Abstract
This edited volume is a collection of case studies from eight European Union (EU) countries on the situation of undocumented immigrant domestic workers in these selected host countries. Monitoring relations in the sphere of commercial domestic work and examining the position of undocumented immigrants within it is of sociological interest and concern for several reasons: it is a heavily gendered employment; it is a kind of work where the boundaries between formal and informal and private and public are blurred; and it is an employment that takes place in private space, which is hard to regulate and control. As the authors recognize, in Europe domestic work by foreigners has become a commonplace reality in the past two to three decades, given the context of (native) women’s increased engagement in employment outside the home, an aging population, and the downsizing (in case of Northern European countries) or underdevelopment (in case of Southern European countries) of welfare states.
In such a climate, immigrant (mostly) women represent a cheap (partially because informal) private solution to domestic work and care needs, and contribute to compensating for the lack of public welfare resources without compromising quality of life in European societies. Realization of this need on the part of households across the EU is the minimum denominator for why these societies should pick up responsibility for and establish welfare solidarity with the immigrant caregivers who “care but are not cared for” (p. xvi). As is argued several times in the volume, the EU countries similarly need to reconsider their exclusive and hypocritical immigration policies and enable these undocumented domestic workers to live freely in their countries. Such freedom is a matter of fairness and recognition of fundamental human and work rights for foreign workers. Without legal residency, exploited and/or abused domestic workers cannot file complaints against their employers, nor can they travel to their home countries in order to be able to exercise their right to enjoy the benefits of their own family lives, leaving aside the discussion of how disturbed those families are in the first place (i.e., the problem of transnational digital motherhood).
Irregular Migrant Domestic Workers in Europe developed from the EU Fundamental Rights Agency’s (FRA) project monitoring migrants’ access to their fundamental rights. Besides mapping the legal framework regulating domestic labor, the authors of these essays provide sociological accounts from their research sites and focus in particular on three themes: the living conditions of undocumented domestic workers and their migratory careers; their health issues and access to health care (including pre- and post-natal care, which is particularly relevant given that most domestic laborers are women of reproductive age); and their own family lives. The legal landscape of work in private homes and of rules about work and residency permits, along with the three ethnographic foci, provide a backbone structure to each chapter. A reader thus receives an overview of the law and the everyday lives of irregular migrant domestic workers in Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain.
Individual authors narrate too familiar stories of unfair treatment and exploitation of domestic labor. But they also propose a less well-known explanation for why such behavior is so common: namely that the native families basically do not conceptualize their role as employers vis-a-vis their workers but as clients who have been trained in/by the consumer society to demand it all without looking behind the scenes for what it takes to provide it all. The concept of emotional labor as well as the trickiness of pseudo-familial relationships are broadly discussed. The individual chapters tell stories of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse. In the words of the authors, vulnerable foreign and irregular workers often “trade their rights for employment” (p. 77). Given the limited (or non-existent) access to health care, these domestic caregivers often end up relying on their social networks for financial support or even survival. It is tragic that there are migrants who spend all of their hard-earned savings on medical bills (injuries and health loss often caused by their hard work), while barely sustaining themselves in their precarious situation and offering little or nothing for the families back home, for whom these laborers sacrificed. Overall, the reader is exposed to a thorough overview of the scene, including the hierarchy of domestic jobs (e.g., live-in vs. live-out alternatives) and employers’ stereotypes about different ethnic groups and how these stereotypes translate across borders of various EU countries.
While informative and compelling, the sociological accounts of individual country chapters are somewhat repetitive, which is a function of the book’s structure: after all, the general problems of immigrant domestic workers are very similar not only in different European countries but all over the world. At times the chapters read as if the “ethnographic” evidence did not receive its justice. Quotations from the qualitative, semi-structured interviews are powerful and inspire many follow-up questions, but given the number of case studies and the limits on page length of each, there is never enough space to go into sufficient detail. The call for a more thorough ethnographic account is justified given the small samples of qualitative research (about ten migrants on average per country), which are more useful for showing rich, detailed snapshots of the lives of irregular migrant domestic workers rather than for drawing an accurate picture of what is happening in a given country.
The strength of the volume consists especially in its illumination of the policy measures in individual countries that attempt to regulate (to various degrees) domestic employment relations as well as work and stay permits of immigrant workers. The reader gets a detailed picture of various provisions, such as regularizations of undocumented labor, voucher schemes aimed at lowering the dependency of domestic workers on their employers, ways of inclusion of irregular migrants into health care systems, and so on. In this respect the volume represents a unique and extremely valuable comparative compilation, which illustrates different approaches that the selected countries have taken in order to address the multiple problems in domestic work practices, as well as the consequences of these efforts.
The concluding chapter is somewhat disappointing. The editors claim to provide a European perspective on the problem of regulating and guaranteeing the rights associated with domestic work. Rather than discussing EU initiatives to tackle the above mentioned problems or lack thereof, it mostly summarizes what the reader has already learned from previous chapters. Even the few general policy proposals for how to care better for the caregivers (basically how to break the extremely uneven relationship between employers and employees in the domestic sector) appear vague given the recognition that concrete policies might be ambiguously accepted by the population under scrutiny (e.g., whether payment of taxes by regularized workers will cease their welfare marginalization or further erode their already modest earnings).
To conclude, the present volume is a comprehensive attempt to monitor the under-studied yet crucial sphere of undocumented immigrants in the ever-expanding domestic sector of European societies. However, the book tries to do too many things at once. The need for a thorough discussion of the legal environment in each individual country naturally cuts short the sociological accounts of the lives of domestic workers.