Floating care as institutional positioning: Professional reclassification of domestic work in the pilot foreign caregiver project in South Korea

This paper analyzes South Korea’s pilot foreign caregiver project from the perspective of the sending country, the Philippines—an angle often less visible in existing debates. Drawing on Migration Infrastructure and Relational Inequality theories, the study argues that labor precarity in the pilot project is a structural outcome co-produced by the institutional reclassification of domestic work as “professional caregiving” and the social closure through visa regulation and labor governance. Based on a focus group discussion and semi-structured interviews with Philippine stakeholders and an analysis of the Korean service mobile apps, Daeri Jubu (Proxy Homemaker) and Dolbom Plus (Care Plus), and an unpublished report from the Korea Federation of Small and Medium Business (KBIZ), the study examines how care workers are constructed and governed within transnational migration infrastructures. The findings indicate that the state-led professional narrative is often misaligned with the material conditions under the pilot project. This study conceptualizes “floating care” as a structural positioning where workers are symbolically elevated as professionals yet remain situated in devalued domestic labor. By foregrounding the sending-country perspective, this study contributes to discussions on transnational migration governance by demonstrating how sending states reproduce and negotiate inequality within bilateral labor arrangements.