Home Care for Sale
The Transnational Brokering of Senior Care in Europe
- Brigitte Aulenbacher - Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
- Helma Lutz - Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Germany
- Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck - Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Germany
- Karin Schwiter - University of Zurich, Switzerland
The world of senior care provision and care work is changing rapidly. This collection identifies brokering agencies for live-in care workers as key drivers of this change. Across Europe, these agencies have become powerful players in reshaping welfare systems, transnational care chains and working conditions in care recipients’ households. The four parts in this volume draw together the latest research on live-in home care for seniors in Europe, including: processes of commodification and marketisation, the transnationalisation of care work, the private household as a workplace and workers’ contestation of the live-in care arrangement. Together, they depict far-reaching challenges in care provision and care work.
The brokerage of live-in care work has created transnational care chains and markets that span across Europe. These capitalise on poverty-driven migration and social inequalities between countries. This collection uncovers how these agencies’ business models are based on gender and migration regimes, labour and social policies, and regulations within and between countries. Increasingly, agencies have been trying to shape these regulations in their own interest:they have, therefore, become powerful players in many national economies and welfare systems.This volume also explores how agency-brokered senior home care provision has become highly contested, analysing the care struggles and labour disputes around both the quality of care and working conditions. We are shown how care workers’ organizations and trade unions have entered the field, raising awareness of the poor working conditions that exist in contrast to the agencies’ promise of delivering good care.
The four parts in this volume each present a specific focus area in the context of senior home care brokering, including the following: processes of commodification and marketization, the transnationalization of care work, the private household as a workplace and the contestation of the live-in care arrangement. Together, they depict far-reaching changes in care provision and care work and the problems that have emerged in this growing sector.
This book is a must-read for anyone wishing to understand the changes in the political economy of care in the XXI century. It offers a compelling combination of classic and cutting-edge approaches that sheds light on the emergence of brokerage and agency intermediation in Europe and provides an excellent variety of examples from different countries and care settings.
When within a capitalist institutional framework accelerating ageing leads to the crisis of social care and to further transnational marketization of household services 'Home Care for Sale' is an essential reading. The rich empirical and conceptual work points toward an almost encyclopedic outcome, where commodification, marketization, transnationalization, exploitation in care industry is explained in a complex manner within the context of global and local inequalities. This work is performed by a group of amazing critical analysts, who dare to confront some of the key contradictions of our current painful social transformation in European terrains.
‘Home Care for Sale’ provides an encyclopedic account of the commodification and marketization of transnationally-brokered senior home care provision across Europe, including the UK. It pays close attention to the economic and social inequalities, as well as state policies, that underlie this new migration industry, as well as collective efforts to contest and improve conditions of work and care. ‘Home Care for Sale’ documents the geography of care chains within a divided Europe. This is a geography that both complements and disrupts conventional understandings of international care chains between global north and south. Theoretically and empirically rich, this is a must-read collection for those interested in senior home care, social reproduction, migration, border studies, and the workings and repercussions of neo-liberal state policies.