Abstract
The book comprises ten chapters, the opening three of which focus on European policies, examining similarities and differences between welfare regimes and their implications for the practice of family care. Kevät Nousiainen’s chapter focuses on the policy infrastructure governing care at the European level. It explores how the adult worker model governs European policy-making, and how the regulation of care (or rather, the lack of regulation) is determined by the needs of the economy not the needs of carers, or those in need of care. It illustrates the importance of the principle of subsidiarity, as a core value governing European policy-making. Adherence to this principle is reflected in the ‘soft’ laws governing social rights and caring in particular. The state is not required to intervene to protect carers, be they paid or unpaid. Fiona Williams outlines how the differences in care regimes across Europe are facilitated and enabled by the lack of European-wide concern about caring. The political disrespect for care work has also allowed an enormous, largely unregulated, transnational economy of care to develop. The net result is an emerging regime of unprotected, frequently exploited, female migrant domestic workers in the wealthier Western and Northern European states. Williams points out that there is a care drain from poorer to richer countries, representing a new type of colonialism that is not only frequently exploitative of the migrant carers but is also contributing to a care-loss in countries and families of origin. Majda Hrženjak examines the lack of protection for migrant family carers. What is seen as a solution to the care deficit in rich countries (or rather it should be said, by the rich in rich countries) allows new exploitations of domestic workers not protected by labour laws governing workers in the public sphere.
The second section of the book focuses on examining care policies across different European states. Thomas Boje and Anders Ejrnæs give an overview of welfare regimes across 21 European countries, highlighting how differences in family, child care and parental leave lead to huge variations in care regimes. In spite of many differences however, the emerging European policy, even in the most care-friendly Nordic states, is one that actively promotes the employment of women in the paid economy. This contribution reveals there is a declining interest in providing publicly resourced and regulated child care across Europe. Janice McLaughlin focuses on the care work of mothers of disabled children. Using data from a UK study, she highlights how (given the gendered order of caring) rearing disabled children gives mothers many extra roles, be it as therapists, educational assistants, or regulators of social behaviour. Mothers are required to help make their child ‘normal’ and to help ensure she or he is not a ‘burden to society’, no matter how stressful or demanding that task may be. The care challenges facing people who are mentally ill and intellectually disabled in Lithuania are examined by Egle Sumskiene in Chapter Six. The chapter documents the demise of the systems of ‘institutional care’ for the mentally ill and intellectually disabled that existed under the Soviet regime, and identifies major care dilemmas for vulnerable people and their families in Lithuania. Residential care is still seen as necessary but it is also not seen as desirable as it carries with it an image of neglect associated with institutionalization in the Soviet era. Another emerging dilemma is the conflict between the new modernist ‘rational and autonomous’ view of citizenship, requiring the vulnerable to be ‘normal’, and the reality that vulnerable people often live in high states of dependency. Sumskiene notes that the wishes of the disabled or the mentally ill themselves about their desired forms of care are not canvassed when designing care regimes. She believes they should be and calls for a new caregiving ethics. The changes emerging in Finnish care systems are examined by Kirsi Eräranta who shows how Finland is moving back to a more conservative home (mother) care model with a decline in public child care provision, and a rise in cash benefits to hire carers privately. Care services are increasingly defined as a way of enabling people to remain employed and of servicing the market. As with other European states, the adult worker and consumer citizen is the ideal type in Finland: there is a re-privatization and re-familialization of caring.
The final section of the book focuses on the issue of migration and caring – the colonial nature of the global care chain. The experiences of Polish women working as family carers in Sicily are examined by Lise Widding Isaksen. She shows how middle class families can maintain their publicly valued ‘family care’ identity in Italy, by hiring low-waged migrant women to care for their vulnerable elderly relatives in their own homes. They buy ‘respect’, for the way they provide care, by hiring a ‘foreign woman’, una donna straniera. The defamilialization of care is a growing trend in Spain too where there is a gendered and ethnicized process of a ‘domestic worker’ emerging. Susana Climent illuminates how, as in many parts of Europe where there is no public infrastructure of child care, middle class and upper class Spaniards are solving their care deficits by hiring migrant women workers, who travel alone to become domestic workers in private households. Although it may seem that the ‘Special Regime of Home Workers’ in Spain protects migrants working in families, the working conditions and protections given to home workers are very limited. In a society governed by the principle of subsidiarity, the rights of the private sphere take precedence over labour laws protecting domestic workers. In the final chapter of the book, Joan Tronto highlights the limited form of citizenship granted to migrant care workers. Being a carer at home is not sufficient to give one full citizenship within the ‘adult worker framework’ so being a care worker in a family home is not citizen-legitimating work even when paid. The contradiction that exists between care work, gender and citizenship is laid bare by Tronto, as is the globalized neo-colonizing of caring between rich (often former colonial) states and poorer states. This new colonization is also highly gendered, and entirely disregarding of the relational lives of carers, be it of their own care needs or those of their children or other family members. Tronto calls for a new model of citizenship that takes account of relationality. She challenges the masculinized and nationalistic notions of citizenship that grant exclusion privileges to ‘who is there first’ within nation states.
What the book especially emphasizes is a serious care crisis in Europe, a care crisis that is gendered, and exacerbated by declining welfare supports for both carers and care recipients. Moreover, there is a growing privatization and marketization of care. The inevitable outcome is the emergence of the often exploitative and hidden hiring of women who are marginally legal, or who, when legal, are poor, vulnerable and easily exploited in the privacy of the family home. However, the lack of class analysis is somewhat surprising in Europeanization, Care and Gender. Care work is working class work, and domestic workers are not just women, migrant or otherwise, they are also working class women in regard to how they are defined in labour market terms, even if they are an isolated, disorganized and gendered sub-class. As migrant (and other poor women) carers are increasing in their millions across Europe, the interface of class and care also needs to be addressed. Another omission is the failure to distinguish conceptually between forms of care, especially between the care work that can be commodified and that which cannot. Love labour, secondary caring and solidarity work are materially and analytically distinct (Lynch, 2007). Love labour is by definition non-commodifiable, as it is about mutual intimacy and support: it cannot be assigned to others as to do so is to undermine the very nature of the relationship itself (see Lynch, 1989; Lynch et al., 2009). Tronto does allude to this problem in her chapter, and rightly notes that the mutual vulnerability of both carers and care recipients needs to be recognized. Her call for a concept of citizenship that is care-inclusive is more urgent than ever.