The COVID-19 crisis in Italy has brought to public attention the labour of almost one million migrant care workers (MCWs) who care for older Italian persons in their homes. Over the past three decades, the migrant-in-the-family model has become one of the main pillars of eldercare provision in Italy. The increase of this kind of care is analysed with a mixed-method approach, using official statistics, secondary literature, and expert interviews. The analysis integrates dynamics in the countries of origin and destination and focuses on Romanian MCWs as a case in point. The analysis highlights crises as catalysts for complex consequences and dynamics of transnational care migration, which play out at the levels of state, family, and individuals.
In the “grey market” for live-in care work in Germany, brokering agencies are playing an increasingly important role in shaping working conditions. Drawing on six expert interviews with “pioneer” brokering agencies, this article centres on these agencies’ narratives on working hours. The analysis reveals that these agencies’ understanding of working hours is contradictory: working hours are either referred to as a fixed, inter-subjectively measurable category or as a subjective phenomenon, leaving scope for divergent opinions. These perspectives are evident in the assumption of an (in)separability of working and leisure time, and in the understanding of leisure time as a personal need or a valid demand. In this context, constructing working hours as a subjective category thus functions as a legitimation narrative for extensive working hours. These findings are connected to the contradictory interpellations of live-in care workers, such as “fictive kin” and “manager of the self”, and to the underlying understandings of work.
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