369). In addition, in 2008 the government liberalized the immigration rules for economic migrants, a move that was seen by trade unions as creating a pool of low-paid migrant workers (Hobson et al., 2015:12). The tax break reform has led to the growth of private domestic employment agencies, and though this has improved the conditions of those working in them, there is still an informal grey market that traps undocumented migrant workers (Gavanas, 2011).

Macro intersections in the transnational political economy of care

All of the above processes and policies are nested within a transnational political econ- omy of care. Here I point to those transnational dynamics which illustrate the connec- tions across the scales of micro to meso to macro. One central transnational dynamic is the movement of care labour. At the local level this involves households in sending coun- tries deciding that, in the context of social and economic instability and lack of access to employment and public services, their collective well-being is best sustained through the emigration of a family member into work from which remittances can be sent home. The insecurity faced by many middle- and low-income countries results from the conditions imposed on poorer countries by the World Bank and IMF since the 1970s through struc- tural adjustment policies, and later austerity measures, and which orientated them towards free market and export economies. In some countries, such as the Philippines, the response has been to facilitate the export of nurses and care workers since their remit- tances provide a large source of foreign currency, although this does little to improve the infrastructure and deprives sending countries of their own care resources.

This movement of labour operates in parallel to the recruitment by richer states and private agencies of skilled health workers from poorer regions into public and private health care in the richer countries, often in conjunction with bilateral arrangements. While this includes highly qualified doctors and nurses, the overall effect is similar to and as cumulative as that of migrant care work: draining poorer countries of their trained professional infrastructure while saving the social expenditure costs of richer countries. It reproduces the very geopolitical inequalities which are at its root. At the same time, with the development of national care provider markets, care provision has become big international business driving out the smaller, more cooperatively run care homes and agencies. The movement of care capital and the principles of market investment – risk, expansion, profit – conflict with the principles of care provision which focus on indi- vidual needs, continuity and quality of services provided by trained workers.

There also exist informal and localized transnational processes such as the complex networks migrant workers maintain in order to sustain their cultural, financial and care commitments across the diasporic space between home and work. Research has docu- mented how migrant mothers care for their employer’s family members while also nego- tiating their own children’s lives back home, keeping in daily touch by phone or Skype, overseeing homework or arbitrating in family disputes (Oliveira, 2017). As well as the

Williams 555

exercise of individual agency, the collective political mobilization of local and transna- tional networks of care and domestic work activists has been instrumental in struggles for better conditions and rights, as have international disability movements representing service users, international non-governmental organizations, international networks of family carers and international trade unions (see below).

These then are the dynamics of the transnational political economy within which the micro and meso are nested but which they also shape. Of further importance over the past decade has been an escalation of global crises that have significance for both care and migration.

Intersecting crises and strategies for care-ethical justice

When the global financial crisis occurred in 2008, most analysts focused on its economic causes and consequences. However, philosopher Nancy Fraser framed it in different terms (Fraser, 2013). Recalling Karl Polanyi’s work on the self-destructive impulse behind capitalism – in its capacity to devalue land, labour and money by turning them into ‘fictitious commodities’ (Polanyi, 1944/1957), she argues that the same impulse is seen today in the global crises of finance, the environment and care. Thus, speculation led to the global financial crisis in which investment was destabilized and devalued with the subsequent intensification of austerity policies. Similarly, the commercial exploita- tion of the world’s natural resources has devalued the planet and contributed to an envi- ronmental crisis, while the commodification of care has led to its devaluation across the globe. These crises are linked by the ways in which each jeopardizes security, human solidarity and sustainability. They are also interconnected: for example, austerity has given rise to public expenditure cuts; climate change and collapsing economies propel migration; care migration solves some countries’ care crises at the others’ expense. My analysis adds a fourth intersecting crisis – that of migration – which has had the effect of turning migrants into ‘fictitious commodities’ in which the accompanying political xeno- phobia further jeopardizes security, sustainability and solidarity.

Understanding these intersections in this way allows an appreciation of care, in com- mon with the environment and migration, as an issue for global sustainability and justice. The challenging nature of this is that it looks beyond an economistic frame in which productivism and economic growth are taken as given in the development of social poli- cies. I will come back to this challenge, but first, strategies for care involve three approaches: temporal – in terms of short-term goals and longer-term transformation; geopolitical – strategies that address both developing and developed countries’ needs; and, third, at different levels of governance – local, national, bilateral and global. Thus, in the short-term, the regularization of care and domestic work, establishing and formal- izing career paths and developing accreditation frameworks are all essential. For migrant care workers this would also include rights to family reunion, to contracts, social protec- tion, training, language acquisition, guidance on cultural norms, and freedom from dis- crimination in the workplace, especially the private home. The consequent need for coordination across the different policy areas of migration, health and social care, employment and development is axiomatic.

At global level, one of the most significant markers of progress has been the International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention passed in 2011 on ‘Decent Work for Domestic

556 Current Sociology Monograph 2 66(4)

Workers’, which set standards for rights to decent working conditions and collective organ- ization to be ratified and implemented by its member states. In this, worldwide grassroots domestic worker organizations were brought together in an International Domestic Workers Network which entailed discussing the hitherto ‘invisible’ informal economy of care and domestic work (Fish and Schumpert, 2017). In some places its negotiation and implemen- tation forced a circular process of pressure and mobilization from local to national to global. Demands from local organizations went to national NGOs and policymakers and on to international protocols whose ordinance then became the basis for further pressure for implementation at both national and local levels (Boris and Undén, 2017).

However, this focuses mainly on developed countries. Important in developing coun- tries are that protective measures for workers about to migrate would include making the decision to migrate one of informed choice rather than pressured by lack of financial and professional improvements. Pillinger (2011) cites examples of strategies for ethical emi- gration policies worked through at local level in countries of origin through coordinated social dialogues between different political and social actors. In addition, the develop- ment of bilateral ethical recruitment codes in health care from the WHO (2010) to pre- vent ‘poaching’ health care workers from poorer countries and the guarantee to provide free training and support for returning doctors and nurses provides a useful template that could be applied to care work.

It is also essential to recognize the different claims of those groups at the centre of care provision: not only workers and the trade unions and migrant advocates that support them, not only carers of children or older people, but also those who access support. While the professionalization of care work might be a strategy to raise care’s value and care workers’ opportunities, disability organizations have long challenged the part played by professionalization in enhancing the power of professionals over service users (Shakespeare, 2006). Overcoming this requires the involvement of user groups in moni- toring training that is person-centred rather than task-oriented – being attentive to peo- ple’s needs; being non-judgemental; recognizing human dignity.

Similarly, attempts to regularize care work as part of labour market activation social policy can deepen rather than mitigate inequalities. For example, a number of European countries, including Austria, Germany, Belgium, France, Finland and Denmark, have introduced tax breaks for domestic work (Carbonnier and Morel, 2015). The policies are promoted politically to encourage job creation for unemployed and low-skilled people. These are not only migrant workers, although such work is often performed by first- or second-generation migrant/ minority ethnic women workers. They are also deemed to create a ‘productivity boost’ by enabling professional women to employ domestic/care workers to maintain their productivity as highly skilled workers while balancing their home responsibilities. However, because many of these jobs are often organized through the private market they are not covered by social protection and they remain precarious, low skilled and low paid. In addition, it encourages a growing trend of the better-off benefiting from tax allowances. While it appears to be a strategy to further work oppor- tunities for differently qualified women and work/life balance for professional women, in effect it reinforces class and race inequalities between low-skilled and highly educated women. In addition, such policies move the solution away from redistributing domestic/ care labour between men and women or partners within the household.

Williams 557

Fundamental to all these strategies is ‘intersectionality in action’: the need for alliances and dialogues between the different groups making claims around care policies. One piece of research based on the claims of those organizations mobilizing around child care, dis- ability, family carers’ needs, trade union and migrants’ rights found that claims clustered around three areas: recognition, rights and redistribution (Williams, 2010). Claims for recognition were about making care visible, giving greater voice and representation to those who provide care and receive support, and giving care greater social and economic value. Claims for rights centred around rights as carers, earners and citizens – to quality services, an enabling environment, social protection and flexible working, to decent wages, and human and civil rights. Claims for redistribution focused on redistributing care resources and responsibilities for care support – from women to men, from families to states, from poorer to richer regions as well as democratic power to those who use ser- vices, along with the reorganization and redistribution of time and space.

Many of these claims, however, entail longer-term transformation of welfare states to give care greater centrality in strategies for social justice. The current logic of policymak- ing in both developed and developing countries focuses on economic competitiveness, on the facilitation of markets, on the ethic of paid work, and now on austerity. The principle of paid work has been central to welfare restructuring, providing the financial imperative to get people ‘off welfare and into work’, and the moral imperative to turn people into more responsible and self-sufficient citizens. Where care policies have been developed their rationale has often been to get women or disabled people into work. Economic logics crowd out the intrinsic value of good-quality care provision. Yet care is central to the global economy, its inequalities and its crises. Demanding an understanding of this means raising the social, economic and political value of care. It is here that a care-ethical approach is helpful. This starts from a critique of liberal notions of justice for their hyper-individualist focus on autonomy and rationality as the basis to moral reasoning, and its consequent devaluation of dependency, vulnerability and interdependency which attend care practices (Robinson, 1999; Tronto, 1993). Care ethicists reconceptualize autonomy, reasoning, jus- tice and equality in relational terms. They argue for the significance of interdependency of human beings as the basis to reasoning and action, of relationships and responsibilities to concrete others as the grounding for justice, for human flourishing and sustainability.

Raising care’s social value means arguing for investment in care especially for those, such as older and disabled people, who are deemed to have no so-called ‘productive potential’. That means raising the moral dimension of care as a universal practice and an ethic. Care is universal: care of both the self and of others involves us all, men and women, old and young, able-bodied and disabled. Care sustains and repairs society. Care relationships can be unequal and oppressive, but in conditions of mutual respect and material support, the giving and receipt of care engenders responsibility, trust, tolerance for human limitations and frailties, and acceptance of diversity. These represent the polit- ical value of care, understood politically as civic virtues, part of what it is to be a citizen, part of the development of solidarity across diversity. It is important, too, to develop the arguments for the economic value of care: why, as a long-term investment, expenditure on good-quality, publicly funded care is affordable and why it cannot be treated as a market good (Himmelweit, 2007). The economic value of supporting care needs is that it is cumulative: the more people are supported the better they are enabled to provide care

558 Current Sociology Monograph 2 66(4)

for others, and this promotes solidarity. It enhances general well-being which in its turn enhances productivity, mental and physical health and self-sustainability. This economic argument is based upon the ethics of interdependence, mutuality and universal human vulnerability rather than on individualism and self-sufficiency. It is this, the understand- ing of care as a collective social good, which needs to be central to concepts of global justice. In its turn this presupposes that human flourishing is the key to our sustainability and that therefore the conditions for this – care and cooperation – are also central.

This understanding yields synergies across progressive movements for care, migration, environmental and economic justice that look to possibilities for alliances and transforma- tory alternatives. They share concerns about global sustainability and crises whose effects are unequally spread; they understand citizenship as based on participatory democracy and presume interdependence and solidarity as a way of being. They invoke care for the other and care for the world. Each envisions a society reorganized to create the conditions of time, security and space to support care of the individual and collective, and to instate value in human labour. In summoning ‘the Commons’ as a way of re-embedding that which has been disembedded or commodified – public space, creativity, land, finance, time to care, people to care, climate, natural resources and public services – these critiques and movements can together imagine possibilities for transformation (Williams, 2016).

Conclusion

This article has presented a framework for understanding some for the most important dimensions of the social and political economy of contemporary care relations. It has employed an intersectional analysis to examine how the practices of care are constituted through a range of social relations which attend to both paid and unpaid care-giving and care-receiving. It has argued that analysis must be able to connect these practices at local level with institutional, social and cultural regimes of care, migration and employment at the national level. These configure differently in different countries while also being subject in different degrees to the marketization, labour activation and austerity trajecto- ries of neoliberalism. Care is also a global issue and, in its manifestation through migrant care work, part of geopolitical inequalities between richer and poorer nations. It is here, in the transnational political economy of care, that the article has drawn attention to the ways in which crises of global finance, ecology, migration and care throw up key exis- tential questions to do with global justice, sustainability, interdependence and humani- tarianism. I propose that the application of a political ethic of care that recognizes the everyday centrality of care for everyday life and work is essential to transform strategies for social justice locally, nationally and internationally.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Note

1. For employment regimes, which I detail less here, see Simonazzi (2009). Neither is there space to situate this discussion within welfare theory. For an overview see Williams (2016).

Williams 559

References

Anderson B (2010) Migration, immigration controls and the fashioning of precarious workers. Work, Employment and Society 24(2): 300–317.

Bettio F, Simonazzi A and Villa P (2006) Change in care regimes and female migration: The care drain in the Mediterranean. Journal of European Social Policy 16(3): 271–285.

Boris E and Undén M (2017) From the local to the global: Circuits of domestic worker organiz- ing. In: Michel S and Peng I (eds) Gender, Migration and the Work of Care: A Multi-Scalar Approach to the Pacific Rim. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cangiano A, Shutes T, Spenser S and Leeson G (2009) Migrant Care Workers in Ageing Societies: Research Findings in the UK. Oxford: COMPAS (Centre on Migration, Policy and Society).

Carbonnier C and Morel N (2015) The Political Economy of Household Services in Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Carter R (2016) Rise in care homes going out of business. Community Care, 26 April. Available at: www.communitycare.co.uk/2016/04/26/rise-care-homes-going-business (accessed 8 June 2017).

Cho SK, Crenshaw KW and McCall L (2013) Toward a field of intersectionality studies: Theory, application and praxis. Signs 38(4): 785–810.

Crenshaw K (1989) Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of anti-discrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989/1: 1241–1299.

Di Martino A, Biondo Dal Monte F, Boiasno I and Raffealli R (2013) The Criminalization of Irregular Immigration: Law and Practice in Italy. Pisa: University of Pisa Press.

Finch J and Groves D (1983) A Labour of Love: Women, Work, and Caring. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Fish JN and Schumpert M (2017) The grassroot-global dialectic: International policy as an anchor for domestic worker organizing. In: Michel S and Peng I (eds) Gender, Migration and the Work of Care: A Multi-Scalar Approach to the Pacific Rim. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Fraser N (2013) A triple movement? Parsing the politics of crisis after Polanyi. New Left Review 81: 119–132.

Gavanas A (2011) Who Cleans the Welfare State? Migration, Informalization, Social Exclusion and Domestic Services in Stockholm. Research Report 2010/3. Stockholm: Institute for Futures Studies.

Glenn EN (1992) From servitude to service work: The historical continuities of women’s paid and unpaid reproductive labor. Signs 18(1): 1–44.

Goffman E (1961) Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Anchor Books.

Hellgren Z and Serrano I (2017) Transnationalism and financial crisis: The hampered migration projects of female domestic workers in Spain. Social Sciences 6(8): 2–18.

Heyzer N, Lycklama A, Nijeholt G and Weerakon N (1994) The Trade in Domestic Workers, Vol. 1. London: Zed Press.

Himmelweit S (2007) The prospects for caring: Economic theory and policy analysis. Cambridge Journal of Economics 31(4): 581–599.

Hobson B, Hellgren Z and Bede L (2015) How institutional contexts matter: Migration and domes- tic care services and the capabilities of migrants in Spain and Sweden, families and societies. Working Paper 46, Stockholm University, Sweden.

ILO (2009) Global Employment Trends for Women. Geneva: ILO. ILO (2016a) Women at Work: Trends. Geneva: ILO. ILO (2016b) Non-Standard Employment around the World. Geneva: ILO.

560 Current Sociology Monograph 2 66(4)

Kofman E (2012) Rethinking care through social reproduction: Articulating circuits of migration. Social Politics 19(1): 142–157.

Leon M (2010) Migration and care work in Spain: The domestic sector revisited. Social Policy and Society 9(3): 409–418.

Michel S and Peng I (eds) (2017) Gender, Migration and the Work of Care: A Multi-Scalar Approach to the Pacific Rim. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Morris J (1991) Pride against Prejudice: Transforming Attitudes to Disability. London: New Society.

Noddings N (1982) Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: UCA Press.

OECD (2015) Labor Force Survey 2015. Available at: https://stats.oecd.org/Index. aspx?DataSetCode=LFS_SEXAGE_I_R (accessed 7 October 2016).

OECD-UNDESA (2013) World migration in figures. Available at: www.oecd.org/els/mig/World- Migration-in-Figures.pdf (accessed 7 October 2016).

Oliveira G (2017) Caring for your children: How Mexican immigrant mothers experience care and the ideals of motherhood. In: Michel S and Peng I (eds) Gender, Migration and the Work of Care: A Multi-Scalar Approach to the Pacific Rim. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Parreñas R (2001) Servants of Globalization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pillinger J (2011) Quality healthcare and workers on the move. Public Services International,

International Migration and Women Health and Social Care Workers Programme, PSI, Ferney-Voltaire.

Polanyi K (1944/1957) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press.

Robinson F (1999) Globalizing Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory, and International Relations. Boulder: CO: Westview Press.

Sahraoui N (2016) A political economy of migrant and minority ethnic workers’ experiences in private older-age care in London, Paris and Madrid. PhD Thesis, London Metropolitan University.

Sassen S (1984) Notes on the incorporation of Third World women into wage labor through immi- gration and offshore production. International Migration Review 18(4): 1144–1167.

Shakespeare T (2006) Disability Rights and Wrongs. London: Routledge. Simonazzi A (2009) Care regimes and national employment models. Cambridge Journal of

Economics 33: 211–232. Tronto J (1993) Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. London: Routledge. Van Hooren F (2008) Welfare provision beyond national boundaries: The politics of migration and

elderly care in Italy. Rivista Italiana di Politiche Pubbliche 3: 87–113. WHO (2010) Global code of practice on the international recruitment of health personnel. Available

at: www.who.int/hrh/migration/code/code_en.pdf?ua=1 (accessed 20 October 2011). Williams F (2001) In and beyond New Labour: Towards a new political ethic of care. Critical

Social Policy 21(4): 467–493. Williams F (2011) The transnational political economy of care. In: Mahon R and Robinson F (eds)

The Global Political Economy of Care: Integrating Ethical and Social Politics. Vancouver: UBC Press, pp. 21–38.

Williams F (2012) Converging variations in migrant care work in Europe. Journal of European Social Policy 22: 363–375.

Williams F (2016) Critical thinking in social policy: The challenges of past, present and future. Social Policy and Administration 50(6): 628–647.

Williams F and Brennan D (2012) Care, markets and migration in a globalising world. Journal of European Social Policy 22(4): 355–362.

Williams 561

Williams F and Gavanas A (2008) The intersection of child care regimes and migration regimes: A three-country study. In: Lutz H (ed.) Migration and Domestic Work: A European Perspective on a Global Theme. Farnham: Ashgate.

Wilson E (1977) Women and the Welfare State. London: Routledge.

Author biography

Fiona Williams is Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at the University of Leeds and Honorary Professor at the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. She is also a Research Affiliate of the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford. She is currently writing a new critical analysis of social policy.

Résumé Cet article développe une compréhension de comment et pourquoi les soins sont une question centrale dans les relations personnelles et pour la durabilité et la justice mondiale. Trois approches marquent le cadre analytique synthétique : l’intersectionnalité ; l’économie politique transnationale des soins dans le contexte des crises globales du soin, la finance, l’environnement et les migrations ; et l’éthique du soin. L’article applique ces approches à une analyse qui peut expliquer la dynamique multidirectionnelle des soins aux échelles micro, méso et macro, ainsi que les intersections entre les catégories de chacun de ces échelles. Nous proposons un point de vue éthique global orienté vers la justice sociale et le développement durable, qui reconnaît le rôle central des soins et l’interdépendance dans la vie quotidienne.

Mots-clés Soin, intersectionnalité, économie politique transnationale des soins, crise globale du soin, environnement, migration et finance, justice sociale globale, éthique du soin, travail migrant du soin

Resumen Este artículo propone una aproximación comprensiva al cómo y al por qué de los cuidados como cuestión central en las relaciones personales y la sostenibilidad y la justicia mundiales. Su marco analítico sintetiza un triple enfoque: la interseccionalidad; la economía política transnacional de los cuidados en el contexto de las crisis globales de los cuidados, las rentas, el medio ambiente y las migraciones; y la ética del cuidado. El artículo aplica tales enfoques a un análisis que puede explicar la dinámica multidireccional de los cuidados en escalas micro, meso y macro, así como las intersecciones entre categorías en cada uno de estos niveles. Se propone un enfoque ético global orientado a la justicia social y la sostenibilidad, que reconoce la centralidad de los cuidados y la interdependencia en la vida cotidiana.

Palabras clave Atención, interseccionalidad, economía política transnacional de los cuidados, crisis global de los cuidados, medio ambiente, migración y rentas, justicia social global, ética de los cuidados, trabajo de cuidados migrante