Home Care for Sale

Brigitte Aulenbacher is Professor of Sociology at Johannes Kepler University Linz/Austria. She combines studies on science, domestic work, senior care and the digital transformation of work with the analysis of contemporary capitalism. In 2019, she received the Kurt-Rothschild-Award for her works on Karl Polanyi, while also serving as Vice-President of the International Karl Polanyi Society. Co-edited publications include: 2018, Global Sociology of Care and Care Work, Current Sociology Monograph, Vol. 66, No. 4, Monograph 2, SAGE (with H. Lutz, B. Riegraf); 2019, Capitalism in Transformation, Movements and Countermovements in the 21st Century, Edward Elgar (with R. Atzmüller, U. Brand, F. Décieux, K. Fischer, B. Sauer); 2020, Karl Polanyi – The Life and Works of an Epochal Thinker, Falter (with M. Marterbauer, A. Novy, K. Polanyi-Levitt, A. Thurnher). As an ISA member, she has served as Vice-Chair of the LOC of the III ISA Forum of Sociology Vienna (2016) and as Editor of Global Dialogue (2018–22). Helma Lutz, a sociologist and Professor of Women and Genderstudies at Goethe University, Germany (2007–21), was the laureate of the Humboldt Award from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Sweden (2012). She has held fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington DC (2012/3), and from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (2004/5). Her research is concerned with gender, care, (transnational) migration, ethnicity, nationalism, racism, citizenship and the relationship between post-colonialism/post-socialism. Recent publications include: Gender and Migration: Transnational and Intersectional Prospects (with A. Amelina), Routledge 2019; Routledge Handbook Intersectionality 2023 (edited with K. Davis). As a 32-years-long ISA member, Lutz has served in many ISA functions, currently as president of RC05. Her article, ‘Care migration: The connectivity between care chains, care circulation and transnational social inequality’ (2018), was selected in 2022 for a list of the 10 most important articles in 70 years’ of the publication of Current Sociology. Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology and a member of the Cornelia Goethe Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt; currently Principal Investigator of the international collaborative project ‘Researching the transnational organization of senior care, labor and mobility in Central and Eastern Europe’ (2023–6), funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. Her research focuses on migration and mobility studies, care, gender and social inequalities. She has published widely in leading journals, most recently, in 2022, ‘Making Migrants’ Input Invisible: Intersections of Privilege and Otherness from a multilevel perspective’, Social Inclusion, 10(1); Co-edited publications include: 2016, Family Life in the Age of Migration and Mobility: Global Perspectives through the Life Course (with M. Kilkey); 2020, German-language volume Postmigrant perspectives: Transnationalism, Gender and Care (with K. Huxel and others). Karin Schwiter is Assistant Professor of Labour Geography at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. In 2016, her research group received the Swiss Award for Research on Education for their mixed-methods study on occupational gender segregation. In 2021, she co-edited the Handbook Feminist Geographies (with Budrich publishers, in German). Her research interests include feminist approaches to work and labour with a focus on care, migration and digitalization. Recent publications include: 2020, ‘Geographies of care work: The commodification of care, digital care futures and alternative caring visions’ in Geography Compass (with J. Steiner); 2021, ‘Who shapes migration in open labour markets? Analysing migration infrastructures and brokers of circularly migrating home care workers in Switzerland’ in Mobilities (with H. S. Chau); 2022, ‘Care crises and care fixes under Covid-19: the example of transnational live-in care work’ in Social & Cultural Geography (with S. Schilliger and J. Steiner).

Introduction — Senior home care for sale: agency-brokered transnational live-in care in Europe - Brigitte Aulenbacher, Helma Lutz, Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck, Karin Schwiter
Part I: Care markets, care provision, working conditions, and the role of brokering agencies
Divided Europe? The role of home care agencies from Poland, and how the ideal of decent work gets lost along transnational value chains - Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck
Business preferences in long-term care: the case of live-in home care in Ireland - Julien Mercille
The effectiveness of informal care-work brokering in Italy - Martina Cvajner
Diversification of the senior home care market in Hungary: informality and the operational modes of intermediaries - Dóra Gábriel and Noémi Katona
The ‘good agency’? On the interplay of formalization and informality in the contested marketization of live-in care in Austria - Brigitte Aulenbacher and Veronika Prieler
Part II: Transnationality, mobilities, border regimes and global care chains
Multiple interacting migration patterns in senior care on Europe’s semi-periphery - Majda Hrženjak and Maja Breznik
Distorted Emancipation and the Transnational Political Economy of Social Reproduction - Zuzana Uhde
‘Care Bonds’ in Times of COVID-19 - Petra Ezzeddine
Transnational migration and brokering agencies in the home care sector in Spain - Raquel Martínez-Buján, Paloma Moré
Part III: Worlds apart: the household as a workplace
‘As I always say, you really need to tame them!’ The working conditions of migrant senior care workers employed by brokering agencies in Belgium - Chiara Giordano
Brokering agencies as managers of conflicts and emotions in live-in senior care - Lucia Amorosi
Shaping working hours in the shadow of the law? Experiences of live-in migrant care workers, brokering agencies and family care managers in the Netherlands - María Bruquetas-Callejo
Shaping the social and work-related well-being of migrant live-in carers: the ambiguous role of labour market intermediaries in England - Shereen Hussein, Agnes Turnpenny and Caroline Emberson
At home with the employer? — Contradictory notions of the care client’s home as a workplace and living space - Helma Lutz and Aranka Benazha
Part IV: Contested labour rights, fair-care initiatives and labour organizing
Ethical comments on the working-time regime of live-in care - Bernhard Emunds
Fair care? On the prospects of (and limits to) implementing ‘fairness’ in live-in care - Karin Schwiter and Anahi Villalba Kaddour
Invisible, yet one of the family? Unravelling the precarious employment conditions of migrant Filipina live-in domestic workers and caregivers in Greece - Theodoros Fouskas
Breaking out of the ‘prisoner of love’ dilemma: infrastructures of solidarity for live-in care workers in Switzerland - Sarah Schilliger
Part V: Afterword
Brokering care migration – a new element in the transnational care worker supply chain - Ito Peng